A home - to share your spiritual journey

[Mr H]

Question: for the observer / witness position.

 

When I am observing the ego. What I have noticed is, primary I am observing without mind. It's a neutral observing. Then after a while, the mind slips in and provides it's commentary.

 

As an example of what I mean. I'm observing judging others. At first just watching like a sniper on the hill . Neutral. Then mind will come in and comment yeah judging others is obviously not good so don't do it.

 

I'm wondering what the best way of observing is? The neutral observing seems most healthy. I'm wondering if the additional commentary and instructions not to do it is necessary?

[Campion]

8 hours ago, Mr H said:

What we seek in the objective world are really aspects of our inner world. Because the outside world is essentially not real, you will forever be chasing your tail there.

 

Paradoxically once you locate it in your inner world it will be reflected in your outer objective world 

 

Just a few thoughts (I'm not being argumentative): 

 

Unless you're quite awake, it's easy to see it as a retreat to individualism: don't seek happiness or social improvements in the outer world, look within. Don't rock the boat of the political and financial systems, blame yourself for your unhappiness.  But it's a balance - too much effort in the outside world won't make you happy if your inner world is in turmoil. 

Dividing the  world up into inner and outer is still living in the dualistic paradigm. If we're going to do that, then we need a balance of both.  But if that distinction collapses and there's no inner/outer divide, then the distinction between spirituality and politics, religion and secular, also collapses.  

 

8 hours ago, Mr H said:

Examples. As I'm a male I will use the two driving forces of male desire, money and sex.

Main driver for sex or relationship is usually loneliness.

What needs to be found in the inner world, is wholeness. And being comfortable by yourself. You could call this self love. Once you love yourself you will find love in the outer world 

 

I guess that's mother nature splitting life up into male and female so we can come together again and re-create the wholeness that feels like it's missing.  Yeah, I think it helps to heal our inner conflicts and demons to go out making relationships in the world, otherwise the toxicity gets in the way.  

[Mr H]

1 hour ago, Campion said:

 

Just a few thoughts (I'm not being argumentative): 

 

Unless you're quite awake, it's easy to see it as a retreat to individualism: don't seek happiness or social improvements in the outer world, look within. Don't rock the boat of the political and financial systems, blame yourself for your unhappiness.  But it's a balance - too much effort in the outside world won't make you happy if your inner world is in turmoil. 

Dividing the  world up into inner and outer is still living in the dualistic paradigm. If we're going to do that, then we need a balance of both.  But if that distinction collapses and there's no inner/outer divide, then the distinction between spirituality and politics, religion and secular, also collapses.  

 

 

I guess that's mother nature splitting life up into male and female so we can come together again and re-create the wholeness that feels like it's missing.  Yeah, I think it helps to heal our inner conflicts and demons to go out making relationships in the world, otherwise the toxicity gets in the way.  

I see what you're saying totally...

 

But I think this is how Maya works mechanically. We project reality reflecting what is within us. This is more at soul, mind/psyche level - our belief systems, values, memories etc. I don't think it can work any other way. That is not to say not take action in outer world. More description of how the projector works. And if you want to change it you must look and work within. This does not imply do nothing in the outer world. Do what you have to do....but I don't think the movie makes  changes here, rather this is where the movie gets played..

 

Edit: the inner world like the director or editors suite. The outer world is the stage and actors. They still have to do the work!

Edited May 10 by Mr H

[Mr H]

1 hour ago, Campion said:

 

Just a few thoughts (I'm not being argumentative): 

 

You know I have to argue the toss dude

 

Need to speak to the Director about that...

[Mr H]

A reflection on my experience with anxiety.

 

The "groove" was initially made after a traumatic experience. And anxiety was the response to the trauma. It is the mind doing what it knows best, trying to protect "yourself" in the best way it knows how.

 

To avoid the same traumatic experience happening again, the mind tries to control a future outcome - this is what anxiety is, feeling nervous about a future event. The mind knows fk all about the future and the unknown, so it's not possible to plan or protect from the future. In its inability to do what it thinks is it's job, the nervous system gets activated, and with that you get the body and mind response which we call anxiety. 

Edited May 11 by Mr H

[Mr H]

Qu: when I meet folks, I notice the mind makes up its own story about them, which includes judgements & memories. Then I notice, often I have a relationship with the story of the person and not the real person.

 

How best to avoid this and create authentic connection?

