harisankartj

@OnceMore unconscious tendency of victimhood around seemingly created 'others' and ' this is real ' when in fact there is only You and this is a dream. The stories are stories. The lens of belief confirmation will filter reality to affirm an egoic position of 'i want to die' which is based on victimhood . Resistance for mind to calm down is the mind asserting duality . to of course .....is based on some agenda Key is to let it be.

What's the existential nature of music ? Have you ever contemplated on this ? we all jam to something.But where is it? what is it? Not looking for any answer, just wanna get some thoughts .

I see it as the Ultimate Reality being a loving teenage friend who decides to befriend the nerdy kid in class who gets bullied all the time (the one who suffers). When its true love, you include Everything.because you are Everything. The One. This is just my poetic view. If you are looking for a "backed-up theory" ,I got nothing. All I know is to be alive is a miracle in itself.

Glad you are okay Leo. Makes you shudder on hearing such news but we are all unconscious. Goes to show how consciousness is the need of the hour for mankind . I can start connecting the dots with the unconsciousness and misery in the heart of the victimiser and become conscious of that in myself. Mindfulness all the way . And sure, I am still coming to Las Vegas! (some day).

Once you enquire about what intelligence actually is... beyond what another human has told you... you will realize that it is the very essence of what makes you aware of your existence this very moment. But of course don't believe me. Lock yourself up in a room, sit there, and ask yourself "What is intelligence ?" and don't get up until the answer hits you. I jumped over your actual question on purpose. You need wisdom, not the answer to a cultural question.

1. Is your experience of mind becoming more alone ? Even when you are *cough* "with people" ? 2. Is your subjective intake of reality natural ? Are you letting this moment speak for itself ? 3. Have you started to relate to people you knew differently ? 4. Have you stopped chasing actualized.org and Leo Gura for the "grand prize of the self-actualized,purposeful life" ? 5. Are you feeling more alien to conventional society, how it works , and seen as a disease to the one who seeks to abide in truth ? 6. Have you reached the point where " information put in spotlights " ---- (I refer to) books, movies , the news , teachings of spiritual leaders,pop culture and most importantly actualized.org.... are given the skeptical lens ... as that which has yet to stand the testing with (your) subjective experience of this moment ? 7. Has your heart started to burn with the desire of rising beyond the baseline human condition ... aka your reality of now ? Have you started to actively test the theory you study with direct experience aka NOW ? 8. Have your actions been purified with the fire of awareness such that if you set out to do something ...that it is YOU...wholeheartedly who is doing it ..... not some conceptual,emotional, physical product of your society that's been told to follow an authority ? Note :- I myself am not immune to the traps of the conditioned human living. These are questions which I find instill consciousness in me.

@Aimblack This list wasn't anything I put a lot of thought into it. One afternoon after I contemplated on my existence there was an instant connecting of the dots of my reality... which integrated me and gave me higher understanding of what i was doing here on earth. So the questions were spontaneously written. Spot on. I have been alone for quite a while and that is what helped me to question a lot of stuff which otherwise I wouldn't have. Funny that you brought up the topic of "interest" , it was one of the things that I questioned during the last few weeks, and if I have to put it in a comprehensive objective way... yes,my interests have changed. (since I have seen through what it actually is) I just shared the questions which made me ..mmmmm lets see.... "one up" on myself. These triggered experiential shifts....in me and may not in others. Seems like my set of questions were the wrong kind of koan for you.

I know , i know ..it can't be conceptualized. But why don't we embrace the linguist in us and ATTEMPT to put the unimaginable into "words" ?

