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  #1  
Old 12-07-2014, 12:55 AM
Cmt12 Cmt12 is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2014
Posts: 325
 
Part 2: Clarity

If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest that you read part 1 before reading this post. If I haven’t established any credibility in your eyes with that post, then I would encourage you to go ahead and not read this post as it will surely annoy you at the very least.

I want to begin this by saying you can’t solve a problem unless you face it. Most people live in a way that is impulsive and focused on the short term. That is not a judgment but an observation. The desire to avoid pain in the present moment, even at the expense of longer term goals, is not only the default of the ego but one of its strongest tendencies. But that is one major thing that makes human beings unique – the ability to sacrifice in the short term for a future payoff, or delayed gratification. It is an evolved trait. Ignorance or denial is never a solution. With that said, turning away from the spiritual path is inevitable especially at the beginning. When you’re ready to return, forgive yourself and move forward. There came a point in my life where I decided, to the best of my ability, I was going to live in truth no matter how painful or unpleasant it was. If you want to continue on the path of development, you are going to have to make the same commitment to yourself. This post is directed at those who have made that commitment and are in this journey for the long haul.

Let’s start by identifying the problem. Conventional wisdom says that all of the following are simply a part of the human condition:
-Anger, insecurity, jealousy, depression, disconnection, anxiety (suffering)
-Aggression, war, greed
-The desire to harm others or self
-Mental and chronic illness

You get the point. In philosophy and religious terms this is known as the problem of evil or total depravity. Current medicine, specifically psychiatry, operates in a way that is almost entirely by symptom management. This approach is ultimately unsatisfying to me; I’m only interested in cures. But before you can solve a problem, you have to understand it completely. With chronic illnesses you have to understand the chain of causality and discovery the root cause; otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.

This is the chain of causality that science and medicine largely operates under:

Brain -----> Mind

Introspection has very little value under this model. To understand the mind, we simply need to use the scientific method to observe what is simultaneously occurring in the brain/DNA/physical body.

Here is how I’ve come to realize the chain of causality ACTUALLY occurs:

Mind ----> Brain ----> Mind
Or
Brain <-----> Mind

I’ve become aware of a mechanism that exists in our subconscious mind that is fundamental, that operates before DNA mutation in the chain of causality. Since the mind is non physical, this mechanism is beyond the scope of observation and the scientific method. The only way it can be accessed is through meditation. When I talk about the spiritual journey, I’m talking about this pursuit. It is a progression that takes a significant amount of time and effort.
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  #2  
Old 12-07-2014, 12:56 AM
Cmt12 Cmt12 is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2014
Posts: 325
 
The Freeze Response

So what is this mechanism? It is what is referred to as the ‘freeze’ response. Many are familiar with the fight or flight responses but ignore this other aspect. It serves as a survival mechanism as well as an instrument for morality. It is activated in any highly stressful or traumatic situation; it’s activated when one feels significantly threatened or insecure, whether that is a soldier in battle or someone who is embarrassed in front of a crowd. This mechanism, found in every animal with a nervous system AFAIK, is very old and uses the reptilian part of our brain. When you’re stuck in this freeze state, your nervous system remains stuck in a sympathetic dominant state. This will often result in the following behaviors:
-constantly scanning the environment around you
-the need to feel in control / easily overwhelmed by stress
-always expecting the worst case scenario / paranoia
-feeling self conscious around others
-introverted in social situations
-feeling wired but tired
-insomnia

Here are the main physiological components of the freeze response:
-tight muscles from head to toe that acts as a suit of armor
-numbness to protect against any physical pain associated with the traumatic situation
-increased heart rate, adrenaline release, and blood flow to muscles for escape
-immune system and digestive system are inoperative for energy purposes
-higher brain functioning disabled for energy purposes

The freeze response, and a sympathetic dominant state, causes an imbalance in every system of the body.


Repression

Conventional wisdom (the brain based model) says when you are in a traumatic situation and your freeze response is activated, soon enough it will disable and you go back to normal. For instance, if you find yourself in the middle of the road and turn to see a car fast approaching, you’ll find that you tense up, your adrenaline starts pumping, and your heart races. But after a little while, once you’re safe, you start feeling better. However, this is an incorrect understanding of what is happening.

