lmfao

@Baotrader To meditate with the purpose of getting somewhere or achieving something is to be against the spirit of meditation, in a sense. My view of meditation is that meditation is just being accepting of the present moment, however the present moment is. Tomorrow never comes because your experience is always now. To me, the goal of meditation is "truth". You are paying close attention to reality as it is. Heres another thing which may be worth thinking about. An "enlightened" person can still have an ego they act upon and present to the world, its just that they don't take their ego with any real seriousness. I like Leo's analogy of video games for enlightenment. For an enlightened person they haven't really "destroyed" their ego its just that they regard their ego as another happening of reality and don't take what happens to it too seriously, the same way I don't take seriously the events that happen to my charecter in a video game. The ego is seen through but it can still be present. What I have said is just another perspective. The only way for you to find out what the goal of meditation is is to try and meditate yourself. Here's a pretty neet video on what suffering is. I'm linking it since you're asking about pain (and probably suffering) in relation to meditation and also in relation to life in general. https://youtu.be/9u9nuSf9g1g

@now is forever can I feel what I said? Intermittently during the day to small degrees. @Shin DON'T TOUCH MY DOG YOU SON OF A BITCH

@now is forever What I said was not intended to trivialise the existence of suffering, it was intended to put across my view that thoughts are just extremely powerful. There is a lot of depth to them. They are often beyond our conscious control and arise simultaneously with bodily sensations. For example, if you put someone through intense pain and discomfort negative thoughts will arise and can make your head feel like it will explode (at least that's my experience). They aren't just something which can be brushed off easily and controlled, which is why personal development stuff. Thoughts are a fiction in the sense that they do not represent the real world. To quote Alan watts, we confuse our symbols for the world with the world as it is (for example is the phrase "the sound of a gong" literally the sound of a gong or is the phrase just a a concept?). Suffering is a part of this fiction. But I do not use the word fiction to trivialise suffering, I use it to state that thoughts can lead to a "false" ( fictitous, ie not "true" ) perception reality. I'm not saying suffering is trivial, I'm saying that suffering a massive facet of reality and that suffering is nested in thoughts since thoughts are a massive facet of reality. @Shin I feel exposed lmao.

@now is forever @now is forever I resonate deeply with the quote "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". I think it's a fundamental truth which is obfuscated to unbelievable degrees because of how "tricky" the mind is.

@now is forever When it come to my deep down beliefs on good and evil, even if I intellectually say "good and evil don't exist" it is true most of the time that I don't act as if this is a present moment experiencial truth. For me, when I think of the word evil I always think of suffering. And I feel like I'm in an odd predicament with my attitude towards suffering. If I'm in a higher consciousness state I will feel as though suffering does not exist because suffering is a thought (of course that's a slightly unuanced way of phrasing it) and so it is only then that I would act "without regard" for good and evil.

@Roman Edouard I talk like a human eh?

@Roman Edouard ah I see. Blue Exorcist is pretty dope lol and that manga is the inspiration for blue Exorcist or something. Spike from cowboy bebop is lowkey turquoise so he's in my profile picture Yeah fam, the points you bring up are similar to what religious people bring up to argue for the ideology (although you weren't bringing religion into the discussion) so I've heard some of this before lol. If we hold a deterministic view of the universe [a view which says that the exact energy/matter/space configuration of the universe is the (necessary) /(only possible) result of the preceeding configuration] we get an image of the universe which can be likened to randomly bouncing balls (but the balls have a linear, yet complex predetermined path) and it then might seem weird that consciousness emerges and is sustained as a property from those randomly bouncing balls.

@Roman Edouard @Roman Edouard where's your profile picture from? Assassination classroom? And another thing is that during the period of (13.8 billion - 70) years your consciousness will not exist, and so for you to even have the ability to ask the question of probability necessitates that you be alive during this "improbable period"

@Roman Edouard why doesn't it make sense? Even if 16 years is a very small fraction of 13.8 billion years, those 16 years have to happen eventually right? And it just happens to be that they are happening right now.

This meme pretty much sums up my problem with the IDW: If any of you have seen anti-sjw videos and titles you'll get the joke.

@Leo-Tzuifk@Leo-Tzuifk@Leo-Tzuifk@Leo-Tzuifk idk why my mobile is doing this "@Leo-Tzu". Fucking mobile actualized.org lol. Here's some orange for you:

To say that killing animals is wrong or not wrong we play the game of philosophy. We start off with axioms about reality and work from them in making arguments. It wouldn't be until you stop playing the game of philosophy that you enter non-duality and ask questions like "Who is doing the killing?". Right now I am not in a higher consciousness state, but there have been times where I have felt that in my present moment experience morality literally doesn't exist. And from that perspective killing animals isn't wrong. But lets philosophise about this anyway. From a non-solipsistic and your bog-standard empiricist view of the world, you reach the conclusion that animals with more complex nervous system experience more suffering than trees and insects ( through science and "empiricism") and you use the axiom that (more suffering)=(bad) to conclude that killing a cow/chicken is more wrong than killing a insect. But you're probably already aware of this point of view and are just questioning people's axioms about reality .

