fireworld

I had a hardcore failure with my meditation practice. For so many months i spent time just letting the mind wander and just being present to the moment. This went on for over a year, what kept me going? The memory of a meditation experience that I had a long time ago. A few years ago I did meditation with an extreme concentration on my breath, and that would lead to euphoric states afterwards.. After that I shifted to just being present in the moment and all my results vanished, I did have a few experiences that were a little out of the ordinary but for so long I longed for the experience of being relaxed just like I used to, then i read the Illuminated Mind and everything feel in place. If you are a long time meditator and not getting good results, try concentrating on your breath and counting it. Try this for 50 minutes for a few weeks and see how it feels. Hopefully this is helpful to someone.

DO not let them take your soul. Whatever the price you must pay. Do no let them take your soul.

I have tried something similar to this, but still have not experienced this wonderful state in any other form of meditation.

@astrokeen Yes, you are quite right about that. I just felt that I wasn't doing "real" meditation because i was conciosuly counting 1- 2 - 3 - 3 - 2 - 1 while taking very deep breaths. In the illuminated Mind the author who is an extremely accomplished man recommended that you start by focusing in on the breath and that is the "first" step kind of. Another thing is that this type of meditation helps me so much emotionally like no other meditation practice ever has. Even forced determined sitting didn't have the same effect for a month that this has in as little as a few days.

@Sashaj When I would focus on my breath for 50 minutes every day for a week or so i would start reaching extreme levels of concentration. And as I would be drawing deep breaths during this whole session I would start feeling lighter and lighter. Eventually I would peak after the session where all of my anxiety, fear and everything else would vanish and i would feel so asbolutely amazing. Not a single shred of fear or anxiety, no bad thoughts, nothing that was draining. My whole body would radiate energy especially from my chest area and my mind would be so sharp it was unbelievable. All thoughts would stop, eventually I would fall into meditative states numerous times throughout the day especially when i was relaxing. For example before i would fall asleep i noticed how i started breathing in the same rhythm as i would during meditation and would get that amazing alivated feeling. I then changed meditation practice for "do nothing" and stopped counting and focusing on my breath. All my results vanished for a year, this is why i am back to the old ways of doing this.

@MM1988 I do not believe you. Either you are lying to us or you are doing something extremely offputting. I know men who have extreme personal setbacks both emotionally and physically but still are able to get women. Either you have no standards on yourself, IE exercise, eat healthy, confidence, humor and so on or even if you don't have these things you are most likely not going out at all. Most men in wheelchairs can get a woman, if a man like yourself, as you claim in previous posts that you are confident, hard working and generally good looking you must be either lying to us, or not going out and approaching women. Under the very unlikely circumstance that I am wrong about this, go pay Todd Valentine to help you with your dating, take out a second mortage on your house if you need to get control over this. Keep in mind that one of the most dangerous ideas of self-improvement especially when you are going for enlightenment is that you are going to get this crap about internal work, but you don't understand that this internal work is 50 times harder than learning about attraction and dating. You can become an extremely skilled PUA in 6 months, most people who work on enlightenment don't reach it within 20 years. Don't lie to yourself or us, go out and put standards on yourself and make it a rule that you go out at least 2 times a week and do 20 approaches each night, you will be drowing in the attention of women. I say this with the hope of getting you pissed off, only because I was where you are now 10 years ago.

I believe that I am mostly stage yellow in my thinking but I have a quite confrontational style with others in life. As I have listened more to the Yellow idea of non judgement I have become a lot more accepting of the other levels even though i have been aware of them for years. I have always felt like telling people of the higher levels that they could evolve into, I have had extremely religious friends who have made horrible mistakes due to their faith and i tried to get them out of it. The same is true about friends who just work for money to be happy or friends who are green and make damaging decisions in their life. I was wondering how you deal with the different levels. Should we try to "motivate" and "debate" them to inspire them to ask questions or rise higher, or should we just ignore them and let them be? What are your thoughts about this?

Maybe so, maybe so, projection is a real thing, but even if you keep all your concentration on them and how they are experiencing the situation they are still going to harm themselves. I am not arguing with myself or have an unresolved conflict if a female friend of mine is dating an abusive maniac and she has an extremely low level of self esteem. I don't even care on the highest level whether the person is in my life, but at the same time she isn't going to recover from this i think, it's a shame to let things like this happen when there are other paths to walk.

@dorg I understand how you see it from that perspective, but there are some things in life that are so painful that you can never get back to "normal". When you have sitauations that involve drugs, or bad people that may end damaging you extremely bad. Some people never ever recover from situations like these. If we do rise to a higher level of understanding, shouldn't there be a way that we can guide or lead or invite our fellow humans to a place that is better for them?

The damage is usually done by that time. Or it's an ongoing process that damages them continually until they break or irreversibly damage themselves.

I can see that, but when you get in to debates and the person is going to make a bad decision that may harm them, how do you reason with them? Let's say that it's a family member who is marrying because of religion or staying in disfunctional relationship because of it? Or let's say that it's a female friend who is letting her boyfriend cheat and even though she suffers extremely because of it but believes that putting up boundaries is inappropriate and so on. She's motivated by green ideals. I would usually just be aggressive and start saying things that they didn't want to hear but believe that I may not be able to reach them. I respond to an aggressive approach myself and have realized my mistake in approaching people in "my" way.

So, as someone who has never had a deep nondual experience, what happens after your heart stops beating and you are dead? What happens to this thing that you are identified with? Where do you go? Is there anything that happens? Just curious to what you think.

My memories desolve and the expression of this human body dies.

@Quanty how do you know?

