molosku

Well put! Where is this from?

Agreed, If I understood you correctly. All I can say is, I can point to an experience I could label as "happening" or "change". Is it real? I don't know man, but listen to this sweet silence for a second. Mmmmm feels good.

@tecladocasio Yes, different teachings but similar tones Both like to pose around flowers.

If you like that one, i recommend reading some Rubert Spira afterwards! Those two have similiar tones in their speech

That could be due to tight muscles around your neck, back and shoulders, they can cause migrane and headache. I would recommend stretching before meditation and see if that helps, if it doesn't, go see a doctor. I think Elliot Hulse might have some interesting material fo you in youtube, he is very into performance and general mobility But yeah, experiencing physical pain is common when meditating, just make sure you are not hurting yourself. "do not do no... hurt the body" -Shinzen Young (on strong determination sitting)

How do you guys reconcile this common knot when meditating. When mediating, its very easy to fall into a head space of trying to give up effort, thus not giving it up because now I just put effort into not putting effort, creating a vicious looping cycle. Its like when you try to meditate really well you actually end up meditating poorly. I am trying to practice self resting, but its really hard when I am trying something. My intuition is to maybe give up all other techniques for now, and practice do nothing instead. I conjure thee, meditation masters, for your wisdom.

@Dodo Rubert <3

Yes, you need a test-kit. BUT IF you are a professional idiot, like me, and got it from a reputable source, go for it. This here is really bad advice but, i'll throw it out there anyway.

I would be careful to fill my head with such ideas suggested here. I guess it start to slip into the realm of _that_ kind of spiritualism. Not judging or dismissing or anything but.... with a belief comes a great responsibility i guess. It all seems like some spiritual ideas dressed from the wardrobe of science, like a lot of new age stuff is. Ideas, especially those that are about the biggest questions such as existence/theory of everything, that seems to make sense at first glance are dangerously easy to just be believed as they are. What I'm trying to say is: a healthy dose of skepticism never hurt anyone

Yes, there is a point, but take a break from meditating if it feels so laborious. And when you start again, start small, like only 5 minutes if you have to.

In this thread, we share and discuss some of the weirdest and most bizarre experiences you've had on psychedelics. What I'm interested specifically are all the experiences that could not be summed up to just "took psychedelics, got ego death" kinda experiences (although they are obviously very profound), but that is not exactly the topic here.To illustrate, I'll share a few of my own stories. 200uq LSD and 10g of (weak) magic mushrooms I lied on a sofa, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, as well as on the sofa, I was on the ceiling looking at myself. I was now simultaneously two versions of myself, on the ceiling and one on the sofa and I did not know which one I was. This lasted under 10 seconds and then I snapped out of it. On the same trip, I suddenly realized that if I stop walking and moving I wont remember who I was, what I was doing, where I was, or anything. I was walking in circles contemplating what I should do, until I realized that this is just fear in action and I stopped and closed my eyes. At that instant, just as I thought, I forgot who I was, where I was in space (lying, standing, sitting), and what lead me to that situation. In my visuals, I was violently being pulled into a wormhole of some kind, and then suddenly a massive sense of infinity hit me, and I opened my eyes because I was just so baffled out of my mind. I would not sum it up as an ego death, It was something else, as I was not left with any insight into myself really. It was a touch of space and eternity. A side note, I would not recommend combining LSD and mushrooms to anyone: you go as they say, completely bonkers. People who do them together are drawn to doing them together and don't need a recommendation. 350uq LSD I was peaking hard and my focus was suddenly being pulled intensely on a particular spot on the wall. Then I switched my gaze upon that spot, and the view behind my window. Suddenly I was hit with this immense non-verbal feeling of "nothing is really inside anything" and at that moment, I became my consciousness. My heart was pounding and I felt a strange pressure around my chest. Tears started to flow like waterfalls, yet I had no emotions except for a huge "OH. MY. GOD." -feeling. I felt as I saw everything for the first time. I could hear my fast paced breathing and pulse, but I was not inside my head anymore, my body was like another piece of furniture, an unrelated object. I was a point of consciousness, levitating in the air. My eyes were not seeing, seeing happened and I had no eyes. This lasted for about 45 seconds, and then it faded away. I spent the whole evening thinking what the FOX (see, don't always have to curse) just happened. I came to the conclusion that It was not an enlightenment experience, it was something else, a very TRUE state of perceiving the space around me. 15g of (semi weak) mushrooms and 5g harmala This is a short, but a beautiful one. I was meditating and peaking quite hard. I was on about 40min mark of my meditation, and I was in a trance that made my whole body feel like I'm a statue. Then a sudden insight hit me: This here, is it. I can do absolutely nothing, in my mind or otherwise, to be more me than I already am. This is what my being is. This insight was related to problems/frustration around self-inquiry that I had pondered for some time. The most biggest, dumbest smile was all over my face, and a warm sweet wave of insight euphoria hit my body and I felt a strong sense of completion, wholeness and bliss. I meditated some more after that, and then i got up. And after that, I became, in my mind, a pirate - - - These kinds of non-enlightenment experiences are to me, deeply interesting and profound. As enlightenment, they seem to happen very randomly and unexpectedly, I don't experience something like the examples above on every trip, even on similar doses. They are something that really can be accessed only on psychedelics, they carry with them an immense sense of reality and unreality, mixed together into this brew of experience that defies language, logic and intuition. They are not exactly as "useful" or pursue-worth as a genuine awakening, but nevertheless, very very deep and profound.

