Carl-Richard

I awoke on an airplane while listening to Martin Ball's electronic music and breathing deeply and lovingly with my spine extremely erect, focusing intensely and lovingly on the music. The lyrics mouthed "surrender to the flow", and a few moments later, my mind shouted internally "oh shit oh shit you're dying! Do something!". I open my eyes and reach out to drink from my water bottle. My hand literally travels from my seat to the water bottle with ZERO feeling of me controlling the arm, ZERO feeling of weight, ZERO feeling of having moved by my own will. That is when I realized oh fuck this is it. I immediately turn my head to the right to look out the window and the airplane lands, and I feel like I'm at home in my old house from when I was 3 years old or younger sitting in my living room, safe, comfortable, at peace. Tears boil up, but I force them down. People are standing up and getting ready to leave. I stand up and look behind me. I see every single person, every single face, sitting there in one single space, all at once, no focus, just wide focal view. And as I walk off the plane, I'm not walking. I'm levitating. Someone else is moving my feet and it's not me. And tears come, but I press them down again. My eyes meet a child in a stroller, they catch my eyes, they keep looking, even as they pass by, they keep looking, they turn around to look behind to keep looking. What did they see? Did they see what I had seen? That worked.

I have a cold virus and I'm cranky >:) Sorry. Sorry, got you mixed up with the other person in the thread saying that. My bad. Lol. Quote Paramahansa Yogananda "you people do not know how to sleep, you pull with you all sorts of images and personal drama". How to get it to work ≠ only way to get it to work. You can awaken/meditate spontaneously without doing anything. That also works. Or staring at your own navel.

Yeah, never let go of any of your attachments. That's a good way to get stuck looping on a forum for the rest of your life.

Nowhere in history was there one single "traditional" meditation. And dynamic forms of meditation have existed since forever. ? ? In your little meta one-up game, I responded by saying that all of that was deconstruction. Letting go is deconstruction. It doesn't matter whether you're letting go of "letting go". Obviously, that is still letting go. I don't know what you're going on about. You've said things I've never said three times now.

You sound like a literal Blue religious person.

Sitting meditation, walking meditation, music meditation, chanting meditation, mantra meditation, kundalini meditation, third eye meditation, vipassana meditation, focused attention meditation, open-awareness meditation, TM meditation, ACEM meditation, compassion meditation, devotion meditation. Just on the top of my head late at night while having a cold virus. Let's also quote directly from all the religious traditions, Eastern and Western. Let's quote Sadhguru. Let's quote all the online non-duality teachers. Let's see how many meditations we can find. Then let's try to claim that meditation is one specific thing and that doing so has any meaning outside being dogmatic about your highly personal interpretation of a word that describes practices that have worked for you in your own life.

Meditation is a billion things. Maybe in your New Age framework, it's one very specific thing.

Take all the health you can get while doing fantastic shit.

Simple is not easy as they say.

Using the word "ontologically" makes it seem like a deep thing, but it's really just me. What I see, what I feel, what I sense, is just me. It is made out of me. We call it "consciousness" when we want to contrast it to some notions of materialism. But we don't need to call it much. Going beyond the ontological ground, operationalizing it, that is what I've done here.

It's all deconstruction. That's not a meta game.

Let me clarify for the thread in general that this energy I'm referring to is not something exotic and "other" that you have to discover like some hidden dimension or realm. It's identical to your body. It's just that it requires approaching it with your attention like a microscope, to try to see the very smallest and finest details. Like there are microorganisms in your body, there are micro-movements and micro-physiological events in your body that you can become aware of. Your awareness of these phenomena is what the energy is. Really everything in your body, even the most gross and obvious movements, like lifting your arm, is this energy. I'm just talking about the subtler and finer detail movements.

Interesting. I guess it underscores the fact that realizing formlessness does not necessarily depend on anything happening in form, such as knowledge or sensitivity of energy phenomena.

Ok so you agree that there is a progression from tension to relaxation (unwinding of energy) in the body and that this occurs in different parts of the body. You just don't feel it around your head area or that there is energy moving towards it. Do you experience the "transmutation" I described with sexual energy (it increasing mental clarity when not released)? That was not what I was doing, but I agree it's mostly a futile exercise to judge awakening through questioning.

Now you're just being a smartass.

Again, letting go of letting go. You see the trick that is being played? It's letting go all the way down.

Some kinds of music play on innovation and surprise, while other play on refining and maximizing specific well-established qualities. For example, Freddie Mercury's voice, while mostly expressed in a "classic" rock format, absolutely blows the quality of "rock vocals" out of the water. Progressive rock for me is somewhere in the middle. You have the deep loyalty and precise refining of the rock format but also elements of innovation. And that produces a very unique balance of refinement and familiarity sprinkled in with surprise and idiosyncrasy. Someone like Gentle Giant is arguably an example of pushing more strongly in the direction of innovation. But this all kinda depends on the time horizon you're viewing it from. Because you can also take progressive rock as its own format and refine that again, which is arguably what someone like Steven Wilson has done (he is not coincidentally a renowned audio engineer, so much so that he has gotten to remix the old music of bands like Yes and Jethro Tull).

Does it load now? 3:45 is when the monstrocity of a riff starts (and again, the one after at 4:16 too is a monstrocity). The time starts a bit before where you get the buildup leading to it. I couldn't let that one slide 😤

I'm just trying to judge how far you are from Enlightenment. But anyways. Is there nothing physical going on in your meditation? Do you not get more and more relaxed as your meditation deepens? Do you not feel your muscles becoming more loose and your body becoming lighter? I'm just pointing out that there is a certain logic behind this that you can tap into and that you can become more aware of.

And that's also why you think substance in teaching is problematic, because the distinction between teaching and truth is less firm ("it's all mind so we must limit mind").

Why mindwork? Truth reveals that the mind is an illusion. But of course you will object to this because you usually don't distinguish between the personal and transpersonal.

One time I connected so much with this girl in terms of shared interests, my mind was in denial as it was happening, and instead of pursuing one of the threads, my brain just malfunctioned and responded as if I was talking to someone who didn't have those interests 😂 "Oh so you also used to listen to death metal when falling asleep? Cool... I really like all forms of music..." 😂😂 Or it was just the social stigma with liking death metal that caused some mental block. Anyway 😆

Is there no sense that you're running up against a threshold, that this state seems to be maximizing or self-sustaining? Or is it much more fluctuating or even rare?

Seeing the formless in form, more than ~95% of the time.

And below self-imposed retardation, you have learned helplessness.