As my spiritual development progressed, and I went deeper into meditation, deeper into my mind, I was able to access these traumatic, frozen ‘imprints’. It took me a long time to understand what was going on but eventually I had a breakthrough when the idea of repression came to me. I stopped thinking of symptoms as just occurring/not occurring but also repressed/unrepressed. This is how I became aware that this is a non physical mechanism “located” in the subconscious mind that manifests physically in the body. So, what is happening when we are in a traumatic situation is our ‘freeze’ response is activated but it doesn’t release and instead gets repressed. The result is we have all these unreleased imprints below the surface stored up in our mind.

Even though we may not feel it in our bodies above the surface, these imprints are producing a continuous stress signal. This stress signal is the cause of negative DNA mutations. Biologist Bruce Lipton does a great job describing the process in a Youtube video called ‘The Biology of Belief’. I’m unable to post links. Keep in mind that he is unaware of this mechanism so his solution centers on belief which is not quite right. Since our survival is our primary motivation, these imprints are more influential on our physiology than our beliefs. This is why exposure therapy cannot cure PTSD. The idea of exposure therapy is to, in a controlled way, expose someone to a traumatic situation in the hope that you can update their belief system which does work. The problem is you have these unreleased imprints opposing this process that are saying “no, this is not safe.”

The Ego

The ego arises along with the imprints. It is also part of the reptilian, emotional brain that is only concerned with its own wellbeing. Remember this is a survival mechanism. Ideally, the ego would only be active when we are in danger but since we have these unreleased imprints, the ego is overactive. The ego doesn’t care about truth and will easily sacrifice truth in favor of survival. This is why we sometimes get those stories in our heads that are exaggerated or paranoid. The repressed pain from the imprints is also the source of the stream of automatic, negative thoughts. The ego influences our decision making by discouraging us from taking chances and seeking the more secure, certain option. In our natural state, what is good for the individual is good for society. We are supposed to live in an ultimate Self perspective with moments of ego perspective (competition), but the imprints push us into an ego dominant state. Once you understand all of this about the ego, you realize that it is not a villain but an alarm that needs to be turned off. To silence the ego, we have to release our imprints and heal the mind.


Energy Allocation

It takes energy to keep the stored up imprints repressed. However, the mind has to use energy for other processes and stressors. Have you ever wondered why you get a headache when you’re stressed? Or why your immune system fails and you get sick when you’re stressed? It’s because the mind is juggling too many balls at once as a result of energy allocation. Due to the imprints, the headache is already there from the tight muscles and the immune system is likewise already inoperative but these symptoms become unrepressed because of the increased energy requirements of the new stressor. This is a difficult idea to grasp and I can’t say that I fully understand it myself; the idea that your muscles aren’t tight but below the surface they are or the idea that your immune system is working correctly but below the surface it isn’t. This is how you can get a backache from just sitting or how you can pull a hamstring. It’s why older people start having “aches and pains.” Those aches and pains were already present but due to presumably decreased accessible energy, the issues begin to surface more and more.

There comes a point in which, even absent stressors, the mind has accumulated so many imprints that it no longer has enough energy to repress them. I call this the repression point. This will cause someone to be in a sympathetic dominant state chronically. This is often the case with people with conditions such as PTSD, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME), Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and to a lesser degree ADHD. Many people with CFS/ME think a virus is the cause of their condition because they experienced a prolonged virus prior to their CFS/ME symptoms. But what happened was the stress from the virus pushed the mind past the repression point and it was too much too handle.

Further, this concept explains why there are so many “successful” treatments out there for various chronic illnesses. From my perspective, what often happens is someone will go through a stressful time in their life, and then they will start to experience symptoms as they shift across the repression point. So they go to the doctor where they are given a treatment plan and soon the symptoms go away. What they don’t realize is that the symptoms vanished because they became repressed again as the stress diminished over time and not because of the treatment. There is a lot of mixing up of correlation and causation going on right now in medicine.

What happens if a developing child is in this unrepressed state? I believe that is what Autism is. Observations of brain states of an autistic person show similarities to someone with PTSD or other anxiety and fear disorders. It explains why there are so many people that believe that autism is caused by different stressors such as vaccination, toxins, etc. These stressors may contribute to cause the imprints to become unrepressed but they are not the main causal agent; it is the unreleased imprints.

