lmfao

@UnconsciousHuman Yeah. I just meant unwarranted to my own standard. Edit: Looking at these chat logs, I think @UnconsciousHuman is more of an "impressionistic thinker" compared to @The observer who're a more "lexical thinker". As in, UnconsciousHuman seems to perceive The observer as being too nitpicky, when that needn't be the case completely. UnconsciousHuman isn't giving some simple orderly presentation of his thoughts, its moreso like a barrage of images/aesthetics and impressions. I heard these cool terms from an anime YouTuber called Digibro (he layed out the system which also includes a lateral vs linear dichotomy, before talking about the different categories he made with the two scales). Even though he came about it in the confines of anime, it's actually pretty cool in terms of applying to to real life. Hmmm, maybe I should just make a thread on this. Check the timestamps in the video for various combinations you can be. e.g. very linear + very lexical as opposed to very lateral + very impressionist

There can never be too many Peter Ralston appreciation threads.

I wouldn't seek to unwarrantly reduce stages to these simple approaches. But if this sort of a breakdown works for you and only serves as a tool/pointer, then all power to you. I suppose this is generally true with ideas anyone holds or says. What is said perhaps isn't so important as the relation and context with which you hold the idea. If its all seen as approximate and loose and rough it's fine. Its a very hard to judge in another person, whether they are holding the right relation or not. The same way it's hard to judge any characteristic of someone, e. G.Their archetype/stage. It's as though the moment you put your observational understanding into words you've already betrayed the image you had. Hmmm I'm reminded of this quote from monogatari. "The moment you put it into words and tell someone, it starts to diverge from your feelings. Words are nothing but lies and nothing but cheats. No matter what the truth, the moment it is told, it becomes dramatized."

Thank you for the reply! Thankfully you posted this just as I checked this website again. I will certainly try that.

What I am confused about is these visualisations involving your body. Okay so for example, there's spinal breathing in kriya yoga. You visualise cold prana rising up your spine from muladhara to third eye when inhaling, visualise warm prana going down spine from third eye to muladhara during exhalation. What I'm confused about it the difference between entering my own mental landscape of images versus feeling into my body. It's always been a general principle in enlightenment work that you don't make any images/idols of god. You know, the whole thing about paying attention to your experience without abstractions. I'm not saying this to disregard visualisations or anything of that sort at all. I'm merely sharing with you the sentiments that express how the confusion I'm experiencing could arise. So I'm paying attention to the different locations in my body, the spine for example...it appears as though I am indeed able to project an image into the space there and move that projection up and down. There's another type of visualisation meditation exercise I came across in regards to emotional healing. It involves recalling a person or negative experience that's caused grief in the past. You then visualise a white light emanating from your heart chakra....Again, I pay attention to that space in my body and project that impression/image of compassionate/loving/forgiving white light. I suppose what trips me up slightly is about whether, I am supposed to project some sort of image into the space surrounding my body. When I concentrate and try , this feels like it's happening but it doesn't make sense why/how or what's going on, too much brain fog. What's also tripping me up in general with that is, what to do with my attention and my mind. Am I supposed to put all my attention into building some mental image, where the mental image is me looking at myself in third person and seeing white light coming out. Or am I supposed to just pay attention to my body and just work the projection from there... ------ This is now a tangential point. I just wonder about the effectiveness of yoga in general. You're projecting all sorts of mental images into the domain of your body, seems ripe for entering into fantasy. Because there are states of consciousness you can experience in which you see the body as fictional to begin with, yet there's so much emphasis and treating it as a real thing with this chakra system. Concentrating on your third eye, visualising prana, etc. Hell, if you take it far enough just the concept alone of paying attention to your breath is a construct...And so when I try and concentrate on just the now, I can start to feel immersed in something profound but not before getting lost in thought again. So that leads to using the body and the breath as tools for concentration even though, they don't really exist. What a mind fuck.

Is there anyone here who has looked into salt and the effects it has on health? What do you think of this video? I find it interesting but because of how notoriously hard it is to navigate around the science of diet I've reserved judgement on the topic of how much salt we should be consuming.

@Leo Gura is Ken Wilbers book The Religion of Tomorrow worth reading then? It has a tier 3 (in this formulation) , although I don't know the justification. Whilst he makes it a point to separate psychological/(Spiral Dynamics) development from spiritual awakening development, perhaps he dovetails the two into one when considering tier 3.

The prospect of clinging onto a physical substance for higher consciousness is extremely scary to me, it would sound like the most beautiful and destructive drug. It's sounds like the problem you can get with meditation, maybe multiplied over several times. I'll have to try psychedelics and see how they compare to meditation for me. That said, in spite of fear, whatever is the truth is the truth.

