1000 Hrs Sds In 6 Months

[askdfjnak]

On 18/11/2016 at 8:14 PM, samadhi said:

What exactly is SDS? I googled and searched and it isn't documented anywhere. If this is a meditation method, then what does it entail and how is it different from the ones we know from Buddhism, etc?

As @Dragallur said, SDS is an acronym for strong determination sitting.
Link to Leo's Guide is here
Link to Shinzen Young discussing it is here

It comes from zen buddhism I think, so it is a buddhist technique. Supposedly this is how the Buddha meditated, but I wasn't there.

Edited November 20, 2016 by Marc Schinkel

[askdfjnak]

I've filmed and edited my video, but my computer crashes everytime I try to render it, I didn't anticipate this.
I've been trying out different settings all day but it's not yeilding so I'll figure something out tomorrow. 
I might try splitting it into parts and then combining them or something ... I dunno.
 

right now im standing at my computer like...
 

 

It will be done when it's done.

[askdfjnak]

Massive internal and external conflict has risen over this god damn video but I finally had a breakthrough that I can sum up rationally.

I had to rectify the conflict between two deep seeded belief/value systems I had adopted.

The first belief system basically revolved around the idea that being egoistic was a bad thing, or at least counterproductive on the path to enlightenment, and should be avoided at all costs.

The second belief system was that trying to express myself or accomplish anything I believed to be significant, is an egoistic thing to do.

This back and forth between these two exact paradigms has fucked me up so much over the last 2 years, you have no idea how huge this penny drop was for me.

They are both just beliefs. Neither is valid, neither is invalid. The conflict between them is valid and the conflict between them is invalid. I have the freedom and the authority to adopt whichever suits me in any moment in time. The same applies for this new meta belief. End of Story.

I know how stupid this sounds but one other thing I have learnt recently is that there is a massive difference between knowing something and understanding it. I’ve “known” that beliefs are just beliefs for ages but that hasn’t stopped me from getting caught up in them. Even belief’s I don’t really believe!

All the videos and books that are available, especially those here on actualized.org have plenty of cool knowledge that you could learn in a couple of weeks/months. But understanding all of it - I don’t think that’s something that I could achieve in this lifetime.

I bought a new computer because my old one was quite antique. The processor in this new one is fast enough to do a filming technique that would allow me to explain my model much more rapidly and efficiently. I’m confident that this will work out better than I originally anticipated.

So, I’ve upgraded my computers processor and how I process my beliefs systems. Neat.

I tried putting a ssd and extra ram into my old computer first. It definitely improved the performance  of the computer but not enough to get it done.
I also wasted so much time trying to fix something that had zero chance of keeping up with my needs.

Sometimes in life, fixing it isn’t as good as replacing it all with something better.

This concept of 100% responsibility = 100% acceptance that Sadhguru explains here fits in quite well with what I just realized, and how the last couple of years have played out for me.
 

 

Wanting to express yourself and be creative and get shit done and have opinions and values can all be egoistic things to do, but keeping yourself quiet, refraining from success, being too humble, avoiding taking a stand can also be egoistic things to do. It’s a tricky thing to sort out.
Self honestly and/or deep suffering are the only cures I know of.
 

Self-honesty is probably the greatest asset that anyone could have in this work this is another core understanding I’ve gained.
What exactly does it mean to be self-honest?
This question needs to be put under the microscope asap.
I find that whenever I do it, I mean actually do it, so much shit gets resolved.
But it only seems to happen when I’m desperate. This needs to improve.

Video will be up next Sunday.

For real this time hommies.

… For real

Be there

7 days…

[Dragallur]

2 hours ago, Marc Schinkel said:

7 days…

Hell yeah!!! Great post otherwise!

2 hours ago, Marc Schinkel said:

All the videos and books that are available, especially those here on actualized.org have plenty of cool knowledge that you could learn in a couple of weeks/months. But understanding all of it -

Amazing, I can very well relate to it, the moment when you actually understand something that you have known for long time, priceless.

[George Paul]

Interesting

[123456789]

Hey Marc, your journal is very, very inspiring. I have a question to ask you, for how many hours (roughly) have you been doing self-inquiry in total?

[Dragallur]

@Mr Lenny He said that he will answer these things at the end of December when 6 months will pass.

[askdfjnak]

15 hours ago, Mr Lenny said:

Hey Marc, your journal is very, very inspiring. I have a question to ask you, for how many hours (roughly) have you been doing self-inquiry in total?

Thanks, I appeciate it

I have no idea what my total self inquiry hours are. It's basically an automatic process for me now, I do it through most of my day.

I am logging my sds hours though and I will post that number up at the end of the month. There was a point where I was getting too focused on the numbers instead of the process, so I decided to stop posting them.

[askdfjnak]

More technical issues lol, the universe does not want me to upload this shit.

