UnbornTao

It's Ralph all the way down.

I should have clarified that by letting them be, I meant your feelings. Experiencing things tends to dissolve them. Okay. Also stop beating yourself up, that's a start.

nah, joking.

You know who I hate? Those Buddhist beggars. All bald and annoying. plot twist i'm one

I write how it comes naturally for me. Has always been like this. Effective, honest and concise is what I aim for.

I beat you to it

Something like that, yes. You're welcome. Enjoy.

Appreciate it, you're welcome.

Who said that living a normal life correlates with having a weaker intention to find truth? Pursue mastery, transformation, and the absolute. You can live and take periods of intense contemplation, but I doubt many people will do that long-term.

Maybe everything about the person is appearance. Doesn't "person" mean mask in latin? Something to think about. About your concerns, you don't need to judge others nor yourself. If you do, be clear that judgments are usually superficial, quick, simplistic assessments based on impressions. Some might be accurate, depends on intuition, but are still rather shallow opinionizing. For example, I might be addicted to the internet, and from that you jump to conclusions about my life, etc.

What are relationships? What is another? What are emotions? What is skill? How can you transform yourself and master something? Pursue both relative and absolute truth. Could be, I don't know.

Investigate how resisting your present experience relates to anxiety.

Live life and contemplate. You don't have to become a monk in order to get enlightened.

Let them be first, neither act it out nor suppress. Enjoy being the victim. You're doing that because it gets you something. I'd suggest you acknowledge your experience as it is by letting it be completely, and look into it. Then unnecessary activities are organically dropped.

@Carl-Richard Inaccurate but bears repeating: What's done within the dream, occurs within dream. For instance, you could drink coffee while dreaming, hoping that that will wake you up. Maybe it helps in some way from your current point of view. In the dream, doing so may make sense as you're stuck within it and can't see beyond it. In this analogy, we can see that this mindset doesn't apply. The waking up is a different domain than the dreaming. You wake up whenever you do irrespective of the dreaming. I've said methods can help focus the mind, etc. As human inventions, few methods seem to be purely aimed at direct consciousness, even though many of them may offer that as a selling point. Many methods are plain ineffective and misleading, a set of superstitious rituals that require adherence to their cosmology in order to get a sense of progress towards the promised results. Besides, as the final destination isn't known by us but imagined, we have to trust what the practice stipulates as the end goal, hoping for the best. As tools, we use methods to achieve certain ends. The mind might want to come up with a way to understand this subject, inventing a method to get there -- it doesn't work that way. For example, you might have an enlightenment just after hitting your head against the kitchen counter, but the relationship is made up by your mind. Just so with any other method. No method can possibly produce enlightenment; it can help in taming the mind by giving it some toy to chew on -- a discipline, an object of contemplation, etc. And then somehow enlightenments occur. It is paradoxical. Can't find yourself, since everywhere you look for is relative, and yet wondering and intent seem to help in grasping it. I still think you're holding the matter as relative, so when you experience something unusual and powerful, you think of that as awakening. When you talk of uncertainty, complexity, and spontaneity, you're talking about something experienced, even if preceded by intense meditation. They don't apply to the Absolute. It is true now. No change needed. Our experience is relative, which doesn't mean one's nature is relative too. We might have gotten too far with the speculation and intellectualizing, which is what this is. You are not a perception. What are the implications of the above assertion, assuming that it is true? What can be done within the domain of experience that somehow produces such a leap? How can you manipulate yourself and your experience, the condition you're in, into having absolute consciousness? We're back at square one. Anything we come up with and have adopted about, enlightenment, is bullshit, a distraction from the real work. Better get busy contemplating! In the end, it doesn't matter how you arrive at the truth, as long as you do.

Who? What? Stand on nothing when questioning, otherwise what you're looking for is people validating your conjectures.

Why separate them? Can do both.

No weirdo's please

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.