Carl-Richard

What keeps you away from it is entertaining these types of thoughts ("Do I just have to keep remaining alert and vigilant?"). The key is essentially to do whatever it takes to gain enough trust in yourself to not go around worrying that you're not good enough. If you do 1hr every day where you put in 100% and there is no way you could've done any better, then you know that you atleast did your best and that you can try again tomorrow. If you instead choose to drag every insecure thought about meditation into every moment of your day, you're royally self-sabotaging yourself. Deal with your insecurities about meditation when you're actually meditating.

I don't want to die — what can I say? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Entertaining these types of thoughts is the very thing that keeps you away from it. This is why I keep hammering it in again and again that all your meditation sessions should only happen within a designated spot of your day where you dedicate 100% of your attention to meditation and nothing else, and then when you're done with that, you STOP! — meditation session over. If it didn't work for you that day, come back tomorrow. If you instead spend your day looking for free moments to do short spontaneous meditations, your mind will never stop producing these thoughts of "oh maybe I'm not present enough" or "maybe now I got some time to boost my presence". The only place where you're going to fix that is in your meditation session, so worrying about it during the day is pointless and will only keep fueling the monkey mind.

Yes but it's terrifying so I stopped doing that

When a thought arises, you realize that it's a thought. Job done.

The way she describes it sounds like a flow state. Flow maximizes information flow, so the more flow you have, the more karma you're able to burn through (which you could say is good in her case). Maybe next life she'll be a "normal" person

7:50 The crop byproducts argument is the equivalent of saying we have recycle stations so pollution isn't a problem. That and the numbers "2.8kg edible plants for 1kg meat" are complete red herrings, because the numbers are based on current crop usage and not the crop usage in an all-vegan world. An all-vegan world would use much fewer crops, so all the other numbers like crop byproducts wouldn't be represented in those numbers.

@Megan Alecia That already exists in China ?

There are a few common traps with this pointer (as with all pointers). For instance, does this mean you don't need to do any spiritual practice? Well, all the teachers who say these things did tons of practice, so that can't be right. Maybe it's more about the way you're supposed to do the practice? Well, there is really only one way to do the practice, and that is to actually do it. The idea that meditation is something that should be effortless is actually you forcing something onto the situation ("it's supposed to be this and not this"). You can't try to not try. That is actually the very reason why you have to do the practice. If meditation feels effortless for you, that's OK. If you feel like you have to make an effort, that's OK as well. Your only job is to do the practice. There is no person to make an effort in the first place, so you shouldn't worry about that. Then what is the problem? Well, it's the worry. My advice is to keep a consistent daily practice where you pick one time of the day where you devote all your attention to just that practice. No immediate breaks, no checking the phone, no doing it while standing in line or waiting on the bus. When you're not practicing, you live your life. This is how you avoid the trap of worrying that you're trying too hard or not trying too hard. The mistake is actually not that you're trying too hard; it's when it's coming from a place of compulsion and a feeling of lack, a.k.a worry. It's not the feeling of effort that is bad, rather it's the fear that you're not making enough effort (or not being effortless enough).

Enlightenment doesn't give you anything. It only shows you what you got. That said, it doesn't hinder you in operating in the world either. Gary Weber got enlightened while he was running a research project with 1000 employees and a quarter billion budget.

Because most people on the world stage got there by selling their soul to the devil. Sadhguru isn't too bad though:

You can't think in a non-dual way. Thought is duality. If you think you're non-dual, you're deluding yourself. You simply know you are.

Red.

And what is Leo doing?

That is what the retreat is for

Nah. Join the bald crew with me. All the coolest forum members are bald

True. This has been stated ad nauseum.

Ok.

Whenever I think about someone with ridiculously high IQ, I think about this guy (apparently he had 172 IQ):

Sam Harris is among other things a gateway to psychedelics and non-duality. JP is in his own ways as well. You just have to dig a bit below the surface. Nobody gets A-level celebrity famous for being a psychologist. I study psychology and his work gets regularly cited in our books. He isn't a revolutionary theorist or anything, but he is a darned solid researcher. If you were to question somebody's academic credentials it would be Sam's.

You mean emptyism? ?

That is why I used to love smoking weed. It took my already deeply philosophical mind and magnified it 2x by increasing the immersion, speed and flexibility of thoughts. However, after I had my first awakening experience and returned to smoking again a month later, something was not right: the mind was just very silent. Thoughts didn't just come out of nowhere like they used to. I almost had to force myself to think. Without the thoughts, weed suddenly became very boring to me. Then I realized that I was never actually addicted to weed — I was simply addicted to thoughts. It still took 1 year for me to come to terms with this and drop the habit. Then my new addiction became about meditation.

There is this analogy I stumbled across 5 years ago that also Leo has used to describe how psychedelics work. Imagine you have a mixing board of the kind used in music production: Each dial represents one phenomenological quality, and the entire board makes up everything you could possibly experience (technically an infinite amount). Examples of some very broad categories could be the experience of colours, edges, sounds, tactile sensations etc. Each dial goes from 0-100 in intensity. Let's say your "baseline experience" is when all the dials are sitting in neutral position (50/50). Depending on the dose, psychedelic drugs will generally push most of the dials close to 100, however there are different types of psychedelics with slightly different effects and therefore different settings/configurations. Some psychedelics tend to be more visual than others (e.g. DMT), some tend to have a stronger capacity of inducing ego death than others (e.g. 5-MeO-DMT), and some are outright crazy (Salvia Divinorum). Every drug will always show a somewhat differentiated pattern, but serotonergic psychedelics will frankly always show a general increase (unlike say sedatives, hypnotics, tranquilizers and anti-psychotics which tend to dial things down). There seems to be an afterglow effect like you're suggesting for most psychedelics, but they rarely last longer than a month unless you had some deep awakening experiences during the trip (it also depends on the individual). The greatest changes tend to happen not as a result of the afterglow but rather as you start uncovering things about yourself and the world that you never thought were possible. One critique of the analogy could be that subjective experience cannot be quantified in any shape or form and that the idea of a positive or negative is somewhat arbitrary. For instance, who is to say that sedative drugs cause a dialing-down effect and not just a "change" in experience? Then again, it's just an analogy

Synthesis of TeSi FeSi NeFi and a lack of TeNi... OK?

Seeing the parts but not the whole.