lmfao

Good luck! Just remember you always have the option to go slower.

@Eren Eeager Oh man, that's an even shorter half-life than sertraline ! That's very rough --- I don't know what most of the doctors say about how tapering anti-depressants should be done, but I found this guy on YouTube who had interesting opinions on it. Specifically in regard to how tapering should be done when you're down to a low dose. He essentially recommends that when at a low dose (like you being at 10mg or 20mg), you have to go extra slower at the end when tapering off. He says most doctors are looking at the wrong thing ( I forgot what, but something medical) for conceptually understanding it. He claims that at those low doses, small decreases in medication have a large impact on your withdrawal, his justification involving a graph like this. This is citalopram, the maximum dose being 60mg: ^in relation to what the above graph is showing, I don't understand it all myself ------------------------- I found this graph for the drug you're taking I'm guessing that in between 0 and 10 (of your blood concentration, not dose) is a sharp drop there, be careful. I don't know all this though, this is just something I'm guessing. The graph would be the same shape if you changed the x-axis to dosage. So go slowly when at the end, is my advice. Rather than what you did of dropping the last 20mg all in one go.

What SSRI you on? I'm on zoloft. I'm tapering down extremely slowly rn. My journey is far from ending, I'm sure the hard part is to come soon. My dose was 100mg and now I recently changed to 25mg after being on 50 for a very long time. In the past, I tried to leave the celexa medication cold turkey and failed. Severe vertigo and dizziness, yes. Brain zaps. And also, my muscles felt unbelievably weak to stand up and walk. So a fatigue there. It was absolutely wretched. I ended up going back on different anti depressants, zoloft, but now I'm tapering off again since July. Took me 4 months to go from 100mg to just starting 25mg now. What's worked for me is very slow decrease. And doing whatever else possible to worm your way through. Exercise, meditation, eating vegetables, these things give a little baby step to make the process a little easier. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. There are benefits to quitting, maybe there already are some going on for you. I'm more in touch with my emotions now.

@Chimera I'm gonna sidestep talking about whether ego is important is not. And instead try and give pointers about how to generally manage the paradoxes going on. --- The problem I've found with suppressing and denying feelings is that it's denying reality. Denying the truth of what's in your direct consciousness is a central part of that pattern. You should always want to be on the side of examining your experience as it is. Ignore what books and other people say (and have programmed you with, so self-deception is your biggest enemy) about how you should see your experience. The more powerfully you relate to your direct experience, the more powerful you become. ---- Okay but here's where it gets nuanced. It is possible to be in touch with the truth of your experience whilst being determined and fixed on achieving some goal. It's difficult because when trying to reach some goal or do some process, we superimpose ideals on experience, and the ideals distort your perception of what your experience actually is. Hence all the suffering, beating yourself up, etc. So. Be fully accepting and fully observant of your experience as it is. And if you're aiming to and trying to force yourself to do something, take every forceful step as consciously as you can . You'll find that you relax unnecessary muscles. --- Due to me projecting myself onto you, I'm gonna elaborate a bit more on the last point about my discovery of it. After a long time of denying and suppressing my feelings, I heard these eastern ideas of acceptance of the present moment. I heard and believed in an attitude of "don't try". But here's the thing. People's automatic behaviour, your current way of being, it will remain the same unless you do something. Trying to be more conscious and more mindful and more accepting, that's a deviation from our automatic behaviour. So you have to try and break the automatic. And that will require "forcefulness" without denying anything at all about the truth of your experience, and it's hard.

If you've ever meditated, you might feel that your emotions and mood are the result of you unconsciously processing sensations and feelings which have physical locations in your body. When I'm meditating and noticing the feelings which cause my low mood, I can feel the source of my emotions and feelings to be in my (stomach)/(mid torso). For the past two days, whenever I've been mindful of these sensations which control my negative mood, I've almost vomited. My body will involuntarily activate the my gag reflux and the muscles which contract during vomiting will contract but I won't actually vomit. I could feel food/liquid rising to the top of my throat. This was felt to be very specifically triggered by me directing my attention towards the feelings in my stomach. This only happens to me during meditation, my attempts to be mindful of my emotions outside of meditation do not induce the same effect. Has anyone had any similar experiences? What could be the cause of this? Is my body recoiling from having to face the "negative" feelings which I unconsciously carry?

