SeaMonster

The problem with Islam is one of scale. You can have individual Muslims who are pretty Westernized and pretty much ignore a lot of the more fundamentalist aspects of it. I have Muslim friends who had sex before marriage, dress like Westerners, live among Westerners, are Western in most aspects of their life, but e.g. fast during Ramadan. The problem is when you get into the community and then state/country level, the negative aspects invariably rear their ugly head (the most extreme types tend to want to dominate the more modern types.) Turkey and Egypt have historically handled this by, in essence, secularist military dictatorships, but it seems to be a constant struggle. So, like, importing a ton of Muslims where they take over an entire town (like Malmo, Sweden or Dearborn, MI) is a recipe for disaster in a modern Western country.

It's all about how you handle the feelings. They can motivate you to grow and improve, or you can just get caught up in the negativity. The feelings themselves aren't wrong.

If that's his take on self-enquiry, frankly he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. That technique is not about engaging the intellect, it's about bypassing the intellect. It's in that general Zen koan category of practice. And if you want to talk about inducing energetic states, repeated shaktipat is king, and makes everything else superfluous (including Sadhguru himself.)

Yeah, I don't dispute that you do a lot of things right in your life; however it's usually our Achilles' heel that trips us up, so if there is some trouble spot that needs to be attended to it would be a good idea to do so. OK, that's pretty funny, I have to commend you. But seriously, it depends on the kind of jazz. Free jazz might be a bit disorienting but cool jazz might be good.

Yeah, it's freaking hilarious. -- I've lost my mind -- Meh, take a month off. This fucking forum...

Because you're being unrealistically negative. You're discounting all the things that go well, focusing on the few that don't, and blowing it all of out proportion. That's a problem ripe for CBT or some kind of therapy.

Feelings don't necessarily mean what you think they mean. If I want to kill somebody, that usually means I didn't get enough sleep last night. You simply don't take them seriously, their surface meaning isn't the actual meaning. It's more like a sign that something in your life is off, like you're neglecting something.

I think you have a major problem -- you don't want to deal with actual reality. If you're in terrible condition, you should improve it by setting realistic goals, not wild Andrew Tate or FreshAndFit type fantasies. Believe me -- those guys are depressed and miserable, and the crazy lifestyle is a major cope. People don't understand basic psychology and can't see through the kind of overcompensation that e.g. Tate engages in. I repeat myself: he is definitely depressed and the outward behavior is a cope. So improve a few things before you set your sights on something so far out of your reach right now. You will feel a lot better about yourself. Maybe kick ONE of your addictions to start with. Maybe go to the gym more, and consume less toxic online content. Maybe develop some career goals.

I think the key is become comfortable with uncertainty in life. Even if NOW you're not living your dream, you have to have hope that things can change even if you currently can't envision HOW they would change. In other words, you have to keep yourself OPEN to opportunities to make your life better.

Depersonalization isn't psychosis, but it is a severe neurosis. Here's the issue: it is not something to take lightly. It is a response to powerful feelings of panic or anxiety that one can't handle, so the world and your sense of self turns strange. It's quite different from nondual awakening. They SOUND similar but are very different. You may want to practice more grounding techniques rather than those causing you to dissociate like this (or whatever intoxicants cause it.) You want to be more IN your body rather than OUT of it.

If that article is any indication of the content of his books, then maybe I was right in suspecting that he is some pop-psych hack that I shouldn't waste my time on. "The only way to be truly confident is to simply become comfortable with what you lack." AND HOW DO WE DO THAT, MARK? That's nearly the same level of advice as "just...be...confident." Just...become...comfortable...HOW? LOL what a hack.

"Nobody tells me what to do!" LOL. OK, honestly, I don't care -- be a child. I can't care more about you than you care about yourself.

LOL. Please don't play the stupid forum game of "these are just words and concepts." DP/DR is listed in the DSM, you can google it for yourself. Educate yourself, try to understand what happened and why it happened and what you need to do differently, because if that's not a wake up call for you, worse things may happen.

