gnosis
Boulder, CO
Joined July 2022
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dark room enjoyer retweeted
The Buddha says in the Sabbāsava Sutta that the belief "I have no self" is wrong view. If it were right view the second noble truth would be "Belief in self is the cause of dukkha."
Maybe you rejoin "atta is the cause of tanha." What do the suttas say? That the cause of tanha is avijja.
Maybe you rejoin "the cause of avijja is atta." But that also is very obviously not what is said. If that were the case the Buddha would have said that. The opposite is a reasonable read: atta arises due to avijja.
Anatta is a teaching tool just like anicca. The metaphysical status of anatta is as irrelevant as the metaphysical status of anicca. Anatta helps undo a specific error but is not the whole premise of waking up.
These tacit premises are extremely widespread afaict.
today i had a breakthrough experience with zhan zhuang where i actually felt like a tree! instead of me "doing" it, it was as if my body was standing itself up. reflected in my state of consciousness feeling very pleasantly still right then as well
i had incremental improvements each day for weeks/months, suddenly can go from like 8 minutes to 12 minutes. stuck around 12 minutes for a while. then suddenly today when this happened went from like 14 minutes to 20 minutes and enjoyed every minute of it. so that confirms that the tension patterns were causing the exhaustion. had no idea that that would be the threshold of relaxation to emerge into a new state of consciousness as well. incremental -> incremental -> emergent -> incremental -> incremental -> emergent.
happened after i relaxed some muscles i never even noticed were tensing before. must have hit a threshold
just like any other day, had some intuition to adjust toes a little bit. then noticed something below belly pulling stomach up, relax. noticed something in pelvic floor tensing, relax. felt the hips pushing up and back, compressing spine a bit, decompressed that by letting hips fall, and then woooosh, stillness washes over me
i can already tell it's quite profound to directly make a connection between a physical change having that big of an impact on mind. really sudden and noticeable. never had anything like that happen before
it also feels good for my spine and hips especially since those are the ones i've been having difficulty with for a while now, being able to experience for longer and longer actual relaxation, earning trust with the parts residing in there and the like (believe it's standard chronic bracing at the level of brainstem in there)
dark room enjoyer retweeted
Unfinished emotions hinder our access to them
You go for a run. It sucks. But in the end you feel great. So you connect these: running sucks BUT I feel great after doing it.
Now imagine it sucks so much you're so overwhelmed you distract, you stop running, you lose frames. You'd never connect completion to a good outcome!
So it is with emotions.
dark room enjoyer retweeted
Suffering = Somatic contractions. But the cause of those contractions can be many and matters when it comes to alleviating them.
🤖 Made with AI
dark room enjoyer retweeted
Wrote a thread about some of it some time ago. Each of us is a loadbearing machinery of intentions, and all our actions are driven by those intentions/desires, and most of those are below our conscious thought level. Some of them are wholesome, and others are unwholesome. We might end up, spending a lot of time in a roundabout way in order to achieve a certain un/wholesome desire, usually a lot of those desires are planted into us by others/egregores/narratives/mimetics.
But basically deepest inside for all of us we all just want to love and be loved and that is our deepest intention i.e. the bodhichita or Jesus.
We can be reconnecting with it via certain meditations, and definitely prayer.
And I think it can all be proven mathematically as well 😂
xitter.gq/spiritdirtbag/status/1…
dark room enjoyer retweeted
They be like "I want God to eat me!" right up, until Kali licks their spine.
dark room enjoyer retweeted
i use "hell realm" loosely to refer to a state in which
- you are suffering enormously
- the suffering is sticky or persistent, refuses to dissipate, regenerates, feels correct, justified, necessary
much social media discourse is "viral hell realms" - content created from inside a hell realm implicitly or explicitly trying to pull its audience inside the same hell realm. to briefly gesture at examples one could speak of a misogynist hell realm, a misandrist hell realm, various political hell realms, a climate change hell realm, a trauma hell realm, a neurotic parenting hell realm, a singularity hell realm. imo it would not be wrong to call viral hell realms demons
emotional flavors associated with hell realms are more or less the obvious stereotypes: paranoia, hatred, rage, grievance, resentment, jealousy, envy, self-pity, despair, etc. you can apply a cartoon character test: if a cartoon character was suddenly filled with this, would it be an indication that they were possessed or corrupted by an evil spirit? would they suddenly sprout fangs, have black smoke curling off of them, etc
(it would be easy to misunderstand this as being about "negative" emotions. we have to carefully distinguish fear from paranoia, anger from hatred, sadness from grievance and self-pity, and so on)
antidotes to hell realms are the sappiest shit imaginable: gratitude. love. the brahmaviharas: metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (empathetic joy), upekkha (equanimity). patience. forgiveness. mercy. grace. the light of heaven. the care bear stare. friendship. laughter. joy. beauty. mourning. prayer. you can again apply a cartoon character test: if a cartoon character was suddenly filled with this, would it be an indication that they were blessed by an angel? would they suddenly be filled with light, sprout angel wings, etc
choosing the antidotes to a hell realm from inside the hell realm is not easy (if it were easy they wouldn't be hell realms). the hell realm will try to convince you that the antidotes are poison: cringe, lame, uncool, unserious, naive, embarrassing, unsophisticated, frivolous, kitsch, banal, childish, girly, gay, woo, fake, selfish, morally corrupt, a betrayal. alternatively the hell realm might try to convince you that *you* are poison: you don't deserve this, it isn't for you, it's for other better people, you are a creature of darkness, loser, barely even human. i don't know that i have a better response to this than to say that you have to find a part of yourself that believes in straightforward, uncomplicated goodness, ordinary human goodness, and you have to crawl towards whatever goodness seems even remotely reachable to you from where you are even if you only have a single pinky available (so to speak) to inch yourself forward with, even if you can only manage to inch yourself forward once a day or once a week or once a month. finding a single thing to be grateful for, even if it's just that you aren't literally dead or suffering even worse than you currently are, is much better than nothing. finding a single person you're willing to pray for is much better than nothing. turning away from hell and towards the light is a habit you can build, no matter how slowly
more reading:
- the great divorce, lewis
- opening the heart of compassion, lowenthal and short
dark room enjoyer retweeted
different systems in the medieval tantric world identified different numbers of chakras, from four to infinity. The problem is, its all someone else’s model. What did they feel, to be so sure? How can i have my own experience in such clarity, unburdened by preconceived models?
