lmfao

@abrakamowse I started a daily habit in January/February 2018, but I wasn't strict with it until March. I used to do 35 mins but I now do 70-80 mins a day. @Outer and yeah you're completely right. Abiding non-dual awareness is a very different ballpark from temporary nirvana. For it to become abiding it would probably take so much dedication to mindfulness in everything you do 24/7. It makes sense that people go off into social isolation to find out the truth about themselves.

@PsiloPutty no the cold shower was a minor additional detail, it was through meditation I feeling that. I feel slightly "sad" that all my psychological problems and habits haven't vanished into thin air.

@Swede God tier profile picture

@TripleNipple nah just meditation. I took a long cold shower before meditating.

@Leo Gura What is your general life situation and living situation? Are you living with anyone? What activities and hobbies do you do? How many hours a day do you spend working, and what things are constituted as working for you? Outside of actualized.org, what activities do you do(e.g. Sports, exercise, meeting with friends/family, playing chess, reading for fun, television and etc). I'm just generally curious about what the life of Leo looks like.

@Shin top tier profile picture.

@Serotoninluv woah cool. I would have studied something biology related at university if I didn't like maths. I think I still have the mentality of a hardcore rationalist in many ways. Like even when I was a super strong rationalist type of guy in mentality, I was still open to philosophy and metaphysics (but not spirituality). A hardcore physicist would believe all is one and that free will doesn't exist because of the belief that there are laws of physics which even should they happen to change they change in ways predetermined by the laws of physics.

@Roman Edouard the number one problem I found with school is that it takes a one size fit all approach. People who are too smart or too dumb get disadvantaged. The too smart die of boredom and find it hard to fit in, the too dumb are constantly receiving feedback (through exams, homework and grading) that they are not smart and so the too dumb people will interpret this as meaning that they are inferior. When you are taught anything at school you are told that it is true and you are not told why/how something is asserted to be true. Schools do not reward curiosity, in fact its the opposite. People would think that I'm showing off when I ask a "complicated" question to a teacher out of curiosity, and often the teachers wouldn't even know the answer to my question and would only give me information as far as I had already thought through the thing on my own. In order to get marks in an exam I would have to dumb down what I was saying and instead have to repeat verbatim what big brother wants to hear. I wanted to learn things because I found them interesting and didnt care about grades, other people learnt for the sole purpose of getting an "A". A fixed mindset is imbedded into the atmosphere of my high school, I found. As you can tell, I'm pretty bitter about school.

@Serotoninluv what are you a professor in?

@Gligorije Probably. Only you can "work out" the implications of this and work out the "answer".

I feel like I've been completely stabbed in the back by people I considered to be friends for a few years now. They were fake. When it comes to negative feelings, is there nothing to do but be mindful of them? Is there anything else?

Amen. It is extremely hard to be relativistic the moment shit gets personal for you, but it is possible to be so. If I've done a meditation session I'd like to think that for at least a few hours afterwards I'm relativistic for even personal things. But other than that, I find it very easy to fall into trap of getting pissed off with people and being quite angry at times.

Looking at your experience, all we have is "now". But I wonder, what is "now"? Let's look at language and thought. Whenever one thinks of a word, e.g. "cat" and has it in their mind, I have the perception that I have this word totally grasped in my mind. However, it takes a time which is not equal to zero seconds for this word to pass through my mind. If everything is now, how does perception exist? Without time, how can sensations and perceptions exist and change? I'm just thinking, that it's all truly spontaneous. It comes from nothing. In my present moment experience causality doesn't exist. There is this experience and I don't know why it is. And if we say that time does exist, then things still change spontaneously. Because no matter how small a chunk of time you consider, it's a mystery why anything happens at all. Reminds me a of calculus a bit here. As for why I used the word discontinuous, imagine a graph with a line. A line has an infinite number of points in it by definition, and its continuous. But a point has no size, and there is no lee way to move around and have change. I used the word discontinuous because of its connotations in studying maths.

