Cathal

@Razard86 Seeing things as they really are is wisdom. Being wise enough to know you don't see things as they are is to an extent wisdom but to comprehend dependent origination to the cessation of all suffering and realization of the four noble truths as they really is another kind i'd say, it's just knowing how reality works in your direct experience of it. It can not be borrowed or be made an opinion/view out of.

From my own experience I would suggest making sure you are in a safe environment if your intention is to explore these things Manny and to understand the conditioning of the mind is not going to be erased with a few psychedelic trips, it may take years of integration work to feel like you aren't a victim to what happened to you. But, they may help you see you are a winner and the choices you're making moment to moment either prolongs or dissolves the patterns of trauma. So take joy knowing every moment is a moment to free yourself!

@Linda22 'we can wake up, but it's not enough to get out of bed' - an essential step in the way the Buddha taught anapanasati is called 'gladenning the mind' (or i like to see, conscious re-conditioning) where, when we are just aware, we can see many unwholesome states within us (our conditioned minds) and just sit and see it all, we are infact not really in a state of meditation at all and have not applied right effort, we are basically never reaping any fruits of our practice we just keep watching rotten yields come in over and over and over in the mind, it's quite dissatisfying to practice that kind of meditation someone who wants to feel better right effort is introducing wholesome thoughts and relaxing bodily sensations that arise from unwholesomeness like anxiety. a certain thing in the world makes us anxious and our mind begins to reproduce the same old patterns and stories of 'I am in danger, there are threats outside', creating a state of anxiety within us that is very unpleasant, it's not enough to just bare witness but to actively gladden, relax our minds, we can literally control the way we feel through thoughts of 'i am safe, i am secure' over and over and over, we recondition ourselves, bringing ourself out of hindrance and into a deep relaxation or jhana. a nice little CBT trick is instead 'Oh god I have to go for a walk with the dog' creates a state of resistance, but the 'I could' instead of 'I have to' literally makes us feel so much better about the situation. The Buddha basically taught CBT 2500 years ago, and it's a moment to moment practice of that rewires years and years of the patterns of negativity within us our parents/society taught us

@DocWatts Letting go; the pathway of surrender is fairly solid.

There is absolutely nothing to do, there is absolutely nowhere to go, until that really penetrates you it's all just being lost in desire

