Telepresent

I hit a basic issue when it came to quantum physics, which is that it led me to believe I knew what was going on! I built a model around several different strands of quantom, string, and multi-dimensionality thinking (as could be understood and filtered through my brain, which I am sure squished a lot of it to mush)... and I suddenly thought I knew everything that was going on. Oh clever clever me! So just watch out for that. Maybe you're smarter so don't need to worry about it, but beware

@Moreira Hello! There have been a lot of replies here and I'll be honest: I can't be bothered to read through all of them. So you may find counter-arguments and refutations of what I am saying within those. Please treat them with the deserve they need. But I'll also tread your query with the raw power it asks for. Great. Fine. You know, a lot of people never, ever, ever, find comfort or joy. So don't consider this to be a 'bad' or 'inferior' thing, just because of the circumstances by which you find it. Firstly, every single person is unique in their experience of the world, so it doesn't matter a fucking shit what anyone else thinks, because they're not thinking/feeling/experiencing what you are. I'll also say, no, it's not a trap. If it's what you really, really, really want, if you'd genuinely be ok with sitting on this hillside forever and never, ever, ever talking to someone again, fine. The tricky thing is that meditation can make it seem that way, but in reality it's not true. I like to imagine that I'd like a world without any other people in it. Then I think about it, and realise that within three days I'd be bored out of my mind. It's all perspective Ok, so how do you feel about this? Like, if we were to stop talking about avoiding fears, how do you feel about this?

Am I allowed to post my own "self-one-liner" on here? They change once or twice a week, and I'm on the journey so I can't call them wisdom, but I also suspect they might help people... anyway, I'm going to post one: Self-verified or bust. Open-mindedness' ugly cousin. False until proven true. Yes, that inclues YOU.

@Silver Hello! I was talking to someone today about the concept of 'everlasting life'. In terms of, what would it actually mean if it happened here, now, in the midst of what we know? Just to me. And I thought. And I figured I'd probably drop out for a short time, because my immediate goals (food, shelter, everything that is about survival) would be met by the simple caveat that I can't die. And then I thought in that dropping out, I'd have fun. Because what would be the point in engaging in the career ladder? I could sit at home and play games etc. And then I realised I'd get bored. So, ok, let's go explore. Eventually, I'd have been everywhere on Earth. Ok, great, let's go to Mars! And it slowly grew in me that the 'more, next, grow' idea is both unstoppable, but also simply within me. Like a balloon. The gas wants to expand, but the limits of the balloon stop it. I've also noticed that people scream for definition. They want to make every single experience make perfect sense. And particularly when they are a young adult, they want to find a magical way that all the shit they're dealing with is some perfect build up to them being special. (as someone who is still dealing with not being special... learning to live with it sooner helps) And going back to re-read your post, and what I've written here, I can't see that I've written anything that will directly help your question. But I'm a fan of serendipity so I'm going to post it anyway. Fare well!

Fair do's. Good man! That's what happens when you declare "facts" you remember from a couple of years ago! Thanks for the correction

@ChimpBrain Aaaaand this is the point. Every stone every clue every chance. I remember watching a video of his where he said that his first presentation on why atheists need spirituality was the first where he went onstage to cheers, and came offstage to boos. Imagine how they'd take Mooji. We need all sorts

Well, given my avatar, I can't avoid responding to this, can I? I love the book, and I think it's an invaluable tool for helping more skeptical people onto this path. I also think it states limits that Harris is unwilling to speculate beyond, because he himself has not gone beyond them. He suggests you can glimpse non-dual consciousness for a second or two, but is unwilling to claim it can last for longer than that, because he hasn't experienced it so can't prove it to himself. I respect that. I also wonder if his requirement for physical empirical evidence is a hinderance. And at this point things become tricky because... well because then we're in the realms of personal experience and consciousness and so on, and it's very easy for people to make an argument that that counts for nothing (from a purely physical-sciences perspective, which is where Harris comes from). @Socrates asks about this in this thread, and I'm afraid I can't provide an answer, but I want to share something that helped me to further join the dots this week: In particular it was the way this man spoke of the "world of being" and the "world of becoming/unbecoming" made stuff make sense to me, but in a way I'm not ready to articulate yet. And that's part of the problem, I think: we want to pull people with us as we travel. But how?