@Finland3286 imma address your original post that started the topic before I look at your reply to what I wrote, since my answer wasn't addressing what you were talking about specifically. In science, you make empirical observations of the world and make conclusions about how you think it likely functions. The problem with science is that science is based upon presuppositions and axioms about reality which you cannot prove. E.g. You might assume the past is real, you might assume you aren't living in a matrix, you assume logic is valid for determining truth. Logic can be used to defeat the validity of logic. Logically speaking, all sentences can only be determined to be true or false through holding unverifiable axioms about reality. Think about a specific belief you have, and look at the logic which has led to that belief. The real question is, from where is it that we can derive a golden standard of logic? Through what axioms are you arriving at conclusions you have about reality? You ask how you can go about understanding non-duality. Non-duality is to be experienced, and so you must do consciousness work. It isn't a conceptual thing, as you've already heard said to you. And I don't believe non-dual experiences can be likened to lucid dreams in the way that you say. A perfect lucid dream is a reality where your ego in perfect control. But to experience non-duality is to see that the ego is an illusion and that you are all of reality. You let go of the need to control reality, different from a lucid dream. Hm, you talk about whether enlightenment is about realising you are a constant. I've been thinking about something similar recently. I wonder that if all we have is now and time does not exist then how does flux, change and perception exist at all? I started a thread. I've always thought you can frame the non-dual realizations in one of two ways. Either you are everything or you are nothing, both statements point to the same experience. So you could be pointing to the "right" thing in saying that you are not your sights and feelings. I've always phrased it by saying something along the lines of "the actions and thoughts are as much me as every other facet of my consciousness (E. G. The sounds of the birds or my neighbours outside, the sights I see, the actions of other people)".

@Finland3286 to explain and conceptualise non-duality is, for the most part, to sell snakes oil in the sense that reality isn't a concept. This is why discussing non-duality is such a pain. The problem of communicating is two fold. First of all, there is always a problem in putting your experience into words which you yourself can recognise. And second of all because non-dual experience are so unlike anything else, even after you have put something into words the same sentence will have a different meaning in different people's minds. What I mean is probably 99% different from what you think I mean. I'm using the word "meaning" to represent the sum of images, words, connotations, intuitions we have about something. These two points aside, the main point is that non-duality can't be conceptualised and so I'm created a paradox by typing this. To quote Alan Watts : “There is a Zen poem that talks about ‘IT,’ meaning the mystical experience, satori, the realization that you are, as Jesus was, the eternal energy of the universe. The poem says, ‘You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you speak, it is silent. When you are silent, it speaks.’ " And so when it comes to non-duality, focus on the consciousness work and read theory which encourages your awareness to be open minded about your entire experience. To not understand reality is sort of the point.

1) A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! 2) Kyogen said, "It (Zen) is like a man (monk) hanging by his teeth in a tree over a precipice. His hands grasp no branch, his feet rest on no limb, and under the tree another man asks him, 'Why did Bodhidharma come to China from the West (India)?' If the man in the tree does not answer, he misses the question, and if he answers, he falls and loses his life. Now what shall he do?"

@Solace watched that video, was pretty good

@here-now A koan I think I'll never get is this: Nansen saw the monks of the eastern and western halls fighting over a baby cat. He seized the cat and said, "If (any of) you can say (a word of Zen), you can spare the cat. Otherwise I will kill it." No one could answer. So Nansen cut the cat in two . That evening Joshu returned and Nansen told him what had happened. Joshu thereupon took off his sandals and, placing them on his head, walked away. Nansen said, "If only you had been there, you could have saved the cat."

@Ingit masturba**** doesn't dr*** ************

@primzolo In regards to increasing your mindfulness and becoming enlightened, I think books are mostly unimportant. As long as you know backbone/fundamental theory in regards to our awareness and the nature of thought and action, you should be fine. If you believe that truths are experiential and not so much so in the realm of verbal abstraction then the limit of books is clear, especially if you have had enlightenment experiences. And so it is that I think that the issue of reading books is separate from experiencing "the absolute" in this sense. Books are mostly important for navigating the matrix, but enlightenment is about "escaping" the matrix. When you escape the matrix (even if it be temporarily) you realize that everything is equal and language, at the core of it, is meaningless and whats paradoxical enough is that what I'm saying is "false" because I'm trying to use language and if I'm being technical there is no "I" to begin with. See how much of a mess has been created from trying to explain enlightenment?

Nah

@Leo-Tzu The book of not knowing.

@Scholar I could tell you that all suffering is a thought, but that is generally unhelpful as advice alone. Like Leo said, people who are suffering should just obverse it. Thoughts however can be very strongly linked to physical processes. If I indefinitely deprive you of any food, all the consciousness work in the world won't allow you to stop awareness being consumed in thoughts/suffering. Maybe I'm wrong for extremely extremely high consciousness people. And yeah, suffering can get extremely deep. I've had emotional breakdowns where I've hyperventilated and cried for over 40 minutes straight (Lmao at the accidental holotropic breathing). I had thoughts racing so fast you wouldn't believe and spiraling out of control to the point where I thought I was genuinely going insane.

In b4 thread gets locked.

@MarkusSweden I've felt with politics that the most important thing is to not get caught up in reactionary extremes. Like some parts of the left are anti free speech and unreasonable but that doesn't mean I'm gonna start talking about gassing Jews. And if there's a massive income inequality in a society I'm not gonna just then support communism. I feel like most of these unhealthy movements are in response to something else which is unhealthy, but the movement always go too far.