Echoes

@SageModeAustin To be alive means to be relative. So of course there are endless positionalities, contexts, value games, etc. You MUST value things differently if you want to live. Survival means valuing and prefering. You value health over disease, yourself over others, having something to eat over starving and so on. Don't confuse the absolute truth with the game of survival.

@Amadeusz who is "we" and "them" and "you" and "me" if "everything" is "nondual"?

This morning I was showering and when I was about to grab the shower gel it hit me out of nothing that for years I was rubbing my body with a bunch of chemicals I don't even know. Suddenly I was really disgusted with the idea of using this to "clean" my body. Never really thought about it before to be honest, and it came so out of the blue, like waking up from a long unconscious robotic routine. My question: Are you guys and girls using some special organic shower gel or something? Is is worth it or am I exaggerating? Maybe some even use water only? I mean in past times and in parts of the world people didn't and don't have shower gel neither.

Thanks guys! I think for now I'm going with reducing the days of using shower gel and buying some organic stuff after I have done a little research on what really is good. Don't think there is much I can do about the water, always believed it's relatively clean because of the safety standards and control of tap water.

@Igor82 "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." - Ralph Waldo Emerson I just read and mark stuff that resonates with me. I also only read if I really feel like that's what I want to do right now. Not out of guilt or obligation. A book is not there to replace thinking for yourself. You have to mainly think for yourself and take responsibility for your understanding of the world. Also don't take books too seriously. In the end it's just paper that can be burned and your life would be not much different. It's just language, not reality. I find if I take a more relaxed attitude about reading it's more entertaining AND I learn more. The feelings you described are exactly what the education system does to us: Enforcing feelings of guilt, obligation, pressure and insecurity around the process of learning, when it could be a joyous process. Our "job" is to realize we are not in school anymore.

@Pluck nice copy paste

@Steph30 Life is not a dream. You can not know what it is. "Dream" is already a characterization of what is that brings certain associations with it. "Physical Universe" is another characterization. "Consciousness" and "Being" yet another. It is not anything. "All is God!" "All is Consciousness!" All is Yahweh" "All is a dream!" aren't that all just word games to pretend anything is knowable? that being said It might be helpful to deconstruct a current belief like "All is a physical universe" with the counter argument of "All is a dream" to "achieve" a general sense of humbleness to the fact that you don't really know. But don't take it too seriously.

@sarapr You fully embrace it. Because the situation is indeed hopeless: Nothing will ever finally work out because everything is temporary and you are just going to die. Hope is still the desire for some thing/place/people to give you everlasting peace and satisfaction. But such a thing does not exist in a future. Ask yourself this: What if the situation for every human being is absolutely hopeless? How would I live? What would I do?

@Viking You are always "present" no matter what you do. Contemplating, listening to audiobooks/music and thinking is also being present. It is all what's happening. So [thinking about a future problem] is still being present, because it is what's happening. You can never be not present, and you are obviously not really in an imagined place only because you imagine you are in that place. It is all here now - everything (including the most distorted agitated mind states with pathological worrying about a future). Of course you resist this, because [you] depends on the idea of a place that is not "now" to escape into. But do you really think there is fullfillment in a place that is only imagined?

A few thoughts that came when I watched Leos new blog video. I hope to get some perspectives on the notion of many degrees of awakening and how to reconcile this with what Neo Advaita is saying. So neo advaita is obviously correct when it says things like "You are already enlightened" or "Awakening is the most simplest thing there is". Because the truth is the truth is the truth, and it must be all there is and it must be right here the real, the actual. It's like Jed Mckenna says: "»Truth does not exist« is a self-nullifying statement. If an ultimate Truth does not exist, then that statement in itself is an ultimate Truth. Conclusion: Truth must exist. 2. Un-truth cannot be true any more than non-being can be or non-existence can exist.". How do you reconcile this with many degrees of awakening? When you say "many" degrees, mustn't that then be infinite (and not just "many") degrees if absolute infinity is the real? So then you could say "Infinite degrees of awakening" is the absolute truth. And inside of the infinite degrees of awakening, every single degree must be absolutely true also - how can this be? since there is more conscious/expanded degree of awakening still possible, in fact infinite degrees still possible. So every degree is relatively true, but the actual, the real, the factual, undeniable reality just IS the absolute truth. This is what neo advaita means. To realize the undeniable truth which is final, and an endpoint, with no further question of what the truth is. When Leo says "infinite degrees of awakening", he can't mean "infinite degrees of truth", since that would mean there is no truth at all. In what are the degrees? what makes degrees even possible and is the basis of degrees? I sense a trap in the notion of "infinite degrees of awakening". Maybe God is eternally awakening to new revelations about himself, but God is God is God. God is. and then there are degrees of revelations of God. Neo Advaita is talking about realizing that God is, and that includes every future or incoming, new revelation. But no revelation can negate the already realized reality of God.