Plot twist, I am the universe.

Here's some elevator music to get you settled in as I work on this transmission.

Take a seat, there's plenty of space.

 

 

[askdfjnak]

 

Add ~100 hrs from 1 Vipassana Retreat

Total: ~650 hrs

 

Ok, so I failed.

I’ve known I wasn’t going to make it for a while now and I have been reflecting on some of the mistakes I made when I started working towards my goal.

I underestimated the negative effects of SDS.

1.       I underestimated the level of emotional labour that would be required to pull this off as a meditation newb.

2.       I underestimated the dark side of meditation and the effects it would have on the other areas of my life.

3.       I underestimated just how far I would go to avoid meditating sometimes.

4.       I underestimated the self-doubt that began hitting me when purification started in ernest.

5.       I didn’t realize that most of my motivation for starting this journal and this meditation habit came from a highly egoistic place and as the process brought that to the surface I was forced to drop off the “unclean” motivation that was fuelling me in the beginning.

I underestimated the positivise effects of SDS too.

1.       I underestimated just how rapidly SDS would start delivering deep experiences and insights.

2.       I underestimated the depth of those insights and experiences.

3.       I underestimated how quickly I would become attached to those experiences thinking that I had attained something.

4.       I underestimated the benefits of developing concentration, sensory clarity an equanimity would have on the other areas of my life.

I don’t feel comfortable writing about my meditation habit anymore (as you can probably tell) because it has humbled me so much.

I was so identified with my previous insights and experiences (which were absolutely life changing) that I had no issues writing about them and trying to get others to experience the same thing but that has all changed.

If I had to summarise the take home lesson I got from the last 6 months it would be
“I’m a total beginner and I don’t know shit”
 I have had a glimpse into the depth of the rabbit hole and I can’t do much but stand here with my foot in my mouth.
 

I don’t want to journal publicly anymore.

I’m still dicking around with my video. I will get it done eventually, I think it will make a good close to this journal.
It's just low on my list of priorites right now.
 

Happy New Year!

[Alex K]

@Marc Schinkel have you had any awakening experiences during this six month?

Edited January 5, 2017 by Alex K

[askdfjnak]

13 hours ago, Alex K said:

@Marc Schinkel have you had any awakening experiences during this six month?

Yes

[Alex K]

@Marc Schinkel cool, why have you decided to cease public journalling?

[askdfjnak]

@Alex K The return on investment is low.
I can spend my time doing more productive things.

A private journal is more authentic and unfiltered so I will just do that.
If I have a specific question/issue I want help with I can just post it in the main forum and everyone can benefit from the discussion there.

Edited January 6, 2017 by Marc Schinkel

[eskwire]

@Marc Schinkel The difference between your first post and your last post is pretty big.  You've like bullet train matured.  If youth is wasted on the young, then getting old as hell as young as possible is the workaround for that, no?  

I just started a public journal here and I'm wondering how helpful it will be in the long run.  It made me stick to my word today at least.

[askdfjnak]

On 07/01/2017 at 3:53 AM, eskwire said:

If youth is wasted on the young, then getting old as hell as young as possible is the workaround for that, no?  

Depends what you mean by old. Sometimes I like to think that immaturity will keep me young.  
 

On 07/01/2017 at 3:53 AM, eskwire said:

I just started a public journal here and I'm wondering how helpful it will be in the long run.  It made me stick to my word today at least.

There are definite pluses to public journaling, it just depends on what you hope to achieve by doing do.

You can get more motivation to do stuff if you're somebody who likes being liked.
That can backfire if you need to be honest with yourself and become conscious of those parts of you that other people may not like.
You might avoid doing what needs to be done in the long run, if that makes sense.

Get clear on why you want others to read your journal, then it should be pretty obvious what the advantages/disadvantages/traps/benefits will be for you.

[askdfjnak]

I have been experiencing some stuff that I want to write about. This could prove to be useful for others.
 

I have been continuing my sds but I have just recently started to do cold water immersion in conjunction with my sitting everyday for the last 2 weeks. I have posted my setup in the Wim Hof method thread here:
 

I have been stuck with some massive energy blocks for the last 2-3 months. Previously I would never have used the terms “energy block” because I had associated it with negative connotations but this is real for me right now. “Energy” is the perfect term for what I have been experiencing.

If I throwback to the beginning of this journal where I wrote down some of the positive and negative experiences I had in my first few weeks I would now classify many of these as “energetic experiences”.
 