Epigenetics

How can a child have so many imprints stored up to cross the repression point and become autistic? That is when I began to realize that these imprints are inherited from one generation to the next. From a survival viewpoint, it makes sense. If there is a new stressor introduced into the environment that can threaten your group, you would want a much quicker way to pass on adaptive traits than what conventional Darwinism allows for. Epigenetics is the process that allows this to occur. Science is just beginning to examine the possibilities of epigenetics. I was very pleased to see recent articles come out about a study conducted that discovered mice can inherit a fear response (google “epigenetics, mice, fear response”).

The implications for this are very concerning; it means the status quo is unsustainable. It means the sharp increases in, for instance, autism and ADHD rates are not merely due to better diagnosing. As a species, we are gradually increasing the amount of our collective imprints with each generation. And in the increasingly stressful conditions that we live in today due to new technologies, modern warfare, and so on, the upward trend is sloping more and more. We are not going to solve the problem by trying to change the external environment we live in, but by releasing the imprints and healing our minds. It follows that if we heal ourselves, we won’t be passing on the burden to our children.

Mental and Chronic Illness

I’ve already touched on this a little bit but I hope it’s pretty clear how these imprints in the mind cause mental illness and psychological symptoms. From depression to anxiety to compulsive tendencies, it should be self evident how these states are related to survival and the freeze response. To better understand the need for anger, aggressive behavior, and the impulse to harm another, think about how these traits would be beneficial to a cornered animal having its life threatened.

Understanding how this mechanism is the root cause of chronic illnesses requires more consideration. Beyond my intuition (refer back to what I said about intuition from Part 1), I’ve done a continuous amount of internet research looking for connections. I looked at the following illnesses and symptoms and determined that they are caused by the imprints:

PTSD, Gulf War Illness, CFS/ME, ASD (Autism), Fibromyalgia, ADD/ADHD, GAD (anxiety disorders), bacterial infections (Lyme), Upper Respiratory Infections, fungal infections (Candida, Valley Fever), Depression, Suicide, Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, epilepsi, stroke, Leaky Gut, POTS, IBS, specific phobias, personality disorders, eating disorders, asthma, allergies, insulin resistance, kidney disease

Autoimmune diseases including HIV/AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's, celiac, lupus
Degenerative diseases including Parkinson's, Huntington's, dementia, alzheimer's, ALS, heart disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)
Endocrine Issues including diabetes, adrenal disorders, hypoglycemia, hypothyroidism, Cushing's

and any other related illnesses


Symptoms:

arthritis, anxiety, brain fog, fatigue, dizziness, hypertension, obesity, skin rashes, itchy skin, headaches/migraines, chemical sensitivities, heavy metals imbalance, magnesium/calcium imbalance, sodium/potassium imbalance, sleep abnormalities, night sweats, TMJ, sensory sensitivity, panic attacks, irritability, anger, tinnitus, muscle/joint pain or discomfort, scoliosis, hot flushes, sensitivity to cold, vision disturbances, food intolerances, exercise intolerance, histamine intolerance, glutathione deficiency, oxidative stress, high cholesterol, low testosterone, infertility, impotence, menstrual cycyle disorders, frequent urination, nerve problems, fatty liver, psoriasis, pyroluria, bad breath, peeling lips, plantar fasciitis, aching hands and feet

At this point, I stopped and decided that this mechanism is the root cause of all mental and chronic illness. The overarching idea is that illness occurs because the body is out of balance. If you release the imprints and reach equilibrium, then the body will self regulate and remain healthy. Remember, the freeze response affects every system of the body. It seems there is another way the imprints cause illness aside from becoming unrepressed. Over time, even if repressed, it seems the imprints put a strain on our health until eventually one or more systems fail whether that is cardiovascular, immune, digestive, nervous, etc. If you examine something like Alzheimer’s, you can see how the symptoms show a clear connection. Of course, ultimately, time will tell with all of this. I have a lot of articles bookmarked supporting my case.



Evidence

Sit down and relax yourself as much as you can. Now cup your hand around the front of your throat and squeeze like your choking yourself. As you squeeze harder, eventually you’ll feel constricted muscles behind your throat. This is evidence of the repressed imprints.