@Carl-Richard As well as being preferences, the functions are also kinda like intelligences imo. With each function having a different type of intelligence you could say. But that said, I'm not sure about the mindfulness thing. I try not to make strong claims about it. But that said. Se users often have an advantage in sport due to "being in tune with the present moment" and having control over their bodies. But I wouldn't be justified in then jumping to saying Se users have an advantage in all facets of mindfulness and consciousness and etc, because that isn't true. Your "degree of enlightenment" can be quite apart from your personality. And it might not be that Se users are strictly "more in tune with the present moment" but that they hold a very particular kind of relationship with the present moment that, due to lack of better words, we imprecisely describe as "being in the present moment". Se users are a tautological reference point for what being in the present moment means to most people, which isn't necessarily good. But there is some truth to it. Imo, enlightenment does and doesn't change your personality at the same time ( What I'm saying in this post isn't important at all for becoming enlightenment, this is just random side talk, want to clarify. This is just opinions). A tree is a tree, before and after enlightenment. Your psychology is your psychology, before and after enlightenment (well it is the same , but not the same at the same time; it's the troupe in stories of the hero's journey coming full circle. You arrive in the same place you started, but something has changed.) You can't aim to go in a circle. You have to aim to go forward and change yourself, and by happenstance you do a circle of sorts.

An old thread of mine got revived, how pleasant! The synchronicity is pretty funny because for the first time after taking vitamin supplements like I always do, I'm feeling a lot of pain in my stomach. @HollyV I can't remember how I dealt with the vomiting thing with meditation. For whatever reason it eventually went away for me. The advice all here is good. Approaching this from a few levels, physical and spiritual.

What feels like a long time ago, I heard the story of evolution. A layman's understanding of how natural selection works. For while I've never really thought about it, and it's a random little specialised sub domain if you're interested, since I see spirituality as ultimately about subtraction. So I have zero insights or any opinion to offer, I'm just making this thread for fun in case people want to post stuff about a topic I don't engage in with much. A main aspect of the story being fed is one of randomness and dry logic, in terms of what is stated explicitly. The story I was told was that sometime long ago on earth, the conditions were right for the first single celled organism to exist. And then evolution and natural selection occur over very long timescales, so that tiny steps within our reference frame for time add up to something extraordinary over those long timescales. So what happens is gene mutations occur 'randomly'. If the mutation favours the survivability and chance to reproduce of your species, the organisms with that mutation outnumber the organisms who don't have the mutation. And these tiny advantages from tiny gene mutations, they add up over long timescales to the overwhelming dominance of some genes over others, until those other genes are extinct or branch off into something else completely. So there are all these 'random gene mutations' going on, and some set of genes is selected by the environment. The environment containing things needed for the survival of your species but the environment also containing things that threaten to kill your species. And so in a certain way, someone could see it as drab. Whatever the end result of evolution is will be selected by adaptability to survival and reproduction, and its drab because it's kinda tautological. What survives, indeed survives. Hence it is here. What doesn't survive, well it doesn't survive. Hence it is not here. ---- But I don't think it's drab inherently. I think that's an illusory conception you can have if all you are concerned with are the words and bland textbook theory. Rather than looking at the beauty of and living nature of it. A tautology needn't be drab. Reality is a tautology, and it's an infinitely complex and vast one to explore. Getting fixed on words like "randomness", "entropy" or "nihiliism" in the context of a non-articulated set of assumptions makes it so that you can have a pessimistic and dry view of things. And of course if the assumptions were articulated and brought explicitly into someones awareness in their psyche, they'd be less likely to be consumed by them.

This is one of those tricky things about materialism and causality. Whether material conditions cause consciousness. There are physical correlates and expressions to things, whether that means causality I don't know. Math can be an aspect about reality without being the essential nature of reality. I'm not into psychedelics. Leo claims that by taking these physical drugs you paradoxically become conscious of the limits of physicalism.

@Khr hahaha pretty much

I love vaush. That said, he seems to call everything right of Obama to be fascistic. "Fascist" is his replacement word for all of stage blue. And that's pretty dumb, you can call all religious folk fascists with the logic. The label becomes watered down and kinda meaningless.

Shin basically summarised it. Not being sexist but I haven't met any or talked to any yellow women, whether in real life or online. (with the exception of this forum). On the other hand, I've come across more yellow men. Most of the yellow folk I've met have been INTP or INFJ lmao.

