UnbornTao

Have you ever caught yourself dramatizing your pain, adding more to it? I imagine there have been times in your life when you experienced pain yet didn't suffer it - maybe when playing a sport, or with other physical activities. It's not at all about dissociating from or suppressing your experience but about recognizing that you're at the source of most of it. Is the stress actually caused by "life," as you seemed to suggest, or do you have an active role in it? How does a problem exist except in relationship to you? Fasting is a practice that some people take up. The fact that it is intentional tends to change their relationship to hunger. Maybe the physical sensations themselves don't have to be suffered. There's a guided meditation somewhere in there: be a rabbit. Have the experience of a rabbit. Once you can make that real in whatever way works for you, contrast it with your usual experience. What doesn't the rabbit do?

Yes. It depends. Are you holding happiness as an emotion? Do you see neutrality as a kind of equanimity? Are we ever in a truly neutral state? I'm not sure. Everything we encounter is automatically regarded as either positive or negative. What's neutral tends to recede from our awareness; it goes unnoticed. Yeah, that's fine. Stopping something doesn't mean that "the opposite" will be experienced, just that the former has ceased. To suffer requires that you create both a self and a situation in which it can suffer. Suffering arises after a long chain of associations, attachments, agendas, and assumptions have been activated, interconnected, and called "real," whereas happiness is your primordial condition. Consider that the beingness of something is inherently free from suffering. Becoming happy does not require you to create happiness. Rather it is a matter of letting go of everything that obsures the happiness that is inherently there. I was going to include more flowery language, but I think that illustrates the point well enough.

A vacation from food.

Leave God out of this bullshit

"Folks, my speech — and everybody’s saying this — was the greatest speech, maybe in history. People were crying, people were cheering, some even fainted. I looked at the teleprompter and thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s good!’ Then I realized, it was me. Nobody gives speeches like I do, believe me. The fake news? They didn’t like it. But that’s because they don’t understand words… or sentences… or winning.”

Let's, eat Grandma!

Soup! https://www.reddit.com/r/soup/

@Someone here A belief by definition is different from whatever is true. We're experiencing something pretty much all the time, but let's see how he answers.

That is fair, thanks. What question is being answered, and in what form, though? Usually it's an idea that one likes rather than an experience of the truth. I'd ask how hearing something - in particular a "voice" presumably from another entity external to you - would be possible without - or outside of - the body, to start with. Where was he located, if not in the body? It sounds like a subjective state to me, and calling that proof of anything is premature. I'm not dismissing the potential psychological or emotional benefits that one may have by going through such states, by the way. But I get irritated when they're taken as gospel.

What turns a physical sensation of pain into something suffered? @Someone here

Great to hear!

Sorry, I can see my tone may have been a bit harsh. Since there seems to be a fair share of assumptions operating in the background, you may ask: "What is God?" "Is it true I was shown something by another being?" "What did I actually experience?" Setting aside hearsay and bias, making those questions can help clarify all this.

Perhaps a more effective way to approach this investigation is by noticing that everything you end up doing, you intended to do - even when you say you "didn't really want to." When it comes to taking action, intent is the main component. It is essentially the same as the action itself - a concept that generates and co-arises with action. Contrast this with desire, which is the wish for an imagined future scenario to come to pass, without necessarily requiring action. If you did something, you intended to do it. Intent obviously comes prior to the consequences of the action. In your experience, intent shows up as the action. This focus tends to simplify the matter. Stand up and sit again - what made you do that? Notice that concepts like motivation and desire aren't required in order to take action.

Yes. It requires consciousness. The paradox is that everything in our experience - which is where our life happens and the place we'll look in - is relative. We find that we can't find ourselves there, and yet, direct realization is possible at the same time. How come? Go figure. And openness isn't limited to the mind either; it could be applied to feeling, the body, and awareness. It's based on not-knowing. It's a bit tricky. Regardless, it's useful to remember the mind isn't limited to logic or intellect, as useful as they can be. Your last sentence is a good way of putting it. Don't you dare invalidate my suffering It's your condition now so there's no need to reach it or do anything extra, only to recognize it. That's apparently easier said than realized, though. Still, whenever you've been happy, you've accessed that. What stands in the way of this possibility is our selves. Remember Ramana: he lived in a cave while insects were eating his body, and yet he was blissful. He was free from life and death. It's independent of circumstances. What you're referring to is survival or conventional happiness, which is fine too. But notice: being happy doesn't mean being complacent, dumb, or lazy, nor does it mean we can't create what we want in life. You can be happy and still pursue a certain degree of comfort, for example. It's not like happiness has to keep you stuck with your circumstances. 'Freedom' is a good term to use for that.

