Cathal

@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?

https://suttacentral.net/an8.19/en/sujato?layout=plain&reference=none&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin patience and the continutation of practice wherever you are and less about your mental proliferation from the conditions you find yourself. read my post on the insights on practicing at home vs a wat (monastery) it is very much important one practices within themselves to get established not to be constantly sucked into the conditions that arise being in unwholesome environments. thats why the Buddha made it so clear the Sangha is so essential we all struggle with this

nothing

@newbee Psychedelics are like pulling a trampoline up against the prison wall that is the self jumping up and down one can see the immaterial boundaryless reality, or to put simply 'reality as it is', but it's just that, an endless jumping up and down. Meditation is the real game.

Absolutely on the case of Jung from what I read, he seemed to touch an intelligence and an understanding of how to go about touching that intelligence in how he described the indivduation process, yet one thing I've seen is one can be entirely consumed by mental proliferation of the content of consciousness and to what end that goes can be endless. Let us remain understanding the goal is Self-realization and the end of suffering

TLDR: If you've only ever practiced alone in your house, try going to a monastery/wat for at least a month (or what is most relevant to you, eg. ashram) to practice it's a pretty big boost to insight and experience across a whole lot of dynamics of Self-realization, mainly I've come to realize the reason spiritual progress is so wonky is sila, being stuck in unwholesome social conditions, this is fundamental especially for users who rely on using drugs to feel free in social environments so i thought i'd post here. "I like it but I don't crave it I dislike it but I don't avoid it this I is one who is free" Here is what I came to see after 3 months inside a Monastery. Enjoy. After about a year of practice alone like a hermit in my studio apartment I remember at a time where it started to sink in that I couldn't go on this journey alone and it became obvious I needed real guidance, community, like-minded people/other spiritual seekers to talk to and share with and I knew early on this was way more important than pushing longer hours or some other delusional idea. I grabbed a backpack and took a bus from Scotland directly to London, and found myself being accommodated for 3 months in Amavarati, a forest Thai wat in the tradition of Ajahn Chah located in Hertfordshire. I knew nothing of this place, carrying only the advice of an online Dhamma teacher, Dhammarato who visited it almost 30 years ago, my heart wavered a bit to discouragement but I had a lot of trust in him, so here I am writing this 3 months later. Some insight and story being there: The most no-brainer and important thing here that i've come to realize being at a wat, being around people who really practice sila is that without a good foundation of sila (morality) I was endlessly going to be disturbed by my socially paranoid monkey mind each time I entered any social setting. Sometimes it feels like I really haven't left high school here, sometimes it feels like I'm still an angry child blaming my family for everything and the need to project that pain or shut my mouth and remain miserable, put on a big persona to fit in, it's kind of wild to see how much judgment and criticism resides inside of you on the level of just feeling when you begin to let go of the story constructs around them, it's just a simple i like and i don't like this person - for what reason?! it was obvious how important this was, it was fundamental. A lot of the time being alone and online, that didn't seem to really ever rise to the surface so I concluded sometimes I had ‘detached’ and let go of a lot things over the years, I always this barrier of safety and cocoon with online communication (forum's, servers, video chat etc...) . I never really understood how defiled my mind was, how being around others kept triggering the same old patterns that I didn't even know still existed, the same hateful, sad, jealous, conceitful, validation needing character just came and came and came and I was vulnerable, and it's being vulnerable that I was confronted by layers upon layers of these many characters popping into conscious laying inside of your unconscious, and in my unskillful ways found very difficult to dis-identify with. Actually living with 30-40 fairly like-minded people with whom I talked with, eat with, practiced with and shared with proved to me in order for me to understand how I am conditioned, I have to confront it, people are really just reflections of your own delusions for the most part, lighting up all the old dark corners, the basement left for 10-20 year it all comes out. I had both the constant cycle of guest's coming and going to long term lay-residents, to practitioners to see these 'personalities' pop into conscious for a visit And in an environment catered to spiritual development you begin to see how much you just get played by your environment, that you simply are a product of your environment - that you are basically a slave to the cultural conditioning you’re brought up in. Amavarati is a really well constructed place and it will force the devil up onto you that simply wants to be lavish in selfish desire, “Huh?! Washing dishing every morning, I came here to do my meditation!” I found that a very important thing to see in my face. Being here 3 months or so, I've gotten to see the many layers o f desire in which I habitually escaped into to avoid feeling of all those things, so it felt like they're just always there on play in the backround lurking on me from the darkness of the subconscious waiting to strike in moments of weakness. I really struggled here, I was torn between two worlds, when you put a stop to desire you really see it does run the show like I was being pulled by two strong horses opposite ways and I was going to rip apart. I began to crave material things like never before, despite being so dissatisfied my mind made resorting to old habits making the simplest things appear like crack candy, now I see for most of my life, I was just a hungry ghost more or less. I was to prone to my own bullshit and I equate it like trying to see the outside of the very box you're trapped in, the misguided 'I/me/mine/self' maker, the ego - defilements, delusion, which again it became obvious the more I practiced I needed some outside eyes to help me see what I was unable too, it wasn't so much even asking for someone to point a finger or fix my problems but putting myself in choiceless situations where, the choice of bullshitting myself no longer existed and I had just to follow the steps without crying about what I did or didn't like. In Amavarati, there are about 40 overall monks and nuns and the abbot (Ajahn Amaro) who himself would be sitting in the sala in the morning and the meditation hall right after the meal everyday where you can talk openly about whatever you want. I cannot stress how even a 5 minute conversation and drastically flip your perception and views on things that may have been driving you insane for years. The actual wisdom and experience of these people was undeniably invaluable. Being fairly involved with various online communities, forums, weekly video chat calls, talking to online teachers and so - on I began to notice on one hand, this was nice. I enjoyed it quite a bit, I felt a sense of having people to practice with, to share my struggles and inspirations with, guidance and to gain more insight - having the internet means unlimited access to whatever Dhamma I so needed, but relying entirely on me and the internet proved to be not what I really needed. Intuitively I knew I was very stagnant, not truly pushing myself, half asleep in the dullness of practice, settling with going through the motions of my 1 hour bell timer, not truly here with the here and now because whenever things got hard I had a mountain of distractions, whenever I had a very unpleasant mind state such as anger, boredom, dissatisfaction the gross and subtle layers of self-deception took over and to emphasis - Ah social media! Ah video games! Ah another podcast! Another new teacher to learn about! Another book! Another movie! anything but the long drawn out days of practice without the sensual experience here at the wat. It's really not so hard to fulfill yourself with desire and practice than practice and practice then practice some more. It's really here I got a taste of beginning to push up against those barriers, days where you actually have nothing to turn to, it can be really intense I must say. And speaking for myself, I knew deep down this was not going to work. I could not just sit at home and make real progression on this path surrounded by all of this seduction I was constantly being lost in and more aligned with being free and more content. To confront myself, I needed to get away from it for a while. I have a deep sense that it is better to practice away from these things for a little while, the next time you handle them they will likely less swallow up your less developed mind - that was my logic to it and so far returning back, it has been totally true. Even so, I found myself many days drinking a lot more tea, adding another few spoons of sugar, finding another new book to distract me, oh god anything to distract me... But slowly you get this feeling of drifting towards content with what is, a few minutes later you might find a dissatisfied mind seeking an object to plunge and penetrate itself into, but you again return to that contentment knowing it's really not a big deal. But at least in my case, those emotions can be really overwhelming, it's that 'this is too much' feeling and 'I need a break' voice appears. I really needed a nursery, a mind training school, a re-conditioning center... That's really all this wat was in a nutshell, it is simply a re-conditioning center. The people really rub off on you and it lasts, it stays, it is like seeing another version of yourself who is a bit more awake than you and equally show you what not to do, those grumpy monks uninterested in the Dhamma or the strange ones preaching to you and so on, there is so much to see, so much insight into the human character. And a note on seeing dana (offering of almsfood) was a kind of eye-opener to the prospect of sharing. Each day a large buffet of offered food was there for me, nothing asked for in return, I would walk past the dana table almost daily and see quantities of food keeping the community running. It's really that quality of sharing and giving, non-attachment, merit and acts of virtuous that touch you and make you remember how good and pure it feels to just give. How funny it is, that you feel so much more free. I really feel like there is no bulls*** here, it's just a real quality Dhamma centre that I don't think anyone can't benefit to a degree from. Whether you want to remain in total silence and practice day in and out or have a chat with spiritual companions and an adventure across some english countryside, it’s really an easy going all-inclusive kind of place that allows everyone to come by and test the waters a bit of really simple living.

