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@YinYang Mind is mind. Mind is not you. The meaning of life is you, already. Identify with mind, and allow mind to believe it is primary, and continue to hurt and suffer. I'm working on observing mind, noticing mind, and remaining conscious of mind. I don't want to be associated with mind at all though. I am, often, and I suffer like a bitch. In my opinion and experience, the bad trip of relating and identifying with mind on 'one of those days, FUCK!!' is an exponentially more miserable, grinding, halting, downwardly spiralling second-by-second nightmare much worse and damaging than any panic attacks and existential crises that mind may want to throw into the midst of a substance-catylized journey within. Mind wouldn't have much problem messing up just about anything, no substances required! (As we see daily) My mind manages to do a horrible job on itself, by itself, whenever I let it run itself for very long. When I let go of mind, my higher self soars and lives and loves and creates, much like a good 'trip'.

AL-LADin Heights - The new standard of opulence and luxury. 50% off for naive realists and anal-retentive hard-noses. Chemist on-site for custom tailoring and alterations. 'Come for the recreation and escapism, stay for the profundity!'

For fuck sakes.. alright..! - you hold him & pinch his nose & I'll break out that quarter of Golden Teacher & we'll just have ourselves a little 'shift'..

I think I often go into meditative self-inquiry when I'm doing a sinkful of dishes. (Gaargh!) I qualify it as meditative if the (ego-elicited) boredom or distaste of a task gets me 'daydreaming' or contemplating the nature of myself and reality. Before you know it I haved done the dishes completely automatically & unconsciously without being aware of the work I'm doing. Meanwhile my body has either relaxed into a more peaceful, easy stance, or forgotten to be so contracted at least. It's kind of the opposite of being in the now though. Even if the daydreaming is about spirituality or enlightenment, it's still an avoidance of the present moment. The is-ness thang. Sometimes I can manage the different & more emotionally labour-intensive method of changing things up to 'make the best' of that is-ness with total presence & no escapism. Say you had 40 figurines to polish & place. It could turn into play pretty quick if you thoroughly explored the contours & textures of each peace, just enjoying the sensation on your fingertips & palms, & loving the fact that you are able to have the perceptions & sensations. The mind may wander a bit & try and arrange the figurines somewhat differently than they were, according to some theme or whatever (size, colour, type). Maybe you just try and mess with grandma's reality for fun by hiding some of the figurines to see if she notices. Maybe she'll quit it with that pickle thing.

This is from the Devin Townsend Project's latest release, 'Transcendence'. Mad ego-pride that he's Canadian!

I realize, embrace, and forget that about 200 times a day. Damn I love life!

I check out his videos. The shorter ones and occasionally those long Satsang ones. I'm always inspired, fascinated and moved by his presence and love. If I was in attendance at one of those, I may not choose to ask a question, but would surely crave a Mooji hug!

I wonder if the lunchbag letdown factor might be mitigated by a different practical understanding? (I just thought of this so it very well may be stupid.) Say you gathered the dollars to purchase something really sweet. For you it may be that beautiful, shiny new car. For me it might be a beautiful, shiny new guitar. What if we allowed ourselves to really enjoy it for what it was, all the while adopting an attitude of detachment as well? Something like "I sure love this guitar, but would I be pretty okay with losing it or having it destroyed or damaged? Yeah, pretty much.. it's only a shiny object. There's always another beauty out there, and a way and means to aquire it." I guess the whole idea is flawed though. Almost impossible to only partly detach? I can see it still boiling down to: partial detachment - loss, partial detachment - loss. Guess I have real work to do, haaa!

Dammit Leo, did you make that Trump guy too? Could you maybe cut it out?

Lol, that new car is sweet until some dink scratches it, smacks into it, or the novelty simply wears thin. Then it's all lunchbag letdown, right? Who needs it? I guess that non-attachment thang is one of the most powerful practices.

@Ramu You mentioned thanking the plow guy. Yeah baby, hard to not to spread it around when you're joyful and happy with life eh?

Hey bud, welcome. En-joy all of it! When I manage to quit it with the incessant, unconscious monkey mind stream, and relax my body for real at the same time, tears of joy come out and there's just no denying that love and peace and contentment and joy must be what I Am. I'm sure as hell not that reactive, resentful, always lacking thing that I got used to!!

