So before dilution I had this strong idea of who I was. I had this back story. There were certain things I do. And certain things I don't do. I used to judge everyone. I had a very high opinion about myself and used to constantly do or find things to validate that.
Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Each and every moment is intense. Sunsets are absolutely beautiful that you cannot describe through words. Spending time in nature is surreal. You do the right thing instead of doing things to validate your narrative. The dopamine hit I used to get when I used to do certain things is gone( i use to confuse these dopamine hits as me doing something right). This unlocks doing things more from Intuition and less from memory. There is less fear. There is more flow. More creativity. No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe.
That said it's not all great stuff. You also have to work through some existential questions which you were previously isolated by the ego. Like mortality. Impermanence of everything. Aging body. What happens after death. Nature of awareness. Why I am aware. Is awareness eternal and it's implications etc etc.
Lately, I've had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is by settling on like this one kind of character, like someone out of a movie that’s playing in your head, and acting like that person. Then, as time passes, we simply forget who we were before we started acting and the only way we know how to act is as this one character.
You say you've lost your 'story' and your 'character', that you don't 'act' anymore.
But, it just feels like you've made another story and another character for you to fit into. You've got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that's what the 'character' you try to fit would do.
And by acting like that person in your head would, you start to feel the same way too.
I think it's a lot more complicated than how I'm thinking. But I really do have a strong intuition that people feel the way they think the person they're acting like should feel, when physical feelings are non-factors.
Really, I don't actually know. Like, what we actually do and what we say we do; what we actually think and what we say we think. What we say we do and think feel like things we're saying to trick ourselves into doing and thinking those things. That's I guess the core of my intuition.
It's hard to describe, because you're still doing the act, just some part of you realizes the unimportance of it.
And some of that realization shines through in the act itself, in your character.
Because I think you are thinking this again through ego.
I don't have a thought that I appreciate sunset when I see one. The sunset looks magical. There is a shift in experience. Before watching sunset was like watching in 420p. Now it's 4k. The consciousness is heightened. You only see the sunset. You don't think of old memories of sunset. Or random events from past or thing you have to do. You just see the sunset.
It's not the commentary that changed from hey yet another sunset to I appreciate sunset.
The commentary is gone or minimised and the resolution is increased. And there are no memories from past to distract you from experiencing the sunset.
And this applies to most things. It's just nature has a lot of stuff that work well with heightened awareness. You don't want to spend your time with a heightened awareness and live next to a highway. That works against you.
I see this with some people and other animals. I can't speak. Sometimes I want to shy away because it's like seeing someone naked without them knowing they're being watched. I can see their souls. It's not every animal or even every person. I really strongly disagree that all people are equal. Everyone is different, everyone has a different path, and I feel like people are so vastly different that it's overwhelming at times.
I don't think of it in terms of ego. That's because, I think, there are different kinds of transcendence, and it's easy to think that up is only one direction.
There was a time when I felt unintelligent and incapable of great, technical things. So I kind of just did things that it seemed capable people did. I felt like people who are smart, capable, and rich now, hacked things when they were young and were rebellious and broke the rules and did whatever they wanted and put lots of effort into random interesting things because they were interesting.
So, because the end goal was attractive to me in a way, I tried to do those things too - maybe consciously, maybe not. I feel like that process made me different though. I have genuinely changed into someone far more capable technically, way more interested in super 'nerdy' things.
Anyway, I don't know what it means to think this through ego. I don't really get it.
But sunsets are nice - I like seeing them too. Yeah I suppose what I mean was that the commentary changed. Interesting that for you there's no commentary, I think I've felt like that before. Sometimes I feel like I just exist in a nice feeling - no words, nothing. Just experiencing. But that doesn't last very long, or it turns into something negative like boredom or something. Then I get up with a bad feeling lol
I think this is a case of words are hard.
OP was asked to elaborate, and tried to put into words a state of being. It wasn't as another story of self, the previous state of having stories of the self was in the original post. This was an attempt to describe something, I am not sure language is nuanced enough to grasp it, or encompass it. I personally experience it as "inner peace" or "acceptance", very close to the core essence of philosophical Daoism or Epictetus' Stocism; I've never been able to put it into words but as another comment says:
>> The problem is that state cannot be expressed in words or cognition, because it isn't part of your mind.
Which I find to be a great way to express it.
It doesn't mean being a transcended guru or anything; for me, the more I work on myself the more I find things that are leftover relics given to me, and I work on figuring out if that idea or values are actually mine or someone else's, and if mine, are they outdated (why did something trigger it) what needs to be reworked, does it need to be reworked. If it is someone else's, do I want to keep it or discard it. Thats one of the more actionable ways I try and explain the years of inner work to get here (by here it sometimes feels like the starting line, not the finish). One day while hiking I stopped in my tracks as it hit me that I could not think of the last time I berated myself (this use to consume a lot of my time, but no one ever knew it), or was triggered into aggressivly defending my ego or tried to be something other than myself for others. I think we are told to build the outer self (protect and hide the vulenable inner), for me that was backwards, build the inner, "know thyself", and you don't need to build an outer protective shell. It's a much more "authentic" self experience, one I don't have to think about.
Of course there are bad days and negative thoughts, but compared to what it was..., its rainbows and butterflies with a couple passing rain clouds now.