Alternatively, open your mouth as wide as you can as if you are yawning. If there is a click in your jaw – that is also an indicator. Regardless, everyone who is not actively releasing them (which is everyone), has them.
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  #3  
Old 12-07-2014, 12:58 AM
Cmt12 Cmt12 is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2014
Posts: 325
 
How to Recover and My Status

For recovery, the spiritual principles remain. This problem can only be solved through meditation and conscious awareness. By putting your awareness on your imprints, you cause them to surface and once they surface then they naturally play out and release. As you might imagine, you are going to suffer through the process since you are living in a constant stressed state. I have had a headache, tight muscles, fatigue, depression, anxiety, brain fog, low stress tolerance, amongst many other symptoms for almost six years now. This is my second time going through the entire process because I’ve had to start over from the beginning. When you get to the end, there is an opportunity to release the trapped energy and reset your nervous system but as I’ve found out if you are unprepared for this and resist against it, you have to start over. It has been a little over two years now on my second run and I have to think I should be done soon. The problem is it is impossible to know exactly how much longer it is going to take based on how you feel because you are only dealing with one imprint at a time. I’m not going to expand too much on all of this right now because it is completely foreign to everyone right now. You can watch Youtube videos of animals discharging their freeze response.

I want to make one point clear though. Your mind will not present you with anything you can’t handle. This will be the most difficult thing you have ever done but it’s not useful to think it terms of difficulty. For me, I didn’t care how difficult the process was going to be. I just cared whether it is POSSIBLE or not.

Jesus Christ

As I continued to fall down the rabbit hole, I started wondering about Jesus and who he really was and what he really taught. After my exploration, I’ve come to believe that Jesus was the last person to achieve the task that I’ve set out. He was the last person to heal his mind, turn his ego off, and transform into true Self. It has been a mystery what Jesus has been up to from the ages of 12 to 30. I think for a lot of that time he was going through his own spiritual journey in solitude. I’m speculating, but I think what happened was there were probably two views that branched off shortly after the death of Jesus: the one that is more in line with his real message and then the other that was engulfed with Jewish understanding of the time and what is close to modern Christianity. The latter became more popular because the requirements and amount of investment and sacrifice are so much less; it appeals to the ego. It’s a lot easier to just say you accept Jesus then to go through the process I’ve described. There is a reason why the Gospel of Thomas, which I feel contains the more accurate view of Jesus, was not contained in the canon and had to be buried and dug up in 1945 in order to exist today.

Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
This is about as clear as it gets. If you bring your imprints to the surface and release them, then you will be saved. If you do not, the imprints will destroy you.

Jesus said, “Men think, perhaps, that it is peace which I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know that it is dissension which I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war.”
Fire is the realization of the burden. It is the ego throwing a pity party.
The sword splits in two. It is the separation of Self from ego.
The war is after you have called up the imprints.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”
What you have to understand about Jesus is that since his teaching is about the metaphysical, he uses a lot of parables and figurative language. You can’t convince the physical you, the ego, to destroy itself right? He is teaching to your soul or true Self, which may be asleep or in the background but is always there. You won’t be able to understand Jesus through an egocentric perspective. When Jesus says this famous quote, he is not talking about his physical, human self. He is talking about something deeper that we all share.

Jesus said, "But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent."
When Jesus talks about sin, he is talking about the domain of the ego – to sin is to choose ego over Self. So, repentence means to retreat from this or change your direction from ego back to Self. The ego looks for external objects for salvation (money, status, religion, etc) but the ego can never be satisfied. Once you realize that these things cannot provide what you need, then you will turn inward and begin the spiritual journey.

Jesus said, “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.”
When you disconnect from the world, you’ll not only face resistance from your ego but from the egos of those around you as well.

Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters.”
At some point, you are going to have to choose between your spiritual development and your ego.

Jesus said, “For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.”
I mentioned earlier about how the mechanism is not only for survival but morality as well. When you are going through the release of the imprints, you will realize that some of the imprints contain moments when you harmed others. For instance, I would get flashbacks to and feel a lot of shame about situations in which I may have said something regretful. Often, they were moments when I didn’t think much about it or feel regretful about it at the time. The shame is a powerful lesson. Shame is a sharp, psychological pain. When you harm others, you harm yourself is more true than people realize. Whenever Jesus is talking about the judgment you’ll face, he is talking about the shame you have to endure to release your imprints and get to the ‘Kingdom of heaven’.

