Neo

Call me a cynic, but he freely admits to having done *a lot* of drugs, and so as many of you on the forum keep saying, you can have drug induced stuff happen that can open your mind to enlightenment type ideas. Personally I've not had any of these type experiences, I stayed up for 3 days on drugs once and all that happened was my entire world broke down into polygons and flew apart so my entire field of vision was broken up into flying pieces.

I'm just playing Devil's advocate. I must be bored.

If time is an illusion, you can't "start" anything?

Haven't been meditating ... but I've been doing quite well listening to Leo's video and reading some books. Now, I know this post will not get me any *brownie points* and may even annoy some people. Because I've been told on this forum I need to put the work in. You guys that spend hours in meditation, *respect.* It's just when I close my eyes and start to meditate, it's all fireworks, bangs, whistles, major awful chaos in there, and mind wanders easily. I find it difficult. I'm sure that just needs practice but I'm also real busy. I just wanted to say that listening to videos has helped me in other ways. For example. I have a bubble jet printer I used about 40 times a day and it likes to print everything at an angle, throw random error messages, paper jam and tell me it's run out of ink when they are full at great expense. (It's an Epson). While I'm not known as being prone to anger, this heap of black plastic junk has a certain effect on me totally out of character. But since I've been listening to Leo, I can step aside from the angry emotion and *see* it rising. I can know it in a way impossible before. I can see the anger rising in it's horror and beauty and remain detached from it. Another way I've been affected, is by trying to practice "letting go." I suffer from pain a fair bit on and off, and while I'm not telling you it's a cure all, I've had some interesting experiences doing this; when feeling pain in joints, limbs, back, instead of having that face that looks like I'm passing a kidney stone, just relax, allow the pain to be, surrender completely to it in mind and body and on one occasion the pain even disappeared completely. This surrendering I'm trying in other places in life too. I realised when doing creative things like playing the piano, I've got that difficult look on my face again. I'm learning to loosen up, and the two parts of my brain which have to operate in synchronicity in order to play the piano seem to start laughing and the hands just seem to move on their own, all from just relaxing a little and allowing your body to flow. Listen guys, this is not an excuse, I should be putting in the work, but this is a positive story of how Leo's videos are affecting me, and it's about self improvement at the end of the day...

Well, I don't know if it's just me, but I've just been called "stupid" in Leo's latest video!

What? I've just hit my second coffee within the first hour... and it continues through the day...

My OH is already fed up with hearing about Eckhart Tolle and I'm not even particularly Enlightened or anything.

Hey all, I would love to reply more but I'm at work and I need to read it again later, but I'm glad for all the replies, I even stirred a rare debate on a section of the forum where everyone is "ONE" lol @Ajax I feel like I've let someone in my living room and they've told me what a state it is in, except it was may brain!!! lol @MartineF Yes, hmm, well. I've not had a very ordinary life. I can sit there and look at the clouds and think, we were meant to be here to experience all this separateness otherwise it's not possible and every hair on my body stands on end. These kind of things have gone on my whole life but I didn't know what to call them. I also have been having, "I exist" moments my whole life and didn't know what to call them either. ;), really should have been saying "I am."

The brain has to make sense of it's sensory input. It's actually quite a jumble of stuff and lots of white noise coming in through the senses, trust me, I suffer from both visual snow and tinnitus. And it puts these inputs into a clear "experience" that you see as the outside world and you understand what you see, and you also put it into some personal context. Well, the brain can do this too in certain stages of sleep, for the reason that this electrical activity from the senses carries on, and of course the results are dreams. One day I witnessed myself wake up from a dream much more slowly than usual and actually saw the visual field of the dream break up into random static.

This isn't quite on topic but I thought I would share, it's about what you said, I'm befriending some wild birds in the garden. I don't have long to do it because I'm moving soon and also I only get a window of opportunity to do this on coffee breaks. I noticed today, the main friendly bird seemed frightened that I was holding something metal in my hand and I was thinking, Why is the bird frightened of something he doesn't know what it is. How does he "know" it frightens him? And I started imagining that in your field of view, there might be a system of recognising things but another layer of understanding where it was just necessary to know if something was safe or frightening. Stay with me here. lol So, talking about layers of awareness, not in the visual field but awareness in the brain now, there could be "layers" of emotions or feelings, say "boredom" and these could be mapped to underlying more basic emotions, simplifying in each layer. For example, there could be a layer of feelings about what will kill you or what will aid survival. Break it right down? Does this ring true with anyone?

