Telepresent

Bonus question: Is it? What might an artist or musician say about that?

I'd be very surprised if you claimed you did! My intent is to save a lot of tyre-spinning: the smaller "what is X" questions - in my experience - can lead to a hell of a lot of frustration, and not take you very far. Boil it down. From what I quoted above, I can boil down 2.5 questions: 1) What is a feeling? 1.5) What is a feeling regarding another being? 2) What is the mind? Eh, I think people get stuck on trying trying trying to do that. Right now I think that's an outcome, not an activity. These two things are connected and HUGELY important (though not the whole shebang by a long salt) But You sure of that? Is there no more to Samuel than the language-thoughts about him? What if I stab his eye with a fork?

@Daphne Often a tingling sensation is a release of dopamine - which is a reward chemical. So it could be that your biology has determined that the activities you mentioned are worthy of rewarding, in order that you do more, so you get rewarded more, so you do it more... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-is-my-brain-tingling/

Have you ever noticed that every attempt to define something only conjures up a new thing, which itself needs to be defined and lo! There's a new thing which needs to be defined, which itself creates a new thing which needs to be defined...? What if you can hack them all at once? What would that be?

Do you know that? Or might it be closer to deep sleep: do you experience black in deep sleep, or not see at all? Sharks can detect electromagnetic disturbances. Perhaps, like us with sight, sharks don't ever have a 'silence' for this, but the absence of a disturbance is a distinct sensation we will call 'garp'. You have been blind to these electromagnetic disturbances since birth, as you lack the capacity to experience them. Are you currently sensing 'garp'?

If you "process" something but have to return to it, you didn't process shit. No offence. Or maybe you processed layers. But you're far from done

That's lovely but I can't believe a word of it. If I do I've stalled. From where I'm sat, if you understand what you've said you understand I'm correct. But maybe you know more than me: if so, please expand (really, I mean it, please!) Why are we so obsessed with telling people what is rather than helping them find it?

@Violinpracticerdude I haven't read that particular article but I am very familiar with Zzzen. All I can say is that he comes from a definite sense of morality, which lays the foundation of what he calls Horror (I assume) I don't know who what or where he is, but I totally think that 99% of seekers are after comfort, which is what his link seems to talk about. He's smart, capable, confident, but in my opinion he stopped

@seeking_brilliance Push on push on

Hang on, @Shin , I don't want to be either a negative Nancy or a dismissive... Dennis? I don't want to do either of those things. But as someone whose feelings are often led by my thoughts, I wonder that your wondering that life may be a big dream has made it start to feel like one. We can't trust feeling. It's not objective or true. So how will your perspective feel if you revert, for a week or two, to thinking of it in material terms? If it changes again, your feelings are being led by thoughts. If not, woo! They're not thought-based

@lmfao then I would suggest you try to meditate in any way other than with a sat, straightened back. But that's my opinion

@seeking_brilliance Problem is you have a preset idea of what reality "should" feel / look / be like. So how can reality ever not be that? What are you comparing 'real life reality checks' against?

@Shin @seeking_brilliance So can we find 'higher' reality checks? What would they be?

Except to become lucid in a dream we are checking against certain constants we accept to be true in the real world (number of fingers, how clocks work, how books work, etc.) That provides a reference of proof that it isn't real. Much harder if your entire existence has been in the dream where fingers, clocks, and books have always worked that way

Can we not tell other people what their journey "should" or "shouldn't" be? I mean, by all means let's share our experiences, perspectives, and thoughts, but unless you know this as an absolute inviolable truth then maybe avoid the word "should"? I don't mean to pick on you specifically, @NoSelfSelf , it's just that you have posted the right post for me to moan about this at this time. Lots of people do it and I think A) they don't truly know, & B) it's false language. Please no personal offence

@dmwrss What was sharing it here? (Note: I know very well I'm distracting myself by browsing here over and over!)

@Shin I suppose "going nowhere" could be considered a very good thing!

@SoonHei I'm going to be a bit of an ass here and link to another thread where I attempted to outline autolysis (a form of self-inquiry), as I think it's as good a description as I can manage. I'll say though that if you're contemplating the same points every day, you're going nowhere

@Alexo45 Are you attached to the ideas you have about spirituality/enlightenment, and the emotional reaction that you get from reading or watching videos about it? I wonder if you're hooked on that rather than the search itself? I speak from the point of view of an addict: what you describe sounds familiar to my relationship to alcohol, and the struggle to give it up. Not wanting to be a downer...

As someone who is finally learning to let go off blame for things that were never his own fault: you make me happy! Keep going and don't let the past define you

What were you taught as a child would make you feel whole/complete as an adult? Do your adult experiences align with that? If not, is it your fault, or was the map you were given as a child inaccurate?

