reading this thread makes me feel uncomfortable, probably because im too stupid to understand such sentences: anyway, glad you call me precious and inherently perfect

gl on your road, i'll stay away from it and will go back to posting my (calling them mine is probably the cause of all my suffering) silly pictures and youtube links.

Ya might be, but you still used the word wrong, which is a rating. It's basically his interpretation of wrong or what he understood through you saying that. I would interpreted it in in his way too, so if you don't mean that, what did you mean with wrong?

Why do you think your way is less wrong or not wrong at all?

I think it could either be that OP lacks empathy to a "normal" perspective or language or his ego now identifies with a state in which he is beyond certain classification and therefor does not really want/try to understand.

Not sure in this case and no shots intended

It depends, sometimes I do more, sometimes I do less. But I try to at least get 90 minutes in every day.

I did not use "wrong" anywhere?
Nonetheless, as I already wrote earlier. I stated an opinion. The opinion is: Most people don't know what they are doing when they meditate, nor do they have a streamlined approach. This is comparable to the difference between an HSNL reg and a 10NL player. There is nothing wrong with playing 10NL, but most of them just simply don't know what they are doing when they play poker, nor do they have a streamlined approach.


In general, I would suggest us to stop making assumptions about OP, what he is or isn't, what his intentions are or aren't, what he lacks or what he doesn't lack; and just focus on what I'm saying. This also goes to Plasticelephant and baaani4.

Intention wise, regardless of what you assume to be the case, I am just trying to share things that have helped me and others, as well as share some aspects of my life.

But ultimately, all I'm doing here is writing words. If you find use in them, that's great. If you don't, just toss them out.

I'm honestly fairly open minded to all of this stuff, I've given it a lot of thought over the past year and found what works for me to be happy is spending time outdoors, spending time with friends, getting ample sleep, stretching and building something. Maybe I am yet to be awakened but I find a few of the above akin to meditation.

RE this thread, I think effective communication is a fairly fundamental skill in teaching.
Obnoxiously inserting long words into longer sentences isn't great honestly, particularly when the net content of those sentences is at best opaque and at worst meaningless.

I agree with you.
Communicating more efficiently is one of the skills that I aim to improve.
However, I am not inserting long words into longer sentences for the sake of it; perhaps there are simply some aspects that you can't fully make sense of at the moment.
There are always two sides to the coin. One one hand, my communication skills are definitely not limitless, on the other hand, your comprehension skills aren't either. Who is to blame? No one.
Note that I am not writing specifically to you, and others seem to find value in it; calling the net content at best opaque is just your perspective.

Anyway, I in no way intend to argue with you, nor do I think that it is your intention either. So, moving forward:
Which aspects do you find confusing and would like me to explain better?

Really excited about this thread.

interested in this thread, end my suffering

But as Buddha teaches, the transitive properties that words invoke are nothing but an illusion of the mind that fails to differentiate between "us" as beings within a reality. It's pretty straight-forward really.

In all seriousness, can you clarify this? Are you saying you don't suffer from psychological stress while you're mind-training? Or are you saying you don't suffer in any way at any time?

Edit: nevermind, I see you already did. Definitely would have to agree that your style of communication is opaque at best.

Imagine how much worse it would be if you were still capable of experiencing suffering!

Alright I misinterpreted having no clue what they are doing with doing it in the wrong way, my bad. Had this wording in my brain somehow and didn't double-check.

How do you think somebody can improve themselves from a 10nl player to a highstakes one? Since you think most meditators have no clue am I right in believing that without external guidance or explanations there is no way on figuring that out? or do you simply mean most people do not occasionally with no real long term training and therefor now real progress?

@say more words with less meaning, besides this being a comment that I found quite funny I might have a comparison that helps:
For me spirituality is a kind of science, you explore stuff, make assumptions based on hour experience and if you are honest with yourself there will be the point where these assumptions will not hold true to further experiences. So, based in these 'experiments' or experiences you introduce new theories of how you are working and use that for whatever you want I use it for.
Like science this can be used in an infinite amount of ways.

Like in science, when you explain somebody some of the phenomena that are not always intuitive when seeing the world through eyes of someone who has not done these experiments, the words used make no sense. It's like talking about the world from a physical perspective and in a physical language ether than an Every day one with somebody who has never learned anything about physics. He just does not understand and you talk as if you speak a different language for this person.

How did you process in your spiritual growth? What tools did you use?

Sorry buddy, this was inappropriate and reading what I wrote that morning pretty much built in the misperception what you have said before. So pretty much nonsense. Thanks for sharing your experiences and I look forward to what you have to say

wait what did i say again? i forgot

This allows me to clarify the difference between current and previous experience:

One year ago, I would have been upset about me making the purchase, upset about the monetary loss, upset about my decision-making abilities, upset about the current situation, and probably numerous other kinds of mental fabrications. You can probably relate.

