Carl-Richard

I'm accepting more and more that people will use whatever pointers they want, and even though some pointers absolutely suck and are constantly misunderstood in my opinion, most pointers kinda do suck and are constantly misunderstood. That is the case no matter how enlightened the messenger is, and in a space like this where all kinds of people can inhabit the role as a teacher, these things are inevitable. I don't often give this advice (because it's obvious), but if you want the truth, go discover it for yourself. In spirituality, forums like these are best used as practical advice and social support as a means to that end. If you like listening to people talk about awakening, actually listen to somebody speak in audio and preferably video format, even better face to face. The words are only a fraction of the communication.

Good stuff.

Nothing worse than a wino man

Huh?! Its clearly a crossover between a brain, a DMT entity, and a tree

But that seed exists for all of us. It's not special

What is that tree?

The sentence after it:

Frank Zappa.

In what way?

@UnbornTao I'm talking about the psychological meat and potatoes of addiction. You're talking about spiritual self-transcendence. I'm talking about a ground-up healing of the issue. You're talking about an orthogonal movement away from the issue. I'm talking about having a healthy psychology. You're talking about becoming trans-psychological. The reality is that you'll have a hard time only focusing on one of those frames, because both of them are leaky buckets.

Are DMT realms relative or absolute hallucinations?

Nah.

She didn't give me enough candy or video games, so I became a drug addict. What about you?

O_o

That's just my personal bias towards you Haha jk. My main advice or wish for how these types of disagreements can be alleviated is to not treat non-duality or awakening as something special, or as "the Truth and the only Truth", or as a reason to treat somebody as beneath you, or to criticize their character. Awakening is just one facet of life, and people have disagreements about what awakening even is. It's best to keep the format or style of the conversation as normal and empathetic as possible, just as if you were talking about the weather, or your favorite animal, or other less spiritual facets of personal development.

If you want to survive as an organism, pleasure and pain cannot be ignored. They can be approached in more or less conscious ways, but they're essential for survival. It seems like you're calling it a presumed lack because you can just choose to die. That is not a very relevant proposition (in my "living" opinion). I would say addictions tend to develop when there is something "wrong" (e.g. a lack in fundamental human needs or unresolved emotional issues or trauma), and it breeds on the compulsive and unconscious mechanisms fundamental to the human condition (the same mechanisms that force you to breathe, or drink water, or scratch your arm; "lower" forms of survival). And that is why they're so hard to unwind: they're so deeply ingrained into you. You have to essentially do a full system reboot to get a significant chance of change, which is why spiritual experiences or other extreme conditions like rock-bottom experiences are some of the very few reliable predictors of recovery.

I'm thirsty. Do I lack water or is that a presumed lack?

If you see something that other people don't usually see, it can be labelled as a hallucination. Essentially, society dictates what is a hallucination or not.

Addictions are compensations for a lack.

My model is: more developed = more meaning and being.

Feeling like you're dying inside a university lecture is pretty horrible

Gary Weber once said that non-duality has to be better than sex, or else nobody would be meditating

If you're doing what you're meant to be doing (e.g. as a person in terms of life purpose, or as an organism in terms of healthy behaviors), and you have the right support around you and you've had time to build up momentum, things that look hard actually become not hard at all. I don't find going to the gym to be hard. I've been doing it for so long that I find it harder to not go to the gym. Of course, adapting to something new can be hard, but once you've adapted to it, it's just normal.

It's fun chasing death, but when death is chasing you, shit gets real ☺️

@mmKay ?