@Annetta Have you ever encountered CBT? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? I've found it to be an immensely useful, evidence-based approach to challenging my automatic thoughts, interpretations, beliefs, and their resultant emotions. I don't know where in the world you live, but in the UK I know there are many free services which offer short courses, and I expect this is true in many other areas of the world. Even if it costs, I'd argue that it's worth it (so long as you engage with it)

@electroBeam Oooooooooooohhhh fuck you you troublemaker you (you'd better bloody appreciate I waited 117 seconds to post this reply. Which I'm sure you will. So all you other people reading this: wonder why I waited for 117 seconds to post this reply, given if you read my post history you'll see me pass over chance and chance to earn points)

So long as you can stay alert. As far as I am concerned it's more about alertness than your position. I've meditated sitting, lying, standing, in quiet places, in crowded and loud places, and it's all fine, because it's about focus. If you can stay focussed while you're on your bed, fine. I'd also suggest starting on vipassina or another meditation that is based on focussing on an object, rather than the 'do nothing' which is implied by your description. Find a point of focus and keep all of your attention on it. In vipassina this is the breath, but it might be a sound (if it is constant/regular), or a feeling in the body, or so on. The breath is good because you are guaranteed it keeps going regularly. You can sit, stand, lie down, whatever, in order to do this. When you say I think this means you're trying 'do nothing'? This is a valid meditation, but if you're not experienced, I'd suggest you spend some time with vipassina first. The reason is that vipassina helps you to learn to 'see' thoughts. If you're only ever engaged in 'do nothing', it's possible you'll spend all your time thinking and call it meditation

Good - I like the skepticism here One counter I'd suggest for the first point is that enlightened people just might not be interested in coming back. Certainly my interest in this forum ebbs and flows, and it normally flows if I recognise that I'm feeling a little stuck and need some inspirational prodding. I can't see why I'd come back here if I were to become enlightened (as I understand it). The point, though, isn't whether it helps other people: it's whether it helps you. If it does, stay. If it doesn't, leave. Fuck the rest of us and what we say - your journey is about you, and as much as I can scream 'do this! do that!', I've not lived a day in your shoes. I can advise, not tell, and that's the same for anyone here

@Milos Uzelac You don't need to tell people. And if you feel like you do, why not wait until you can be an example? Once you reach a certain level of calmness, level-headedness, and non-reaction in potentially emotional situations, people will ask you what your secret is... Or, to be honest, I've noticed the more I go into this work the more relevant topics come up in discussion. It's not that they didn't come up in discussion before, just that I didn't recognise them

I haven't read through this post, so sorry if I'm repeating what's already been said, but: throughout most of human history and throughout most of your individual life, the opportunity to share experiences, ideas, and perspectives in the way that we can on this forum has not existed. The past and other people don't matter. You and now does

@Leo Gura Absolutely - and thank you for that clarification. It's fasinating to see people who call themselves skeptical not realise they're clinging to this-or-that foundational paradigm. I had a really thought-provoking discussion with my partner recently. Neither of us like socialising with people we don't know, so we were discussing small-talk, and how there might be much more interesting things to discuss than work or weather. She remembered the time someone asked her 'when was the last time you allowed evidence to change your mind?' as a great conversation point. But it stuck with me. And I look around. And my version of skepticism seemed to only be the skepticism that conveniently agreed with what I wanted to believe... Yet it's so easy to convince yourself otherwise. That 'not-knowing' you suggest: it's so easy to pretend like you're doing it, when you're really not...

A moment ago I described myself to someone as 'extremely skeptical', and it made me think: It's easy to be skeptical of things 'out there' I don't believe in. It's harder to be skeptical of things 'out there' I do believe in. But the one thing I know for certain is that most (if not all) of my thoughts turn out to be demonstrably wrong. Yet I still believe them. Again and again and again I believe them. For some reason, applying skepticism to myself, to my thoughts and 'inner' beliefs - that keeps eluding me. And I suspect it's where skepticism is needed the most

@Annetta Thanks! I'm mostly a fear/anxiety person, really. I've hated in the past, but I can't say I hate anything now (aside from momentary bursts, which I'll discuss below). Maybe that will change again, but for now I don't. Actually, I'm having to address fear more and more as I move forwards, because it's becoming more... hmm... I feel like I'm getting closer to a core, and I'm starting to fear the process of looking at it. Like I'm starting to really see what makes my ego tick, and it all seems to stem from fear in one guise or another, and now I'm fearing the looking process itself! Like I'm imagining some big, bad, invisible I-don't-know-what lurking there waiting to engulf me, or something. And fear is an interesting phenomenon - I've realised we (or at least I) give it a bad name. It's a mechanism that's there to protect us. It should be respected, and embraced for the great job it does. But we rather mistreat it, dislike it, want it to go away and leave us alone. Which isn't very nice, and tends (in my experience) to make it strike back even harder. But back to hate. It's been an interesting couple of weeks for me: I live in the UK, so we've had several terror attacks, a very nasty high-rise blaze, a fierce snap-election, and the start of Brexit all hit us at once. And I'm seeing hatred EVERYWHERE. In the news, from politicians, opinion columnists, but most of all in social media. And it's so transparent: I can see so clearly that my friends and relatives are afraid for a future that is uncertain, where they don't know what will happen next, and they can't help catastrophising and imagining the worst. So they look for something or someone to blame. This political party. That newspaper. These stupid people who vote this way or behave like that or hold whatever opinion. It's fast, very fast, and these people who claim to be liberal and inclusive are the first to start throwing stones at anyone who they see as threatening. And I know that a few years ago I would have been like that too. And I still feel it spike in me - I'll read or hear something and I'll feel an instant spike in the belly, and a reactionary thought will slam in: always an automatic thought, always unchallenged, and always all about me. Somehow I'll take what someone else has said, make it all about me, and react with fear, anger, hatred. Instantaneously. Then I catch it, and the recognition makes it go away. This can all take place in the course of a second or two, and it's fascinating to watch, but the more I look around the more I see how many people are completely under its control