Chapter 15 WE ALL WANT experiences of some kind - the mystical experience, the religious experience, the sexual experience, the experience of having a great deal of money, power, position, domination. As we grow older we may have finished with the demands of our physical appetites but then we demand wider, deeper and more significant experiences, and we try various means to obtain them - expanding our consciousness, for instance, which is quite an art, or taking various kinds of drugs. This is an old trick which has existed from time immemorial - chewing a piece of leaf or experimenting with the latest chemical to bring about a temporary alteration in the structure of the brain cells, a greater sensitivity and heightened perception which give a semblance of reality. This demand for more and more experiences shows the inward poverty of man. We think that through experiences we can escape from ourselves but these experiences are conditioned by what we are. If the mind is petty, jealous, anxious, it may take the very latest form of drug but it will still see only its own little creation, its own little projections from its own conditioned background. Most of us demand completely satisfying, lasting experiences which cannot be destroyed by thought. So behind this demand for experience is the desire for satisfaction, and the demand for satisfaction dictates the experience, and therefore we have not only to understand this whole business of satisfaction but also the thing that is experienced. To have some great satisfaction is a great pleasure; the more lasting, deep and wide the experience the more pleasurable it is, so pleasure dictates the form of experience we demand, and pleasure is the measure by which we measure the experience. Anything measurable is within the limits of thought and is apt to create illusion. You can have marvellous experiences and yet be completely deluded. You will inevitably see visions according to your conditioning; you will see Christ or Buddha or whoever you happen to believe in, and the greater a believer you are the stronger will be your visions, the projections of your own demands and urges. 93 So if in seeking something fundamental, such as what is truth, pleasure is the measure, you have already projected what that experience will be and therefore it is no longer valid. What do we mean by experience? Is there anything new or original in experience? Experience is a bundle of memories responding to a challenge and it can respond only according to its background, and the cleverer you are at interpreting the experience the more it responds. So you have to question not only the experience of another but your own experience. If you don't recognize an experience it isn't an experience at all. Every experience has already been experienced or you wouldn't recognize it. You recognize an experience as being good, bad, beautiful, holy and so on according to your conditioning, and therefore the recognition of an experience must inevitably be old. When we demand an experience of reality - as we all do, don't we? - to experience it we must know it and the moment we recognise it we have already projected it and therefore it is not real because it is still within the field of thought and time. If thought can think about reality it cannot be reality. We cannot recognize a new experience. It is impossible. We recognize only something we have already known and therefore when we say we have had a new experience it is not new at all. To seek further experience through expansion of consciousness, as is being done through various psychedelic drugs, is still within the field of consciousness and therefore very limited. So we have discovered a fundamental truth, which is that a mind that is seeking, craving, for wider and deeper experience is a very shallow and dull mind because it lives always with its memories. Now if we didn't have any experience at all, what would happen to us? We depend on experiences, on challenges, to keep us awake. If there were no conflicts within ourselves, no changes, no disturbances, we would all be fast asleep. So challenges are necessary for most of us; we think that without them 94 our minds will become stupid and heavy, and therefore we depend on a challenge, an experience, to give us more excitement, more intensity, to make our minds sharper. But in fact this dependence on challenges and experiences to keep us awake, only makes our minds duller - It doesn't really keep us awake at all. So I ask myself, is it possible to keep awake totally, not peripherally at a few points of my being, but totally awake without any challenge or any experience? This implies a great sensitivity, both physical and psychological; it means I have to be free of all demands, for the moment I demand I will experience. And to be free of demand and satisfaction necessitates investigation into myself and an understanding of the whole nature of demand. Demand is born out of duality: `I am unhappy and I must be happy'. In that very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness. When one makes an effort to be good, in that very goodness is its opposite, evil. Everything affirmed contains its own opposite, and effort to overcome strengthens that against which it strives. When you demand an experience of truth or reality, that very demand is born out of your discontent with what is, and therefore the demand creates the opposite. And in the opposite there is what has been. So one must be free of this incessant demand, otherwise there will be no end to the corridor of duality. This means knowing yourself so completely that the mind is no longer seeking. Such a mind does not demand experience; it cannot ask for a challenge or know a challenge; it does not say, `I am asleep' or `I am awake'. It is completely what it is. Only the frustrated, narrow, shallow mind, the conditioned mind, is always seeking the more. Is it possible then to live in this world without the more - without this everlasting comparison? Surely it is? But one has to find out for oneself. Investigation into this whole question is meditation. That word had been used both in the East and the West in a most unfortunate way. There are different schools of meditation, different methods and systems. There are systems which 95 say, `Watch the movement of your big toe, watch it, watch it, watch it; there are other systems which advocate sitting in a certain posture, breathing regularly or practising awareness. All this is utterly mechanical. The other method gives you a certain word and tells you that if you go on repeating it you will have some extraordinary transcendental experience. This is sheer nonsense. It is a form of self-hypnosis. By repeating Amen or Om or Coca-Cola indefinitely you will obviously have-a certain experience because by repeti- tion the mind becomes quiet. It is a well known phenomenon which has been practised for thousands of years in India - Mantra Yoga it is called. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind. You might as well put a piece of stick you have picked up in the garden on the mantelpiece and give it a flower every day. In a month you will be worshipping it and not to put a flower in front of it will become a sin. Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration. It is one of the favourite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration - that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts. This is a most stupid, ugly thing, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to. It means that all the time you are having a battle between the insistence that you must concentrate on the one hand and your mind on the other which wanders away to all sorts of other things, whereas you should be attentive to every movement of the mind wherever it wanders. When your mind wanders off it means you are interested in something else. Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind, but when you understand the structure and origin of thought, which we have already been into, then thought will not interfere. That very understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline which is meditation. Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old - this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past. If you have read this book for a whole hour attentively, that is meditation. If you have merely taken away a few words and gathered a few ideas to think about later, then it is no longer meditation. Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system and that is not attention. Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy - if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face of your wife or child. In the understanding of meditation there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of habits, of following a method. Love cannot be cultivated by thought. Love can perhaps come into being when there is complete silence, a silence in which the mediator is entirely absent; and the mind can be silent only when it understands its own movement as thought and feeling. To understand this movement of thought and feeling there can be no condemnation in observing it. To observe in such a way is the discipline, and that kind of discipline is fluid, free, not the discipline of conformity.