@Leo Gura What is your perspective on Kriya Yoga, or yogic practices which have some sort of chakra system added to them as supplementation? Does what you're saying here have any ramifications to that and etc. Obviously you're saying everything is imaginary. My question to you is, by using difference phrasing, is the chakra system fictional? Does it actually exist? i.e. is real in the same way this "table" in front of me is real, like it's an existing structure. I've had strong experiences with my third eye having sensations, or if I'm doing spinal breathing I will interpret there to be energy spots on my spine. What makes this tricky however is the fact this spinal breathing is a visualisation exercise of imagining prana moving up the spine, so my mind can be seeing what it wants to see or my mind rather will change my bodily sensations to match my visualisations ( I need to experiment with this a lot more than I currently am). So does this structure called the chakra system exist? If it is true that (adding the phrase "If it is true that" because I don't want to pretend like I've directly experienced this) I imagine my nervous system to have an impact on my consciousness. The spine being a part of the nervous system, it is of energetic significance? I'm not ultimately concerned with rationalising it as nervous system or as this or that tbh, I'm just curious what you think about this entire concept of chakra system. Is Kriya Yoga effective because it is using this existing structure called the chakra system (existing in the same sense this table in front of me exists)? --- Lots of things are blurring for me and I've perhaps created a false/strange-loopey dichotomy by making the distinction between fictional and imaginary as I did above. The biggest mindfuck for me I suppose is seeing glimpses that my labels for things are illusory, seeing glimpses of the fact that causality doesn't exist. Yet here exists science, here exists math. That just fucks with me I think, and it definitely freaks me out a lot if I contemplate it, I'm probably subconsciously preventing myself from examining it fully. ---- ALSO, WELCOME BACK LEO I MISSED YOU. I'm so excited to see you talk about the various perspectives and teachers, especially now that you've been doing a lot of work, because there's still a lot I don't get. Love, or how it is someone like might Peter Ralston lack love realisation, what that means and why that is and etc..and other stuff about why some people/teachers/teachings/gurus only see one side or some facets but not others.

@Bulgarianspirit I suppose the idea that you are the only sentient being/ego is scary. This post made me nostalgic of these threads a long a time ago, although I have no intention of perpetuating that karma I just thought you might find it interesting. If everything is you/one, who is it that is getting afraid at the prospect of solipsism being true or not true? Whether someone's theory about the universe and "other sentient beings" existing is true or not is a relative truth, which ultimately doesn't matter. Even this level of theory is ultimately a relative matter, although you sure as hell can contemplate it if that orientation will yield growth! @GskDon't make this work about Leo or any person. There is no ultimate authority, just see what you can use for growth. Try not to get bamboozled by the words and concepts he inevitably has to use to explain his experience. E.g. Maybe you don't see the lens from which or like the way in which Leo uses words like "imagination". But that's okay. Accept that it doesn't jive with you. Maybe it will later, maybe it won't. Just keep your steady spirit of not-knowing and inquiry alive.

Haters gonna hate, preety.

Yeah it's bizarre, most Orwellian thing here by a long shot ( which is a complement to how this forum is overall). I think it's just a slippery slope approach (which can sometimes be fair), it ensures the potential harm doesn't happen at the expense of potential good. So it's a risk and reward evaluation for rule makers. If this sort of thing turned out wrong, it could turn out really wrong.

Simple adage which holds true here.

@The Don Your direct motivation to do this work doesn't have to be a desire for truth per se. It can just be to understand and see why you're suffering. I've tried lying to myself before that I was doing this work to "seek truth", but no I just want to stop suffering. That makes me more truthful without getting lost in mental landscape. Prior to the onset of apathy and dejection are powerful emotions of frustration, misery, anxiety, fear. It doesn't matter if you feel those powerful emotions, there's no shame. No shame in you being pissed or annoyed. Be pissed, be annoyed. Scream to the heavens, hate God. Your intentionality will unlock doors. --- Flux=death. No flux--->No perception/reality/consciousness ( imagine time standing still, or a 0 dimensional object. This thing in brackets isn't so important, just a tangent you may indulge in.). Once you can see first hand that death is literally life, you'll be more "liberated". If you befriend death, what can harm you?