Maybe that's a good starting point, then? A tricky thing when we're surrounded by people saying this and posting that, is that we can think we get things more than we honestly do. So maybe examining "I don't know much of anything" will help get it out of the way, or turn it into something helpful rather than a hindrance? Glad my work was useful for you as well. Just remember it's not "the correct" way, it's just my way. Anyway, Telepresent is knackered - time for bed! Let me know if you want to discuss more, but for now, goodnight!

@seeking_brilliance Glad you find some of that helpful! Incorrect definitely talks about the process more, and provides some examples of a student's writing, but be careful with it: I found myself for a long while feeling like I needed to imitate the way it was presented in that book, rather than read under the surface to understand it. I find more and more as I explore further myself that, when I return to McKenna, I recognise much more that he is talking on a more subtle and symbolic level a lot of the time, rather than a literal one. The funny thing about how the process is examined in Incorrect, though, is how much more of a deeply personal and emotional process it is. He explores it through two characters, and focuses almost entirely on their emotional/personal journey, rather than the intellectual one described in the autolysis chapter in Damndest. I think the reality lies in-between: that you need to return to autolysis as an intellectual process as a grounding, but that it will lead to some very personal and painful places.

*NOTE: this may start in a way that sounds very dramatic, but it's just where I've gotten to right now. Also, I actually broke through another bit of wall here, so that's cool. I need to sit with it, absorb it, return to it later. Right now I'm in a place of excitement, which is nice, but makes critical thinking and examination of the idea hard. I am evil. That's a deep one: it goes down to my bones, my core. Core belief, they call it. No shit. This thing is harsh. I know my past, I know what happened as a small boy. I know the psychological reasons that a pre-verbal child would blame themselves for things that couldn't possibly be their fault. I know how that impacted me as I developed through school, how certain moments of treatment or discipline by parents, teachers, other kids, reinforced this core concept. Knowing doesn't make a shit bit of difference. I am evil. I am evil. Ok, here goes: what the fuck is evil? Yes, yes, easy to answer. Opposite of good. Great. Job done. Bah. Not at all. That's an idea. Evil - my evil - is a knowing. A being. It's suffused in my very state, my very essence. It's not my actions, not my words, not the opposite of a moral framework. It's me, deeply me. Of course I have no words for what this state actually is. Why? Because it's not actually an object. It's not a tangible thing I can point to. I could say that it's an idea, but that word isn't right because it's far more pre-cognitive than that. It's... the best word is ether, I think. No, it's the substance. The substance that is the making of me. Whether in body, mind, spirit, action, memory, impact or influence... Don't get too bogged down. Stay on target. Go back to evil vs. good. Of course, both of these are subjective issues. There is no absolute evil, or absolute good. There is only objectivity and subjectivity. Good and evil exist in the subjective, but what is evil for the worm is good for the bird. So evil is based upon survival. Of course it is. Always goes back to survival, doesn't it? Refresher: everything is about survival. Survival itself is neither good or bad, but over billions of years of evolution - evolution which is dictated by survival - the drive to survive, the need to survive, is very very hardwired. Everything good or bad is based, in some way, on survival. So evil... is evil that which contradicts an individual's survival? Ok, maybe, but how does that relate back to me being evil. Abandonment. Of fucking course. Daddy left, didn't he? Daddy left and that was your fault. So says pre-verbal Telepresent. Daddy left you, which from an evo-bio perspective greatly increases your risk of death. Then he comes back. Then he goes away again. Then he comes back. WHY??? Am I being good, am I being bad? I don't know. But pre-verbal kids blame themselves for everything, so it must be my fault. I am the cause of my potential death, at such a formative time. I am not worthy of the guarantee of the one most important good: survival. I am not worthy of that. I am not worthy of that. Yeah, there it is. That's true for me. That hurts. And it only gets reinforced. Yelled at. Unpopular. Not good enough for the grammar school. Sent somewhere where I get yelled at. Picked on. Girls not liking me (another fundamental 'good' I'm unworthy of, there). Reinforcing, reinforcing, reinforcing. Unworthy of love, safety, security, survival. Evil. Unworthy of good. Evil. Yeah, that's the belief. What's it targeted at? Nothing. It's not targeted at anything. Not body, or mind, or achievement. It's prior to those. It permeates them all, because it's further inside. I'm not evil because of xyz, xyz is because I am evil. And here we reach the wall again. Smack your head, smack your head, because you know this isn't Absolutely True. You KNOW it's not! Evil is a subjective feeling, not an actual Hang on. Subjective feeling. Not object. Hang on. Of course it is. Of fucking course it is. You've played around enough with the idea of emotion and feeling that you should GET this. It's an energy. It's an energy. "Emotions are states of consciousness", right? Well, maybe, but yes emotions are the energy of conscious experience, right? Well, sort of, the energy of felt experience... ah, this is too loose, but let's worry about that another time. Evil, evil, evil - it's not a thing. You can't point to it in the same way you can't point to anger, or anxiety, or anything else. Holy shit is this sense of being evil an unnamed emotion? Is it a fear? IS IT FUCKING FEAR??? Fear masquerading as fact? And of course that makes sense as fear has to be the primary emotion of a survival-dominated perspective. But what does that do to you, if you take an emotion and transform it into a fact of the world, a fact of life, a fact of yourself? If you infuse it into your being. Not your feeling, but your substance? What does that DO to how you know the world? Shit. Fear of what? Fear I will die - that's what all the fears come to, isn't it? Fear I will fucking die and be no more. Pre-verbal, unable to look after yourself... the only thing you can do to try to survive is be loved. And Daddy leaves. It's your fault. I can't protect myself. I can't protect myself. I am unsafe. I am unworthy of love = I am going to die. BANG, branded deep deep in that developing mind. Looking out through that forever, looking at the world through that fear, seeing the potential to be hated, abandoned, to die, in every moment, every relationship, every person. The only way to protect yourself to try to keep them all happy, all the time. So we're touching on something new here: fear as a perspective. Not fear as an intense feeling, not dramatic fear, but fear as a way of seeing, interpreting, thinking. Fear as a world-filter. Seeing myself, and everyone else, through it. And given that fear is subjective, that means the filter can only be subjective, can never be absolute. Enough for now: I need to sit with this one for a bit, let it settle in. Thanks for indulging me.

