Carl-Richard

Solipsism can certainly have something to do with the egoic self. There are many different types of solipsism. You just have to clarify which type of solipsism you're talking about. The Absolute type of solipsism this forum is so obsessed about is actually an extremely uncommon type of solipsism in the larger culture, which is why people get so confused when the term is brought up.

😂

22% is not rare imo. My brother and my mom also gets it.

Man, how does the world not go to complete shit when so many people get Covid and so many people get brain fog for about a month?

Please clean up your grammar.

Different teachers teach using different methods (and teach different methods). Find some other teachers and see if they resonate more with you.

@UnbornTao So what I gather from this conversation (which we've had before and which I don't think will lead to an agreement) is: I think there are methods for reliably increasing the chances of enlightenment, just like all the religious traditions that span back 15000 years, just like all the New Age spiritual teachers who are not Neo-Advaitans (Sadhguru, Rupert Spira, etc.). You think there aren't. You point to the spontaneous and irreducible nature of the realization and argue against the utility of methods, because it's all inherently uncertain, thus we cannot rely on methods. I can understand the impulse of acknowledging the spontaneity or irreducible complexity associated with the realization, but uncertainty does not mean impossibility; it still allows for probability (and distinguishing between different probabilities). In other words, the uncertainty is not the whole story, and fixating on it is no good. Also, while the realization itself is "absolute", there is a relative side to it as well, and treating the realization as only absolute is therefore an unfortunate conflation. If enlightenment was purely absolute, nobody in their right mind would talk to humans in the relative realm trying to wake them up. "What do you mean enlightenment? If it's absolute, then surely I must already be enlightened, right? What must change for that to happen, and what is change but relativity?" As long as we are here as humans, we're using methods, and some are probably better than others.

Meditate at least 1 hour in each sitting, at least once every day.

Become a moderator.

I'm not having weed withdrawals 😂

Remember that we only have to think about things like eating healthy or working out because of modern society. Modern society severely complicates things, mainly because our environment is no longer in alignment with our biological makeup: urban environments, office environments, sitting still all day, not being in the sun, fast food, social media, living alone or with only a small number of people. It's a miracle we are able to get out of bed at all. The people you see who are healthy and go to the gym are more conscientious and have higher IQs on average. They have better executive functioning and impulse control: they know how to organize their goals and stay on course. They're more able to firstly recognize what is healthy and unhealthy and also to navigate through the challenges of living in an unhealthy environment. Most people simply go by society's standards for determining how to act, so they will be unhealthy by default. In short, when you construct a society where health requires brains to maintain, many people will not be healthy.

@undeather God daym 🤩 I don't know. Something like @undeather wrote: essential nutrients, anti-oxidants, etc. Things that aid in bodily processes. Not anytime recently. I got the vaccines a few years ago.

Those are good for battling the symptoms. I'm mostly interested in speeding up recovery.

I'm actually surprisingly better today, but I don't think I'm back to normal. One of the symptoms I had (eye pain) is now almost gone. I had a pretty good nights sleep (even overslept a bit by accident), which might have helped. I still appreciate you guys' responses. B complex or something more specific?

I read somewhere that one proposed mechanism for the brain fog is some type of immune cell in the brain getting out of wack and causing excess inflammation. A shock of adrenaline could maybe have some effect on that considering adrenaline's effect on the immune system. I also thought what if getting infected with a different virus could maybe "reset" the aforementioned immune cells? (I'm not trying that just yet though 😅). I'll try some cold showers.

