kinesin

Once you attain enlightenment, your motivation to do all of those things will fade away and they'll start seeming like signs of ego-driven desperation. Instead, you'll simply be content with things as they are.

He hasn't even posted in this thread so I'm not sure how he's relevant to this. I'm referring to the advice given by other people here.

Yes, she's very much enlightened. I've been watching her videos for a while and imo she's quite a bit further on the path than Leo or Frank Yang, and more importantly she seems to have reached it from outside of this particular youtube spiritual community. If anyone's interested, here's one of her videos specifically

I don't trust nature documentaries in the slightest. They're essentially fake, overdramatic narratives put together to create relateable stories for human audiences.

I'm very disappointed in the advice people are giving in this thread. This is supposed to be a spiritual forum, is it not? Why are you all advising OP to change their external reality rather than the inner? It doesn't matter where or when you are, what your circumstances might be - the path toward freedom from suffering is the same regardless. "Oh but they're in poverty, that's a real problem, not one of the fake first world problems which we can just tell ourselves are illusory!"

I think your attitude is a perfectly sensible response to the alien culture into which we were born. For the vast majority of our ancestors prior to the modern period, people were born into communities which they'd remain in until the day they died. Think about that for a moment. Imagine you knew practically every detail about the 150ish people you knew, imagine you shared a common set of values with them, imagine if the prospect of getting to know anyone from outside of that group never even crossed your mind. If every person you ever knew was part of your own extended family. Those were the circumstances by which our brains evolved. Nowadays we have to conjure up trust manually and dance around trying to build rapport all while knowing the other person is doing exactly the same thing. The sickening fakeness, the theatrical gestures and expressions learned from dramatic media... We have superficial relationships with friends which don't come close to significance of the relationships our ancestors had... hell in many cases we don't even know our friends' parents. We live in a degenerated, disconnected culture. A culture like this shames anybody who doesn't succumb to it, and that's why you feel a pull toward becoming more open and accepting of others.

Fight against what exactly? Against who? If you spell it out in precise and straightforward terms, you'll find many on this forum who disagree heavily with you, and they'll point to entirely different 'devils' altogether which you yourself don't even consider to be such. Infact, I personally believe that the devil has motivated the creation of this very thread, and that the devil is behind your words. It seeks to sow vague discord and nothing more. Fight for 'truth'? What vague horseshit. You think you know the truth? Ego!

@Striving for more If you're so sure that this laptop will enable you to earn millions, then why are you even here asking us if you should buy it? Just get it and don't give it any more thought. It sounds more like you're trying to justify an unnecessary purchase to yourself simply because you have an urge to spend some money, though. It's quite a hilarious concept for a thread, considering the nature of the forum you're posting on.

Yes, most of the major governments (US, Russian and Chinese) have done extensive experiments of this nature with the intention of developing tools for intelligence gathering and warfare. None of them ever found any evidence for ESP, and the projects were shut down. Of course the conspiracy view is "they were shut down to give the public the impression that they hadn't found anything, when actually they had" but such conspiracy views are an absolute inevitability.

My advice will be different than the other recommendations you got which are focussed on transforming your external situation in order to make it more pleasing and to reduce your suffering. My advice would be to stop consuming content aimed at first-world audiences, and focus on coming to terms with your place in the world. Try your best to be a valued member of your own family, practice meditation, develop your spirit and then try to improve your local community in small ways, even if all that means is doing very small things which bring moments of joy and relief from those who are in your direct vicinity. The highest spiritual teachings aren't dependent on having access to luxury, or even having access to the basics of survival. These teachings are equally applicable in times of plague and famine, in war and in concentration camps. Look to those around you who have managed to carve out a sense of meaning and purpose in their own lives, who find joy in the simplest of pleasures, and aspire to be like those people.

This is why I suggested an improv class. In truth, a person who feels restricted in their behaviour can't just allow themselves to be spontaneous, they need an external social situation which not ony gives them permission to do it, but which requires it. Look for situations which allow for being free and spontaneous like an acting workshop, a friday night on the street in your city where all the bars are, a music festival etc. Life is essentially roleplaying. If you want to express a certain character trait and don't want to feel out of place doing it, then put yourself into situations and locations where that role is generally played. The big fear is about being seen as weird or out of place when acting more outwardly expressive, but you need to learn that there's no behaviour which doesn't have its own place where it's perfectly appropriate.

Take an improv class. More importantly, try to become the kind of person who gets told 'take an improv class' and actually goes and does it, rather than someone who just nods to themself saying "hm yeah that might be good" but then forgets about it within a few minutes.

@Fran11 I said your comment demonstrated a lack of perspective and then made a joke about solipsists. I don't know why you interpreted that as being so aggressive as to call it 'shit-throwing', but suffice to say you must have misread me.

I do, for one. That aside though, the idea that you can blankly state such a thing as if it were true that 'nobody' thinks of the subconscious as an actual universal mind indicates a major lack of perspective or understanding of views outside of your own. It goes without saying, but this is a common issue among solipsists.