I just wanted to write about my experience visiting a monastery. I ended up spending 3 months recently at a forest thai wat in the tradition of Ajahn Chah. It has radically changed things for me, I am going to put up a few pointers as to how this may be beneficial for you. I want mainly emphasis and try to express how we in the west have been conditioned in a certain way that doesn't exist not even mildly to the extent it does in Thailand, as many of you who do psychedelics know your potential to be selfless and loving and a real friend towards others and the polarity to that in your regular day to day state of dealing with your repressed nuerotic delusions and projections onto 'others', you can see childhood traumas come up again, see parts of people you thought you forgot about 20 years ago come back in some way or another, your karma is going to be popping off my friends - going to a monastery will drastically develop your awareness around your 'social selves' or that part of you that comes online around others, that tenses up and walls of and rejects, that projects pushes away, judges and scans for threats and so on. The whole of the unconscious is here right now, it just needs a certain mirror for you to see it, communities are a room full of mirrors. Maybe you will see that you do infact still hate your ex gf? That this part of you, the day to day one that walks around in a social environment is a huge hindrance to maintaining a wholesome state and not falling over and over and over into the 5 hindrances. We often talk about causes and conditions and how they arise parts of the mind, and when you live in a community tailored for spiritual development - for a little bit it can be like high-school all over again or being at your parents home, it's such a radical dynamic that to just experience it is absolutely mindblowing. The most important insight is that of understanding just how fundamental it is to develop Sila (morality/ethics) and how it affects your actual meditation. It is really difficult to explain this until you see yourself being in an actual community for a little while. Dana - the sharing experience; being in the west, we don't really experience sharing, we are ruthlessly climbing on a hill of bodies trying to make a living and don't have a clue what Dana is. It's so weird, when you are shown unconditional hospitiality and care, you actually want to give back and that feeling is incredibly important to experience - the development of generosity and unconditional giving is essential imo. Meeting those who have been practicing for 30/40 years and senior monks such as Ajahn Amaro can be a transformative experience in itself, these people can have such a profound impact just by being around them and speaking about your life/practice - they can point out things you are completely ignorant to, point you towards things you cannot see and make you feel what it feels like to be in the presence of actual unconditional love. The Sangha (or spiritual friends) are fundamental to everyone's path and we ought to put effort into making and maintaining companionship so we don't fall into delusion or isolation and develop very important parts of ourselves that shouldn't be left behind. Patience - is a really a powerful virtue to develop, enjoying the way things are despite how they are, being here with the way things are... most monasteries will have a degree of sensual restriction such as no tv/internet/music/noble silence/meal times and so on and you might be very suprised to waking up to how many habits you have regarding this. It will develop your ability to be here with reality and help you see how much control you actually have over your own actions. As Daniel Ingram said I believe, that it is more beneficial for someone to instead of meditate 1 hour a day for a year meditate for 1 hour for 6 months a year and do one 7 day retreat, retreats and environments with other practitioners can create a group energy and inspiration to push through phases of the vulnerability to sloth and torpor we find in our regular homes and touch into territory that requires a certain amount of striving. I see now how important it is to find a place we can visit often, a place where we can find like-minded people and practice diligently together and discuss our path to truth that isn't online - see online and in-person are just two different environments and are incomparable, It's so crucial and the main thing I hope you take away from this post. So my last word here is to do yourself a big favour and find that place of yours that you can take refuge in and strive in your practice. may you be free from suffering

Knowing everything is fading away, what is really important right to your heart right now? Do you want to go on retreat, volunteer, change your career? Do that and enjoy doing it, enjoy spending time with everyone around you dieng, because that's the only reality to where we are going; into the soil, so smile or cry going in - that's the only choice you have really

@BipolarGrowth Yes, so I mainly know about this tradition https://forestsangha.org/community/monasteries now, each monastery is slightly different, if you are for example to come to the UK to Chithurst or Amavarati, you could stay for 3 months at one time if you wanted by extending month by month, but the slightly smaller ones like Sunyata in Ireland, you might get a week max at your first stay but you can extend that more and more. And they have the same system in their US wats. https://forestsangha.org/community/monasteries/abhayagiri https://forestsangha.org/community/monasteries/temple-forest-monastery I just emailed the guest monk and talked about staying and how I want to practice and know the Dhamma. You could easily go from wat to wat in the UK for months on end just practicing, a few people i've met do that. One nun I met done it for 9 years till she ordained

Unless psychedelics somehow aid you into bringing you to the point you have to experience your own humility of views and opinions of the 'experiences' of Truth, you have a lot to work on to pull yourself out of ignorance of what Truth is. “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." - Tao Te Ching So let's not get lost in the great egotistical elation and addiction into talking about the Truth and work on being Truth, here and now, this

@Gabith Hi Gab. I've seen you here when I used to be active, I really liked your posts and you seem down to earth and a real benefit to others. If you can't enjoy your Self-growth, you will end up hating it and fall back in the loop of routines that lead nowhere, that's quite the common thing I see here, people get big glimpses through psychedelics but have no real basis of day to day reality so they revert way too easily to old habitual ways of living, we have to learn to cultivate positivity within and act from that point with effort, with striving. Anapanasati is such a practice and with an amazing teacher you can learn from, you can begin to gladden yourself into positive states and develop such a base in your state that the external and inner world have a lot less friction, we can enjoy meditation, we can enjoy working 8 hours in a job, we notice the sun in the morning instead of immediatly thinking of what we have to do. We condition ourselves, moment by moment, out of this radically self-critical negative restless culture towards positivity, content, and the enjoyment of just breathing