Do you mean objects seem to disappear visually? Wondering if you mean in a 'blind-spot' kind of way or more of an exists /doesn't exist kind of way? (Maybe it's pretty much the same thing?) Perception IS reality. I tend to think if it ain't there, it ain't there, even if just for a second or so. Fun to ponder & play with for sure. Did you have a chance to check out Leo's episode on 'Naive Realism'? Approach that one with a radically open mind & see if it doesn't mess you up. It's fun & funky to continue on to 'The Holographic Principle', if you enjoy science. Have you ever tried to inhale & digest those blog posts over at Science and Non-duality? https://scienceandnonduality.wordpress.com/2016/06/11/matter-is-a-form-of-consciousness/

How can anyone pigeonhole an entire genre of music? Isn't ragging on metal just the same as saying something small & obtuse like; 'Opera sucks', or 'Blues is stupid', or 'Classical is boring'? It's fun to be able to enjoy someone plucking beautifully on a nylon-string classical guitar as much as someone who knows what to do with a backline of Marshalls & Mesas & a 7-string.

Restless

Geez, I haven't heard that Sabbath tune since I was just a lad. Thanks. Gotta go get my guitar now lol.

You've resigned yourself to the fact that today, your burgers will be naked, then you find two stray cheese slices in the fridge when looking for the mayo.

Thanks bud. A part of me knows that the magic of life is all of experience. The second I start resting in the now, with a natural awareness increase, life becomes so exquisite, so slowed down and so detailed, hi-def & joyful. I love slowing down & dwelling on the moment by moment joy of BEing. When distracted or anxious, (often it seems), the magic that flowed and shone so beautifully and naturally contracts faster than Sean Spicer's scrotum when it's "Live from New York!" But yeah, I have a lot of cultivation to do.

@Azrael Nicely said, thanks for that. This forum is a gem. I'm only just beginning to be able to become present in the moment at will, but it seems to be something that improves exponentially with some real effort. I can sometimes just recognize in the moment that I am Awareness, and everything stays in the picture but the central-feeling sense of self seems to just dissipate. Then that empty, pervasive awareness begins to feel like it's literally made of, and the making of, everything it's aware of. Then my lazy mind habitually remembers it was doing or thinking about something and finds it's place, and the magic of life so easily becomes commonplace again. 'Til next time! @Laisa Happy to share, glad my words sometimes make sense. I'm figuring it all out as I go, and having a very good time. My ego is so strong and good at what it does that I forget so easily the magic of just BEing, but more and more awareness and opening up to all possibilities is tilting the scales nicely. A little slowly and not really consistently yet, but.. Woohoo!

That time in your life when you are pretty sure you are likely the only person in the world who can flick their dirty underwear off the floor with their toes and catch them & with one smooth motion swing them into the corner or even more impressively, the clothes hamper.

Hey, quit saying in one sentence what it took me a whole page to say, lmao!