Drop the bullshit. When you look into your mother's eyes, what do you see? You see a mind. You see a person, you see a soul. If you pretend not to be able to see such things, then it's almost surely the case that your intellectual curiosity regarding spirituality is blinding you to the reality (yes, reality) of subjective human experience. You've come to believe that you aren't supposed to be able to see such things as a mind in another person, because according to the teachings that isn't the case. The spiritual ego is truly the hardest part to overcome, but it must be let go of.

This thread is full of stupid, stupid, stupid absurd advice. Don't listen to it. If you want to be grounded, you have to let go of your desire for spiritual growth, and stop thinking in spiritual terms for a good long while. Be a part of your local community, step up and be more helpful and supportive with your family and friends. Visit your grandma and spend the day with her. Pick up a hobby and take it seriously. Build something. Learn about your local plants and animals. Write a journal not of thoughts and ideas, but of memories and things you've actually done. Visit somewhere new or somewhere old, and throughout all this simply remain *mindful* of the things you're doing and experiencing. If you want to be grounded, you're going to have to do exactly the kinds of things your spiritual ego thinks it is above doing.

When life is nothing but a dream and everything is purely an illusion, what do you do when your dad breaks down sobbing at your mother's funeral? What do you do when your pet looks up at you with an empty bowl in front of it? What do you do when your child is in the hospital, and they're scared? You treat the dream as if it were the most real thing that could ever exist, because that's exactly what it is. An enlightened person doesn't say that life is only a dream and nothing more, an enlightened person behaves as if it were real because that's what reality requires of us. Genuine spiritual wisdom, shared as information and recieved without embodiment, is a source of evil.

Thoughts and impressions? I want to see @Leo Gura speak with her, as I think that could be fruitful.

Another one, for anyone out there who enjoys the daytime.

@Clems Apparently it's estimated that around 1-3% of the population have something called 'aphantasia', which is the total inability to form visual mental images. The rest of the population vary in the clarity of the images they're able to see, there's a whole spectrum of ability stretching from 0 mental images to photorealistic full-colour imagery. On the surface, this 'inability' is presented as a static unchanging thing which a person is simply stuck with. I don't believe that's the case though, I think it's simply a matter of where your attention goes and the particular unique mental habits of perception you might have formed during your life. I'd bet for example, that though you cannot form mental images, you likely have some other sense perception which far outstrips the ability of most people. That said, if you want to develop the ability to form mental images, I believe you can do it, but it'll take a lot of practice, experimentation and study. In my experience there can be a 'trick' to seeing mental images. Personally if I close my eyes, there are several 'layers' of visual perception which I have access to, and it can be tricky at first to learn how to observe them and switch between them. There is a base layer where images and patterns form amidst the visual snow which covers the blackness. There is a 'ghost layer' above that which is the layer upon which I usually see memories. To give an analogy for how it can feel to tune in to these layers - have you ever been in a situation where an alarm or other repetitive sound has been going off for a long time? It can reach a point eventually where you no longer even hear it. You might think 'is that alarm still going off?' and you try to scan your hearing but you can't find the sound anymore. Suddenly you notice it actually *is* still there, and you wonder how you could have missed it a moment ago. This is the way in which your mental imagery is hiding amidst the blackness. You just need to develop the ability to spot and 'tune in' to the layer that it's on.

@EntheogenTruthSeeker They warn you away from Jesus because they want you to believe only what they believe, because they confuse their beliefs about reality with the 'truth' about reality. This is an especially pernicious issue in buddhism and buddhism-adjacent communities, because the general sentiment is that this religion provides meta awareness which supercedes that of other religions. This is why they tell you that Jesus is imaginary and that you're falling into 'egoic traps'. The truth is, this is simply base human behaviour. If you went to a Christian forum and started talking about buddha, the people there would essentially say the same as people did here. "Don't follow that buddha guy, he didn't have the truth, follow Jesus instead!". If you talked about your love of Jesus there, you'd have a whole thread full of people praising you for really understanding it, just like as if you posted a thread here about how you realized that Jesus and everything else was just imaginary. What does this disparity in responses tell us about the nature of spiritual communities? Imo it's that spirituality should always be a solitary and private affair, because the moment you bring other people into it or discuss it with anyone, you get pulled straight back down into base human behaviour.

It's that thing which you're pretending not to know about, so you can present yourself as too enlightened to even be able to relate to subjective experience.

When you want for things to be more mystical than they are, all you're doing is blinding yourself to reality.

@ivankiss Triggered? You didn't think I was calling you an asshole, did you? I meant your literal asshole. The reason you can't see your face in your conscious experience is the same reason you can't see your asshole at all times - your eyes aren't pointed toward it. Nothing more. The only reason you have any concept of anything resembling visual images is because your eyes contain photoreceptive cells which detect photons, and your brain has a visual system which processes that input data into 3D models. If you're under the impression that eyes or photoreceptors aren't necessary in order to see visual photon-based images, you're mistaken - your ability to do so is entirely dependent on the fact that you do indeed have eyes, and you've spent your entire life looking at things.

Replace 'face' with 'asshole' and you might see just how absurd what you're saying really is.