Erlend K

@Vitamine Water That is brautiful! This is my band

There are some research showing that success and happiness is correlated. The main causality seems to be that happiness leads to successfull, not the other way around.

Meaning is not something out there, but a purely psychological phenomenon. Any activity can feel meaningful to you, or it can feel meaningless. In the same way your life can feel meaningful or it can feel meaningless. Creating a strong sense of meaning is achieved through three steps: 1.Find a cause that feels bigger and more important than yourself 2.Find a way to apply your natural talents/strenghts towards furthering this cause 3.Devote a lot of time and energy for this cause. Do this and your life will feel meaningful.

Buddha at the gas pump - https://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhaAtTheGasPump Includes in depth conversations with most of th most well known contemporary spiritual teachers

Hey fellow self-actualizers! This week the US Berkley Greater Good center has started it's annual free edX course on The Science of Happiness. Has anyone else here signed up for it? If you haven't, I would deeply recommend signing up. It is a very practical course that goes through all the main findings of contemporary research on what makes people feel happy, and what makes life feel meaningful. They also give "homework" in the form of happiness boosting practices/techniques. They have carefully picked the practices that have been most consistently proven to be effective for most people. These include "3 Good Things", "Gratitude Letter", Random Acts of Kindness, etc. The graphs below show the reported effects on participants from a previous year, both directly after finishing the course and three months later, compared with before starting the course: The video below is a 2 min explanation of what the course is all about: It would be cool if someone would be interested in starting a study group. We could discuss practical ways to implement the content in our lives.

You can use any object/activity as a concentration practice. As soon as you realize you have gotten distracted, reward/congratulate yourself for realizing it, and return your focus to that witch you wanted to pay attention to. Over time this will train the mind to stay focused for longer periods of time.

If you want to raise your self-esteem and self-confidence, quick fixes/"techniques" are not likely to give any serious results. You can do things like affitmations to temporarily boost your self-confidence, but research seems to indicate these have little or no long term effects. In order to raise this traits you have to change the way you act in the real world as you go about your day. Treat yourself with respect, set up personal boundries, stand by your values, push through your insecurities, set personal goals and work hard to achieve them. Etc. These are the kind of efforts that actually build self-esteem and self-confidence. It's a slow process that requires a lot of dedocation and will power.

I would not recomend messing around too much with your subtle energy system on your own. At least be careful about it. You risk distorting it even more, if you do things wrong. Idealy you should try to find a tai chi teacher to guide you through it.

If you have a year off anyway, why not give it a try. If you realize its not going to work out, you could just get a normal job for the last 6 months or whatever of your free year. Even if you fail, it can be a valuable experience. Are you alowed to own a company at 16 year old in Denmark? Is your business plan to make websites or do you have some other plan?

From what I have heard, most professional psychologists view the mbti as outdated pseudoscience. The Big 5 theory of personality is considered more accurate.

Yea, I agree. You don't need to meditate. I guess it depends on what your goal is.

To make any significan progress you need a daily practice, so I would say make it a habit. The more you practice, the faster your progress will be. 2 houres a day is good if you can maintain it, buy not nessesary. As a beginner a few min per day is enough to slowly progress. Culadasa claims a minimum of 45 min a day is required for most people to progress. I support the idea of trying different meditation techniques. However a new practice may require 100+ houres before one notice benefits. Therefor, I don't like the idea of jumping from technique to technique. If you spend just a few houres doing a technique, you will just be scraping at the surface. I think it's better to pick a technique, give it a serious chance, and try to master it before moving on to something else.

Not every exercise is going to work for everyone. If an exercise dosn't resonate with you, just skip it and do something else.

@Max_V Awareness of breath is anapanasati. Piti is a powerful prāṇa phenomenon that every anapanasati practitioner experiences once their concentration reaches a certain stability. It is a sign that you are making progress. Piti develops through various stages as ones concentration sharpens. At low levels it can be painful, and cause weird body movements like shaking or twisting. At higher stages it becomes very pleasant, and can be used to enter a jhana (absorption) state by switching the object of meditation from the breath to this pleasure.

What kind of meditation are you doing? If you are doing anapanasati, shaking can be a sign of early level Piti.

@DodoSo when you use the word "Space" you are not referring to the space-time continuum, but rather something unfathomable that you hypothesize exists beyond the space-time continuum? Something that's not a three-dimensional extent, but something non-geometric, with no physical properties. Something we have no way of verifying or falsifying the existence of?

It's not really that hard to achieve if you practice in an intelligent, systematic way. Never loosing attention of the breath means you are at stage 4 in the tmi system. It took me about 4-5 months to reach this level, using the tmi methodology. Many more talented/dilligent meditators reach this level much faster than I did. Anapanasati can be used as an intro practice, but is also a powerful practice in its own right. It is all you need to access the Jhanas, Samadhi and Steeam Entry.

I dont see why you assume space to be an eternal being. Our best estimate is that it came into existence 13,8 billion yeas ago, and it may verry well dissipate at some point in the future.

Using sounds as your meditation object is a valid form of meditation. For beginners using the breath id usually recomended by most meditation masters, tho. Do you still experience mindwandering, or is your attention fairly stable? When your attention moves to the sounds, do your attention on the breath completely dissapear? If so, its technicaly forgetting and not a gross distraction. If you follow the tmi system, you should not worry about gross distractions untill you reach the point where you can sit 45 min, and pretty much never lose attention of the breath (no mind wandering or forgetting). For an unexperienced meditator, using your being/Isness as a meditation object will result in co stant mindwandering and forgetting. You will not achieve much that way. I think you will make faster progress if you start out using breath as your primary meditation object, at least until you reach access consentration.