[Mr H]

Call the police I had another thought today!

 

There is a reason why history keeps repeating and rhyming, it's not happenstance.

 

Because the majority of folks live in the mind. The mind knows nothing about the future (now) , it only knows patterns & memories from the past. All we're doing is recreating the past with slight variation.

 

Truly new things have always come from outside the mind, Tesla etc....

[Campion]

5 hours ago, Mr H said:

Qu: when I meet folks, I notice the mind makes up its own story about them, which includes judgements & memories. Then I notice, often I have a relationship with the story of the person and not the real person.

 

How best to avoid this and create authentic connection?

 

Would you say this is human conditioning, learned mental patterns going back years?  

 

If so, what do you think are good ways to uncouple the memories from the present action and behaviour?  To let memory be memory, let the past be the past and the present be the present. 

 

There's no doubt lots of methods depending on your tradition and path.  Regarding the path of mindfulness and meditation, I'd suggest there's a practice of watching the mind to see what patterns are occurring, and using the letting-go / letting-be you may have developed from meditation.  Think about what you do in your regular practice (meditation/self-inquiry etc) when stray thoughts come up from the conditioned mind. What I would do is recognise the thought, then let it go and carry on. 

 

It gets easier with practice, to notice the story, let it go and return to the present moment of what's real between you and the other folks. 

Edited May 11 by Campion

[Mr H]

20 minutes ago, Campion said:

 

Would you say this is human conditioning, learned mental patterns going back years?  

 

If so, what do you think are good ways to uncouple the memories from the present action and behaviour?  To let memory be memory, let the past be the past and the present be the present. 

 

There's no doubt lots of methods depending on your tradition and path.  Regarding the path of mindfulness and meditation, I'd suggest there's a practice of watching the mind to see what patterns are occurring, and using the letting-go / letting-be you may have developed from meditation.  Think about what you do in your regular practice (meditation/self-inquiry etc) when stray thoughts come up from the conditioned mind. What I would do is recognise the thought, then let it go and carry on. 

 

It gets easier with practice, to notice the story, let it go and return to the present moment of what's real between you and the other folks. 

Thank you. I never considered this before.

 

Thinking about it, its linked to the larger anxiety problem+ stories of things that happened at childhood. It's like a defense mechanism. Because being in the now whilst with others when I was young equalled trauma and abuse, I had to create a "fake" false, safe feeling now, to protect myself - or so I thought. So would present myself in a safe way, and imagine them in a way that felt safe to me to protect myself. Not sure if that makes sense? First time I've actually thought about this. 

 

Edit: I can still feel the residue today. By myself I can get completely lost in the now. Put someone in my field and my Spidey senses go off and the shutters go up until they leave. I guess that's why I enjoy usually being by myself.

Edited May 11 by Mr H

[Campion]

3 hours ago, Mr H said:

Thank you. I never considered this before.

 

Thinking about it, its linked to the larger anxiety problem+ stories of things that happened at childhood. It's like a defense mechanism. Because being in the now whilst with others when I was young equalled trauma and abuse, I had to create a "fake" false, safe feeling now, to protect myself - or so I thought. So would present myself in a safe way, and imagine them in a way that felt safe to me to protect myself. Not sure if that makes sense? First time I've actually thought about this. 

 

Edit: I can still feel the residue today. By myself I can get completely lost in the now. Put someone in my field and my Spidey senses go off and the shutters go up until they leave. I guess that's why I enjoy usually being by myself.

 

I can relate about the anxiety, it sounds like dissociation perhaps.  For me, I tend to go into avoidance behaviour and look for ways to leave the situation. Such as limited communication with new people and feeling relief when it's over.  When I can't leave and it's a high stress environment, it becomes what feels almost like an out of body experience. So I would get to job interviews and completely flunk it with my mind and body going blank, rigid and spaced out. I can't remember all the preparation and good answers I'd rehearsed. I probably should have gone to the doctor for some medication to get me through it, because my education was effectively wasted when I fell at the last hurdle in getting into decent jobs.  Yeah, it's coping mechanisms which have slightly different symptoms.   

