UnbornTao

It was an example. In any case this is a skill that can be developed regardless of where you currently find yourself at in life. Everyone is going through their own process, remember to enjoy it.

Experiencing something is different from intellectually understanding it. For instance, you could live as a zen monk in a monastery for six years and increasingly deepen your ability to be present. It can be practiced and mastered, even if the idea behind it is easy to understand. For example: Am I able to remain grounded in the midst of challenging situations? How good am I contemplating an object for 4 hours straight? Can I be intently present effortlessly, or do I struggle with a bunch of emotional reactions, distractions, pains, and imaginations?

Paracetamol? The "psychedelic" I'm up for.

But we must get clear on what methods are helpful for: focusing and opening up one's mind producing altered states increasing awareness developing sensitivity, etc. These don't hurt. Such leaps, in any case, are sudden, unexpected; they don't follow a logical progression nor a process -- these are functions of time. The mind is the one concerned with logic, progression, and trying to latch onto the consciousness; it is not up to the task, though. You are focused on achieving a state of relaxation, that's fine. What can result from a method and practice is something other than this absolute business. Predictive of what? If what you're talking about is phenomena, sure. Long periods of meditation help produce all kinds of altered states that can be blissful, terrifying and everything in between. Prediction relies on time and process, just as actions, events, and results, which are relative. Your mind makes up the associations after the fact. It tries to interpret what it considered happened in order to understand it and find a way to reproduce it, which can't happen. Seems like you're referring to perceptive phenomena, so it's difficult to say whether it was a satori or something else. What are you? What are you conscious of now that you weren't of before? I suspect that if it were a profound satori, the self-referential notion to share the experience, to avoid crying, etc. wouldn't have come up for you as there'd have been no one there to share it. If it can be predicted, then I'd say it is something else, a shift in state likely precipitated by belief and circumstances. I experienced a "no-self" insight while walking my dog. I didn't consider it to be an enlightenment, even though it was an unusual and joyful experience preceded by a state of radical openness. I realized that who I am is not my self. In other words, I was able to experientially make the distinction between my nature and my self -- who I confused my nature to be throughout all of my life. My nature remains an unknown for now. Notice, however, that this is an interpretation of mine, a story crafted after the fact, the consciousness itself is in a completely different domain. We want to make sure that what we're talking about is a direct, personal consciousness into one's nature and whether we've "experienced" that. If not, we should acknowledge that we don't actually know what we are talking about, no matter the ideas and concepts that we hold about this matter. Let's leave as much crap as we can aside, and start from authentic experience. When you talk of meditation as an activity "aimed at Being", you're still holding Being as an activity and as a process, not as what is. An activity is an action and so relates to what isn't. It's up to you to "invoke" it, it's not external to you. The practice can't and won't do it for you. The Absolute is grasping it. Don't conflate circumstances with the awareness itself. Unfortunately, there's no pill that can produce this realization, as it is independent of the method. We'd like to come up with a way to access such consciousness but are stuck in a world of relativity (the "dream"). No matter what we come up with, they are relative inventions. Oh, and it isn't an experience. Experience is indirect. This is key. I say experience for lack of a better word. What's considered to be experienced seems to be conceptually-based, or at least dominated by concept, added upon "reality", whatever that is. As long as the "method" is taken to be contemplation, yes. What I hold to be essential is setting out to experience what's true, being open that such a leap is possible for you. This needn't take any form nor formal practice, just the intention to get it now. This is contemplation. In my view, contemplation did occur for you. I doubt that without things such as wonder, openness, presence, and the possibility of personally grasping it, that it would have happened. It is very simple and direct; seems like the only thing to "do" apart from grasping it. Components: You intending to get who you are now. That's it.

Hostility without enthusiasm. And arrogance. Thinking that the world is the way you think it is. Open up 'cause things are what they not what you think they are. See the distinction? We don't even know what a pencil is, for real. Don't stand on assumptions and belief systems and you'll find that you, as everyone else, is deeply ignorant. Then you can wonder about stuff. Go get bored for a week or two and stay there contemplating who you are. This is the least popular spiritual practice!

I cook legumes (bought pre-cooked) very similarly, without the eggs. Fried eggs on another pan.

Also agreements that facilitate co-existence in our culture. There are effective and empowering things to do both as individuals and as a group. Facts of experience, such as basic principles that are real. Gravity might be relative and not a universal phenomena, but you better not jump from a rooftop and pretend to fly (you can delude yourself you're flying just before hitting the floor). Lying has consequences, telling the truth, keeping one's word too, etc. Also there're more intelligent strategies for our collective survival and thriving. Slap a post-modernist in the face -- or anyone lost in intellect -- and ask him whether the slap was relative or not. This is for the sake of the argument, don't go around slapping people.

A sense that arises from our deep-seated self-doubt is the tendency to trust the veracity of another’s expression more than our own, which often seems to ring hollow. Since we make a distinction between the objective world--external to and independent of ourselves--and the workings of our own minds, what comes from this “objective world” is given precedence over our own fabrications. We are acutely aware that our experience is profoundly subjective, and we would do well to recognize that the same holds true for the experiences of others--even though, for each of us, "others" belong to what we regard as the domain of the objective world.

Adyashanti looks legit.

I don't know whether combining caffeine and modafinil is a good idea, if that's what you meant. In any case, best to try one at a time.