@BlessedLion The seeds haven't been planted, so they won't ripen. Also you seem to overestimate how transformative psychedelics can be, waking up to the truth is actually fruitless in a sense, getting out of bed day to day is hard work that most people will not really do

The neglect on developing my relationships with like-minded people - not understanding the importance of the Sangha for my development

@Ulax Deeply investigate why you want to 'become' a psychotherapist. I am in the same boat in some sense, yet I don't think you really need a degree, the purity of your intention will set the pace of how much you want to have an impact, you can start a youtube, a website, a personal business, any of that stuff, but if your utilitarian life is not secure and you are not developed within yourself you will absolutely fuck this up, the purity being to the extent you want to do this from a place of goodness or the self getting identfied as 'I am going to help' 'I want to help others' 'I want to change others' and those kinds of delusions - or choosing taking over giving, in its gross and subtle forms. I agree with @puporing but not to the degree one needs to be fully healed, whatever that means, since most of the good therapists if not all are just people who are suffering as much as the people they are helping, at most the best ones are the ones who have actually transformed themselves - the real issue is when someone is really ignorant as to how much harm they are causing the patient they are helping and end up making the patient even more distrustful, unnurtured, and unwilling to develop themselves. At the end of the day, if you sit for 5 mins you just know if you should do that or not, sometimes its helpful to journal, brainstorm, make a little web of notes but you always kind of just know

@at_anchor Do you want to die as a victim or a winner? I don't doubt you have experienced a lot of pain and abuse perhaps to a degree I couldn't ever understand. But I'm asking you, do you want to die forever a victim to the experiences you had or do you want to be free of their grasp? Because both are a possiblity

@bliss54 Hey man, don't judge yourself too much for having these fears, there's good reasons as to why you are the way you do, all you have to do is recognize you are entirely in control of these patterns conditioned into you. I myself realized I had to seriously socialize and change myself several months ago and jumped into the world of living in communities and volunteering, that seriously helped me, it was a total transformation. I highly suggest both visiting a regular place in the society like night clubs, cafes, house parties, friends, cinemas, pubs or whatever and visiting some kind of monastery/ashram or what is related to your own spiritual practice, it's good to be able to handle a dynamic of people to more develop your own sense of confidence around people Regarding your stutter, and from a few guys i've met, I think stutter comes from the endless judgment and hesitation and manipulation of our own speech. You have to learn to express how you feel without apology, it doesn't matter how you feel, just say what is true Speak the truth and it will cut away your stutter like an axeman works diligantly cutting down trees

@LoneWonderer Ease into who you are, there will never be anyone like you again to walk this planet, you are an utterly a unique being

An outside kick helps wake up, but an inner kick will move you out of the bed. Extrinsic motivation helps us run but once that's gone and it's nice to get screamed at, get confronted, be yelled at in a sense for but there's generally returning to old habits once that's gone, you can only hope you ran far enough once the noise settles down. Finding something intrinstically deeper, meaningful and rewarding is what you will want in the long term.

The solution to starvation is to handout pamphlets with pictures of french fries and burgers

@Fadious Yes, don't do that. You will eventually hit some very unpleasant point

@integral i never mentioned veganism

If you care even the slightest about yourself and anything living on this planet you have to take responsibility to just give it up now, we are approaching that time we have to take action today, now, in this moment. Even if you fail tomorrow, you just keep your intention pure to give it up, over and over you will eradicate your destructive habits just like in meditation, in fact spirituality and vegetarianism are synonymous, responsibility is spirituality = to take one’s reality into one’s own hands, to understand your karma is your karma alone whether you create good results or bad results for yourself, you just investigate your ignorance and go at your own pace. We must choose the truth of goodness over what feels good, for the more expanded your awareness becomes the more you realize how impactful just being alive can be, just not eating meat you are having such a beautiful healing presence in this world, you will get a lot of backlash, you will be faced with uncomfortable emotions, confrontation from others, just let go and stand side by side with what is good. Slowly your body will heal its lifetime of digesting meats and slowly the seed turns back to its saplings on the land’s cut down to feed this lifestock – just as in meditation, letting go of the conditioning falls away and the being returns to the deathless being of now. Love to all beings. If this stresses you or you feel like you are being threathened or challenged, simply notice that is your attachment to your views, and you absolutely the choice to stay within your own views but this is simply me putting food out on the grass and whomever comes and takes comes and takes, do whatever you want.