Quote

Experiences:

 

Extreme pain in knees and buttocks
Lingering pain in shoulders/neck
Pressure in skull
Headaches/migraines
Extreme negative emotions – Terror, Rage
Extreme positive emotions – Joy/Bliss Love
Anxiety attacks
Sexual arousal
Irregular pounding heart beat that could be felt throughout body
Increased heart rates
Adrenaline
Spontaneous muscle spasms and locks esp. in core
Violent Shaking
Sweating
Shivering
Internal resistance – like a volcano was erupting below by navel, spewing hot lava up into my thorax
Tight chest
Laboured irregular breathing – I do long distance running and I experienced a shortness of breath/burning sensation in lungs that occurs when running above lactate threshold
Crawling / tingling sensations (like insects were running over my body)
Nausea
Claustrophobia
Suicidal thoughts
Clenched jaw, grinding teeth
General malaise
Difficulty sleeping, vivid dreaming
Fatigue / exhaustion
Depression
Feeling of impending death

Many of these same energetic experiences have been reoccurring for me along with some new ones. Before I write about them I want to make a brief note about doing daily ice water immersion.

Dropping into freezing cold water is an instant induction into the present moment for me.
All my petty egoic thought patterns are annihilated within a few seconds as my body goes into survival mode making it especially suitable for enlightenment work.
In this environment, there is a total silence and all the entropy of life seems to reverse for a few moments as I return to the still source that permeates all. Once my mind touches this place the opportunity to consolidate my “energetic hang ups” is greatly enhanced because my critical thinking has all but been turned off. I can stop getting in my own way.
 

I believe that this combination of factors has allowed me to open the floodgates and let whatever energetic imbalances I have find their expression in my body and release themselves. This started in my first few dives where I would go under and sit perfectly motionless for about 1-2minutes underwater. After that my body would erupt into a frenzy of vigorous physical movements with all kinds of twisting and gyrating usually accompanied with some screaming before I surface for more air. If you could picture an aggravated electric eel in a bucket you would have a good image of me during this process. I then go under again and repeat this process until the cold has drawn out all of my strength and dissipated all my excess energy.

This is another aspect of the cold that has really helped with this energy work. It doesn’t matter how much pent up energy I have the cold water can absorb all of it and embrace me. It probably sounds strange to personify freezing cold water like this, but that’s what it feels like.
It feels like I am being embraced by my mother as she strips me of all my burdens and allows me to rest. I think dying of hypothermia would be a very peaceful. It just feels like you are being gently put to sleep in a safe cosy place away from all the world.

 

When I get out of the water I am completely still within myself and this permeates into the rest of my day and especially my meditation. I have occasional outburst of energy release as move through my day almost like I have Tourette’s outbursts where I will randomly contract and squeeze muscles throughout my body and then relax them outside of my conscious control.
I also have noticed some significant changes to my voice and speaking. Occasionally I will begin speaking and it feels like the sound is being generated in my stomach and vibrating its way up my body to my mouth. When this happens, it feels very pleasant. This isn’t my normal mode of speaking though, it only happens about 1-2% of the time, but I can intuitively sense that this will become more and more natural as I continue.

I still sleep on the floor and I go to sleep on my back, meditating until I lose consciousness. During this time I experience some extra energetic releases. I keep my body completely relaxed and allow my body to do whatever it wants to do.
 

Some of the things I have consistently experienced, individually and in combination:

•  My mouth will open and stretch fully while my head throws itself back lifting my shoulders up off the floor.
• My chest will expand up off the floor while I arch my back and relax very rapidly. Exactly like this but MUCH faster and with MUCH more force.
• My entire body will begin shaking violently like I have the bends or like I’m having an epileptic fit.
•  My head will nod up and down rapidly, like it’s trying to make a milkshake out of my brain.
• My teeth will chatter to the point it feels like they’re buzzing.
• My abdominal muscles will contract violently.
• My breath will begin to take control of itself and rapidly pump air in and out of me and then stop and relax, then repeat. I will sometimes begin speaking in gibberish during inhalation.
• My tongue will press itself up into the roof of my mouth as my mouth goes through a series of movements.
   

I am NOT doing any of this consciously. It just emerges out of me. It was scary in the beginning because it felt like I was being possessed but I know that I maintain full control as this happens and I can stop it whenever I want. Although it sound demonic it feels very natural and spontaneous and when it is over I feel AMAZING. I go to sleep in a full non-dual state sometimes. When I wake up I am directly conscious of the emptiness inherent in all things i feel like a person in one of these zen paintings, and I can feel the same form present in everyone I interact with.

 

 

 

Anyway, that’s all I want to write about for now. If anyone else has had similar experiences let me know, I am interested to learn about energy and “energy-work”. Also, I think that cold immersion should NOT be underestimated as a tool for spiritual development. I feel like I have make a quantum leap in progress since I started doing it.

[askdfjnak]

I felt like sharing these.

These short tracks have had the most profound effect on my contemplative life than anything else I have ever encountered so far.