@Mongu9719 I wrote this to someone once in a similar conversation. I can potentially see a few angles to address this question, but I'll just go with the lens of science being incompatible with holism. So there's more than just what I'm saying here. One thing I could mention, scientists have been trying to explain consciousness in their framework. The " hard problem of consciousness" comes down to consciousness being beyond the "linear sum" ("principle of superposition" in physics but more generalised) of its parts. I think something being beyond the sum of its parts is impossible within the framework of physicalism, and also impossible in the framework of how we use logic. But who said the truth has to be grasped by logic? Physicalism is the view that reality is purely physical (whether its matter or energy). We assume that there is duality, that we can describe reality as being the sum of distinct objects (when I say we assume duality, I just mean that we can take the existence of boundaries to be something we can construct. Boundaries exist in order to ascertain the existence of more than 1 object.). Those objects can interlock, be chaotic, and interact with each other in whatever way you fancy but at the end of the day there's the assumption reality is nothing more than the "sum" of those objects. For an analogy. If "reality" was a triangle, you can cut the triangle into as many pieces as you want but the triangle is still nothing more the sum of those pieces. I think if you get a deep enough insight or look at the way our mind uses logic, you'll see that our rational brain can't really transcend this "sum of the parts" of thinking. For me this insight comes from imagining motion in space, and just the inherent duality to it all. Duality implies sum of the parts thinking by necessity. ----- It might be worth noting that there is a tautology in modern science by calling everything in reality physical within the framework of physicalism. Given this tautology, why would it be any different if I said everything in reality is spiritual? You might find this worth considering, why different tautologies exist. Why do some people say everything is love? There are millions of different tautological theories you can find, millions of different circular axiomatic systems.

Isn't there a quote for this situation, "There is no such thing as bad publicity"? It is far easier to turn negative attention into positive attention than it to turn no attention into positive attention. I found this insight very interesting in the conflicts I've had with people. It relates to that feeling of respect people have for each other after butting heads. Children do it quite frequently. Hate and conflict is the path to love and understanding. It made me realise the power of antagonism.

I am not excited about death at all, I'm terrified. I will be gone.

The question I see becoming relevant then, is at what point does this place become a monolith of identical opinions and approaches. To reject what Leo says ----> Thread lock, seems to be the pattern being approached day by day. Whether it's the means or whether it's the goal or both that have changed for this forum, something's shifted/shifting. It seems to me that the degree to which mental masturbation is allowed here is simply the degree to which the particular thing agrees with one man's formulation of the "highest teaching". Use the incorrect buzzwords or alternate definitions for things, your viewpoint is more likely to become automatically shunned. Use the correct buzzwords and "correct definitions" and your viewpoint is automatically praised, irregardless of how insightful or dumb or contextually appropriate your message is. Considering how tentative language (every person has their own idiosyncratic grammar, structure, etc, not to mention the relative nature of it overall) is, I worry there will be too little generosity and openness to exploring or acknowledging other people's viewpoints Sheep-like behaviour and ideological parroting is only going to become more common here. Sure the top dogs might not be that deluded in your space, but you end up setting up a system where you're left with cult-like followers.

I get you

In regards to moderation, one is inquiring into the difference between exploration and "spreading misinformation". Radically grounded , radical openness is the desired quality of this space, as paradoxical as that sounds. If you default to heavy moderation, you default to assuming bad intent and intentions. I don't even mean bad in the moral sense, I mean that you assume the other person is in the incorrect orientation/mode at the very least. You create enemies where there are none. Take this thread for example This guy was sharing his truth, his insight (The clickbait title isn't even that bad). Instead, Leo gives a nit-picky criticism by referencing the strange loop nature of things whilst the guy here alluded to that and was receptive to a dialogue. I saw that space as great for people exchanging concepts, and then Leo terminated it. Leo used to be a big propagator of avoiding "non-duality wars" but his approach in this regard has changed. What's going on I think is an ultimately utilitarian endeavour towards transforming the nature of the forum. It's a "the ends justify the means" approach. Leniency leads to the water becoming poisoned, you get bogged down in trying to convert the deluded by playing the same game as them. It's a pure waste of time. And although nobody wants to hear it, not all opinions and ideas are created equal (equal in the realm of relative standards/goals that we set). Ultimately, I think the dynamic Leo is aiming for in this forum is changing a little. He's making it closer to a school or teacher-student dynamic. --- That being said, I agree with more decisions of his to lock a thread than I disagree with. I'm fairly aimless and scatterbrained though because when I see these threads of people e.g. ivankiss talking about the distinction between god, the absolute, consciousness it just doesn't resonate with me and I turn off. And it's mostly in those threads where people nitpick terms like these that the locking happens.

@tenta snakey move there lmao. I've posted a selfie here before but then I was like "nah" and deleted it. I don't want my real life identity to ever overlap onto this account. This is a good thread to revive. In nature and real life, one sees the face of the person they are communicating with.

@Rilles Well, before I would nibble a quarter but now I take half a tablet at a time if I ever use. I can pop 1 tablet without too much effect either, but ive only done that a few times. I've been playing it safe, being fine with subtle changes. My tablets are 150mg armodafinil.

@Rilles having spasms sounds like some sort of anxiety response to the drug. I take armodafinil on occasion, it doesn't do much for me either! I have to increase the dosage, but that could be for any random reason.

@YoungSinghit's here to stay.