@Annetta As far as I can tell right now, it's fear. I might be a little biased right now, as I'm on something of a 'fear kick' - I'm noticing more and more how much of my self-identity is actually a defence mechanism based around fear-thinking and fear-imagining (i.e. all my little mental projections into the future - say when I imagine myself having a conversation with someone later today - are actually a fear mechanism attempting to predict and protect me from appearing stupid, etc.) Hatred, as I see it, is an extreme fear reaction. Most of my anger definitely stems from fear: it's another defence mechanism designed to protect either my body or my self-image from external attack. Seems to me that hatred is a longer-lasting version of that fear, which is why it can be so well indoctrinated. "This person is evil, they are dangerous, they will take away everything we care about and love, and they will kill us given half a chance. We must hate them". Something like that - I haven't expressed it very well, I fear (ha!)

Yes

@Mert No worries. Shout if you want to discuss anything that comes from it: I'm constantly processing it all myself. In fact, that's my advice to your question Process what you know, but crucially what you don't know, but think you know. Sounds like gibberish, maybe. But this is what self-inquiry is. I hold to the idea of Spiritual Autolysis rather than self-enquiry, but only because it is written down rather than done in the head. If you read the book that you find through the link I sent, it discusses this, and what I like is that Davis suggests that the typical self-inquiry question "what am I?" might better be "what am I not?" As much as you might want to experience things, you might want to meditate and experience a way into enlightenment, that's only part of the journey as I understand it. An important part, as it helps to separate you from your thoughts, feelings, and (maybe) beliefs, but there's a deeper challenge that faces us which often seems to go overlooked: If you are trying to understand consciousness, you have to debunk how you think the universe works. Why is that? Because how we typically think the universe works is a conceptual model, and is actually quite falsifiable (one of the reasons the Holographic Universe is such a head-fuck is that it falsifies the universe as we think of it, but we don't want to accept that so start making excuses for it). It doesn't account for the most basic experiential conditions (i.e. the only thing I know for certain is that I have experience, yet by the standard objective-physical-Newtonian model of the universe my lived experience, the qualia which are the only thing I know, are not answered for), and makes massive, massive assumptions to the point that hypotheses are taken as facts. For example, in your inital post you ask why you can feel your pain, but not the pain of another person. I suggest you have no way of knowing that the other person experiences anything; that you cannot know that they are not just the shape and sound and feeling of an object that claims to experience, but does not provide evidence. Bold claim. But one you have to face. What does this have to do with Spiritual Autolysis or self-enquiry? Both are avenues into exploring these questions. What do we know? What do we think we know, but actually only believe? What are we taking for granted? What are we taking as fact but is in fact a fudged "that'll do" we came up with when we were 10 years old, but doesn't remotely correspond to life, or to our understanding of string theory (for example, as it's my latest thing)? I recommend Spiritual Autolysis simply because the act of writing forces you to clarify your thoughts, to put them into clear language, and helps you to see the gaps in them. It can also highlight when you are going in circles, or repeating the same thing over and over again without actually developing your thinking. Self-inquiry should be able to do the same thing, but it's much, much harder if you keep it all in the head, and (in my experience at least) tends towards asking the same broad, un-specific questions ("Who am I?" "Who is thinking this thought?" "Who is observing this thought?") without any actual progress being made. (Incidentally, do you see the flaw in all of those questions? They presume a 'who', which suggests an object, a separated entity, a separation of observation and thought, a limited thing. It's hard to catch those kinds of hidden assumptions without writing things down, in my experience)

@Dodo I'm in the UK; Oxfordshire. Not too hard to get into London from here either.

I just encountered this short video which sets out to explore what a 'zeroth' dimension could be - in other words, what 'nothing' actually means. I'm going to be processing this one for a while, I think, but it's struck me as remarkably important. Definitely opened a door for me:

@Dodo Aha! Thanks - I'll have a dig through that thread then

Hello! I just tried to write a reply to this but it turned into something of an incoherent mess and probably would only be more confusing. So instead, I'll link you to a series of videos which really, really helped me on some of this stuff. Enjoy: http://www.butterfliesfree.com/holographic-universe-workshops/

Great! So define for me the word "I"? Thanks x

@Nahm Cool - thank you! Nice clarification Also apologies if I was aggressive - as a teacher of budding creatives, I get defensive