Jesus said, “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.”
When Jesus says ‘Son of man’ he is referring to higher Self. When he is talking in apocalyptic language, he is talking about the moment of transformation; the moment when you release the final imprint, release the trapped energy, and rebalance your nervous system. It is an intense process, so he uses dramatic language. When he talks about the end of an age or about rebirth, he is talking about the end of your egocentric life and the beginning of your new, more evolved perspective.

Jesus said, “To whom much is given, much is required.”
Boy, is that an understatement.

I think that should be enough for now.


The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell spent a lot of time exploring the idea of the hero’s journey. He talks about how in the mythology of so many different cultures throughout time, you can find similarities in themes. Google “the hero’s journey” or “monomyth” for details.

I believe the reason why we connect so much to the monomyth is because we are “remembering” our mission here. Spirit has been flooding our collective consciousness with this message for as far back as societies have existed. It is the next step of our evolution. For instance, take the story of the Athenian hero Theseus and the Labyrinth. In the Labyrinth (the mind), Theseus (Self) kills the Minotaur (ego).


Five Stages of Spiritual Development As I See It

First Stage- You are becoming familiar with concepts like the ego and maybe starting to meditate; perhaps you have experienced altered states of consciousness that have given you insights and glimpses of deeper awareness

Second Stage- You incorporate mindfulness and introspective techniques to actively separate from the ego and its attachments based on what your regular life triggers

Third Stage- You begin your conscious intention, or Law of Attraction, practice aimed at external pursuits which serves to bring up ego from below the surface; this is a more active process in which you are expanding your spiritual power and developing your intuition

Fourth Stage- After being able to fulfill the desires of the ego and realizing you are unsatisfied as well as further developing yourself spiritually, you make the decision that you are going to disconnect from the world and go all the way on your spiritual journey. You choose to serve Self over ego; you choose truth.

Fifth Stage- This is the stage I’m at now in which you are releasing the imprints.

Based on my observations, it seems most people with a spiritual practice are in stage 1 or 2 so I will make a post about the law of attraction soon which should be helpful.

*Disclaimer- To be safe, I think I should say I’m in no way giving direct, personal or medical advice with any of this. The spiritual journey comes with risk and everyone should take responsibility for their own personal choices. I’m merely hoping to provide information and understanding. Hopefully, this disclaimer will prevent any of the posts from getting deleted.
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Old 12-07-2014, 05:02 AM
BurningBush BurningBush is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2013
Posts: 562
 
I almost could have written this. Actually, I did so about a year ago. It was on another site but I'll post it here.

Quote:
The Two Desires

To keep this as simplified as possible, there are only two basic desires, the desire to be aligned with your individuality (who you are at your innermost), i.e., the desire for self-actualization, and the desire to survive. The desire to survive is fairly straightforward – its only tool is fear (although fear has many tools of its own), which aims to keep you alive so that you can get what you want. But what is it that you want? Well, you want to be aligned with your individuality, and fear’s role is to keep you going until you can make that happen. However, if you fail to make the jump from acting from fear to acting from individual desires, you will likely experience frustration. That frustration is evidence that you are already acknowledging that you want more from life than mere survival. If that were not the case, you would be perfectly fine with going along simply surviving – in fact, many people are happy to do that for most or all of their lives. However, since you are here, it is likely that you have felt the frustration of misalignment. Furthermore, when it comes to survival, the failure rate is 100% so it’s probably a good idea to take a look at the other things that you might want.

In short, alignment is established and perpetuated through the connection of the more fundamental desires, i.e. non-fear-based desires related to self-actualization, and understanding. When one’s innermost desires are available to the conscious mind, an understanding of oneself can be established. The greater the internal clarity that an individual has, the more external clarity he has and when he has both, he can more efficiently align himself with his desires and the external world. In other words, he can fulfill his desires. When surface desires are fulfilled, he can then bring deeper and more subtle desires into the conscious mind so that they can also be understood and integrated.

The Cause of Misalignment

This is the one area where I can’t rely on conscious experience, memory, or self-inquiry, so I’m going to have to stick to what I think is a reasonable explanation and in line with mainstream psychological theory. The reason I can’t rely on any of the above is that I think the cause potentially plays out from the earliest years of life, much of which is before conscious experience. In fact I think the experiences that occurred before conscious memories are probably the most important, more so than later experiences. At least that’s what makes sense based on what I know about my life.