@Raptorsin7 Go ahead then, you can travel down for a day or a few weeks in December if you'd like. Winter retreat won't begin until early Jan. Well, those 10 day retreats are not really going to change lifelong habits my friend tis quite a journey to tame ourselves haha

@Raptorsin7 My next step is to remain watching this present moment unfold haha. I've been at home for a week. It wasn't a concern I just accepted it was going to be a real test to continue to renunciate and practice under unwholesome conditions, it's a struggle in one way but man am I grounded. The one thing I miss is being surrounded by other people practicing, that's the real issue. There is a good reason the triple jewel is such a big deal in Buddhism, to find and be and practice with our spiritual friends is really truly as important as the practice itself. The logic was to spend some time away from these sensual things that generally consume and own us to better train the mind to not let them cause us unbalance and suffering. And I am super glad for myself I did that and highly recommend to give it a go. Really cool man when are you gonna be in europe? you can apply anytime you want except during the upcoming winter retreats (in the forest thai traditition) - I recommend either Chithurst (near the scottish border) or Amavarati (near London) if you're in the UK. Just apply via the websites, you can stay for up to 3 months at a year. There is nothing to pay for.

@Jenkins what was it about your life that made you smoke 1-3g a day?

Most people really assume depression is something they'll fix with a diet or treatment or routine, you may spend a few years in that loophole of externalized western problem solving conditioning. The truth about most cases depression is when you make life about the concept of yourself and the extent in which you get suffocated in your own limiting beliefs and fall into a stuckness or a kind of pattern of life where there is spontaneous activity, no expanse of exploration or creativity and you naturally become depressed and more and more dead inside