The idea behind spiral dynamics is that you go through the stages and incorporate the previous stages into the higher ones to some extent. Given this shouldn't stage greens have a decent amount of understanding of how science and logic works? I understand that there are limits to science and that it can be done in an unhealthy way, but from my perspective every person that i have met that is in stage green is extremely unrealistic and disconnected from "how things work." Take the human body as an example of a system, we know that this system called a human body operates in certain ways that keeps it healthy and strong. Proper food, sleep, meditation and so on. But the stage greens seem to be extremely against any "set" rules on how reality works. They will take something like obesity and call it healthy even though we know it isn't healthy at all and is most likely going to be the thing that kills you. The same is true about business, or relationships or anything that we have a deep understanding of and can predict the outcome of, in other words the "causes" of the outcome are known. Isn't this the greatest limiting factor to stage green? Is that they are completely ignoring how reality actually works and thats the reason they end up in so much trouble and pain? Also on a moral level, they tend to force high taxation and collectivism that can be extremely damaging and even deadly for people. Take Sweden where I live, don't pay your taxes and get 8-10 years in jail (punished for going against the collective) , rape a woman and get 2 years(individualism isn't valued). I have watched the episode on morality but from my view here i don't understand how this can be seen as a progressive intelligent way of "evolving" upwards. Given that this has been my personal experience, I have always wondered how a stage green person like a hippie who is unemplyed can be more evolved than a stage blue doctor who helps people for free because he believes that God wants him to help his fellow people? I might not fully understand spiral dynamics yet, but this is just something that I can't sort out in my head.

@Leo Gura Nope, don't agree on that Leo. I'm a model agnostic and understand that science is a lens, in 20 years my understanding of the world will be different I don't get attached to what my understanding is now. However, science is the best model of understanding how to reach your outcomes and it's highly pragmatic. What other model is better at predicting the outcomes and being as pragmatic as science is? With the use of science you can build an engine, what other model could replace science that could build an engine? Btw, thank you for all your work Leo. I have grown tremendously from your videos and still have more to grow as you can see haha!

@DocHoliday The problem is, if you are stage green and you have the ideals of community and love and sharing and caring, you won't get there using irrational non-critical thinking which seems to me to be a consistent theme in stage green. If you are an effective stage green person, shouldn't you say "Ok, we want to start caring about the environment more and create more inculisveness in our society. So how do we do that? Gather all the available evidence, gather all the experts in mutliple fields, lets sit down and find out how we can do this in the best possible way". Instead, most of the green people that I have had a conversation will have very direct, non systematic thinking in every single thing they approach. Which in my experience leads most of the stage green people down a path where they can't hold a job, their relationships end in disaster, and so on.

@Till I don't demonize anyone, I couldn't care less what the people at the different stages are doing personally. If I can help i'm available, but as I said it doesn't make a lot of sense that the rejection of science and reason and the embracing of emotional decisionmaking is a step up in the ladder. The reason I say this is because you can use science and reason to achieve things like personal love and peace, a great economy where everyone can reap the rewards, you can implement environmental legislation to help all creatures of earth. But if you are a stage green politician as an example, you will implement rules and laws that may destroy the well being of your citizens but you can do it because the idea sounds great. How is this more evolved than taking in all the data, and making an informed decision that benefits all?

@CreamCat This is always what i suspected, that they simply skip orange and go full green.

@Leo Gura Very intersting to read i must say haha. The difference though, is that blue is not based on science. And science according to my understanding our best attempt at understanding the world. Green seems to also steer away from science, if you tell people that you can pray away your disease, or that you can just love yourself and eventually your disease will vanish. Most of these things won't work, where as if you actually go to a doctor, get diagonsed you can fix your problem and move on with your life. This is my thinking of them, I am not saying that rationality and science present ultimate reality but it doesn't make sense that someone who ignores science, reason and logic which are the best thinking tools we have so far and just goes for pure emotional appeals is somehow more evolved than the other stages.

@Leo Gura Lol, I read this along time ago in Davids book on "Way of the superior man". When I used to work in sales i met thousands of men and I would say that maybe 1 in 200-300 guys actually had their shit together. This made me really feel for women. On the other hand, hypergamy is great in the sense that women who aren't very hypergamous will end up with loser men who will be loser dads and the circle continues. The dream of having women who don't have standards is actually a nightmare.

@Leo Gura What is the essence of a quality man according to you?

@DocHoliday I understand how the concept of values and motivation works, but to genereate undying motivation and drive is something very unique and something that i still haven't been able to decode.

The idea brother is good, the difficult part is how do you manufacture that enthusiasm for your goal? There are plenty of people who know what they are meant to do, but either lack the courage or motiation. The secret lies in the "how" not in the "what."

As someone who just got into an argument about this, let me offer my insights as a long time PUA. Most PUAs that you see online are usually explotative and very self centered. Look at how they are advertising pickup "Get into womens pants with 5 easy steps using this new gimmick" That's why they get a really bad rap, because they deserve it. Pickup, just like martial arts can be done from the highest levels down to the lowest levels of humanity. It is a very serious super power pickup, especially when you get to the highest levels of it. If you are using pickup as a way to learn to be more social, more confident and learn to understand women better so that you can be a better man for your woman than you are actually more stage green than orange. (maybe) Don't mislead, don't lie, don't make her do anything she is going to regret and you will be good. Also the most critical insight that you will have as you advance in game, is that 90% of what they teach you actually doesn't work. Also, most people don't stay in the Game for more than a few months at most. People fall in love and stay there, just like I did and just like most people do, even the PUA teachers.