Ne is divergent creativity which acts spontaneously. You can jump from domain to domain instantly, connecting the dots. You can jump from place to place, tendency to go on tangents and present a million angles to look at something. Ne will go from the few to the many. It diverges, and it isn't trying to reach a definitive conclusion. And just connects the dots and sees the connections "for what they are", the "for what they are" attitude being the attitude of extroversion as extroversion sees itself as not letting introversion/"subjectivity" distort its perception of things. Ne see things as networks of connections. A spider web. It can flip between different metaphysics, flip between different ways of connecting the dots. Downsides of Ne can include adhd, instability, out of control mind like a tornado, bipolar tendencies, inability to stay on topic, insincerity, schizophrenic paranoia and delusional beliefs through conspiratorial thinking. It can make false connections between things and make up the most outlandish pieces of bullshit stories. For ENTPs. Resorting to winning a debate by overwhelming you with a large volume of shit from so many different angles that you don't know how to respond. If you can speak in 5 fallacies per minute whilst your opponent can only debunk at a rate if 2 fallacies per minute, you win to the audience. I know all this because I use Ne a lot and I recognise it in others. Now to talk about Ni. I'm an INTP, so this is less familiar for me. But Ni is amazing, it's paranormal and extraordinary with a genius. I've seen it in INFJs. Ne creates a spider web of connections between dots. However, Ne is often very superficial in its extroverted nature. You can argue it makes superficial or obvious links. Ni on the other hand, it can make the most profound and earth shattering insights into things. It can crystallise a myriad of different things and see their common essence. It is in this way that it's more conclusive than Ne. It can notice things that no one else notices, get an insight into the unifying theme behind things. As an introverted function, it involves the subject more. It can make extremely large and insightful connections and jumps in abstraction thanks to this. Ni is the type of thing where someone will drop a one liner or give you one concept that will completely flip your perspective and understanding of something. It's this weird, ethereal, advanced deep intelligence. Psychic and mystical. It is imaginative and come up with things out of nowhere. Carl Jung is a genius Ni user for example. Ni feels psychic. It can predict the future and trajectory of things with someone who's talented. My INFJ friend in high school had this uncanny sixth sense to just know exactly how a situation would unfold. Feels a bit creepy and scary. A potential downside of Ni is closed mindedness and gross misunderstanding of a person or situation by making the weirdest and craziest mental jumps. Ni can be very judgemental, and it's hard to change an Ni users mind Ne users on the other hand, they are the most open minded people out there on average. Also, secondary Ni users are fake intuitives. ENTJ and ENFJ hardly pass as Ni users. INTJ users can be good. But most of what I typed above only applies to INFJ Ni users. And a couple of INTjs. The rest of them are crap. ENTJs and ENFJs are effectively just sensors. I'm honestly not sure if ENTJs and ENFJs even have Ni. I know it goes against all the mbti theory, but idgaf. If you get what I mean then you get what I mean. They are not intuitives, they are glorified sensors. I'm not sure they even have Ni. All I see is their dom function + Se, sorry. ENTJ and ENFJ have none of the psychic qualities of Ni, they have an extremely very weak version of it. But it's just strong enough that they end up being closed minded and dumb. The difference between a dom and secondary Ni user is night vs day

The exact language and concept I used is immaterial, you keep conflating map for territory. Look that theory up. Look up finger pointing to the moon. The reason you can't break through the map and reach the territory is because you believe your current assumptions and mind too much. --- If after all I explicitly stated about the problem of communication, how concepts don't contain truth, you strawman me as selling you another belief you're completely off. Your current trajectory is one of aimlessness and getting lost in your head. You're not on a journey for truth. I'm not gonna repeat my refutations for your foolish misconstruing for the millionth time. I can tell that you're completely clueless about direct experience. This is all just mental masturbation and a fun thought experiment to you. This isn't airy fairy philosophising, this is dead serious. It's the realest and rawest thing there is. There is no bigger thing than this. And unless you can see that, you are but completely lost and clueless. But there's no rush. All life pursuits are valid. It's up to you what you do. Whenever you're ready to be serious, truth will be waiting for you.

@Nthnl just edited my post. Anyway, im off for now, peace.

My opinion and perception is that you might end up in a paralysis due to this if you aren't careful. I might be wrong though. On the other hand, this looks like it might all be part of the process for you and isn't paralysis. In which case, charge ahead soldier. You seem pretty hardcore. ---- Side note of recommendations for teachers or books. You might like Jed McKenna a lot. I'd primarily recommend him based on my interaction here. If you can get over this philosophical hurdle of not trusting direct experience or people who use those terms, or whatever we just talked, I'd then recommend Peter Ralston. "The Book of Not Knowing" by him.