@Principium Nexus I too had recently been contemplating place AND TIME for quite a while now. For me the experience is same but for a few differences. I see that ANY place i have ever been to is right here. To realise this I look at my feet on where i am standing and contemplate on how my feet being in this point is different from ...say when i was in the grocery shop... and i notice how the social contexts determine place.....this also deconstructed the essence of "time" for me...which is a conceptual projection that is created to make sense of actions that are needed for survival.

What life has taught me so far ( I turned 18 this august ) is that it is okay to be yourself even if you feel inadequate. Give yourself love whenever you can,with no strings attached and understand yourself . Cherish the people who matter in your life, and TRY ( because its take something to become a sage overnight) to understand others before judging them. Make spiritual growth as intimate as you can. The pain involved is just misunderstood suffering of the human condition. I am still very young but these are all what i have come to understand

A great site I found on the different types of meditation (covers a WIDE VARIETY! ) which goes into detail on how to do each technique and resources to learn more about them http://liveanddare.com/types-of-meditation/ Credit to the blogger GIOVANNI DIENSTMANN

@Falk This is going to sound hypocritical since I too used to be addicted to porn and fap regularly (still do to some extent). But I read somewhere that sex energy had to do with gender-identity. Have you heard of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa ? In the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramakrishna) it's quoted You probably don't have to go that far ! I think it's a matter of consciously un-wiring outdated stimulus-response ... Inquiry ,contemplation into it hopefully will trigger insights that change your experience permanently. Not sure about it though

@aniss The purpose of reading books is to gain understanding and knowledge.But that doesnt come from just reading the black texts on paper. Before reading a book,inquire yourself about how much you know about the subject already... Read actively...such that after each page you ask yourself "What did i understand ... and how is this playing out in my normal experience when i am not reading a book?" Notice that its not that "you are reading a book" .Its that you are engaging with yourself in intellectual stimulation ...using the sentences as "lifelines". So i think to properly read a "book" is to self-inquire along with reading the pages.

Numbers and shapes are helpful since we can navigate the world based on certain models of reality. But doesn't that mean math is biased towards human need ? I don't see numbers anywhere .... and shape ? Forget square, rectangle,circle ....What the actual heck is a shape ????? What are we ACTUALLY DOING when we say we wanna know the math of the world ?? Is it a pattern seeing stuff ? Cus lately i have been wondering about the role of what they call "math" ... in my direct actual experience.

Let's face it. If we go deep into this self-actualization process at SOME POINT in time, we will eventually decide to go live in a cave.Or this might be just a broad claim I am making from interpretation of my experience. cus this is some SERIOUS shit, and i haven't even done much I honestly don't know if I want that.I don't know if that is what i ACTUALLY want .What do you guys think ?

@Wouter Thanks for sharing this! It was really enlightening.

You know how when you wake up from a dream into waking state "feeling more real" ? Today earlier when i was not engaging in any activity and sitting still... I felt a DENSE PRESENCE. I can't "point it out " anywhere .It necessarily isn't occurring in the body too. The presence was there and it was DENSE . That's the word that would describe the "texture" of this phenomena which was not necessarily an experience. Is this a sign of something ? Should I be expecting something ? I don't think I would want to see aliens or demons or even angels just now. Would love to hear something on this.

@Visitor It's kinda scary though. I notice that what i call the "physical world" is conceptual projection - just like a belief. What I do now is let my self-concept work that belief cus If i fully embody the metaphysics of existence- I don't think I could be able to function for survival... Man how did Leo do all this stuff and not go crazy...

@Max_V Try doing this. Once you feel integrated and lightweight in your body,take a piece of paper.Hold your pencil or pen. and let your body do the expression.(Be aware of any resistance that creates subtle heaviness in the feeling body-- (they restrict expression)--- and let them go.).Let me know if this helps.

@dead man walking Right now become conscious that there is nobody reading this sentence. That's all I can give you.

@Joseph Maynor IKR ! The way they teach math in school is just so robotic that no wonder most kids grow up to despise the subject of math.They don't understand the essence of it! How it came to be! Will put it on my "to read" list. Thanks for the suggestion!

@nick96 Thanks man . Will check it out .

I have all these built up stress energy in my head neck and shoulders that are making me unable speak expressively.I am constantly stressed and my neck and shoulder muscles tighten up . I can't seem to get these energy blocks out of my head. Can anybody help me?

But it seems that nowadays NOTHING is satisfying for me ... NOTHING. I don't want to die . I am afraid of how i will relate to the people around me and with the world. I am feeling more distant and unable to "dominate " social interactions. The point of having friends seems like escapism. But if I go through ego death I am afraid will i be motivated to "do anything".Will i be able to navigate through society ? Should I renounce life, become a monk and leave this "physical world". Or should I make up "a life purpose" to feel some sense of activity? I feel so depersonalized and confused . Any advice will be greatly appreciated. I underestimated enlightenment.