Again, a method can be useful even if it's not always necessary. How do you explain the sense of progression and coherence from the beginning of the meditation session to the end where the awakening occurs? If what happens during the meditation doesn't matter at all, why is meditation the experience of getting more and more relaxation/bliss and awakening the experience of hitting a threshold of relaxation/bliss? Next scenario: I was on a plane on my way home from a vacation, and I decided to listen to music while breathing deeply and sitting in an extremely upright posture (my brother can vouch for the "extreme" part: he commented on it). Again, it was progressively building up to it, and maybe 45 minutes into it, I entered such a blissful state that a part of my mind eventually said "oh shit, I'm dying!". I quickly opened my eyes and tried to grab my water bottle from my backpack, and the most bizarre experience of my life happened: it was quite literally as if somebody else was moving my body and picking up the bottle for me and opening it. That is when I realized "oh shit, this is it". Then I looked out the window and saw the plane was about 10 seconds from landing, and then I was overcame by an immense wave of warm nostalgia and the realization that "this is where I have always been and where I always will be". I was about to shed tears of joy, but then I had to distract myself with the fact that I was on an airplane that had just landed. After that experience, I started having spontaneous awakenings. Now, would any of that have happened if I instead had opened a magazine, sat with a crouched posture and with shallow breathing (as I had done for the previous flights that summer)? As for the spontaneous awakenings after that, would they have started happening at exactly the same time if I didn't do what I did on that airplane? If "no" to either of these questions, are the "methods" involved in these scenarios not at the very least predictive? Well, the core "lesson" I got from that "change in state" was identical to all the other dozens (maybe hundreds) of awakenings I've had: "this is it". If you don't want to call this awakening or something that points to enlightenment, then at least invent some other term for me. Hell, even today with my covid-induced brain fog, I tapped into that experience again while listening to music and working out. It's gotten rarer over the years as I've (ironically) stopped meditating regularly, but it's still fundamentally the same experience: complete immersion and merging with reality, a lack of sense of distance between things, lack of sense of time, separation, "being the center", doership, self-concern. Meditation (for me) is just aimed at Being. It's a method, and an useful one at that. Contemplatation can also be a method that is useful. And just like any method, it might not be necessary for invoking the experience in question, but it can invoke it. Or lighting the fire and waiting to see when the building collapses. See, you do value method, just in an extremely constrained way. If you truly didn't value method, you wouldn't suggest contemplation as a method. And again, it is a method, because you can get the realization without contemplation, as I have, in fact in both experiences detailed in this thread. I can keep going on detailing my experiences. This virus isn't exactly making me concerned about brevity.

For example, "go meditate". Meditation is not useless if you want enlightenment. Let's get concrete: my first awakening happened during my first proper meditation session. As I was sitting, I became progressively more relaxed, my mind became more and more silent, and then those effects maximized and it felt like I was going to disappear if I kept going. I then opened my eyes and saw myself hovering 2 feet above my body. Then I looked up to the ceiling and started floating/melting upwards towards "heaven"; a level of bliss I had never encountered before. Then I jumped up in a panic as I did not expect that. Ever since that day, my mind has never been the same: it has always been extremely silent relative to what it used to be. Are you saying the meditation I was doing had nothing to do with the effects I was experiencing at the end of that meditation session? Do you not see how the effects at the beginning of the session and at the end exist on a continuum?

1. Talk to other people like you would talk to them face-to-face. If something is worth saying, you should be able to say it to their face. 2. You don't have to respond to every thread. If you feed low quality, that is what you get. If you engage with it, that is what you'll become. 3. Not every response is worth responding to. Allow yourself some level of self-respect. Your attention is valuable.

Yeah. But just pretend like it isn't. I feel like I can't follow the steps myself because I got covid 5 days ago and I'm experiencing the same intense brain fog which severely compromises my decision-making. Might as well take another 10-day break (ah, that should be the 4th step).

I know. But when conceding to speak about something (relativity), and assuming that you're doing it for a certain preferred outcome (relativity), whether or not that outcome if fully understood, all of this is relative, so might as well embrace it. If you can speak about something at all, it's also possible to speak about it in detail.

A wut?

There is a chance I could write a master thesis on something related to this using brain imaging techniques ("are musicians better meditators than non-musicians?"). It would be a simple experiment of having people lay in an fMRI scanner while meditating vs. not meditating and comparing between musicians vs. non-musicians (vs. trained meditators?). Better meditators would be expected to have more decreased activity in for example the precuneus (part of the Default Mode Network) and increased activity in the medial frontal lobes (task-positive areas). One of my professors happens to be a researcher in the neuroscience of music, so he might take interest in that (besides, our faculty leader currently researches the clinical applications of mindfulness).

Once every 4-5 months at most.

I struggle to see that. When did Razard mention anything about "Game B, Daniel Schmachtenberger, John Vervaeke, Jamie Wheel, and other systemic thinkers?"

I split it in 4: chest and triceps, back and biceps, shoulders, and legs. I'm a weird boy. "Only shoulders?". No, it's more like an upper-body workout that focuses on shoulders. The muscles in your body are highly interconnected functionally speaking. Even on so-called "pull days", you're inevitably going to train muscles that you target on "push days". The body is not dichotomous. That said, you should try to work out all your muscles, and splitting it up can be helpful for that.