The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
"yourself" is just a specific type of content in consciousness. You don't need it to live or to function. Definitely don't need it to be happy. The mind's rehearsal of problems to ruminate on, re-running of unfortunate painful patterns and pathologies, and hand-wringing over all sorts of losses, etc, etc, are quite reliant on this "self". For someone to suffer, there must be a someone there. That 'someone' is a construct that you are actually better off without. What remains when you have seen through it and dropped that app? Well, the body, the mind, pure consciousness. Everything except the most troublesome bit.
There are three marks of existence that mar every sentient being: anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), and anatta. Because everything is impermanent, it is unwise to attach to these things (body, wealth, popularity, whatever) for wellbeing because all that has a start has an end. When you lose or may be about to lose something you are emotionally attached to, dukkha is the result. The good news is, it's never personal. Thinking it's personal is a delusion you buy into by believing in the senses of 'self' (physical and emotional sensations built on an idea from the mind).
Yet I need it for something far more important - Meaning. Pain is the proof that you're alive, as well as the price of it. I strongly hold that it's necessary to believe that joy ultimately prevails over sadness, beauty over ugliness, and so on.
I'd rather pursue the strength to bear my pains, than try to extinguish it along with myself through wire-heading praxis of ancient oriental death-cults.
It's not a death cult. Whatever you've heard from dabblers, wackos and drug users about "ego death" and similar things is just nonsense. You don't kill "yourself" at any point by attaining enlightenment. As for not wanting "rebirth", that is in terms of not being reborn in the cycles of suffering anymore. Doesn't necessarily have anything to do with literal rebirth after the death of the body. Needing the conventional "self" for "meaning" is a delusion, a story your mind is telling to itself. You don't have to take the mind's stories seriously. Pain is the proof and price of being alive? Really? Is that actually proof? Can you think of other proofs for being alive? Why attach yourself to wanting to keep having pain? That's a silly addiction. Whatever strength you achieve is temporary. You're going to be old and sick soon. Better to free the mind from delusion than to keep following the carrot on the stick that the mind puts up. You never really get that carrot. Not for more than brief moments anyway. What the mind, through evolution, is shaped to give you is similar to a bone from a butcher that has already been scraped clean. Evolution wants you constantly hungry. Never permanently happy. Serious meditation helps you break free from this unnecessary and pointless prison-construct. I think there's real value to finding the truth of things rather than being strung along by manipulative forces that were thrust upon you.
Can every thought, feeling, conclusion, value judgement be framed as "story"? Maybe I don't quite get what this means for you
Neither do I.
I don't want to be "happy", I don't want to be "content". I have no use for equanimity of a sheep grazing out on a sunny day. I'd rather be eternally hungry, and eternally discontent in pursuit of infinite heights. Of what is worth perceiving, understanding, possessing, enjoying. Camping on the roadside to catch my breath is good and well, but that's not where I'd like to get stuck
How would I do that without any drives and passions, without sense of frustration over not yet having it yet? When pain stands in my way, it becomes another obstacle to conquer, and here meditation and stoic techniques (in moderation) come in handy.
However, obsessing over min-maxing suffering and pleasure is just a waste of my time. Centering your ethics/metaphysics around this is a dead end. It's an animal thing to do.
It's unbecoming of me as a man. This is a betrayal of myself
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