When it comes to the ethical standing of killing animals for food I'm not concerned about the fact that I've "robbed a life" the same way I am of humans, but I wonder how much pain do animals feel compared to humans. Like when you kill a human you think "I've robbed this person of their hopes and dreams" and etc but that's not very applicable to non-humans imo. Could killing animals be comparable to killing human infants in terms of the suffering you generate in a conscious being? In both cases you are killing creatures of comparable intelligence. I wonder how much pain an animal feels relative to humans. Because if killing animals is comparable to killing human babies then I think there will come a time in the future where humans will look back on us past generations and think "I can't believe those barbarians ate meat when there wasn't a need to" and they will look down on us in the same way we might look down on past civilisations for human slavery and other injustices. I don't think that killing animals generates the same amount of suffering as killing a human infant, but if the comparison is at the very least a bit valid I think there may be something to reflect upon. Because I know that I myself would barely hesitate in killing an non-human animal, but this would not be the case for humans for me. Perhaps there is a double standard here. Perhaps we suffer from "speciesism" but this speciesism is hardwired into nature at a far, far deeper level than other things like racism. Despite the arguments I've provided for not eating meat, I'm still gonna eat meat and love it and I know I'm probably a hypocrite but I don't feel guilty. @Tony 845 There are two angles I have on your question from both a chemical and psychological point of view. The first angle is very quick to look at. I think its extremely, extremely unlikely that eating meat will cause your body chemistry to be incompatible with enlightenment. Eating meat is natural is for us humans biologically (and even psychologically which I will now discuss). Let's consider "evil" in the conventional sense of the word. You cause suffering to others and are an asshole (e.g. rapist, murderer, thief etc). Even if killing animals and eating them when there is no need to is an evil act, the evil act is hardwired into our biological essence that it won't have the same impact on your psyche as other evil acts like human murder. Like theoretically speaking, a human murderer can become enlightened its just that it's unlikely because most human murderers have a fucked up psyche. But even if killing and eating animals is "evil", the act of doing so is not nearly highly correlated with a fucked up psyche the same way rape/murder is correlated with a fucked up psyche. This is further true if you are only eating the meat and are not killing the animals yourself.

@Gabriel Antonio I found this paragraph interesting from the link: " If you make a sincere effort to 'just sit,' you may really go insane. Only because people do not really try sincerely does insanity not happen more often. With a sitting posture you begin to know so much madness inside you that if you are sincere and continue it, you may really go insane. It has happened before, so many times; so I never suggest anything that can create frustration, depression, sadness ¯ anything that will allow you to be too aware of your insanity. You may not be ready to be aware of all the insanity that is inside you; you must be allowed to get to know certain things gradually. Knowledge is not always good; it must unfold itself slowly as your capacity to absorb it grows. " If you go too hard with enlightenment work there are homeostasis mechanisms in place which will bite hard. What is good about meditation is that it gives you an insight into just how insane your mind is. It makes you realise that despite the fact that you are sitting down with nothing external acting upon you, your mind alone is great enough to create a very deep conscious experience. There have been times where I've finished meditating and thought "damn I can't believe that was all just inside of my head". @Hellspeed @Torkys @PsiloPutty yes

I've made a thread about this a long time ago, but I still have this problem. Any time I meditate I experiences waves of irritation and annoyance which express themselves as subconcious muscle contractions. The urges feel very much out of my control and happen any time I meditate. I common experience I have is squeezing both my arms and fists at the same time. Or I'll squeeze my facial muscles. I think these movements are just the result of my ego and body fighting back against letting go. At other times I might just keep swaying my head, but then I might become mindful of me fighting back and I slowly snap out of it. Does anybody else have this experience? Whenever I you meditate there's always this paradox between being forceful and not being forceful so I just wonder what the right approach is for me when I get the urges to tense muscles. If I choose to not act on the strong urges for muscle contractions, my mind goes crazy for some reason. Should I "force" myself to not move and be try to be mindful of the intense feelings? Should I just let whatever happens happens and just observe it?

@Gabriel Antonio Nice link. I've been doing meditation for a while now so I ain't gonna stop it although I should do kriya yoga or something.

@PsiloPutty I have two interpretations to your question and my answer is yes to both of them.

Couldn't agree more lol, especially in regards to Dave Rubin lol. The guy cannot think for himself to save his life. He's just says whatever will benefit his career. I used to watch him until about a year ago.

@Tony 845 "Enlightenment through the path of Kundalini" by Tara Springett is one book and another is "Kundalini Exposed" by Santata Gamana. Trust me here

@Outer Yeah that podcast is some good shit

PREACH

Increments of what?@non_nothingI might try this

@Revolutionary Think That's unfortunate. I hope you've at least exorcised some pessimism and negativity in your system by typing your thoughts and feelings on this forum. It's always the same story for all of us miserable creatures lol, the external world doesn't conform to our egoic desires so we feel down.

@Roman Edouard This is a completely baseless assumption you've made. There is no "why" in reality, so your question is meaningless.

@Roman Edouard Putting away the question of whether life has meaning or not for a second, think of a random question like " what is the meaning of the existence of cars?". There are many facts you can say about cars and about their history but in my mind the obscurity in answering this question deepens by rephrasing the question as "What is meant by the existence of cars?". Like wtf are you supposed to say to that. Meant by whom? Meant by what? Meant by (absolute infinity)/(God)? What is the meaning behind our existence as biological organisms? Well we may be able to say that reproduction has allowed for the existence of biological life over a time spans far longer in duration than that a single life time. Reproduction is necessary for life to continue to exist. But what is the meaning of life? This is completely subjective. It doesn't matter how many facts I accumulate about life, a question regarding meaning asks you to explore the very centre of being and existence. But when we go that far deep into reality, concepts are useless. Reality is (*insert massive gong noise*) .