We know this kind of thing happens with history - certain people become famous while others drift into obscurity, things get remembered incorrectly etc - but it also happens with your own memory of your own life. The only real way around it is keeping a journal.
Further posts clearly portray what one might call "McBuddhism", complete with meditation and the new age "don't judge others!". Judgement is an animal mechanism, it's your subconscious quickly putting people in boxes to ascertain their intentions and reliability then your conscious refining that rough estimate. You can't "turn off" judgement, only keep it inside.
Once again, people being misled around by emotions and tone. Judgement is a tool, it's not good or bad by itself, what matters is its accuracy, i.e. truth.
Our self awareness - in theory - allows us to change our habits, or at least temper them.
So my experience of this is that my default animal instinct is to automatically judge people in a negatively biased way (which I think may come from our evolutionary instinct to try to predict danger - or if not, perhaps something encoded in me specifically at an early age) but I have tried to adopt the conscious habit of overriding this initial instinct with “mediating thoughts” like “what do I really know about this person?” and “how would I behave if I were in their position”.
I also try to simply remember my discovered self-knowledge that my instinctive emotional response - pre-thought - is to be distrustful or overly negative. Just keeping that in mind helps automatically attack the judgemental thoughts as they come up. I guess it helps me recognise the pattern and not trust those thoughts.
I’m quite convinced that I’ve done this for long enough now that my “habit” of automatically judging people has lessened over time.
The instinct is still there, but better cognitive habits have been overlaid on top.
That said, I still feel I’m about 5-10% along in terms of progress compared to where I’d want to be! (And in reality there is no “end” to this work).
My outward behaviour towards others is generally “good” - I think - but I find myself often frustrated at the instinctive negativity in my head which I have to proactively counter - each and every time.
And because I’m human, I sometimes (ok… often) forget to.
For a lot of people this is triggered by something unexpected happening in life which breaks the narrative one has been building their entire life.
You can search for Spiritual Awakening and find a lot of examples. Buddha at the Gas Pump is a great podcast to listen to for such experiences.
As I sad it's not all great all the times. There were a lot of times in which I wished I could go back to the old mode. Though I think the overall change was for the better.
It's infuriating that you write all that about how enlightened you supposedly are, then conceal the manner by which you got there.
This just feels like trolling or a creative writing exercise.
A great starting point can be Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and/or Sam Harris's Waking Up.
After that, you might look into Why Buddhism is True or The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or Mindfulness in Plain English.
The Healthy Gamer Youtube channel also has great videos going into this and how they tie into psychology.
David Chapman's https://meaningness.com/ is also pretty great.
> Needing an answer is an attachment. Attachments causes suffering.
"Radical acceptance : Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha"[0] may be of interest to you. It won't answer the existential questions for you or get real deep into philosophy or Buddhism; it does have actionable exercises to try and meditation practices/instructions attached to the different concepts covered. At times it will use what I would call woo-woo language, overly fluffy "love & light" phrases--so if that bothers you, simply discard it and take the practical nuggets that are also included. It is more a book to help "come to terms" with (life, basically) and in turn helps (or may help) resolve some of the heaviness in an unexpected/indirect way.
[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/57351231 (2004 version, version I read)
https://search.worldcat.org/title/1400088877 (2023 version)
There is also a lecture series on Advaita Vedanta on YouTube. That helped as well.
https://youtu.be/gEd22QZF_mM?si=iDIXY1oUhOC9PaHm
Meditation helped a lot.
Spending time in nature a lot helped. Camping under trees helped..
Also Jordan Peterson's biblical lectures also surprisingly helped even though I was not brought up Christian. I know he is divisive but the lectures are not political.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE4zj0nQN08ewq9dl1e8MCz3Y...
Also just praying and believing in a higher power helped.
However, I don't know Islam very well! Do you have any suggestions for where to start? A specific translator? Thanks in advance.
"No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe." I am often amazed / in awe of the internet for leading me toward this place. My mind and equanimity opened much further as a result of the knowledge share that occurred over the last 20 years. Much less judgment, more curiosity. Paradoxically this has led me to revisit areas, like religion, that are often dismissed as irrational.
Although, I try not to use words like that because I am still working through it.
How are you working through: why I am aware?
There is a line in Upanishads that say something like why even the god doesn't know why it was created.
(I mean this partly in jest of course)
Your new enlightenment sounds like the product of a productive drug trip (no judgment implied whatsoever, possibly some jealousy though)
Thus, only death of others is a relevant topic of concern, but taking care of them while they are alive is certainly far more important.
Impermanence of everything "only" applies to contingent matters. So statements like "everything (that happens through some contingency) is impermanent" always match some absolute truth. So the apparent contradiction that "if everything is impermanent was true, so should be impermanence and then not everything would be impermanent", is only indeed apparent.
After all, it means that the universe emerges upon birth and disappears upon death, aka the classic Boltzmann brain.
Meanwhile for anyone who believes in the continued existence of the universe after death is going to need an afterlife. Sure, it might not be the classic Christian afterlife that so many people have in mind. It could be even as simple as having the experience of a corpse, but an afterlife nevertheless.
https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakr...
From an exterior point of view, your behavior seems potentially dangerous, like a disinhibited illuminated drunk that any people or situation can easily point any way as they see fit.
How do you make sure you don't become an "awful" person for those around you ?