@Shu Shunyamurti is the leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.

I highly enjoyed his Maps of Meaning lectures and Personality lectures. But all of his involvement with this whole SJW stuff is foreign to me. I don't know why he is doing all of this. It seems to me that he gets a sense of importance out of what is really not relevant at all outside of this specific bubble.

@Monkey-man It's also, as Benjamin Smythe says: "Is it a boy or a girl and how are you going to call it?" is the basis of everyones life. So nobody was ever made on purpose. No parent decided to make somebody specific. No parent cared for a specific being to be alive, or to enjoy living. It's about becoming a parent, not about the created life, because you don't know the created life. It's inherently about enriching ones own life by making a new being, and this being is potentially encountering suffering (no matter how hard one tries to prevent this, especially in this day and age) and is eventually becoming another tombstone.

@in2deep there is only being. So doing is being being doing

@Spinoza

@LiakosN whenever you try to think in terms of meditation as something you did in time. Like "I meditate for 10 years" or "I meditate 1 hour a day". There is no such thing as "meditated for x amount of time". You can't set a timer for meditation. wanting to time it and then feel good about it is the same as a kid that feels good after he has done his homework. Humans love homework to feel satisfied afterwards, and to add something to the story of "having done that" or "doing this and that daily". So ask yourself if you are "meditating" because you think it will get you anything, or because you think you will go somewhere, because you get something out of it in the future. You will never get a reward in the future for meditating.

@Applejuice

Hey, are there some people here who have done research and have experience with the Enneagram? I never really resonated much with these personality type indicators, because it is only able to describe the ego, and I thought it was a waste of time since the goal is to become free of it. But the Enneagram describes the human personality in 9 different forms of pathological fixation, basically 9 ways to cope with the basic underlying terror every human is facing: Fear of death and fear of helplessness/powerlessness. There seem to be 9 strategies of defense, subdivided into the 3 categories Thinking, Feeling, Instinctive. And I was very surprised at how accurate the type which seems to be mine (Type 5) was describing me. The idea is to identify your type so that you become aware of your specific defense dynamic/patterns of unconscious and destructive behavior, and then to transcend the dimension of personality and to realize infinity. My question to people who have some experience with this system: Has it really helped you to become more aware of your habitual patterns and first and foremost to change them? Or was it a dead end?

@Leo Gura Also thought this...it's just a tool, the trap would be to overly attach to the number. Altough so far I found the Enneagram to be more helpful and accurate then MBTI. @Girzo It's useful to make us see that what we believed to be personal aspects of ourselves are really just impersonal habitual tendencies. Even the most intimate thoughts/feelings/habits/preferences of behavior are not really personal. This makes it more easy to become aware of them and to disidentify. I think this was the original idea of the Enneagram, and in that sense I believe it can be of good assistance to meditative and yogic practices

@egoless I think in this case it's not possible to receive any advice of real value from someone else. There are various strategic approaches like "try to slowly build your LP as a side business and then switch if you are more sure of it". But all of these advices have no real essence or soul behind it (altough they have it's place at times). I think you should contemplate death..death and clarity are the same. So if you want clarity about your life, ask death

@egoless If it's not authentic and you are influenced by all this stuff, have trust that you will recognize this "mistake" sooner or later. That's what I meant. Imo, it's a trap to wait for absolute 100% certainty and then declare "I have forever found my Life Purpose". There is always the possibility that you find something different later. But being interested and passionate for something for 2 years is in itself already sort of a hint. I mean, somebody who likes Painting, and is painting everyday for years could also have been influenced by his parents or something. And in this case the inauthenticity will make itself appearent somehow. So I would just pursue your current interests and trust that life will show you if there is something not right. And then you will have gained new experience and can transition into the new thing. But there is really nothing to lose if you 1. Do what you like in this moment at this time and 2. Try to get what you want in this moment at this time and stage of development

@egoless "Forever" is a quantity box that is unknowable. You want to find [authentic LP] and put it in the box [forever continues to be authentic LP]. Why the need to pin everything down absolutely with the nails of certainty? You can only try to do what you like now and try to get what you want now, paradoxically, forever. But making the object [LP forever] out of these two things doesn't make much sense imo.

@Shin IMO, it's the disney fantasy of the special relationship taken to the extreme. It all comes down to the same thing: finding a special other, being seen as special in the mind of a special other, and having something special together. There are no special animals.

This is Ben Smythe/Jack Saturday on the idea of finding a Life Purpose. If you listen carefully and are currently trying to find a Life Purpose, you might get another perspective from which to approach this "problem". The whole setup of trying to find a LP might be the exact mindset clouding the realization of what you really love to do.