Lauritz

I wanted to recommend this online book: https://meaningness.com/ It gave me many valuable insights. The book emphasizes the idea that there are no absolute truths around meaning and purpose. Nihilism and eternalism are both wrong and everyone can confirm this in their experience. Life is neither meaningless nor meaningful in an absolute sense. It sometimes feels meaningless or meaningful. Meaning is a spectrum that we experience moment to moment. Meaning has many facets, is nebulous and patterned. When we hold any fixed idea about it, sooner or later we will suffer. Because it does not match how meaning is in reality fluid and dynamically changing. It is deeply tied in with spirituality as meaning (and especially purpose) can be a self-created ground that we are unconsciously holding as true. An excerpt: Too Close to See Whatever you do, however boringly mundane, takes into account the meanings active in your situation. That includes concrete, immediate aspects, such as the usefulness of a potato-masher for mashing potatoes; and also longer-term, more abstract ones, such as the symbolism of vegetables versus meat in your culture. Usually you are not particularly aware of such meanings, you just mash potatoes; but your activity makes sense, and it makes sense only because of them.1 Whatever you do, however exalted your mission, you ignore innumerable meaningless details; irrelevant events that occur for no particular reason and don’t affect your project. You cannot avoid momentarily noticing such features, but you usually dismiss and forget them as quickly as possible. You are, therefore, always already implicitly in the complete stance. You recognize, at some level, that both meaningfulness and meaninglessness are pervasive. This is inescapably obvious. It is like the blurred image of your nose, always present in your visual field but almost never noticed. It is so obvious, so much a taken-for-granted aspect of everything you do, that you constantly pass over it without reflective consideration; without thinking through what its implications might be. Too simple The complete stance can be defined in several ways, all ridiculously simple: Recognizing that meaning and meaninglessness both exist Recognizing that meanings are both real and indefinite Abstaining from both eternalism and nihilism That’s all? That’s it?? That’s your Answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything?! Well, yes. I’m sorry you were hoping for something complicated and difficult. That might make you feel like you’d got something when you finally understood it, so you’d have made progress and could feel better about yourself. There are implications… and applications… and practices… and… enormous conceptual complexities? You are now only a small way through the book Meaningness. Maybe the rest will be more satisfying? It’s just looking at particular patterns of meaning to see how they are nebulous and what that means, though.

The interview is now online: The question which was discussed a bit in this thread starts at 01:29:43 What I like about her teachings is that they are so multifaceted. I got reminded that not only the inner work is important but also to work with the personal perspective of reality. I have personally denied this for a while. It had benefits but ultimately the apparent reality of the ego-self cannot be denied and needs to be worked with. No matter how transcendent some experiences are, they still happen in the context of the person. Or vice versa. And for that, I found her advice spot on. I hope some of you will get useful insights from the interview.

I can't reference to what she is talking about in my own experience either, but to me, it sounds like she had some "experience" of something that is not grounded in consciousness. Maybe that is so unimaginable to us because consciousness is the basis of this universe, but oneness actually encompasses several modes of existence, only one of which is based in consciousness.

In the first video she mentions, that there are other "zones" beyond consciousness. From minute 35 she starts talking about it. Has anyone experienced this? I am clueless to what she means by that or how that's even possible. I am very curious about it.

I wanted to make you, who are on this forum, aware of a teacher who in my opinion really contributes something unique to spirituality. Her name is Jac O'Keeffe. If you already had nondual insights, you might find her content especially useful, as it goes much deeper than that. The following two talks are a good starting point for her material. She also has a website and a YT-Channel if you want to find more of her content. I am going to interview her this month. In case you have questions for her, you can post them here and I may be able to present them to her.

Primary psychopathy: 1.3 (higher than 10.51% of people who took the test) Secondary psychopathy: 1.3 (higher than 2.78% of people who have taken this test)

Thank you all for the input. Seemed like it was a good idea to post it here, as many of you seemed interested in it. Frank and I will be doing another interview in the future. You can post any open questions you might have here or in the comments of the video and we will address them in the next interview.