Now there is just the sensory experience of sitting on the chair and its effects on the hip/spine, as well as the awareness of those aspects; all of which are experienced to be dependently arising; perfect and complete in themselves; and it could never be otherwise.


The most important thing in improving is self-honesty: awareness of your own limitations. Without this, it is hard to see in which ways and how much you can improve. The next aspects are motivation/willingness to improve and strategy.

Once one understands that self-honesty is a developable skill, motivation/willingness can be hacked and strategy can be learned; congratulations, you are now in for exponential growth.


All I ever wanted to know is: What is actually going on?
Pursuing this with everything I had let me to where I am now.

However, as mentioned twice already, I highly recommend the book The Mind Illuminated.

Since today is my day off, I decided I will make a little post on a topic of my choice. Perhaps this can be a regular thing. Eventually, I will probably get a website done where I can structure everything better.

Not so long ago, I was pondering why so many people are not interested in transcendence; especially when phrased in the "end of suffering" kind of way. Clearly, there is a lack of recognition of incentive.


Maslow's 8 level Hierarchy of Needs




I find this model remarkably accurate when looking back at my own development.
This also explains why some people are not interested in self-actualization at all; they simply have some other needs to take care of.

This pyramid can help you evaluate where you are in your own journey:
Which needs appear the most important to you at the moment? Work on those first.

How do you work on a need?
1. Evaluate your need in-depth. (Often we have needs that are based on belief-structures that are evidently flawed.)
2. Adapt your need.
3. Fulfill your need.

You can repeat this process multiple times.
As you clear up your deficiency needs, growth needs will naturally arise.
Ultimately all roads lead towards self-actualization, and finally, transcendence. Having a strongly developed self-actualization aspect will help a lot. This is the reason why there are laypeople who make rapid progress, while some monks never become enlightened; the latter never went through self-actualization and just got forced into having to transcend, while they still had all kinds of other issues they subconsciously needed to deal with. Same goes for spiritual seekers who never went through self-actualization; they often haven't developed the skillsets required for exponential growth.

One note that I would like to add is that "aesthetic needs" is entirely aesthetic. So, if one tries to look better in order to gain esteem, a feeling of belonging, or love (so, most cases), it is not an aesthetic need. One should work on these aspects first. There can be mixed needs though.

Very good post.

Been feeling sceptical about the englightment however these things are very little discussed in generally so I'm not having enough insight yet to have a real opinion. Do you think one can get enlightened and then go back to normal state with suffering, needs etc. if I would have to guess that enlightened state once reached can be sustained by only very active meditating, healthy eating and thinking etc. ?

Will be following your journey.

Alright thanks for the input. I think it would be helpful for some things to give examples. I think I am doing very similar things to you but I am not sure since the topics raised are very general and for me not really precise sometimes, a specific example could help.
F.e. How does non self honesty in a meditation setting look like.
I am actually sure I am as honest as possible and I am actively trying to figure out my biases through scientific lectures on philosophy, psychology and other topics and would you classify as a road to 'figuring out what is going on'?

And would you agree that this is a never-ending process?

@Kiljusieppo: I look forward to OPs answer to that, but in my state spirituality gives me 2 things. Enlightment is one, which for me is another word for understanding something on a deeper or higher level than before. After doing so, you can look for the next step. So it's a constant process.

The other thing that I have thought was an enlighted state is presence. Which for me is actually living in the moment with full passion and feel life with my senses rather than mistaking the thoughts in my brain with reality and the concepts with which we try to take hold of reality with actual truth. The moment you think your concept is truth you cannot get enlightened in that area any more because you don't think you can create a better, more accurate concept of what is going on and therefor you are stuck at that level.

I like Alan Watts' quote:
Buddhism helps you to clean a window on which a rather accurate picture of the outside world is painted to see through it and see the outside world.

If somebody is not looking closely, there is no difference to be seen. But it is a very different experience looking at a picture that shows reality or looking at the world itself

I'm currently working on remodeling and restructuring the entire path in a scientific, understandable way. It is extremely difficult as there are so many things to talk about. All of this can be scientifically explained. It makes total sense; we just need to understand it better.

Here is a short primer...

Talking about enlightenment is one of the hardest tasks there is. It is extremely unrelatable. I suggest is to completely forget whatever you think enlightenment is because whatever you think it is, it's not that.

If you want to comprehend what all of this is about, then the first thing to understand is that your entire reality is constructed by your mind. Your mind is constructing that reality based on false assumptions.
Those assumptions are deeply rooted in your psyche and are what Buddha called fetters (chains). I refer to them as intra-psychic binds.

Another aspect to understand is that your mind is not one thing. How could it ever be? From science, we know that there are hundreds of billions of neurons firing every moment. In other words, your mind is a process. That process is divided into subprocesses, or subminds.