I am currently doing a mostly vegetarian keto diet, no meat or milk but eggs. I take supplements, D3 2000 IU, Half a multivit, tumeric + black pepper, strong dose of b12 once a week, Lion's mane 600mg a day A variety of nuts/seeds a day (peanut, brazilian nut, almond, sesame) Tofu Oils usually rapeseed Eggs Dark chocolate Veg - Usually broccoli/asparagus/carrots/cauliflower/pepper/green bean Meat alternatives sometimes which is just generally soy and a bunch of chemicals I found this diet to be by far the most helpful for clarity, stability and my issues with experiencing emotions, memory recall and a lack of focus or an ongoing brain fog (although the improvement I attribute to the results of meditation, the diet is more of an aid) and overall trying to nurture the effects of years of gaming addiction, drugs, social media, repression etc - I also suspected I was developing multiple scelrosis at one point which is why I adopted this diet after reading a quite a bit of research and decided to give it a go and just stuck with it cause it just works really well. If you are into ayurvedic health, I am a Kapha-Pita-Vata Super recommend, but do your own research.

@no_name People infatuate themselves with magical thinking to cope with the cognitive dissonance of the sense of self. The universe guiding you is simply having more clarity through wisdom as to what is causing you suffering and what isn't, there is no seperate entity around you guiding you but your own inherent wisdom as the non-seperate, non-dualistic, all-encompassing universe itself. You are the universe guiding itself towards it's own liberation of the seperateness of the conditioned self, the more conscious you do this you realize that's all you have been doing your entire life. But there's also no 'one' doing it, the one 'doing' is when you are getting identified as the 'I' within your experience as the totality of the universe. So there is no 'one' or seperate entity guiding you, just this underlying awareness realizing more and more the reality to the properties of its own awareness.

@kamwalker If you are to rely on drugs for the path of realizing the Self then you are enslaving yourself to having to endlessly take an exogenous compound to experience said experience with the Self and to escape the suffering of your day to day self. It is no error that the various systematic approaches of more sophisticated forms of spirituality not only have no inclination of using psychedelics but would undergo a precept to refrain from depending on anything for what can be achieved through meditation because it is just a huge hindrance to our potential for growth. It is a big insight and a massive eye opener for people in the western world because of how overly identified we are with our self-interpreter/ego and that perceptual shift can really blow your fucking mind, but as Alan Watts said once in some god knows old lecture "once you get the message, hangup the phone" As in pursue a path that is rooted in the reality of here and now towards the realization and not the temporary experience

I was pondering at how it's likely although maddening to say it does seem inevitable that we are all going to move towards singularity/unity of Self through transcending our biological form specifically the neurological hindrances that prevent us from seeing reality as it is or enlightenment with technology. As in at some point in time we are going to be able to bridge nueroscience and technology to remain and abide in a percieving reality in the constant stream of unification, non-duality. The question I have is how is such a transition possible, this kind of technology won't exist until the right kind of people are at the forerunner of development as the case is now the priority for technological development is driven by egotistical concerns of security. So moving towards singularity and the transcendence of our experience of suffering we already have had to reach a point a portion of society has attained to enlightenment that is capable of influencing society itself. Then that transition as I said will likely be through some kind of broadcast or transmission (not the energetic tranmission in Kriya for example) in the neurological structure, it sounds almost alien and terrifying to say, where there is an ability to merge technology with the immaterial reality, but even so that just contradicts itself - how can one merge material with immaterial? it's rather pointing to being able to manipulate the nuerological structure with technology for anyone to again, abide in total cessation of cognitive dissonance. Imo it is humanities greatest task at hand, but can it even be done?