Essentially, the cause is that, at some early point in life, the individual determines that he cannot fully be himself and survive and it is apparent that the receiving of love (in this case, acceptance is a substitute term for love) plays a critical role in the perception of survival in the early childhood years. The most likely reason for the conclusion of a conflict between individuality and survival is conditional parental love or perhaps no love at all. Where certain natural behaviors, i.e., behaviors exhibited in the absence of fear, result in a withdrawal of parental love, those behaviors are modified or removed by the individual in an attempt to align his behaviors so that the maximum amounts of love and approval are received. As the individual grows up, where healthy self-knowledge should be developed, concepts of who he should be develop instead.

How the Misalignment is Maintained

Misalignment with one’s individuality is maintained equally by the mind and body and there is a direct connection between the two. The mind maintains the misalignment via concepts of who the individual should be and the body maintains the misalignment via physical tension and fear. This physical tension cuts off communication within the central nervous system and maintains the disconnection between mature, individual desires and understanding. Fear literally makes the individual narrow-minded because it prevents the mind from entertaining ideas that don’t fit neatly into the concepts that it is holding. When an idea that is outside of the concepts held by the mind is encountered, the body fights back with fear in order to reign the mind back into the perceived safety of its concepts. Just as a healthy loop can be established between understanding and desire, an unhealthy loop can be established between concepts and fear.

Consciousness Grows and So Does Unconsciousness

There are inevitably some areas of your life where you have self-knowledge and some areas where you lack self-knowledge. In the areas where you have self-knowledge, that self-knowledge will grow, evolve, and become more refined. In the areas where you lack self-knowledge and are dominated by fear and concepts, without a jump to the other side, you will pile on more concepts and fear in an attempt to further distance yourself from the belief that being yourself is a threat to your survival. The belief won’t go away, but it will be further from the conscious mind.

All of this can be a good thing because it creates a kind of polarity or dissonance between consciousness and unconsciousness. Despite your best efforts, you will experience more and more pain as result of this avoidance and it will be more likely that you will realize that something needs to change.

The Mechanics of Alignment

If the causes are concepts and physical tension, the solution is to remove the concepts and ease the tension. When a misunderstood and/or previously unknown desire slips past the body’s tension, fear is felt. Normally, the body does what it can to tighten up again and keep the mind’s concepts intact, but if you wish to obtain alignment, you have to fight back against that tendency. In short, you have you have to make yourself feel the fear. Over time, allowing yourself to feel fear will reveal your desires and those desires will begin to bang against the concepts that were previously preventing understanding of those desires. I find that concepts are eliminated with little warning. It takes a realization that there might be something beyond the concept and it’s as if concepts are annihilated completely unexpectedly. When a concept is removed, acceptance of the desire that was previously stifled and new self-knowledge takes its place. When a new connection between desire and understanding is created, the tension that maintained the disconnection is no longer needed and any fears that may have resulted from the disconnection will no longer present themselves.

It seems that I am the only one on this board to experience the process of self-actualization like this, but I find that there are certain physical mechanisms that can be used to uncover more fear and thus more desire. In general, these mechanisms are whatever the body needs at any given moment. Some examples include sleeping, eating, sneezing, arousal, urination, or concentrated relaxation, just to name a small few. By listening to the body without regard to what the mind might say, the body becomes more comfortable, which allows for sensitivity to more subtle forms of discomfort. For example, satisfying a craving for junk food might allow an individual to look deeper into himself, because he has solved the top problem on his list of problems. If an individual craves junk food, but forces himself to eat vegetables because he thinks that eating vegetables is “right,” it is likely that the craving will remain in his mind, which will prevent him from turning his attention to pain or fear that might need to be dealt with (and might actually be causing on the craving on some level).

I think it should be understood that in order to create change in the mind, you have to change the body. In other words, mental processes are the inevitable result of underlying brain and bodily chemistry. In order to heal that chemistry, I recommend listening to the body, even if the mind warns you otherwise. In general, you should solve the problems that are most important to you first because they will lead to the biggest improvements in happiness and fulfillment.
The next section is just some revision after someone asked me something.
Quote:
The Cause of Misalignment

I mentioned that I wasn't sure why the perception of love was so important to survival in the earliest years, but I think the answer is pretty obvious. A child instinctively knows that if his parents do not love him, then there is no reason for them to protect and provide for the him, so he could die. The younger he is, the more helpless he is, so perceiving love is probably most important in the earliest years.