[Mr H]

24 minutes ago, Campion said:

 

I can relate about the anxiety, it sounds like dissociation perhaps.  For me, I tend to go into avoidance behaviour and look for ways to leave the situation. Such as limited communication with new people and feeling relief when it's over.  When I can't leave and it's a high stress environment, it becomes what feels almost like an out of body experience. So I would get to job interviews and completely flunk it with my mind and body going blank, rigid and spaced out. I can't remember all the preparation and good answers I'd rehearsed. I probably should have gone to the doctor for some medication to get me through it, because my education was effectively wasted when I fell at the last hurdle in getting into decent jobs.  Yeah, it's coping mechanisms which have slightly different symptoms.   

Ty. Yes can completely relate to that.

[Mr H]

@CampionI don't know if it helps you at all. But to alleviate the issue you mentioned I have been trying the following.

 

Instead of regurgitative/ card shuffling thinking, moving towards authentic thinking.

 

How do I define this. It's thinking that is formulated in the now rather than stored in memory.and receiving direct from the empty space rather than memory 

 

How?

 

By asking questions, then waiting for the answer.

 

How does this help me alleviate anxiety?

 

There are only a small limited amount of question words, how, why, what, when, probably few others. So mind had less to do and isn't overwhelmed trying to remember pages of narrative. Then cultivating faith that the right answer will appear.

 

Still WIP for me, but is helping with this issue  

 

 

[Mr H]

Also a breath work to help calm down the electrical system.

 

4 second inhale, 6 sec exhale

 

This is the activation of Chandra Nadi (the moon channel) and Surya Nadi (the sun channel). These correspond, neurologically, to your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

•Inhale (4s) = Activates sympathetic / Surya Nadi - action, alertness, energy

•Exhale (6s) = Activates parasympathetic / Chandra Nadi- relaxation, stillness, surrender

 

During the day most of us are surya nadi dominant. I.e. the inhale is longer than the exhale, meaning we are alert and doing.by increasing the denominator - Chandra nadi, we move into relaxation.

[Campion]

@Mr H Thanks, yes I could do with exploring some more breathing exercises.  It's something quick to do in the moment when anxiety arises.  

[RobinJ]

On 5/6/2025 at 12:48 PM, Mr H said:

It depends on the intention. If it's to realize your true self which many call enlightenment, feeling better practices will not help, can even make the ego much stronger than when you started! If it's wanting to feel better then I would agree, guided "meditation" or going out in nature will help. If you want to develop new skills, guided meditation, hypnosis can help. But will not realize the self. The only way to do that is to experience pure being which is prior to mind arising, which is the purest definition of meditation. The reason why guided meditation cannot achieve it is because you have to use your mind to follow it!

 

 

Hmm not always re guided meditation. You can use it to settle the mind into the state, to give it initial focus. Same with binaural beats etc. Yes, it may start as in the mind, but your own self can take over when in the zone.

[RobinJ]

On 5/11/2025 at 3:52 PM, Campion said:

@Mr H Thanks, yes I could do with exploring some more breathing exercises.  It's something quick to do in the moment when anxiety arises.  

Anxiety is about fear, often a learned behaviour which gets embedded with a kind of addiction to that fear. You need to acknowledge that its about fear first. What fears do you need to let go of? Why do you have them etc?

 

[Campion]

6 hours ago, RobinJ said:

Anxiety is about fear, often a learned behaviour which gets embedded with a kind of addiction to that fear. You need to acknowledge that its about fear first. What fears do you need to let go of? Why do you have them etc? 

   

Yes, anxiety is a type of fear, or perhaps fear is a type of anxiety.  Anyway, resisting it just creates more turmoil and I agree that letting it go and for the energy to flow through and out of the body-mind is the way to go. 

 

Why do I have them?  It's hard to say because I've had them since I was very young. If there was a particular cause, it was long ago and I don't remember. Maybe something genetic.  If I can't get to the root and deal with that, I'm left managing the branches (symptoms) and let the whole process find a natural conclusion and end. Or at least reducing the scale of the energy.  

[RobinJ]

On 5/14/2025 at 2:44 PM, Campion said:

   

Yes, anxiety is a type of fear, or perhaps fear is a type of anxiety.  Anyway, resisting it just creates more turmoil and I agree that letting it go and for the energy to flow through and out of the body-mind is the way to go. 

 

Why do I have them?  It's hard to say because I've had them since I was very young. If there was a particular cause, it was long ago and I don't remember. Maybe something genetic.  If I can't get to the root and deal with that, I'm left managing the branches (symptoms) and let the whole process find a natural conclusion and end. Or at least reducing the scale of the energy.  