It happened because it happened, and you happened to be meditating. No matter the circumstances, individuals have gotten who they are. Get that. In any case, I'd make sure to clarify what that was, it doesn't sound like an enlightenment but perhaps a shift in state, a dramatic and unusual one. The effects are the effects, don't make stuff up. Meditation is aimed at healing by controlling the mind and such, its purpose is not absolute banana. Contemplation is intending to grasp what's true now. It shouldn't be confused with a method, though. It's like wanting to catch the bus: you want to be at the bus stop when the bus passes by. It is preparing yourself to get it, so to speak; being there when the show starts. That's an analogy for contemplation.

The what?

Sure, still we shouldn't consider that activity as anything more than jerking off, ultimately. More than giving a description of it to ballpark one's mind is silly. What's there to say? Unless for entertainment purposes, no use in that. Throw away what you've got of it, it gets in the way. Nothing is the best place from which to come at this matter; unfortunately we've got less than nothing -- convictions, conclusions. preferences, opinions, ideals, knowledge and assumptions. These are more ignorance.

I said certain things seem to help in the relative domain, not that there are necessarily factors involved. "Indicative" is an interpretation and a distinction made in the relative domain. Everything except direct is stuck in a world of relativity. It's analogous to waking up from a dream; whatever is done within it is done within it, and isn't the waking up. I'm being pedantic, the realization itself is what I'm referring to. The mind wants to replicate direct consciousness, inventing a way to capture it. Unfortunately this goes beyond the mind's job. Next time, you attempt to reproduce what your mind think happened before it -- the interpreted factors and conditions -- and it doesn't work. This basically means that you can't find yourself. Wherever you look is the domain of experience, it all occurs in experience. And somehow awakening, a sudden leap in consciousness, can happen. What the mind does with the realization isn't the consciousness itself. This is a tricky thing to recognize, I'm coming from intellect here. Yes; on the other hand, just a guy who got his nature. It shows the nature of the realization, and that it is possible. "If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?" - Dogen.

Lots of people would agree that PC gaming is better in many ways than consoles.

Isn't Edge a bloated mess? Not to mention privacy stuff. Firefox, Brave and Thorium are decent options imo. Not yet. An Arch-based distro would likely be a better option for gaming, not sure. The issue is how much tinkering is needed on Linux for some use cases. Gaming on Windows is easy to set up and use.

If you want to, yeah. Whatever works best for you.

@Thought Art Ok, thanks for sharing, keep it up.

Focus on mastering what you're interested in, whatever skill you feel drawn to. Start now and keep moving towards that.

Notice whether you play the game of life to create what you want or to avoid loss. Avoiding loss shows up in various ways: Don’t play any game. Don’t take anything up. Be complacent. The reasoning here is: if I don’t play, I can’t lose. Avoid completing anything. You can’t lose if it’s left unfinished. Do it half-heartedly. “But I didn’t really try” is yet another way to avoid loss. Keep others from winning. You appear to lose when others win--so you sabotage their efforts to keep your position of relative safety. If no one wins, then (you think) you haven’t lost. Play the nice guy/girl role. Pretend to like everyone, be nice to everyone, so we can all silently agree that you haven’t lost. It’d be rude for us to tell you otherwise. Turn yourself into the game. Become a problem so that you become the center of attention. Get sick, throw tantrums, destroy the game--whatever it takes to make others stop playing and take care of you. Adopt the judge’s role. Play “the righteous judge.” Since you’re not actively creating the results you want, you attack others’ vitality and enthusiasm instead. Criticize, blame, denigrate, troll, sabotage, act righteous, “debunk”--so your relative position appears good and “right,” despite producing no significant result in your own life. Does any of the above resonate with you? Have you encountered people who operate this way? credit to Stewart Emery.

On one of my virtual machines, Edge and Onedrive are uninstalled, and lots of services are put to Manual so that they aren't running in the background except when needed, thanks to a debloat tool. Understandably, Windows and macOS has some basic telemetry services built-in. How bad is it for Windows? Especially if Windows 12 starts getting serious with web tech and Copilot... Do you game on Mint? If so, how's that going?

Excuses are used to justify your behavior, especially the kind of behavior you consider to be wrong or flawed, making you appear "good" and right in your own mind once again, thus fixing that aspect of your "inadequate" self-image. One possible reason is that, the way you see it, making excuses allows you to continue doing what you're doing - to solidify those acts in your mind and the reasoning behind them. They're a way of abdicating responsibility, letting you off the hook. Now, avoid the tendency to confuse the principle of owning your actions with blaming or judging yourself - or others - negatively. You can do the above without a negative motivation or emotional reaction. What if you stopped making excuses? Consider simply acknowledging to yourself what you do or don't do and its consequences, with no story to explain or justify it. "I did this. And these were the consequences." If you're not happy with the consequences, do something different.

Moved to Entertainment section.

Do you? A bit tired, perhaps, not worse. Or rather relieved, like after a good sneeze.

Can you recognize, in your experience, the pressing urge or need that could be phrased as: "World, tell me what to believe in"? What is that urge based on? We often are actively looking for things to believe in! That’s what humans seem to be up to, for the most part - especially in spiritual or philosophical circles. Believing is easy and convenient, while genuine investigation is challenging. It demands discipline, time, and effort, and it can threaten our existing worldview, self-identity, and attachments.