The White Belt

@Evilwave Heddy Thanks a lot! All great suggestions.

@Leo Gura How can we unveil genuine parts of personality?

@Prabhaker But why do I feel that presence from some teachers and not others?

@Dodoster Lol. I wonder why that is though? They are so poetic, the things they say are so profound. Maybe just their unique way of getting the message to people...

@jse, amazing. Thank you so much! I will keep you posted on what happens.

I have ordered some shrooms, in the form of truffles. According the to website, the strength of the first lot I ordered are 3.5/5, and the second lot are 5/5. They come in 15 gram packets each, and they state that that is two servings. My previous experience with psychedelics are as follows; About 8 months ago I had a mushroom 'shake' in Thailand (I don't know how many grams of actual shrooms was in it), and about 7 months ago I had quite a potent Marijuana pizza in Laos. Surprisingly the pizza was a lot trippier. Anyway, some questions for my upcoming psychedelics experience: 1. What is a good dose to take based on my limited previous experiences with shrooms? 2. Do I need a sitter? 3. Is it a good idea to do this with friends who aren't interested in personal development and may be nervous, or do to it alone? 4. Is it a good idea to take it and then go to trip in a public place, I.E. a park? 5. Is it a good idea to do this with people, including children, walking around, or being noisy outside of my bedroom or do I need to be totally undisturbed? 6. Is it a good idea to engage in any activities such as meditation, self-inquiry, contemplation as I trip? 7. Is it a good idea to get some YouTube visuals up to look at as I trip or is this a waste of time? 8. Is there anything else useful you can think of to tell me? Excuse my naivety. When you answer these questions please don't take a shot in the dark. Select only the ones you know based on direct experience, or strong intuition. Many thanks!

Being hungry is distracting, being full is distracting. Somewhere in the middle.. MWAH!

Exactly the same has happened to me. People say that i'm so passive now. I was very silly. Maybe I just need attention a lot less than I used to. It's a good thing.

When you actively invite awareness to the present moment, to aide you in something, such as becoming aware of the feel of a touch on the plates as you unload the dishwasher, the gravel under your feet as you walk in the park, the feel of the air on your face, then soon awareness will be no stranger. Invite it to be with you again and again and again, and eventually it will know it is an always welcome friend. Awareness will just invite itself, and it will help you to find passion, contentment, love, purpose as its gift to you, for giving it a warm and gentle invitation time after time.

Some practical meditation questions. Please take the time to overlook and answer these questions for me to help me get the most out of my practice. What's better, to concentrate on a sensation, i.e, the breath, or to let the mind loose? If my mind wants to kick off, like a child, should I let it, or should I just focus on the breath? Should I have steel concentration or have a little leeway for the mind to do its thing? If I get lost in a thought story should I take that seriously, in the sense that I failed to keep concentrated or just return to the object of concentration and shrug it off? Will trying to keep concentrated on a sensation rather than watch the mind, stir the mind more in my daily life? Should meditation be an opportunity to let to mind run lose, in order to calm it a little for the rest of the day, or an opportunity to tell the mind, that it has is fun all day, and now it the time to concentrate on other raw sensations? By the way i'm currently reading Daniel M. Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of The Buddha. His first consideration is on concentration so that is what is inspiring me to right this.

@Guivs Thanks a lot for those resources! I will check them out promptly. Very helpful! @Azrael I definitely see what you're saying here, but I feel like I need to give my ego something to go off, as i'm still ignorant as to what I truly am. I have to work with it! Like giving candy to a bratty child in order to shut it up!

E.G; I go to a Buddhist monastery, because I want to spend time learning how to hold my concentration, to meditate, to contemplate etc. This teacher tells me I need to shave my head. I tell them shaving the head is an unnecessary dogma that I don't believe is necessary to progress on the spiritual path and that hair growth is a product of nature. What happens now?

Who else but @Martin123?! Guys, please note, that this is just a fun rhetorical question. I'm not contemplating doing it, just want to hear peoples input on my silly, random thoughts .

@Nahm More than welcome! At first I was like this: And then I was like this: Really such a unique voice. I've never heard anything like it. That is the very meaning of the purple cow analogy right? No body else out there sings this way.

@Azrael Hey Azrael, thanks for your response! One more question; Will this more sort of relaxed and anything goes approach also be appropriate for trying to reach high states of concentration? Such as those necessary to reach to first Jhana? I have never gotten there and would like to use that as a bit of a 'goal' in my practice.

Love you. :-) :-) <3 <3

After a few months of not missing a day of meditation, some self-inquiry work and general contemplation/reflectiveness, I keep getting these really old and never thought about memories. They hit me and i'm like WOW, I remember that! The earliest i've gotten is probably like aged 3 years out. The freakiest part is that i'm never remembering as a first-person, but more of an observer. Anybody else?!

Give this a whirl. I'm not sure what impact this music would have on the mind, consciousness or the body. But I found this guy on the Science and Non-Duality channel, and his voice is SO breathtakingly beautiful.

These seem to be self-inquiry questions. Is there a difference between self-inquiry and contemplation at all?

Based on that research, it seems that @Loreena was quite right to say what she did.