The first time I read the Tao Te Ching I was completely transfixed, I had absolutely no idea what the words meant but I could not stop reading.
I made these to capture what I believed to be the most potent parts of the text.
I have listened to them on a weekly basis since. Whenever I feel sad or confused they really help to ground me.
The audio quality is quite poor because I haven’t updated them in almost a decade. I also made a few spelling mistakes in my text to speech conversion, they are quite funny.

I still am realizing just how deep these insights go. Every time I hear them they are as fresh as the first time I laid eyes on them.

I know that they will continue to reveal more and more to me as my perception becomes clearer.

I hope that other people might find value in them too.

 

 

[askdfjnak]

Money is easy to hate when you don’t have it. It's also easy to hate when you do.

I’ve been very angry about how money work for most of my life. Once I started having my first spiritual experiences I realized that money and employment are some of the biggest obstacles to self-mastery and discovery in the modern age. Employment sucks away all the hours of the day and leaves you too drained and too time poor to really contemplate anything deeply.

I have (had) a mountain of student loans looming over my head and the prospect of never having job security or steady income has been eating away at my psychology for most of my adolescence.

About 5 months ago, I accidentally stumbled into the most lucrative opportunity I’ve ever had in my entire life. As much as I’d like to pat myself on the back for my strategic thinking and the balls I have when it comes to trying new things and taking risks, I must admit that my discovery was a complete fluke.
I don’t want to get into specifics and amounts but if my trial experiments are accurate I should be able to make more money over the coming months than I’ve ever had in my entire life. The opportunity won’t be open indefinitely, meaning I only have a short time to grab as much cash as I can before I start getting competitors and it all goes to shit.

Even if it doesn’t work out as I expect it has been interesting to watch myself as this has all started to unfold. I have experienced a true paradigm shift in how I view the world. The other day I went to a restaurant and I noticed myself reading the prices on the side of the meals before looking at anything else on the menu, as I have done my whole life. For the first time, I stopped myself and chose what I wanted by reading the letters and not the numbers.
 

I was also plagued with bouts of greed that I couldn’t have ever anticipated.
I was lying awake most nights just thinking about all the things I would be able to do when I have X dollars, and once I have ABC I will then be able to do XYZ to get X more dollars.
I reduced my mediation hours to one hour a day in for a large part of January to focus on working things out, I’m glad I didn’t stop because I think this frame of mind would have destroyed me if I had let it run rampant.

All the justifications and rationalizations for why it was now good that i start making money astonished me. Not because it's inherently bad to make money but because the possibility of actually getting it changed my thinking so rapidly. I know full well that money isn’t necessary to get enlightened and discover some of the deepest truths a human can come to know, in fact I can see now how easily it can turn into a MASSIVE obstacle to those discoveries, simply because it’s soooooo easy to become attached to it.

On the flip side I have been asking myself, realistically, how much self-discovery is possible without money? When I think about what Leo is doing here, none of it would be possible if he hadn’t managed to make enough money from his early business(es) to then have the opportunity to step back and begin contemplating seriously or to get his hands on resources like books and to travel to seminars and visit various spiritual masters. His work would have drawn out all his attention and energy.

To some degree, a wise man’s life is based around the position of "fuck you", there is an element of truth to that … but a fool’s life is based around his pursuit of the “fuck you” position. 

 

This is a problem.

I have started to think long and hard about how much I need. When will I have enough? Will I ever feel like I have enough? Will I need to make the conscious choice to walk away?

This specific venture might not work out but the way I think about money has changed permanently. I will never again feel trapped by it the way I used to because my eyes are now open to how easy it could be to get rich if I dedicated myself to pursuing it.

Something has also changed about the way I perceive people around me, so much of our daily concern is centered around money, it trickles its way into just about everything. I feel as though I am surrounded by insane people, not just because they believe they exist but because the reality we choose to live in together is just mad.
I mean, if we're going to delude ourselves, why don't we at least make a good delusion?

It’s like everyone in the world running around to get their hands on as much monopoly money as they can. I mean that in a very literal sense. Imagine if someone you knew came up to you and told you, in all seriousness, they were really excited to start work at their new job because their employer is dispensing freshly minted monopoly money… That’s what I feel like now.

These are the things that have been affecting me recently.
None of this would have come about if I hadn’t decided to start this SDS challenge.

 

Right now I must leave because those stacks are calling me. 

Bitch.

Edited March 19, 2017 by Marc Schinkel

[jjer94]

Yeahhhh bitch! Magnets!

I feel your pain. Kind of in a similar position. Maybe it's the "entitled millenial" thing, but no conventional job interests me whatsoever. I'd much rather be playing music full-time or writing or whatever. But the price for autonomy is, well...money. I'm a classic example of the "starving artist." Hopefully not for long as I learn more about marketing and transcend social neuroses.

Not sure if you've already read it, but this book may be illuminating for you.