@Leo Gura Oh don't be such a meanie ; D

The blue thing is called "bruising" and its perfectly okay. Dry them for a few days between news paper pages. They could contaminate if you put them into a sealed bag, it serves a great environment for contaminants. Don't worry about the potency, just eat mushrooms until you cant anymore. Thats a proper mans dose btw there are plenty of dedicated mushroom forums in the internet

Yes. We have strong evidence (the bible) that Jesus Christ himself rose from the dead, rolled a huge ass stone away from his grave and jet-packed to heaven.

@egoless i have to question your question

Have you @Joseph Maynor questioned the belief that questioning awareness is something worth questioning? Or that questioning "non-duality is true" is a statement worth questioning? You’re gonna see some surprises if you look under the hoods of underhoods of both of those beliefs.

Ponder there questions: How would meditation make you more "true" than you already are? What missing ingredient you don't posses as a being that meditation could give you? How meditation could make you more aware than aware? How you could be more than your current being with meditation? Would you be less you if you would not meditate? And the answer i'll give you is: Yes.

Provoking and arrogant title, eh? Well, got your attention I'll try to keep this post not to long as my point/thought is simple. All of this is coming from someone who has not had an enlightenment "experience", but has had a few glimpses of it through psychedelic experiences, and has some ideas to share. If you have loads of beliefs what enlightenment is or how to get there, i suggest you empty your mind a bit and read this with an open mind. Some of the claims made here are intended to be a bit provoking and even harsh, try to read between the lines. I do contradict myself on purpose. What I claim here, is not intended as a truth, more like an opening for a discussion. What enlightenment is not (as i have understood it intellectually, having done research for a little over 2 years now): Some trick you can "hack" with your mind An experience, state or mystical or even spiritual "happening" Something done with the mind with years and years of super hard work A "product" of any kind of "consciousness work" Something you need to rise your awareness to (just bear with me) Anything done or experienced through the mind (image, thought etc.) Anything that requires a "way" or a process "Higher knowledge" you do not currently posses, any grasp of something Something you get closer to by reading and researching about it Something you get closer to by meditating lots (i know i know, just bear with me) Something that is hard to reach Something someone or some tradition could ever teach you or get you closer to What enlightenment is: "Its not something you gain, its something you lose" - Adyashanti That which you always have been: your being as it is. Your being YOUR BEING!! HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE IT?! BE IT NOW! BE! IT! NOW! Why on earth you should spend hours upon hours on "concentrating" (not even going to detail on how hard it is to build your concentration abilities, even more stuff to be put before enlightenment before you allow yourself to be "developed" enough) on something that you already know is not there? If you seriously contemplate the method that is inquiry, and compare it to what you are trying to "achieve" whit it, the whole notion of inquiry as a process or non-process or non-non-process should rise your eyebrows (assuming you don't have massive misconceptions about enlightenment). There seems to be a mismatch of the end and the method. You are trying to put out a small, harmless looking yet very persistant fire with a flamethrower. I DO think that self-inquiry is important in the beginning so that you begin to get in touch what you currently think and feel, and how groundless your beliefs are, but after a while (for me it was after about 50 hours total of self-inquiry) you begin to realize that what you essentially are doing will never ever work because its just hard labor done with the mind, extra work that blinds you from your actual being. Its the mind wrestling with itself asking silly questions it has no authority to answer anyway and just juggling with words, images and thoughts. I do admit that self-inquiry could potentially trigger some "i really don't know"-experience, which certainly would be profound to experience, but that would still be a realization about the groundlessness of your beliefs, and not about your direct being nature. I would imagine this experience to be something like an intellectual realization of the big picture of your web of beliefs. I don't disregard self-inquiry entirely here, but I'm questioning the the directness of it, as it is often sold as such: THE most direct way to enlightenment. I do not claim that inquiry will never get you enlightened, but I do claim that it might be the opposite of what is being sold: the most strenuous and longest path to enlightenment. The method you are going trough in your mind over and over again is like realizing that you don't know where your wallet is, going to google and finding out that you never had a wallet in the first place, and then going to the Himalayas trying to find it just because hey, I haven't checked there yet and I don't really feel like my wallet does not exist, even though I know