About mathematics: It is "Objective Truth" in the only way symbolic representations can ever be objective: "Snow is white if, and only if, it is white". If you define a=b, then in some way you can argue that it is objectively true that "a is the same as b". All of mathematics is based on a set of unprovable premises/definitions. There exists no proof that 1+1=2. We then apply the laws of logic to derive conclutions from these premises. These laws of logic are also unprovable. They are just an attempt at articulating some of the rules the human mind is evolved to apply intuitively for labeling information as true or false, and combine existing information to derive new concutions. The only reason to take math and logic seriously is that, for some mysterious reason, it actually works at describing and making useful predictions in the world.

This might be true for a static universe, but the spacetime contiuum of this universe is expanding. According to Hubble Law, a point sufficiently far away from the person shooting the arrow will be moving away from him faster than the speed of light. Even if the arrow travles at the speed of light it will never reach this point. The question "what is outside the our universe?" is an absurd question. The word "outside" describes a point in space, and as far as we know, space only exists as part of the spacetime contiuum of the universe. It's just like the question "what was before the big bang?". The word "before" also means a point in the timespace contiuum. Time, like space, is a part of the physical fabric of this universe, and came into existance with the Big Bang. At the moment of the Big Bang there was no sutch thing as time, and therefor there was nothing "before" the Big Bang. There might have been something else in the world. Just like the world might still contain something else than the universe. Something fundamentally different from "before" or "outside". Something the human mind is not evolved to be able to intuit.

Three possible solutions to the paradox: 1 The universe is not infinite (common sense is irrelevant. Most of modern physics contraticts common sense. The mental faculty we call common sense evolved to help our ansesstors derive conclutions that helped them survive or reproduce. It didn't evolve as a tool for deriving the ultimate thruths of nature. 2 There are an infinite amount of things distrbuted over an infinite space. 3 Only a spesific, finite area of an infinite universe contains things. This would mean these things are distributed within a finite space.

I think pro-social behavior and attitudes (kindness, compassion, generosity and gratitude), just like wisdom, mindfulness and concentration, are not only the results of awakening, but also skills to be consciously cultivated as part of the journey. These skills will not be perfected until awakening, but still needs to be cultivated to a certain point for awakening to be plausible. It's true the Buddha himself didn't practice compassion as part of his journey to enlightenment. He practiced samatha/jhanas , yoga and asceticism, which were the main spiritual practices in India at his time. There are, however, good reasons why he didn't advice his students to copy this path. These common practices often resulted in profound mystical experiences, but not to any significant, permanent changes. The Buddha reached awakening by coincident/luck, combined with having an unusual talent for meditation (supposedly, he mastered each Jhana faster than any of his peers and surpassed all the Jhana masters he studied under in short time) According to the Sutras: The Buddha considered pro-social behavior and attitudes as a foundation of the most reliable path to awakening. In his later, mature teachings, after decades of teaching/mentoring experience, and after gaining a solid understanding of how different practices worked for the thousands of students he had guided, he kept increasing the focus put on compassion. He even declared compassion as one of the two "wings of the dharma", alongside wisdom. His answer to examples like the "compassion" of George Bush is: the two wings of wisdom and compassion have to be balanced. If one wing is overdeveloped compared to the other, the "Bird of Dharma" will not fly. Pro-social attitudes constitute three of the four Brahma Viharas. When aspiring practitioners ask the Buddha which practice they should start with his typical answer was the practice of generosity. As one progress towards stream entry, one has to pass through the dukkha nanas. Practitioners following mechanical/technique-focused paths, downplaying the importance of compassion, often have to suffer through prolonged, painful dukkha nanas. Many give up the path at this stage. Some even commit suicide because they can't handle it. On the other hand, practitioners from the Tibetan schools, which heavily focuses on compassion, rarely report problems with dukha nanas. One typical explanation given for why these practices are so central is that without them "spiritual" practices tends to be subtly ego-based and ego-reinforcing. The practice becomes a tool for serving the interests of the Self: A pursuit for my Self's enlightenment/equanimity/mystical experiences, so that my Self will be enhanced. Focusing on other people tend to have the opposite effect: It reinforces feelings of interconnection and weakens the sense of a seperate Self. Next time you act with compassion or freely give away something, try to be mindful of how it feels. You will most likely notice a mild, warm feeling of connectedness, and a subtle temporary weakening of the sense of Self.

Just pick something hard that you have a natural talent for and that is in alignment with your values. Eventually you will develop mastery and learn how to enter a flow while doing it, and it will become a purpose.

I agree with Leo. When I was around 25, I realized I was living my life in an irrational, unfufilling way. My first impusle was to start reading the "great" european philosophers, assuming they had figured out the keys to life, and could give me the answers to how I should live. It's amazing how little practical wisdom most of them offers, and how convoluted language they use, just to make their ideas sound more profound than they really are. Philosophy can be incredebly intelectualy stimulating tho and help you challenge your exisiting beliefs. I agree with Leo tho about reading books about the philospher insted of the original works. Unlike the original texts, books about these texts are typicaly written to convey the ideas as effectively as possible.