Oppenheimer The Count of Monte Cristo @Schizophonia French! I watched it in Spanish, though.

Is that cheetah a nazi?

You don't need to be enlightened to stop doing your suffering.

what the hell and who is this "leo" guy?

--- You don't have to. Yet notice the consequences. A natural effect of that disposition is self-deception. You lie and get what you want as a result, but no possibility of real freedom is found there. As for your last question there, you already know what's self-serving. In short, assessing and pursuing that is your job in life. That isn't wrong or bad per se, it's necessary to a degree. But it tends to be exclusive (it excludes, separates) in nature. Any form of lying is exclusively self-serving, as is twisting the facts to fulfill your agenda. To clarify, I'm not asking you to believe anything. Notice that you don't get to decide how gravity works. You can't turn it off for a day and switch it on again the next, or bend it to your wishes. It is not up to personal interpretation or perspective. The principle certainly doesn't care about our opinions, doubts, preferences - it doesn't care about us at all. It - something other than you - makes the rules, so to speak. In this case, it is an objective law. You already recognize this. The same "realness" usually applies to other principles as well. Not every little thing we encounter has to be questioned. That'd be impractical. What's being investigated sets the rules. It could be an emotion, an object, perception, or skill. Be grounded and tell the truth about what you experience. Again, 'questioning' is not an excuse to disregard common sense and basic discernment. I said it didn't exclude them. Try going to space without an astronaut suit. 2 + 2 isn't 5. You can't lie your way into what's true. Skill can't be faked. Eating a rod of uranium isn't healthy. It sounds absurd on paper, yet the deeper point can be missed. Our choice is aligning with reality, or not (rather than the other way around.) Refer to the etymology of principle above. Principles are empowering if adopted, but you can live however you want. Still, consider that, without integrity, no experience of wholeness is possible. Being sloppy creates a certain experience - just as dumbness, intelligence, honor, and so on. An ideal, by definition, is a conception of a perfect, unattainable result, image, or outcome, projected onto the future. And it always creates suffering. It exists only in imagination. A principle is like a "law." The truth is completely independent of you and only serves itself. You seemingly want to be the one establishing that, relativizing everything and assuming that it is dependent on you - on what you think, believe, want. This is where I imagine the quote from Jesus about serving two masters comes in: I hear that as a contrast between "selfishness" and truth. Reread the post above. We were talking about principles:

Definitely. And we are almost always engaged in some kind of activity. Still, "direct" isn't an action. We can't go from "here to there" - and yet, without the attempt, realization is unlikely to occur. So we're faced with a paradox. I was simply using "magic," trying to induce a realization. Hopefully, it helped us bring focus to a more present experience of ourselves. To clarify: if the goal is uncovering the truth of something relative, then the context shifts, and with it, the appropriateness of different tools. If maturity is our subject, then focusing the mind, feeling, and other faculties may be called for. "Direct," however, usually points to the absolute, which is the context of our conversation. Sure, the mind can help, but it cannot make the leap, as you suggested above. It's a bit like trying to get dressed using a computer program: you can plan what to wear in countless ways, but that in no way accomplishes the task of getting dressed. They belong to different domains. Contemplation is not thinking - it's more like "silence" or a kind of "waiting," so to speak. It is dwelling on a question and based on true openness. Thinking may well arise, but it should not be confused with the intent to experience the truth. By necessity, approaching existential subjects requires a tool other than thought. I'm oversimplifying here - don't take my word for it - but the mind may be a limited form of consciousness. Not quite. Undoing implies that a process was already occurring or being generated in the first place. As a result, you may assume that the activity was originally "happening to you." But if you don't generate suffering in the first place, there's nothing to undo. My point was related to this latter approach. That doesn't change the fact that we do generate it, though. Still, if this kind of happiness is independent of experience, then it follows that you can suffer, or experience anything for that matter, and be happy at the same time - a bit like getting dressed (being happy) while also using a computer program to try out different outfits (experiencing things). Probably stretched that analogy too far.

Make a decision now. A process, by definition, is something carried out, rather than an existential (metaphysical) aspect of reality. In other words, it is an action or set thereof. We could think of reality as the primary condition that allows the existence of process. What is versus what is done. To use your example: obviously, you wouldn't choose to open a 'door' if there were no frame for it; you might instead decide to insert a frame so the door can exist. The doors you open are ones you've already decided to open. And no extraneous explanation or story is necessary for what's essentially a simple physical action. I'm trying to shift the discussion toward our experience of decision-making.