I've talked about the earliest points in life being most critical, but I think that conditional love given by parents or other adults is something that can shape an individual's self-concept and behavior long past those first few years. If someone is not secure in himself, he could be affected by others' judgments even in adulthood. To reword what you stated, an individual that feels security is an individual that sees no conflict between his desires and survival.

What I think happens is that, to the extent that a parent (let's use a mother, because she's probably more important than the father in the first few years) is the type of person that will not love her child unconditionally as the child gets older and starts responding to her preferences, she will not be able to transmit real love and thus real security to the child in those earliest years because she doesn't fully feel those things herself. I think that genuine love and the perception of security that comes with it are needed in those formative years and if a perception of insecurity is formed, it will remain as the child grows up. Then, as the child gets older and his interactions with his parents become more developed, he begins to learn exactly which behaviors yield acceptance and which do not and can will shape his idea of himself according to how he perceives he can receive acceptance. So, to summarize, for an unhealthy person, a weak physical and emotional foundation is built in the earliest years and then the conceptual layers are built on top of that weak foundation. If a strong foundation existed, he would be less susceptible to external judgment as he got older and started going to school or otherwise began to separate from his parents (I'm differentiating between the parents and the rest of the world because I'm assuming that his parents would give a consistent amount of love and acceptance all throughout his life).

I guess we instinctively know that we are social animals and so if we have never established security, we will continue to act in a way that attempts to maximize the acceptance that we receive even after we have grown up and should have all of the tools to provide for ourselves.

I think this topic is potentially very complicated but this is what makes sense to me.

The Mechanics of Alignment

The way I've been thinking about this lately is that all that is required is that we move towards pleasure and move away from pain. Before a certain point of development, moving toward pleasure is more about finding relief. On the physical level, the physical processes that I talked about in the first post are examples of that. On the mental level, truth is relief or maybe it's more accurate to say that relief is truth. In other words, whatever must be verbalized (whether internally or externally) in order to provide relief is what truth is. I can't stress that point enough - if you want to escape pain, verbalize or do whatever it is that brings you relief. Pretty simple, huh? - to escape pain, seek relief. However, after a certain point, when relief is no longer necessary, the next step is about aligning oneself with what feels good.

With where I am now, it seems like my conceptual objections to my desires are more often coming into consciousness after I feel those desires. This is an improvement over the previous state of those objections being in the way so that I couldn't feel the desires at all (as I've described). So what that means now is that I have to eliminate the objections from coming in at all, which is just about keeping my focus on what feels good. On a physical level, this is literally about channeling the energy in my body through it in optimal ways, but it's also about doing what I want to do.

Quote:
External Certainty: A Myth

Many people here are probably familiar with the idea of the futility of trying to gain certainty from the external world. Specifically, we seem to get the idea that "if I can just have..." or "if I can just do..." or "if I can just get..." everything will be alright. I've spent the last two plus years pursuing every tiny little desire that arises within me to try to find certainty through externals. Although I understood, on an intellectual level, the futility of this a long time ago, it hasn't been until recently that I could really see that futility and before I did start to see it, the truth for me was that I believed that I could get what I was looking for through externals. However, at this point, the impossibility of finding external certainty is becoming very clear. It's not a matter of not being good at aligning myself with the world or needing to change my life in a way to better get certainty. It's also more precise than just following my desires. It's about the way that I view desire altogether and what the source of what I've been calling desire actually is. Most directly, the source of what I've been calling desire is not desire in its pure form, but fear. It's the fear of being totally irrelevant and of having nothing to do in life and in order to combat that fear, I've been essentially carrying on with a bunch of small addictive behaviors to maintain my relevance. It's like there is this black hole in the middle of my mind that I've needed to dive into but haven't because I was avoiding it through addictive behaviors. I've actually heard the idea of "making up problems" (what I'm calling addictive behaviors) several times before and the idea really ****ed me off because I assumed it was like a kind of giving up in the spiritual process. Now I can see that it's a step that can be taken without sacrificing my faith in my own ability to know truth.