it doesn't and it certainly wont be in the Himalayas once I start looking for it there! ......wait, what? I have heard stories of zen-monks getting enlightened after years of trying and trying and meditating hours upon hours and then experiencing a total collapse of their spirit and trust to the path they have chosen, a true realization of utter failure. And then it hits them. Could it be that the point of self-inquiry is actually to send the seeker to the wrong way on purpose, so that they have to realize their wasted efforts themselves? Here's a fun metaphor i came up with: Imagine enlightenment as the essential realization of the taste of ice cream . You are interested to actualize that, and you know that you don't yet experience it because some people wrote so in some books and made videos about it in youtube. You intellectually understand there is a big possibility that what they are saying is true, but the personal experience is lacking. So you sit down to eat ice cream and with an open mind, inquire about the taste for an hour every day and it goes a little bit like this: *take a spoonfull and toss it around in your mouth* "what do I believe is the taste? Is the taste the ice cream the box it was sold in? Is it the chunks I can feel in my mouth?" *another spoonfull* "not sure it's these chocolate chunks. Is it? is it? what is my answer to this? Is it me who is coming up with the answer or the ice cream?" *another spoonfull* "hmmm I still dont get it.... maybe another bite will do the trick? Maybe i'll try not to think about it too much and see where it gets me" *another spoonfull, ice cream now sitting and melting in the mouth* ".............. iiiiiis THIS my enlightenment? no? hmmm.... curious...." See where I'm getting at? What that guy should have done is just shut up and ______'blank' , 'nothing' , 'emptiness'______ * * * There is no process to realize the taste, there is nothing more or less to it than that which it always was, you could do absolutely nothing to realize the taste that you are already tasting 100%. For me, counter intuitively only the total giving up of the search (and accepting that it is so) seems to be a step in the right direction. That and also disregard of any further research about it, in fact I wish i forgot everything I knew about it except maybe a small gentle guiding sentence like: "Be what you are, and nothing else" would be enough instructions to actualize enlightenment. With a quick google search, the word inquiry is defined as: a seeking or request for truth, information, or knowledge an investigation, as into an incident, the act of inquiring or of seeking information by questioning, interrogation. So if you intellectually accept that the question "who am I" or "what am I" has no real answer you can derive with your mind, and that you "are already" enlightened and you are the awareness, why on earth would you spend any more time trying to figure out the only single thing you have always known for absolute certain: the knowing part of your being, the knowing of experience or the awareness. It is already 100% there for you and it has nothing up its sleeve that you don't get to see. Nothing is hidden. For you, it should be the only thing you literally CANT inquire into, and it should sound like a joke to you. There are infinite amount of things you could try to wrap your mind around and to contemplate upon and you are spending your time inquiring into the only thing you already know 100%? What are you doing???! What do you expect to find out with inquiry exactly? If you inquire into a cucumber, do you expect to eventually after years of hard daily work, to realize something about the existential nature of the cucumber that is fundamentally and profoundly more cucumber than the cucumber? There is no further knowledge to be gained about yourself after you first learn what the truth of no self is. This does not mean there is no further experience that can be had about/from consciousness, just not about YOU. Just because you don't fully realize it now, does not necessarily mean that there is lots of work to be done (although there is, and also is not, but also is, and is not, but there really is some, but there really isn't.... i wont go into this here). I really have to question the whole notion of "doing the work" to reach enlightenment, because it stink of human nature: we see and conceptualize a feat (build a hut, protect the family, kill a deer, reach enlightenment) and then attack it until an end is met. Could it be that this approach has limits? * * * Counter intuitively, it would seem to me that the bigger and more significant the subject, the more research should be put into it, but the most ultimate subject of them all should be left with as little research as possible. Reality is just so twisted and tricky and plain impossible that this kind of paradox would be JUST the kind of joke reality would dig. I won't go into detail here what I think one should really be doing, but i a have a gut feeling that rising your consciousness and meditating might be acts worth considering, that much i'll guess, and my guess is just that: a fools hope. After all this is said, a very important notion has to be mentioned: Everything said here is just another belief I wish everyone some ice cream time in moderation! "We should really be concerning ourselves not with the pursuit of happiness, but with the happiness of pursuit" - Raja Ram