CBT works to find the root cause. Usually its a stuck trauma response, often as simple as something that was said.

There are so many methods to release trauma these days. Definitely worth a try to free yourself.

[Mr H]

Question: In my years here, 99.9999999% of humans I have met, act out of self interest. This is even the case with "nice humans" when you dig little. I have rarely come across human who only act from pure love and no self interest.

 

Why is that?

[Campion]

4 hours ago, Mr H said:

Question: In my years here, 99.9999999% of humans I have met, act out of self interest. This is even the case with "nice humans" when you dig little. I have rarely come across human who only act from pure love and no self interest.

Why is that?

 

You could say that love and self-interest are the same thing, or at least aligned.  It just depends on what your consciousness of 'self' is.  Arugably, your self is what you love. 

 

If your 'self' is limited to your individual personhood, separate from anyone else even your close family, and your love is for just for your own ego then yes of course that's what we consider as selfishness as it is happy to exploit other (separate) selves. 

 

Widen it a bit to your family and circle of close friends, and this is how most modern multicultural westerners live, very atomised. In other cultures, the self is extended to the tribe, the nation, religion, etc who they defend, have a preference for and sacrifice their individual time and money for. 

 

But yeah, most of us, that 99.999% have some form of dualistic love and selfhood.  Ie it has a distinction somewhere between self & other.  Even at the species level of identifying as human.  It takes someone with a very high level of enlightenment to love everything equally with no preferences. There's two approaches to this: either go the Buddhist way of breaking down the self to see it as nothing, no-self, self as illusion.  Or to expand the self, the perhaps Christian way of all-love, until the 'self' is seen to be everything.  It doesn't really matter because in the spiritual sense, everything is nothing. Zero is infinity.  

 

Edited May 17 by Campion

[RobinJ]

Self interest is a mechanism to survive in this realm. As we separate and be free of the control lunatics and the matrix they created, it will become less about self interest and more about the drive to become a collective to benefit all. Together we are very powerful, separate, we lose all our power.

[Mr H]

I would like to challenge the idea of oneness.

 

What is the evidence and is it robust?

 

The evidence as much as I can tell. Is that our essential experience is knowing/consciousness. This is the case for all beings and it is the same experience.Therefore we are essentially the same being.

 

This to me is not pure experiential evidence. Yes we all experience knowing but we cannot experience others experience. It seems more like logical conclusion rather than 100% evidence.

 

What other evidence is there we share the same being? One ess exists?

Edited May 24 by Mr H

[Campion]

1 hour ago, Mr H said:

What other evidence is there we share the same being? One ess exists?

 

The big bang theory perhaps? That our whole universe, all of our space-time continuum originated in a single point, a unity if you like. Later on it developed into a variety of different forms, ie what we see now, but they don't imply separateness because it all develops together. Reality is not constructed from a set of separate parts bolted together. 

[Mr H]

1 minute ago, Campion said:

 

The big bang theory perhaps? That our whole universe, all of our space-time continuum originated in a single point, a unity if you like. Later on it developed into a variety of different forms, ie what we see now, but they don't imply separateness because it all develops together. Reality is not constructed from a set of separate parts bolted together. 

Can a theory be considered evidence?

 

Can the content of experience prove the essential nature of experience?

 

Are my questions relating to that.

 

I think a good argument from a scientific perspective could be. We all share the same atoms. All systems are interconnected. Although this again relates to the content, not that which produces the content.

[Campion]

3 hours ago, Mr H said:

Can a theory be considered evidence?

Can the content of experience prove the essential nature of experience?

Are my questions relating to that.

I think a good argument from a scientific perspective could be. We all share the same atoms. All systems are interconnected. Although this again relates to the content, not that which produces the content.

 

In science, a theory has evidence for it while a hypothesis doesn't. So yes, there is evidence for the big bang even though it's not fully understood. 

 

On inspection, I can't find the distinction between 'experience' and 'content of experience'; ditto with 'consciousness'.  The contents are the consciousness, which is its essential nature.  Perhaps you can distinguish between these things though. 

 

Yes we share the same atoms, energy, photons etc, but there's a danger of creating a belief in a separate 'me', 'made of' my atoms. 

  

Likewise I don't know what you mean by content, vs that which produces content.  I see it as an infinite mixture of processes, content in flux processing into further content. Although perhaps 'content' isn't an ideal name for it because content implies a container and I don't see this in the absolute sense, only in the relative.