UnbornTao

Why do you expect another to fix your life?

@Human Mint Fantasy is a much broader term here, by the way. I recommend you go through some of the past threads. Essentially, we could say that no perceptive experience is 'closer' to the truth than any other. It is a fallacy.

-- Max van Manen

The purpose of this journal is to share questions, humor, miscellaneous creative content, and raw reflections on personal empowerment and consciousness. My goals are to deepen my experiential understanding of these topics, improve my communication skills, have fun, and help others see things in a new light.

@Human Mint Didn't you listen to Pene_Descomunal77's video a while ago? Or read the Teal Swan thread?

I'd say that consciousness and cognition are not the same thing.

It provides a hopeful path in one's mind, and I think that's what underlies much of the clinginess. It's discouraging to drop something that essentially turns out to be a fantasy - in the context of consciousness work. It might have value for other purposes, such as healing or opening one's mind. But as you say, you always come down, for a reason. It's also easy to be swayed by dramatic shifts in state and mistake them for enlightenment, especially when there's no real prior contrast to help you discern what's what. Adi Da spoke about this trap somewhere.

We want a pill that could finally solve our personal and societal struggles, don't we? It's more snake oil than reality, in my view.

Which is all we care about.

You have a body - and diet obviously plays a role in how it operates. What do you consider to be spiritual work? This isn't to say that they're directly related in the sense that your diet determines whether you can have an insight or not. But again, it depends on how you're holding spiritual work. For example, fasting and caffeine are likely to influence your meditation sessions if you sit down to meditate. I guess the overall point is that consciousness of the truth isn't determined by your state. And you can contemplate regardless of your experience, whether you are bored, enthusiastic, sad, or jealous. Something something.

"Why can't we ask a question?"

Gave Slay of Spire a try and I'm liking it so far. Got it on Android too.

I'd have to agree with the quote. But show your face, Jed! 😈

I would say it is trickier because it seems to me that everyone assumes they are their mind. I hate to use this analogy, but the fish in water does not know it is swimming in water - because that water is its reality. I am just pointing to this dynamic and the difficulty of escaping it sometimes. A physical pursuit like sports reveals this disparity more clearly. One might think they understand something, but then the feedback provided by objective reality proves they may be missing something - even though, in their mind, they believe they understand. In consciousness work, this distinction may not be so sharply defined at first. Assessing one's own progress and understanding is likely to be biased if this point is not taken into account (and even then...). For example, you mentioned thinking in relation to understanding. Why? It might be that there is a real possibility of experiencing things - a deeper form of knowing than intellectual comprehension. The traps you mention may be related to this: striking a balance between open-mindedness and being grounded, which can be tricky. It seems many people in spiritual circles conflate open-mindedness with gullibility. Oftentimes, they're just plain gullible. In the case of ambition, illusion may apply to the motivation behind it. More often than not, you think that achieving the object of desire will bring about something that resolves you. This is one possibility, and it is what could be labeled as illusory in this context. You pursue something because you think it will complete you, fix you, or do something along those lines.

Static websites with Hugo:

Yeah, recognizing a belief for what it is tends to undermine our certainty in it; it is seen as invented and adopted, and therefore not true in itself. But how deep does belief go? We might assume it is just a trivial notion we hold in our minds. There may be deeper layers to it, though. What do you take for granted about any aspect of reality? What do you think is true about X and Y? (These are meant to be contemplated.)

That doesn't make it true, though. This is more of the same performative charity. For starters, seriously consider the possibility that your position comes from a closed-minded stance, a particular cosmology or way of seeing the universe. The fact that you tend to associate drug experiences with so-called awakening strongly hints at this. Again, if you're color-blind, I guess you're shit out of luck when it comes to having a Blue awakening. The bells and whistles of "experience" can easily be conflated with a breakthrough. There's nothing you're aware of that is outside of your experience. Revisiting the other threads may help clarify this distinction, but listening is necessary. Sometimes we think we're after the truth when, in reality, we're chasing a fantasy. At some point, I was in your position too. I took my 5-MeO breakthrough experiences to be far more significant than they actually were. In hindsight, I see those episodes as powerful events but ultimately meaningless - and certainly not "awakening." I'm not retroactively making or creating anything out of those experiences in my mind; they were essentially the same effect the chemical has on everyone else. It was self-deception based on wishful thinking and ignorance of what a direct encounter actually is. At this point, if you haven't listened to Ramana, Adi Da, and the others, I don't think you'll drop this belief of yours. It's clear you're committed to Leo's notion. The "cult" remark mostly refers to the relationship many people seem to develop toward this work, which is clear from an outsider's perspective. Take into account the self-validating nature of belief systems.

Oh, that's not the reason at all. I welcome that teaching style.

Taking it as an invalidation is definitely a common reaction. It's almost automatic. Nobody likes to hear that X or Y is a so-called illusion - especially when it's something they value and enjoy doing, and even more so when it involves things like the self, life, or existence. By the way, I Iiked the purgatory bit. Not sure what that process is about, though. It seems that we're so involved in our "bubbles" that it is hard to see them for what they are. It's easy to assume that these things are already understood simply because the associations we make in our minds after hearing such claims feel like the same thing as the truth they point to. In other words, believing that something is an illusion without having had the direct consciousness behind those claims is a kind of pretension. It's an adopted idea, at the end of the day. Do we know that life is an illusion? Only intellectually, perhaps. It's likely we have yet to truly grasp it. The opposite might turn out to be true as well - there may be nothing more real than this. I'm not sure I'd say that something has to matter. Something exists, and then we may generate the importance it has relative to us. For our survival, things definitely have to mean something, though. Still, it seems to me that statements of this kind are fully understood when you see that both observations can coexist: you can engage in any pursuit wholeheartedly and, at the same time, see it for what it is in its essence, like building a sandcastle. You know that in the end it doesn't really matter, it will disappear, and it doesn't mean anything by itself, existentially. But you make sure to enjoy, suffer, and live the experience of building the sandcastle while you can. That's life. Sorry, a bit all over the place.

With all the threads on this topic, one might as well pay closer attention to them. But you keep insisting on your cosmology. Okay. Arrogance can sometimes show up through a veneer of spirituality. Closed-mindedness, too, can be made to appear as its opposite, it only has to look open. Perception itself is a process. For example, ask a color-blind person what purple has that is absolute. You need to put the pipe down and stop labeling experiences as "awakening" so flippantly. It's essentially a very elaborate and unconscious form of confirmation bias. The cult awakening was also dead sober for me. To bridge that gap, revisit the pertinent threads.

This is what a cult does to one's thinking. Oh, I forgot you guys were talking about experiences with the psychedelic drugs.

Keep at it. And remember to do it experientially, not just think about it.