My plan B exactly, if nothing happens in the next 10 years @Shin Its not readily available where I live, and currently I'm experimenting with other psychedelics which have a lot of wisdom to tap into. If you have some, do send it to my address

I really got to give credit to Rubert Spira for giving me a whole bunch of new ideas about what I probably should be doing. He speaks exactly about that: the mistransaltion of "atma-vicara"

(This is an I and me-friendly & "enlightenment is a happening"-friendly post) So I have been self inquiring for some time now, and Im slowly moving towards having a little sense of what the hell Im supposed to be doing/not doing, but Im a little confused about the subject mentioned on the title. Questioning the I and the self-concept and asking verbal questions like "what is the i, who am i, am i, what seperates me from this x object etc" seems to be an important part of the self-inquiry, differentiating it from just sitting or meditating (with a more or less blank mind), and really driving your mind towards this "doubtfull" , open minded "state" that opens the curtains of consciousness just a little bit. Then on the other hand, there is the "just being" aspect, which i can resonate with way more. I clearly recognize that i absolutely can NOT be any kind of mental image, sound or word, and I keep reminding myself about this whenever i notice that I drifted into monkey mind when self-inquiring. Rubert Spira very elegantly said something like "the highest meditation is just abiding in the self / resting the attention at the self / letting attention sink back at the heart" and it really makes sense to me, because I intellectually know that i already AM IT and there is nothing i can do with my mind to be more me as I already am: I already AM conscious and that is my true nature. He also said that what ever you focus your attention to, is an object of attention, therefore not you, and to realize the self the attention needs to "collapse" due to lack of objects to focus on. Makes sense i think. So my question is this: how to balance these two aspects? They both seem important, but its hard for me to see how asking questions could ever cause enlightenment, because it seems to me that what ever i could ask myself, is basically just noise, it would be the equivalent of chanting "my who aware I is consciousness are me my is myself..." etc. It has ultimately no meaning, no question to ask really. The "just being" _seems_ to be a more higher, purer form of self-inquiry. Everyones 5-cents is appreciated ps. I have once experienced a psychedelic enlightenment-type of state on moderate dose of LSD, where I entered a state where my awareness was floating in my body but I was not the body or the mind. In that state there were almost no thoughts, just awareness of awareness, so I have a small taste of what possibly could be and awakening experience. I entered this mystical state with no questions asked, just focusing on my direct experience and it suddenly happened, it lasted a couple of minutes but I did not feel enlightened afterwards, just more elevated than normal.