Quick question: WHICH scientific discipline would be studying Spiral Dynamics? Some branch of psychology? Well, good luck with that one. I breathlessly await the researchers establishing construct validity for being at some stage.

Sounds like you had an episode of depersonalization/derealization. I would guess you are insufficiently grounded in your life right now and prone to anxiety or panic.

It's just a dumb thing to bring up. How does talking about porn make you more attractive to her? Yeah, all the well-known attraction triggers: handsome, confident, good sense of humor...watches porn. Which one of these doesn't belong?

LOL. Doing psychedelics over and over is the very definition of self-destructive behavior. People who advocate that really don't understand themselves or the psychology of spirituality. Psychedelics put a great responsibility on you to make changes in your life based on all the insights they provide. Usually it doesn't take many trips to figure out what needs to change. It isn't rocket science. If you do psychedelics without making changes based on those insights, you're just inflating your ego (spiritual narcissism.) This results in more self-delusion than you began with.

In order to heal from trauma, you need to seek genuine understanding of your own psyche. I don't see Leo focusing on that much -- frankly, because I don't think he wants to change certain negative behaviors he partakes in. He is in denial that a lot of things he does are harmful to himself.

Trauma itself isn't the problem, in the sense that something once happened to me and now I experience negative emotions in certain situations (or generally.) The problem is how you ADAPTED to that trauma -- how you COPE with it. That is usually a bad habit of some kind. If you understood the mechanism of how the trauma has twisted your behaviors, you could change your behaviors and the trauma would no longer be an issue.

Just notice your current sense of self. What is going on? Can you even describe "the self" in terms of direct experience? Many people are simply picking some reference point on their body, like a few inches behind the eyes, focusing on it, and telling a story about it. That is their conception of "I." There is this perceived, separate-from-the-rest-of-the-world entity, with a center point. This idea of "I" is just a thought. It isn't any kind of reality. It's just literally a repeating thought, there ever since you remember. Unless you think that every idea that pops into your head reflects reality, then there is no reason to implicitly trust that this one does. So just...notice what's going on. Catch yourself being this "I".

LOL. The very existence of Israel "fuels terrorists", Leo. Get real. They gave back Gaza in 2005, that didn't seem to buy them any goodwill. Besides, this is clearly Iran-backed and assisted; it's too sophisticated for Hamas. Iran hopes to crush the emerging Saudi-Israeli peace. Iran is making its move. Saudis can't allow this to paralyze them, or they are the next target. That region is in for hard times.

There are plenty of autistic atheists and conventional believers. There are some spiritual seekers, but I don't think they are overrepresented. Secondly, autistic people can be VERY naive about things like politics, society, psychology of individuals, etc. Just abysmally gullible and easily brainwashed. They don't seem to have much "street wisdom" at all; something where a person can see through the bullshit without having all the evidence right in their face. I say this from actual experience with autistic individuals; the level of naivete is just stunning.

There isn't one answer, it depends on your particular life path.

To realize you're the prison guard.

Well, enlightenment doesn't cure bipolar disorder, if that's what you're asking, but it may encourage the person to properly medicate. Also, "problems" are in the mind of the beholder. A lot of people have "fake" problems -- in other words, they stem from ego attachments/aversions and trying to control what's not under their control. They refuse to let go of the egoic agenda. This is the essence of "suffering." What enlightenment does is give you the opportunity to decondition these attachments, which -- unlike some people think -- have nothing to do with "survival." It's not like enlightenment completely obliterates the primitive brain and you simply no longer care whether you starve, or die of thirst, or whether you're attacked and murdered, etc. That would be an idiotic kind of "rational" coping mechanism, not enlightenment (which integrates the higher and the primitive functions) "Survival" doesn't mean you need a million followers on social media, or to become a multimillionaire or anything like that, and then if you don't get that you feel like you're dying. A lot of people exaggerate what "survival" means. So if you're asking "why bother?" it's because the stupid ego-created "problems" are an enormous drain on one's life.