Thanks everyone for your inputs. Every one had valid points. I love having a platform to be brutally honest, I feel like nothing is a taboo here. It's a special forum indeed. I watched Leo's video today on moralizing for the first time, and I actually feel like maybe a large part of my issue is feeling as though I SHOULD be happy. Hey, i'm in another country, I can do this, and that, and I SHOULD be happy. Maybe I should just like go of that assumption. That I should be happy, and relax into whatever emotions come up at whichever time. I think this will be a help alongside what you guys are saying.

Hey guys. All the time i'm looking for something to make me feel fulfilled and happy. I get all excited about a new thing or hobby, a new place to travel. I get into it, and then i'm back to feeling empty and unhappy. I traveled Asia, and don't get me wrong it was special, but there's always this underlying dissatisfaction, and then I look back on the memories of my trip, and I feel like i'd like to go back, but then I remind myself it wasn't all that, you know? It's like I can't appreciate things properly. Also i'm really bad at bullshitting myself into believing i'm enthusiastic and happy. Currently, i'm in Spain on a sort of exchange. Once again, it's nice to be here, but also I just don't feel like the happiness I imagined I would get is with me at all. It feels mundane. Everything does. Is the only way to break this cycle of chasing things, enlightenment? Is there anything else I can do? Does anybody else feel this way often? Thanks.

UPDATE: I gave up on this. Dropped it like a bad habit. I don't fully know why, something just felt in-genuine. Maybe I wasn't doing it for me, or maybe I was trying to fill an unfillable gap. Maybe i'll come back to it if it feels right. Who knows?

Why do I want to be an actor? For me it's a question of why wouldn't I. When I was a kid there wasn't a whole lot of space for imagination. My dad always told me to stop dancing in the living room because I look silly, my older brother was always trying to act like a bad ass rather than express himself in the slightest, and my friends were trying to act hard all the time. I'm talking about age 7 - 11 here. I remember watching the Harry Potter and it just set my imagination on fire, the books did nothing for me, but the films just blew me away. I would sit out on my front garden all day trying to sell my old junk just so I could save enough money to buy the Harry Potter films on VHS. The thing is I thought it was all kind of real, I knew that magic wasn't but I didn't know what acting was, and didn't give much thought to it. I started using computers early on and one day an interview with the Harry Potter kids popped up. I watched it and sure enough I was confused. 'But they are acting differently here... Not like in the film' and then I became aware of what acting was. I remember when my parents split up and me and my Mum lived in a flat by ourselves for a while without my Brother there or my Dad. During this period we watched so many films, it just took us away for a little bit. For that short hour or two we could laugh, in a horrible situation, and just forget about our issues for a short while, not push them to one side, just allow ourselves some enjoyment. I remember when I first got severe depression. One of the only things I could do was go to an acting class. I went in shaking but two weeks on and I could feel my depression leaving me. I remember watching 'lost in translation' and seeing myself in the scene where Scarlett Johansson talks about not knowing what she wants to do with her life. These are some examples as well as countless other examples of when acting affected me. But you see this isn't all about me. I want to do this for others. I want to teach kids to be imaginative and fearless, and to never give up, and adults for that matter. I want to enlighten people on how beautiful the world is, but also about its pressing issues, conveying the lives of people in tough situations in order to inspire empathy. I want to make people laugh, smile, cry, dance, maybe just wind down after a long, hard week of work. I want to give an earth shattering performance, something that changes the game entirely. I want my name mentioned in drama schools, my techniques to be used in the curriculum, create films that live on longer than me, or theatre performances that people can't forget. So all I have to do is stop stopping myself. Simple right? Yeah it is. I've procrastinated a lot. I've told myself it isn't a worthy pursuit. I've let nerves get the better of me. Self-doubt, anxiety, etc, etc. All that can make me deprive the world of sharing something that can, and will, be very fucking special. Fuck that. Not anymore. I don't care if I lose sleep. I don't care if I have to work so hard that I want to burst into tears every five minutes. I don't care if nobody believes in me, if they try to put me down, if I make a fool of myself again and again and again. I will do this. As this is my first entry this is the big WHY. The rest of the entries may be simply what tasks I have done but will vary. The start of this part will begin from yesterday, as this is when the journal was supposed to begin. What I did today to edge me closer to being one of the most impactful actors of this generation :- - Today I practiced my cold-reading for 30 minutes. - Today I read a play for one hour, and finished it. Other Success Habits I completed today:- - I created a dream board, images of actors and quotes. - Today I did a 30 minute stretch and 30 minute calisthenics workout. - Today I expressed gratitude. - 20 Minute Meditation General notes /Notes of improvement :- - When you read something good, don't just read it, study it. If it's difficult to study just remember that somebody put hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours into gathering that information. You always have the very easy version. - Stop trying to be as good as people, strive to be miles better.

@renegade_bee If this is truly it, the end, if you've given up; then you're truly free. If you have the money, get on a plane, go to Asia, go to a monastery and they will take you, free of charge. If you don't have the money, walk. Go to a homeless shelter, get a little job, save a bit of money for a flight and fuck off somewhere. Piss yourself whenever you feel like it, fuck it, who cares? You did it a lot when you were a baby. Go get a load of shrooms, trip your nuts off. You're talking about becoming a corpse soon. Fuck your parents, fuck your comfort, fuck it all dude. Seriously. Try being free before suicide, and if then you still want to leave. you're free to check out. Don't even feel bad for being suicidal, you don't owe anybody anything.