Your conscious experience is an information exchange between subminds.
A fettered mind projects all kinds of nonsense into consciousness, one of which is the belief of being a separate self. In fact, personality view is the first fetter to overcome. Overcoming a fetter does not mean intellectually understanding a certain aspect; your entire mind has to intuitively realize the complete unreality of it through direct perception.

The problem with the fetters is that the outputs they cause the mind to generate are not only delusional and highly inefficient, they are also responsible for the entirety of your suffering.
If all fetters are present, the mind is said unenlightened. If some fetters have been cut, the mind is said partially enlightened. When all fetters are cut, the mind is said fully enlightened.
In other words, enlightenment is not a state. It is a permanent shift in the way your mind constructs your reality.

For a description of how the fully enlightened experience feels like, I quote Daniel Ingram:


I attest to his description through my own experience. I would make some changes, one of them would be to change agencylessness to agentlessness. There is still agency; in the same way that a tree has agency. I also think some aspects could be expressed a lot more clearly, and I will try to do that eventually.



Disclaimer
As stated earlier, there is a whole lot more to be said about this. This was just a primer. There is also an important distinction between Samatha and Vipassana (mindfulness and insight) that I did not go into in this post. In fact, unfettering occurs through the development of vipassana. However, samatha also plays a very important role. Furthermore, even though there is something one might call full enlightenment, there actually is more to it after that too, but that is even more nonsensical to write about.

Once again, this was mainly to satisfy your curiosity, clarify misconceptions, and hopefully motivate you to pursue this diligently. Some of this might not make any sense at all whatsoever and I fear this might discourage some readers. I hope this to not be the case. This is truly worth pursuing. This is what you've always wanted. It truly feels like home; there is nothing like it.

Hey folks, I put out my own words onto this topic of enlightenment here to make it perhaps a little bit easier to understand.

Most human beings believe to be a separate entity in full control of their deeds, actions, thoughts, emotions, feelings and happiness is to be found in the flow of life or simply in objects. Happiness for most people is simply defined as pleasure and will try to seek for it endlessly and protect it because this defines their identity. On the other side (psychological) suffering is unhappiness and most will try to avoid or suppress it.

Buddha mentioned more than 2500 years ago enlightenment is the end of suffering. Suffering takes place in the form of guilt, blame, pride, worry, anxiety, expectation and attachment to outcomes and stems from the deep ingrained belief in personal doership and attachment to outcomes. So when suffering fades away, which is also called peace of mind and humanity is actually looking for then freedom is everywhere and life flows very easily in an continuous, ongoing and unbroken basis which is available for everyone. This means resting in being, peace, silence, stillness or your true nature no matter the circumstance is and is what you are, the real subject, that which is illuminating experiencing which is Consciousness, that which is aware of the five sense organs or simply the body and mind. After lots of investigations or inquiries, which is the most crucial part in all teachings insights come up which then lead to a gradually diminish of the personal doership belief and more and more peace kicks in.

The above, which is Non Duality in a nut shell, is not only a rephrasing from all the teachings I was immersed into but has also been confirmed in my own experience.

However, this conceptual framework merely consists of pointers. Don't take them as truth. You have to see it for yourself in direct experience to be as accurate otherwise it simply remains as belief and perpetuates and reinforces the personal doership belief known as ego.

Peace....

I don't think a longer post on this is required yet, but for those for who this might be relevant sometime soon: you are not consciousness. That's just another trap a partially enlightened mind can fall into; I've been there myself.

It seems to happen quite often in the advaita vedanta tradition. I know personal examples as well as a few gurus that seem to be in that trap.

There's nothing wrong with being there, but stagnating other people's progress based on one's own belief of doneness is somewhat annoying to witness.

There seem to be two main camps in terms of enlightenment. Those that believe that it's something that only the worthy can achieve after 60 years of isolated mountain meditation, and those, often partially enlightened, that believe that their awakening is all there is to it.

No offense to quadcity, I know he meant well. Just wanted to make sure this is clear for future readers that might get confused otherwise.


Quadcity, if you want to talk about this, feel free to pm me on skype. But let's not further derail this thread with a debate about what enlightenment is or isn't. I think there is already enough on this topic for now. Eventually, I will write a longer post; until then, I prefer including some more poker and self-actualization stuff such as book summaries.

I always get triggered when people make absolute claims. In my mind the only thing I know for certain is that I exist because I can think. Everything outside of that requires some degree of faith.

Hmm, there's not really anything scientific there CRAIbaby. It's just a lot of anecdotes and pseudoscience.

Either investigate yourself, or stay patient

very thin line between science and bull**** when talking about stuff like this

i hope you're very particular with the scientific journals you use if you plan to base your write ups on science

i don't know much about mind training but i would love to learn from something legitimate