Hello friends. I hope you’re all well and making progress in your chosen paths, wherever you happen to be wandering.
It sure did get deathly quiet around here - I feel like everyone sank into solitary contemplation at around the same time. But a pandemic is as good an excuse as any to touch base and see how everyone’s going. I don’t have anything groundbreaking to share so I thought I’d do a quick where I’m at post. I’d love to hear where you’re at as well.
For my own part - I finally acknowledged to myself that the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge and power is the abiding and sole focus of my life, and has been, really, from as early as I can remember. I relieved myself of a lot of unnecessary guilt in coming to terms with this. It’s not that I don’t care about other things, or other people - but I perceive them differently now, as fitting within the framework of my pursuit, not in competition with it. They’re sub-headings, not a whole different essay.
To this end, I made a lot of changes, rearranging things so that contemplation and practice were at the centre of my life. What did this achieve?
Well. Lol. Things never move as fast as I want them to.
I’m always engaged in “kicking the walls of reality,” so to speak. I feel like this is less skilful practice and more frustration-driven destruction - but seeing the occasional crack appear in the plaster of our physical experience is satisfying! Even if it doesn’t happen nearly enough. Some strange things happened. I saw what I can only describe as a “cloaked” spider walking across the ceiling of my house one day, only to have it disappear when I got up and examined it closely. A bunch of standard “haunted house” stuff started happening around me - being held down in bed while wide awake, doors opening of their own volition, yadda yadda.
None of it was frightening nor, I think, particularly meaningful (well… the spider DOES make me stop and think from time to time). Basically if you randomly kick walls you’re going to randomly cause destruction and that’s probably all there is to say about that - but I mention it because it’s mildly interesting.
Contemplation-wise, the nature of self, personality and identity continues to hold my attention. I had a lucid dream recently - one of those gift from the gods types, where I hadn’t even been trying to LD but wham! There I was, with a high degree of lucidity.
In this dream I was fully aware of this life, of the body in the bed dreaming the encounter. What made this LD novel for me though was the sense that I was emotionally attached to and detached from that dreamer’s life at one and the same time. I wasn’t quite occupying the position of omniscience and omnipotence that I aim for, but I was in a “higher” state than in waking life because I had more choices. The emotional attachments and things I find important in this life felt real and vital but they did not feel urgent. There are other dreams - infinite other dreams - with attachments and concerns of their own and there is time (or no time) for all of them. It was nice to experience, if only for a brief moment, something that we theorise about a lot here. It’s a good state, I now know, to inhabit. Worth striving for.
Worthiness continues to plague me. This is an unhealthy recurrent pattern for me. u/mindseal has a great post somewhere here about the trap of feeling as if you have to gain confidence through overcoming challenges. Right now I’m stuck between knowing this is true and knowing this is true. If anyone has tips or tricks they’ve used to tackle this particular hurdle, feel free to send 'em my way!
Other than that - over to you guys. I hope your travels have brought you something you think worth sharing!
Do you suspect, then, that people subscribed to this sub might think that their particular contextual understanding of the ideas presented here preclude them from having valid/interesting things to say? For example, if someone understands this content through the lens of a Buddhist, do you think they believe they can’t or shouldn’t speak openly about their ideas because they’re not sure whether their Buddhist understanding = subjective idealism?
I agree with everything in Nef’s post that the trappings of one’s practice are arbitrary outside of commitment, and would hope that most people here understand that. Subjective idealists should have no reason to give a shit what color you paint things. Nothing about the ideology presented here insists upon or rejects any particular flavor of trappings. If anything, it precludes the belief that the trappings are inherently powerful or relevant.
I certainly understand the realization-about-a-realization experience. Had you previously understood posts here as being authoritative or otherwise correct even when/if you didn’t fully agree with or understand them? Do you no longer do that? The idea of things shared here having previously “taken precedent” over your own contemplation particularly interests me because it’s a very tricky and dangerous thing that, if potentially shared by other people here, is something I absolutely want to address.
His post history is available for anyone who wants to scour it. I don’t think he’d be a big fan of the idea of pointing to his words as lessons without his being around to explain them or defend them. That said, I would be happy to see this sub become more active, so if you want to take some lessons you’ve learned and help you’ve received and communicate them to people in your own way, I’d absolutely encourage that.
I’m trying to get a feeling for the pulse of this sub before I start making any big posts again myself, because I’ve gotten the feeling that there are some subtle, latent misunderstandings and potentially counterproductive conceptions around (like, say, that posts here are authoritative even when they contradict your own contemplation) and I want to have a good feeling for those before I go clumsily feeding into them and making a small problem a bigger one.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2020-04-29 14:17:16 (fox4gbc)
Not quite. I would say that the first part is the idea of an “armchair ________” that seems to arise from each subreddit. It’s like a stage of participation in a sub. where you’ve been reading the content long enough that you think things you have to say are important, but lack the context of having direct experience with the subject. I’d say I was guilty of this probably 5 years ago and a maybe a bit more recently because off hand I don’t keep track of when this sub split from the other that everyone was together on for a while.
I think it could be more of a translation issue. Almost like they may not be making the connection enough to be able to relate their own context with the context of subjective idealism. That’s my guess though, I’m both surprised and not surprised that no one else has chimed in on our discussion in this thread. It leaves us both guessing so the chances that whatever corrections/adjustments we make may have no affect on the state of things, logically speaking, would be higher. Then again, I think just putting in more effort from any of us would likely spark things up a bit if this thread is any indication.
Agreed. It gets tedious as a mod though because most of the submissions lack the contemplation from a subjective idealist perspective of what’s being shared. That leads to a lot of things that are submitted getting held up. An example, not from this sub but from another I moderate, is someone posting bible verses. The particular verses don’t really matter, because it’s the structure of the post that’s concerning. The user essentially created multiple posts, all with different titles and verses, but did absolutely nothing to relate what they were sharing to the subreddit they were dumping it into. Like you mentioned, I don’t care if it’s from the Bible, the Quran, the Satanic Bible, the weather channel, Fox news, etc. but if you can’t point out anything to relate it to the context of the forum you’re posting it in… maybe it doesn’t need to be there… <.<
Yes and no. It was more like I was exploring options. The options presented here were very attractive compared to other options I was exploring. So, like how people who follow the ways of Buddha are considered Buddhists, I was following some of the posts here as if they were authoritative but failing to realize that the underlying principles are aimed at “getting someone to paint on a blank canvas” per-se versus doing a “paint-by-number” piece. If this is unclear let me know and I can reword it.
Yeah. I haven’t even begun to imagine how you could address that, but considering how long you haven’t been doing that I’m sure you won’t have much, if any, trouble with it. What’s interesting is that if I look back, I hadn’t always. I made a post or two a few years back, they may not have hit the mark exactly but at those points I was not giving precedent to the ideas here over my own. At some point I must have gotten lazy or really wanted to deep dive with a few specific posts that were shared here but eventually I made it back to my own contemplation.
That’s fair! Definitely something worth addressing. Then again, the engagement here seems pretty low. I’m curious to see how this plays out.
Originally commented by u/Scew on 2020-05-07 02:15:51 (fpobnbe)