I wanted to get the opinions of people here on meditation, hopefully of those who meditate. tl;dr have an extremely fucked up brain, tried psychiatric drugs, and saw the best results from simple meditation. Just wanted to get thoughts from those who have tried it.
I have had a fucked up life, mostly due to my own faults, I have had high levels of stress since I was maybe 15 and at 23, I now have ulcers inside my body due to acid reflux. My ADHD is the worst I or anyone I know has ever seen and I can never be happy. Everything is always bad and wrong. My issues with trauma with work, girls and my own family are quite well documented here and on the subreddit and I have always been the saddest person I know. I tried meditation on and off on a friend's advice and came across Christopher Hareesh Wallis, being a Hindu in North India, I never really thought much of meditation but doing his guided meditations was a life changer.
I have tried recreational drugs, sex, psychiatric drugs, physical culture, sports, and hard sparring in my MMA gym but nothing, nothing comes close to the amount of inner peace I feel when I meditate, apart from doing a good day's work in my startup. I do feel quite anxious at times, on times when I text my oneitis or when my parents talk about my startup, cursing me to get a low paying job instead of trying my hand at getting into an incubator in silicon valley. Yet, whenever that happens, I somehow want to meditate more than before and clear my head out.
My experiences with meditation are brief and though I am not someone who I like, I cannot recommend it enough to everyone, what people say about it is in fact true in a literal sense if you do it long enough. My aim for now is to meditate a little daily and one day achieve awakening. Please let me know what you guys feel.
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Notes -
Basic focus/mindfulness meditation is a skill that everyone should learn. Particularly INT*'s that live inside their heads. It really helps with anxiety and stress. And once you know how, no one can take it away from you. You could be bare naked and restrained in a torture dungeon somewhere, and you can still do it (admittedly with possibly limited benefits if you are actually being tortured, but its better than nothing).
Exercise is probably still #1, but meditation is #2 for activities you can actually do to settle yourself and better your state of mind.
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Been doing it for 7 years.
Stream entry is one of the best things money can't buy.
I hope to reach 3rd Path (anagami) if I have enough time. :)
Woah, I hope I can achieve awakening asap and use the clarity I get from mediation for success in other things in life.
It's honestly an amazing experience, please tell me more about how you got started.
I don't know what practices you are engaged in in your meditation. I've been doing zazen and kinhin daily for the last 25 years. Alan Watts said talking about meditation is always something of a farce. Over time I've come to agree with this, but I'll try here.
As you progress in your meditation, if you are, the illusory nature of this phrase "I hope I can achieve" should become more obvious. The first illusion is the concept of achieving. Wherever you go, there you are. Next is hope, which is attachment to desire and fuel for suffering. The final illusion is, of course, "I", or the concept of the Self.
Its very difficult to communicate this via words. Through our meditation we directly experience the fundamental emptiness of these perceived phenomena, so please continue to mediate. A more experienced guide is suggested, as your practice progresses there are a few known...stumbling blocks (for lack of a better term) that an experienced person can help you with.
No offense, but this seems objectively wrong by any reasonable standard. Most obviously, whatever your beliefs about achievement, surely "achievement" as a concept applies at least to people's progress learning to meditate. You'd say that becoming better at meditation and letting go of attachment is good, right? What can progress along that dimension be called except achievement? And whatever your personal beliefs about suffering, you believe that other people still have attachments and do suffer, and this is bad, right? Therefore whatever your own desires, it makes sense to "hope" that others will come around to your own lack of attachment and stop suffering.
I suppose I don't understand the concept of (dis)attachment in general. 99.9% of my own suffering is caused because I am a reasoning, thinking human being who has values, and those values are not all always perfectly satisfied. I can imagine self-modifying and removing those values/desires pretty easily, but why should I do so? Deleting my own desire to help others, or at least my inclination to be pleased when their circumstances improve (i.e. desire to see their circumstances improve), seems like a straightforwardly evil action.
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Be wary of the "asap" and "using it". It happens here, now. Not in trying to get somewhere you're not; or to gain something. It's about letting go. The "enlightened" brain runs fewer programs than the typical one. And in a sense it involves being willing to give up the world and your life - or at least your emotional attachment to both of these things. It can bring clarity. My working memory is in much better shape now. But you might find yourself less driven than you are currently. Your motivations for acting upon the world may become more wholesome and true to values instead of being driven towards wealth and praise.
But you may be familiar with that already so I'll not babble on.
For me the process started because of desperation. I was suffering badly every day. My life and my mental health was bad. It seemed like nothing I could do externally could take away all the pain. That's a boon for meditation, in a way. It's the one that the fully accomplished billionaire and the hopelessly depressed homeless person share: nothing they do in the world will take away their pain. So the work must be done inside. :)
The book The Mind Illuminated made pretty big claims in its early chapters: liberation from suffering and the dissolving of unwise ruminations and patterns of anxiety can happen if you meditate diligently every day. So that's what I did. I went for it fully. 45 minutes per day at first, but ramping up to 2 hours per day the next year. It was a big investment but it paid off.
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