From my conversation with him, also before and after the interview, that's his true personality. If you look back on his history you can see that he has always done crazy stuff. Now that he has all filters removed, his true self shines through his body and behavior in every moment it seems. To me it feels like he is genuine in his behavior and is not putting on an act.

@Adamq8 those were basically my insights with psychedelics as well. It can be total clarity. Which may also feel like total insanity from the egos point of view, but it may feel very true as the experience is happening. But that is the last mindfuck I realized about psychedelics. No matter how significant and true something feels and appears to be on psychedelics, still does not mean that it is. The sense of what's true is just another parameter of consciousness that gets turned up by psychedelics. In the end, even these seemingly most true insights dissolve into the nothingness/consciousness they came out of. I also agree that it is easy to fall into traps with psychedelics precisely because the insights one has on them feel so significant and true. Doesn't mean they are.

@Adamq8 Thanks for your input. My first thought was also that they only differ in the words they choose to use. But Frank is not pointing to differences in understanding but in experience. He does not say that any of Leos views are wrong, just that he might not yet have let go of that last bit of identification. Frank also mentioned that psychedelics no longer have an effect on him. If one gets what that means, it is a remarkable shift. Psychedelic states are on the most fundamental level no different from the sober state.

I recently did an interview with Frank Yang. We also talked about the role of cessations in dissolving identifications. Because this was mentioned by @Leo Gura in his interview with Curt Jaimungal on the Theories of Everything podcast, I think you might value Franks direct feedback on that topic. If you want to skip ahead, this question starts at minute 46. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4_ywwsbkBc

Yesterday I had an experience that I would describe as a deep remembering. I wasn't there anymore, noone who could have any control. All of my life was seen as the ever changing present moment. New for me was the experience that all senses were basically the same. I could not distinguish between thoughts and sights, between inner and outer. They were all just different flavors of the changing present moment. The attempt to meditate in order to calm me down was futile. There was only concentration on an object for a while, but ultimately thoughts would just pop up, sounds, etc... I also realized that noone else exists. So funny that I write now on this forum again. But I still had and have the question, what are others? How have you come to understand 'others' after enlightenment? Are you seeing them just as phenomena arising in your present experience, or has anyone been able to realize that he will, at another point in time, see the interaction from the others persons perspective? Is there consciousness (even if it is the same) in others, or not? This drives me crazy I wouldn't feel so alone if others would actually be me (filled with consciousness) at another point in time. That would actually be funny, interacting with myself. Isn't that where true compassion and love comes from? Rather than seeing others as empty phenomena in ones first person experience?

Much of the confusion in this thread is actually addressed by Shinzen Young in the video at the end of this post. I have linked to the specific time where he mentions the point I want to make. If you have already done concentration meditation, awareness meditation or mindfulness meditation in the past, you have likely build up momentum. We could also say a mental habit has developed to be aware of certain things. So when you are not new to meditative practices and you start to do the Do-Nothing technique, part of your experience will involve the habit to do these practices you have done in the past. If this happens automatically, you do nothing about it. That means the technique might be doing itself. You will then come to realize that nobody is doing it. You remain as the awareness of it all. Here he talks about this: https://youtu.be/cZ6cdIaUZCA?t=755

I encountered the same question lately. I also ask myself how forceful my concentration awareness (or emptiness as you call it) shall be. Usually I find my thought process goes on along with awareness still being aware of itself. There is usually a detachment from thoughts. I would say, meditation in this way is a form of self-inquiry. If you keep your attention on emptiness/awareness, you are basically looking for your true self. It's different from other self-inquiry techniques though, because you are not coming at it with an attempt to actively see through your currently false believes. For example in self-inquiry you might ask yourself: "What is the distance between me and an object?", with the purpose to see through the illusory separation of subject and object. In that sense, meditation on formlessness is more direct, because you try to see Truth directly. Whereas other techniques tear down wrong believes. But they both have the same end result.