I've been on this journey for eight months as well. I'm still figuring a lot of things out, & then ten more questions pop up every time I do have a realization. It's pretty cool. Maybe some of the wonder & slight worry that you have is only because it's all so new to you. If you were to suddenly have to drive backwards everywhere you went, it would seem awful weird and disconcerting for a while but after a while you would adjust and be cool with it, & keep doing it better & better if you kept it up. It may be that those nice new body feelings, and sometimes a wondrous feeling of connection to 'innocents' like babies, or puppies, etc., is a result of simply being more aware. I guess it's recognizing your own True Nature shining like fresh, pure light within newborns & nature. Awareness can feel like 'paying extra attention' to many aspects of your day, more and more. Awareness can feel like getting to know yourself, through new, more frequent and careful attention to many thoughts and feelings, and the tone of things with yourself, & possible reasons behind many of your feeling-tones. (They'll start feeling better and lighter, as you have noticed, and when that starts turning into a feedback loop, things get more and more wondrous, interesting & joyful.) A feedback loop might work like this; You become interested in your existential nature and your curiosity leads you to a world of info and inspiration. The more you learn, the more interested and inspired you are, and naturally, you begin to become more aware of yourself and your surroundings. Pondering and contemplating the inside and outside world in new and different ways. This new awareness and way of learning and inquiring brings results pretty quickly, and you become more and more lucid and alive and actuated, bit by bit, and this feeling and tone drive you naturally to investigate further, go deeper, and reach further inside. Which of course produces insight and more and more awareness, which just makes you feel better and better as you somehow begin to really understand that lightness and love and joy and peace and contentment and fulfilment and inspiration and enthusiasm are your natural ways of BEing, and all the other, lower-frequency crap like envy and resentment and fear and loathing and all that, is a construct of the finite mind. Sorry, I tend to be long-winded. Awareness, to me, feels like a slow, progressively more acute and succinct way of becoming more and more of the light being of love that you discover under all your layers, and seeing that in everyone else too. Also, awareness to me is seeing the so called outside world more and more for what it really is. (Your own apparently physical self and the apparently physical 'outside world' are co-created, second by second, by only perception.) All you have of the world to inform your brain about reality is your 5 senses, that's it. Period. "Perception is reality." Rupert Spira blew me away by hitting me with those three words once I began to understand naive realism (Thanks to Leo Gura.) Perception IS reality. But, here's my take on what awareness feels like when I look at the really big picture, and look very deeply within and very carefully without; Awareness is only that. Awareness is everything, and everyone. All that the universe is, is within Awareness. Pure, self-aware BEing. Open, limitless, boundless, infinite, timeless Awareness. Then, when Awareness forgets itself as itself, all the universe, ALL of everything, including our differentiated, individualized by separate thoughts of a finite mind, 'selves', come into apparent 'existence'. Reality and each of ourselves is co-created as the dream of life, only when the limitless, unbounded, wide open field of awareness (God, source, consciousness, Awareness, etc.) falls asleep and thus is able to dream up a whole physical universe and 7 billion 'dreamers', just the only way infinite Awareness is able to experience anything finite at all, which is of course, us and all the other 'physical' (heh heh) objects in the universe. Awareness IS the universe, and you. Awareness is God, Source, Pure empty, divine, infinite Consciousness, playing hide and seek with itself, purposely forgetting it's infinite nature in order to see what's possible inside it. We are THAT. All ONE. Perception, Awareness, consiousness. It is us, it's all we have, and it co-creates us & our world second by second, and all the dreamed, individuated, finite minds & bodies on this spinning ball of dirt, see and experience this dreamed world by virtue of the Sleeping Giant that is Consciousness, Awareness, Source, whatever you want to call it. The only, one, ultimate consciousness, playing hide and seek with itself by losing itself in a dream-universe of separate and diverse objects & 7 billion 'people', because when it's awake, it can only know itself, Absolte Infinity and no-thing else. We all perceive this dreamt world more or less the same way because the Source is One, not many. The self-consistency Nature of reality that Leo mentions in his Naive Realism video episode is because there is ONE dreamer. That dreamer's dream is 'our' awareness and reality, and all of us. The best part of it is you and I, becoming more and more aware, by coming closer and closer to our True Nature, by becoming AWARE OF BEING AWARE. Our stunned little egos are having all these 'holy shit' moments as we turn our attention around from the outside world of perceptions (Reality created, second by second), and begin to discover the True Nature of our Awareness. The origin, the Source. Apologies for the long post, just trying to share I guess.

My ego sure doesn't care for the scrutiny and investigation it's been under lately. I'm finding that, with me, the best internally laid intellectual arguments for ego diminishment most often degenerate into another bout of unconscious self-talk in the head. The really neat thing is that with a little work and growth and realization over the last year, that voice in the head, debating with itself, contradicting itself, second-guessing and ultimately judging itself, is seen very very often for just exactly what it is. Sometimes when I recognise the ego at work in default 'us or them' mode, tending towards an automatically defensive & quietly resentful underlying feeing-tone, I can just slow that shit down, under the light of scrutiny, enough for my body and default stance to just relax. If I stay out of my maelstrom-head for just long enough to relax and just be present and grounded and aware, the ego pretty quickly succumbs to a heady, warm, light, sort of magic rush of happiness, joy, love, forgiveness, peace, inspiration, enthusiasm... was going to say 'This is what I want', but I'll wrap this post up with "THIS IS WHAT I AM!"

@John Flores I hear ya. I'm pretty sure of my own slow, sorta steady growth lately, but until only recently I had no clue how to move the cause forward in any real way outside of sharing the joy of it all with a few people close to me. It's crazy though, lately I've walked backwards into a number of pretty solid ideas about how to help more, much more, than just a few folks around me. Bigger thinking is great fun when you're not used to it, but I now have a lifetime of work to do, in a thousand not so little ways lol. I do have a real hard time with even remaining aware of the unconditional love thing, let alone cultivating it with any consistency, allowing it to become more & more natural. I find it tough to balance love with the practical side of things, and I'm learning that eventually, happy thoughts & personal spiritual realizations aren't going to be enough to improve the dream of this world. God I ramble, have an awesome, and I mean AWESOME day!

Acetone is to be avoided if you possibly can. We used it as a very effective solvent in the print shop, but it didn't take much inhalation of stray fumes or absorbtion through the skin of your hands to give you an awful, raw, impairment/buzz/headache feeling. Not a nice buzz, all senses dulled to the point of feeling it in your mouth & tongue. You can almost feel neurons & brain cells succumbing to the shit, and you feel like puking. Pregnant women were told to steer clear of it. I can't remember how flammable it was but I think it was a very flammable solvent. I'd look up the Material Safety Data Sheet on it, within the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System. Nice & toxic for sure.