This is where I disagree, as I see you taking a sort of ultimate nihilism in the undertone of everything you've said so far, that there's no action or no point in trying. That humans are that biased and everything is so relative that there's no point in trying.

^Don't believe us ; )

Maybe it is yeah, we won't ever know. All you can do is take the leap, and discover and watch what you can. What else can you do but try? A very good objection and point, but I still think you might be lacking direct consciousness ; ). It's crazy and makes no sense, I know. But reality is crazy and makes no sense. Take the leap and attempt to do it if you want to. I think that once you get a glimpse of the absolute, it is not confusable with anything else or as anything else. Sure there are different depths and levels to glimpsing, but you can glimpse and experience and be it. That's all I can say.

What our speech is trying to point you towards is direct experience THAT IS NOT is not the same thing as our speech or believing in our speech, or any word in this sentence. The place to find truth, we're trying to point you there. What I am telling you is this. That there is a way for you to find truth, and that it can be directly experienced, and that it isn't any concept. It isn't a concept or thought about experiencing it or being it. It is about being it, period. And I'm saying that if you don't get this, it's maybe because you haven't had direct consciousness of it. Feel free to argue with that, disagree, it doesn't make a difference. Since you know what I'm trying to say, and that's that.

Like I said, the words dont contain the truth. They are pointers. This is the black hole where concepts fall apart and we're doing our best to communicate even though the concepts are what we're trying to transcend. But instead you don't seem to get that, and think that we claim the concept is the truth. This work is about transcending beliefs. Everything being written is a concept. This is communication. Your logic taken to it's conclusion would mean you would criticise all forms of speech and communication, say there's no point to any of it. I could turn this right around on you, and criticise everything you say as a belief. You're strawmannirg because you don't understand the paradoxical difference and unity between the domain of the relative vs the absolute, or of map vs territory.

Truth is another way of saying "what is". What is is what is in your consciousness. Since consciousness points to your experience right now. And experience is all that is. These strange-loops and circles go on forever with thinking. None of this can be logically explained and brought to you through thinking. It doesn't matter if you use the term "direct consciousness" or not, that's immaterial to you grasping things. What's being grasped isn't a concept, so it doesn't matter if you reject that term. For some people that label points them in the right direction, for you maybe it doesn't. The concept and labels are tools. I think you might still be lost in confusing this for a belief system. It's the classic issue of map vs territory, finger pointing to the moon, etc. also the hard problem of "the absolute vs the relative"

Because consciousness (is the same as)/(means) all that is. This is about truth. And truth is about what is (which is a tautology). What is is just in your consciousness. All your thoughts and ideas are occurring in consciousness. This work isn't about conceptual knowledge and theories, which you seem to be equating what we're saying with. It's about deconstructing it all and seeing what is for what it is. These concepts are all tautological and self-referential, just pick a word. So there's no conceptual ground 0, and we don't pretend there is a ground 0 and that we've encapsulated the truth in a concept. You'll get it if you get it. "Direct consciousness" is a pretty direct way to describe the tautology. As I described before, the concepts like "infinite mind" are just pointers and dont encapsulate truth. Finger pointing to the moon

@Nthnl Yeah don't believe in what they're saying. None of us should pretend to understand something to "get with it". I haven't tried psychedelics, but Leo's narrative or teaching is that psychedelics will take you further than anything else can and that you can encounter these facets from using them. The infinite mind thing, I kind of get it when it comes to the manifestation and creation aspect of things. I think you're pointing out a mentality thing. We all have to use concepts, and concepts do have a meaning. It's just that when you say something again and again and talk about it it becomes an abstraction rather than direct consciousness. And the only way to combat that is vigilance of yourself and what you see. Bear in mind that at least some of the people here are probably vigilant and watching, and talking from direct experience, and are aware of the limitations of the concepts. The majority though? Probably not. But that's not the case anywhere.

I don't reckon gore videos are good for this sort of thing. I don't think they're helpful or important. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it. Gore videos are mostly like watching a mindless horror event. Putting aside the gore videos involving intentional violence, with murder and suicide. Maybe it invokes something positive from you when you watch someone dying in an accident going about their day to day life. Doesn't really invoke that in me. There isn't any emotionality and sentiment to a gore video. Maybe if it was a documentary or news report combined, talking about who the person was and giving it context, I think it would be meaningful. Otherwise you're just seeing blood and violence (accidental violence) where there's no soft emotional impact to it. It's just a gross video.