lmfao

@Rilles whatever the person chooses to do, they'll do it wholeheartedly and with presence of mind. They'll probably do the best that they can do, regardless of how good their best is.

I can't help but feel that since thoughts are just another part of the happening (like the things you hear and see in the external world), using thoughts and communicating about states of higher consciousness feels pointless and is a waste of time. If I've finished meditating I'll feel as though any of the words I say are vacuous and contain no more truth in them then birds chirping or random colours. It just seems to me that talking about enlightenment and similar things will not help you fundamentally understand things deeper. I can't help but feel that the right approach to consciousness work is to just close your mouth and pay attention to reality as it is. Beyond instructions and advice for meditation and other practices, do you think that there is a place for discussing enlightenment (I'm not referring to self actualisation concepts)? Do you think discussions about enlightenment and deep non-duality are helpful and useful? In what situations do you think they are? I think that provided we aren't referring to someone experiencing deep emotional problems and barriers, discussions on enlightenment may be interesting but for the most part it wont get anywhere. I feel it worth mentioning that any verbal exchanges we make regarding enlightenment (and any other topic for that matter, like this question) are by very definition "ego-driven" and involve a communication between egos.

@Equanimitize the problem I had was that the questions didn't allow you to rank preferences for all 4 items in the question, it only allowed you to do it for 2 items. There's always a discrepancy between what we think is the ideal/correct way to be living and how we actually live. The world view that my entire psyche (subconscious + conscious) most identifies with is probably "modern", followed by postmodern or integrative. The test doesn't tell you your scores for the other two world views.

@emind It takes self confidence and low neuroticism to be yourself and not be a sheep. People around you may make it easier for you to fall into a lower consciousness states, but you only fall into that state "because you let them". I've found myself in a similar situation to you ( not in what my friends are interested in but in "being dragged down"), and this situation reminds me of the stories you hear about the devil in religion. He may have tempted you, but its your fault for biting. What Leo said is good.

@Elysian For me to say whether something is meaningful, meaningless or pointless I am by definition comparing that something to some, ultimately subjective, standard imo. @Outer @Jack River @Leo Gura I pretty much agree with you here.

@now is forever who knows man ??

Yeah I know what you mean. Some of the racism isn't subtle on that site. They will use crime statistics, employment statistics, IQ statistics as justification for prejudice and assertion of racial superiority. I used to watch a lot of anti-SJW content, if you go down that rabbit hole you'll inevitably end up being exposed to more and more right wing ideological view points. I view anti-sjw's as people who take a valid observation about (other groups)/(the world) but then proceed to go too far and form a reactionary extreme. But that how I view any political movement. They start off with reasonable concern they have about the world but they always go too far in the opposite direction to that which they want to oppose.

Are you referring to /pol/ or something else? and fam that video was hilarious.

@now is forever Tell me how cute you find this political discussion board lmao http://boards.4chan.org/pol/catalog . Its one of the most cancerous places to be. I found it fun to shitpost there around the time of the 2016 American election, although it surprised me when I found out a sizeable portion of the people there were unironic and serious in their posts. From a SD perspective its stage blue and stage orange fused together on steroids. I found visiting there to be interesting.

@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.