so much 'spiritual' language ought to be translated into practical phenomenological terms.
no self = contraction around center reference point dropped. process emotions = let moment to moment sensations be with equanimity. present moment = uncompressed sensory experience without interpretation. karma = accumulation of heavily weighted priors. surrender/letting go = ceasing of top-down narratives about ever-changing sensory experience. etc etc.
There is a three year old somewhere right now squatting in a cold puddle with mud up his forearms and snot running into his mouth, screaming at nothing. he will bite his sister in twenty minutes and cry for an hour after because she bit him back. he will lose his favourite toy in some wet grass and grieve it like a death. by nighttime he will have lived more honestly than most grown men manage in thirty years. and somewhere in a clean room with expensive candles and a view of some mountain, a grown adult who paid four thousand to sit on a cushion for a week is begging his own nervous system to produce what that kid got for free by falling face first into a thorn bush
@__tinygrad__ your moralistic objection to the fundamental mechanics of human progress is incredibly ignorant. please sit back and relax and enjoy the magical fruits being produced by private enterprise, all from the comfort of everything it has brought to you already
You might have already realized that talk therapy almost never works & self-help stuff are mostly useless.
If you arrived at this place, you're ready to dive into the world of the body & nervous system. Real emotions & really feeling stuff. There's no other way out.
I find the Reich-Lowen-Pierrakos lineage to be highly, criminally underrated. First pic below is a good intro (getting denser from top to bottom) and the second pic is more experiential/actual stuff you can do. Theoria & praxis.
The main risk is going too fast or alone, which could actually cause real problems. I myself have always been not so cautious about these types of warnings, and went too fast, too deep & can honestly say, there's literally zero need to go too hard, too fast. It's just not smart. Don't do it. Take it easy. These are overpowered anyways, take your time & listen to your body.
Worst thing you could do would be to read/research these and not apply anything (or overindex on types/theory in general) - the whole point is to get out of your head & into the body! Terrifying, I know. Take it easy & focus on max enjoyment.
Favorite beginner jhana resources (links below):
1. @tasshinfogleman: Discovering Bliss States
2. @nayafia: How to Do the Jhanas
3. @DiamonDie: Jhānas as Easily Accessible Insight Practice
4. @OortCloudAtlas: How to Jhana
5. Rob Burbea: Jhana retreat lectures
One of the reasons I’ve been predicting (and pushing) a feral summer for both men and women is because I think we’re reaching a tipping point re: human domestication.
We’ve been socially and psychologically dominated by social media algorithms that make money off time we would have otherwise spent building a business, an invention, a relationship.
We’re constantly being sold clothes, beauty products, perfumes that cover our scent and keep us from finding real, primal love.
Like cattle, people are by and large being fed high calorie, low nutrient foods that cause excessive weight gain, decrease motivation, and are actively addictive.
And possibly worst of all, we’re now being convinced that the only way to lose said weight is to inject a drug that appears to be destroying all feelings of desire.
To domesticate an animal, you must make it reliant on you. You must convince it that dependency is a better survival strategy than independence. You only gain authority over an animal when you take away all possibility of it surviving on its own and it decides to give away its power to you.
And the only way a domesticated animal can free itself is if it is left out in the wild long enough to remember its instincts.
Remember who you are Feral Child. Take your freedom back.
By the way, there *is* a 10x meditation-based productivity hack, but practicing it inalterably changes your psyche so that duty, family and treating other people well become your most important values. So don't fuck with karma yoga if you're just trying to hit your KPIs