Here's a funny take on the idea of avoiding the black hole. The whole video is hilarious but what I'm talking about starts at about the 50 second mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c

Crossing the Finish Line

As I mentioned above, a lot of what I've been doing was to cross a perceived finish line of certainty. In my opinion, there's sort of a paradox here because there is a finish line and there isn't a finish line. There isn't a finish line because chasing external certainty will never get you actual certainty. Every time you cross a perceived finish line by pursuing external certainty, a new one will appear, so there is no real finish line when it comes to external certainty. When it comes to externally-based finish lines, the only way to really cross is to forget about the finish line altogether when the time is right. However, when it comes to the necessary physical changes that must occur before and alongside mental change, there is a finish line. That finish line is about establishing a certain level of connectivity within your body and, also paradoxically, in my experience, that occurs through pursuing all of the false external finish lines. The reason that occurs is that pursuing the external things that, with full self-honesty, you know you have to pursue (for example: eating a half dozen donuts for dinner because you know your body wants it more than it wants to each grilled chicken and broccoli - and yes, I've done **** like this before) results in a release of tension within the body. I think the release occurs because you do cross an external, albeit temporary finish line and the cumulative effect of repeatedly doing this is a release of tension, which expands the flow of energy in the body, which unveils more desires. If, as in my case, the desires being unveiled are fear-based desires, this inevitably leads to the realization of the futility of the process and you can start to do things because you want to, not because you unconsciously believe you have to.

I think that the black hole is not just a mental idea, but a physical one, and when you have extended the energy in your body to a certain part of the brain, you have effectively crossed the finish line.

One more thing about the black hole: the willingness to do what you know you need to do despite what you think you're supposed to do is the first step into the black hole. From the outside of the black hole, it appears as death, but from the inside, it's freedom.
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Old 12-07-2014, 05:15 AM
Cmt12 Cmt12 is offline
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Thanks for sharing BB. I can definitely see overlap. We all end up at the same place eventually.
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Old 12-07-2014, 05:41 AM
BurningBush BurningBush is offline
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The thing that's a bit concerning about your post is that you said you've been dealing with this for six years. I've been dealing with it for about three years and, like you've said about yourself, it's been a physical train wreck. Have you seen any improvement in your physical condition in those six years?
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Old 12-07-2014, 06:40 AM
BurningBush BurningBush is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cmt12
I have had a headache, tight muscles, fatigue, depression, anxiety, brain fog, low stress tolerance, amongst many other symptoms for almost six years now. This is my second time going through the entire process because I’ve had to start over from the beginning. When you get to the end, there is an opportunity to release the trapped energy and reset your nervous system but as I’ve found out if you are unprepared for this and resist against it, you have to start over. It has been a little over two years now on my second run and I have to think I should be done soon. The problem is it is impossible to know exactly how much longer it is going to take based on how you feel because you are only dealing with one imprint at a time. I’m not going to expand too much on all of this right now because it is completely foreign to everyone right now.
Can you expand on the part about ending a cycle and beginning a new one?

In the three years that I've been experiencing this and reading people's accounts of their spiritual journeys, your account seems to be the closest to mine of anything I've read. When you talk about getting to the end, did this have to do with the top of your head at all? Are you pushing all of the bull**** (tension, etc.) through the top of your head? I look at the imprints as being the muscle memory of tension and the escape route for this tension seems to only be up.
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Old 12-07-2014, 11:35 AM
Swami Chihuahuananda Swami Chihuahuananda is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cmt12
We all end up at the same place eventually.

I especially like when it doesn't feel much like work anymore . There's some clarity : knowing that the force of grace doesn't have an off switch .
I'm quite certain I'm not the only person alive to find this out
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Old 12-07-2014, 12:00 PM
Gem Gem is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dar
I'm not the only person alive to find this out

you mean... ... You're dead?
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Transcend entirely
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Old 12-07-2014, 01:15 PM
Rawnrr Rawnrr is offline
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I really enjoy your analysis based on your experiences, sound very similar to how I work through all this.
I do have a couple points on a couple of things.

I have found that the "freeze responce" you are speaking about generally occurs because we are "brain oriented" in our action in this world. When we are faced with a situation outside of our "normal expectations" this creates a traumatic incident. At which point our brain is actively searching for more data to help understand the situation and develop a plan to react to it.

With Autism, there is alot more going on than that. I have an autistic son, and I may even be on the spectrum myself in some degree. But to go deeper into that would take a long time....and I am going out the door. So maybe another time I will share on that.

Rawn
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