I took this all to be a hint or maybe even a metaphor for ... how deep you need to question everything in order to eventually question your own existence. I mean, how will you ever question your whole self and whether it exists if you can't question gravity or, not gravity itself, but the whole freaking belief system of what makes a belief in the first place. In other words, understand you are completely surrounded, absorbed, engulfed, in one giant belief system and you are at the centre of your belief system.

My opinion is that some people confuse the concept of *free will* with the *decision making process*. There was another thread recently called, "may as well flip a coin", something like that. When you are faced with a choice, every atom in the universe that impinges upon you and everything that has happened up to that point conspires within you to make a certain choice. If I hold out my hand with a poison pill and say "take this pill, eat it", you go through a *decision making process* as to whether to take the pill or not. It's still a process. It doesn't matter if there is no ego doing it or if it is every atom in the universe and all history impinging on that moment. It's still a process. The ego may have no control over the outcome, but that is different to claiming there is no process. And there is a little part of me that worries that people who are handing over life to a dice and saying, "there is no process of decision making" are actually in for some pretty chaotic problems.

That guy Rupert is right you know. I admit to being the guy on the forum who is not doing much meditation, but something does "connect" when you ask if you are aware, or say I am aware.

Is he saying the true self is unchanging, it can't change because it isn't in *time*, however the ego is in a liquid state, flowing in time and growing?

I don't agree with that statement. There's many things which you asre not afraid to share but you know it's the wrong audience. My partners eyes glaze over when I go on about quantum tunnelling, and when I mention that the galaxy is colliding with Andromeda, she just tells me she finds it upsetting. You don't necessarily cut people off though because they don't share your passion. Life is always a bit compartmentalised. I mean there's evena small section of my hard drive I wouldn't share with the local vicar!!!

OK this might be seen as a geeky if not weird suggestion, but Captain Kirk in The Nexus, red here: "It was like being inside joy. As if joy were something tangible and you could wrap yourself up in it like a blanket." – Guinan, 2371 (Star Trek Generations) The Nexus was an extra-dimensional realm in which one's thoughts and desires shape reality. Inside the Nexus, time and space had no meaning, allowing one to visit any time and any place that one could imagine. The doorway to the Nexus was a violent, destructive temporal energy ribbon which crossed through the galaxy... (copied from somewhere on the internet)

I am always amazed by nature, and not always even "living" nature. There is a place I went to on the Jurassic coast in the UK, an exposed coastline from the Jurassic era where the layers in the cliffs were laid down in different times 150-200 million years ago with fossil remains of life visible in the rock mainly in the form of ammonites. I spent a lot of time there just pondering the huge amount of time that had passed and history that was laid down. I can't claim this process was bringing me any more "present" lol, but it is certainly mind-expanding, if not "spiritual" to be in awe of this, to feel the elements, breath the air, smell the almost oily layers in the rock, feel the hard cold rock and just let the mind focus on this "other world" for some precious moments.

You guys are just gluttons!

Wouldn't it be interesting if already we've reached that point, where questions cannot be answered. I often ponder the famous two slit experiment, where if it is being observed (with a detector), acts as a particle and when not observed as a wave. Maybe there is something in the greater consciousness which explains this?

I don't know - I can't remember.

You just put that in a nutshell.

thank you for that!

I have something that comes very quickly which is light and dark patches moving across my field of view, however, as someone that suffers from visual snow even with my eyes wide open, I just put it down to the blood vessels in the eye and other phenomena.

You are a bit late reporting back Michael so was hoping you are ok. You were definitely doing some hard core stuff in your other posts last week.

Can day dreaming be regarded as a form of meditation? By day dreaming, I mean unintentional thinking, either deep thinking about a subject, or possibly fantasy, or anywhere in between?