dark room enjoyer retweeted
Off the top of my head:
1. Muscle relaxation is gated by energy: i.e. the relaxed muscle cell is in a state of high structure, which takes energy to reach, like pushing a ball up the hill
2. More muscles = more mitochondria in general (although maybe less bodily sensitivity?)
3. I don't think your VSMCs get physically more numerous as you do mental workouts (?) but their muscle tone will get sharper
4. Muscle tone / neural coherence is much more of a gating factor to big lifts than people realize. This is also the reason why simulating big lifts in your head allows you to lift more over time, you train the control signal
5. Supplement stuff that's good for energy and biases the system toward relaxation, like magnesium. Try creatine also. Thyroid/T3 is not something to casually supplement but it might also be potent. Maybe DMSO too, with similar DYOR caveats
6. Literally put tiger balm on your somatic blocks
7. Heat helps muscle relaxation and all (100%) of the people I've spoken with who have had big meditative breakthroughs had them when their body was warm. Like slightly-uncomfortably-warm
8. People should be way more willing to be experimental with latches and bloodflow. HIIT between sits, headstands, sauna, etc. I respect Buddhist cultural traditions but the Buddha himself was pretty much down to try anything
dark room enjoyer retweeted
been thinking a lot about this
the cure to addiction is always more consciousness
conversely, the “cure” to consciousness is addiction
for all of my compulsive behaviors, it’s becoming more clear how my system just says: “I don’t want to be conscious right now”
All addiction, at its heart, is addiction to unconsciousness.
It doesn’t matter if it’s social media addiction or heroin addiction.
The addict is always trying to block out consciousness by covering it in stimulation or numbness.
This means the cure to addiction is always more consciousness.
But consciousness can’t just be willed into existence.
Instead, developing consciousness is closely linked to developing insight.
This is because usually the reason we want to hide in unconsciousness is that there’s something we don’t want to be conscious of.
Something in our world that contradicts the story we want to tell ourselves about the world.
Perhaps we want to believe that we can always avoid pain and only experience pleasure.
So we try to push pain into unconsciousness.
Or we want to believe that the things we love will last forever.
So we try to push any sign of decay or change into unconsciousness.
Or there is some story we want to believe about ourselves and who we are.
So we try to push anything that contradicts that story into unconsciousness.
So the way to overcome our addiction to unconsciousness is to build accurate world models.
When we learn to view the world as a place that includes suffering, is impermanent and is free of stable selves, reality starts to match our worldview.
With this insight in place, we no longer need to push suffering, impermanence, and things that threaten our sense of self out of consciousness.
Consciousness then naturally expands of its own accord.
dark room enjoyer retweeted
Tibetan Buddhists will sometimes talk about how falling asleep, dreaming and waking up are like a microcosm of the processes of death, intermediary bardo, and rebirth.
Each of these moments ime offer great opportunities for seeing into our true nature.
For me, I tend to get the most vivid glimpses of my true nature in the moment of waking (closely followed by the moment of falling asleep).
Just as we call dawn the Golden Hour, I like to call the moment of waking the Golden Moment.
It is a golden opportunity we have each day to get a clear glimpse into our true nature.
Lucid dreaming might feel more exotic and it is indeed a great tool.
But lucid waking - training yourself to notice that transition from sleep to wakefulness - is at least as powerful.
And often more accessible for some.
A good place to start is just to consciously set a concrete intention before you go to bed each morning of:
“When I wake up in the morning, I am going to pay full attention to the nature of my consciousness in the moment of my waking.”
Try setting this intention repeatedly for months and years and see what unfolds for you.
In the best case scenario, it can be one of the closest things to magic that you’ll experience this side of death.
dark room enjoyer retweeted
I remember between the age of 7 - 12 telling anyone who would listen at my elementary school that I was pretty sure the principal there was a paedophile.
Everyone laughed it off - teachers, my parents other kids.
Few years after I left he was found out and put in prison.
I feel I’ve often been able to recognize various flavours of predators and other wrong ‘uns (as call them in British slang) throughout my life.
The common denominator is sensing people who just don’t feel authentic, then digging into that lack of authenticity to see what it hides.
I wish it was a skill they taught people in school.
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