@seeking_brilliance Hello. I hope you don't mind me replying to you here - it seemed easier. I've had a bit of a read over this and it seems to me like you're getting a bit overwhelmed by the mass of concepts that you're trying to deconstruct all at once: every word, every term, is subject to a simultaneous attempt at deconstruction. The problem with doing that is that you wind up jumping from idea to idea, without really digging into everything. Remember that you don't have to do everything at once. In fact you can't do everything at once. So allow yourself to focus in on one thing. Without focus, you will only skim along the surface of things. The problem with autolysis is the fact that it involves using an intellectual approach to try to attack ideas that are very deeply felt and believed. That means a quick theoretical skim of a deconstruction isn't going to be much use: you come up with an idea, which you will quickly forget as you go back into autopilot. Beliefs about what you are, what the world is, how everything works, are very very convoluted things and a brief four-line deconstruction as you've done here won't dent their surface. I often find that I'm chipping away at one idea, one concept, for days or weeks at a time - writing, thinking, talking to myself - knowing that it is not true but not yet knowing that it is not true, if that distinction makes sense? How much time do you give over to this? Autolysis (or any kind of self-inquiry) requires time to work on. Time to reflect, re-examine, check yourself, remind yourself again and again what you're trying to understand. In truth, I spend most of my non-practical time (i.e. when I'm not at work etc.) in some form of autolysis or self-inquiry, and while I don't know if that's necessary for someone else, I do know that to dig into beliefs like this you need to dedicate time in the form of hours, not sub-hours. And this ties in with the question of focus: it's a very different thing to spend half-an-hour writing a bunch of questions, to spending six hours trying to dig into one. Reading back over this, I think you're currently wrestling with the issue of terminology, and semiotics in language (i.e. that language is only a sign-system, not the thing itself). That's fine, good, and important to do. I wonder if you'll get more traction by focusing on the concept of language as a whole, rather than trying to pull apart each individual term? There will certainly be terms that need deconstructing and re-definition as you go on, but right now I think it might be the problem of language as a pointer, not true thing, that is causing you to loop around on yourself. This process of re-definition is important. If you only question (as you mostly do in your first post), you're going to get frustrated and stuck. So take your concept, the thing you are exploring, and define it in your own terms. Then deconstruct that definition: what assumptions are going on in there? What foundations does it rest upon? Define those, and you'll have a re-defined simplification of your first statement. Then start again. (Admittedly, sometimes it doesn't feel like a simplification! I think that's just an indication that more work needs to be done, though). I don't want to start answering any of your questions as a 'demonstration' as I don't want to imply that my thought-process or conclusions are correct, but I wonder if what I've written above makes sense without doing some kind of demo of what I mean? What I think I'm going to do now is work a little bit more on the door I'm chipping away at at the moment - it's useful to me as it's part of my process, and if it's of interest to you, great. I'll do it in a follow-up post. Apologies if it feels like I'm thread-jacking or something like that. Finally, don't worry too much about what your subject matter is: I think the three things you've used here are all good starting points. What will happen as you progress is that a sense of A-B-C-D starts to emerge. One thing leads inevitably into another. The important thing is to begin. Have you read Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment? One of the things that McKenna says in that book is that "discovering your process is part of the process". Keep going, experiment with it, refine it, and it'll start coming together.