u/BallKey7607

Mukti talked about how soon after they were married, when her and Adya went to a Gangaji satsang and Adya raised his hand to ask a question and got up on stage with her to ask. She says it was apparent they were both speaking from some place she didn't yet know.

I think Adya would have been around 33 then and would have just had his big realisation but not been there for long yet.

I'd love to see the video if anyone has one? Or if anyone has even seen the video or somehow knows what he asked her I'd be very interested to hear.

I'm referring to comments that are intended to be supportive rather than intentionally dismissive or sarcastic

I've been vegan for around a year and a half now

I just remembered this and keep thinking about what that drive would have been like and if it this was kind of a strange situation to even be asked?

I was 23 and she was about 50, we were just kind of fwb who hooked up occasionally.

Her son who was also around my age was stuck in the next town over and it was too late for the trains to be running. So she texted me, since I drive and asked if I could drive over and give him a lift home. It's roughly 30 minutes each way to the town he was in.

I thought it was a bit weird so I told her that I wasn't able to

I'm just thinking about what that drive would have actually been like? Like if he knew that I was sleeping with his mum and was only doing this because of that reason, I can't even imagine how he'd have reacted to it and what the vibe in the car would have been?

Edit: From previous times I'd been at her house on weekends when he'd called her I'd gathered an impression of him being a bit of a scumbag already. Things like him calling because his girlfriend had chucked him out the house for something while he was drunk and that sort of thing. So it wasn't something I really wanted to be involved in.

Plus the added tension of the sleeping with his mother situation onto someone like that being drunk sounded a bit unpredictable too

I just remembered this and keep thinking about what that drive would have been like and if it this was kind of a strange situation to even be asked?

I was 23 and she was about 50, we were just kind of fwb who hooked up occasionally.

Her son who was also around my age was stuck in the next town over and it was too late for the trains to be running. So she texted me since I drive and asked if I could drive over and give him a lift home.

It's roughly 30 minutes each way to the town he was in.

I thought it was a bit weird so I told her that I wasn't able to

I'm just thinking about what that drive would have actually been like? Like if he knew that I was sleeping with his mum and was only doing this because of that reason, I can't even imagine how he'd have reacted to it and what the vibe in the car would have been?

Genuinely not intending this to be disrespectful, and I don't want it to come across that way.

So I had always previously thought that the Dalai Lama must be deeply realised, but in the last year or two when I've actually watched him in videos I've been really questioning that.

I've now watched a fair bit of him and I've never heard him giving much of a pointing towards "that". I appreciate most of his role is public facing and talking to people at a different level, however I've seen plenty of times where someone asks him a question which is clearly coming from their genuine practice and he still doesn't meet it with or help point them towards "that".

He usually pinpoints the "subject area" which they are talking about and recites what Buddsim has to say about it. But he doesn't really meet what they're actually saying at all when they're asking from something real.

I just recently also saw his interview with Piers Morgan and while Piers himself is an asshole, I did feel the Dalai Lama seemed to say some things that were more about certain "ideals" rather than addressing the heart of the question.

Like when Piers asked him about sex, he seemed to imply that it's fine for reproduction but other than that it's not a good thing. This is something monks often give up as part of their specific way of practicing but I don't think many awakened beings would be saying for people in general that it's a bad thing. Similar to the way he talked about marriage as though he can't see the beauty.

To me, he definitely doesn't feel enlightened, but I'm also wondering beyond that, if he's not even awake in the sense of actually even having an experiential connection to "that"?

So when I say a relative answer, I mean something less absolute than "it's all one and nothing is happening". I agree that's true but I also think there is a relative universe too.

So why would consciousness make some a huge galaxy with so little life? Yet there's loads of life on earth.

The question isn't "why is there no aliens" because the obvious answer to that is there could be aliens in other galaxies or at the other side of ours which we just can't see.

But why isn't there aliens taking over our galaxy? If any civilians in our galaxy had become advanced and capable of space travel they'd have had plenty time to colonise the whole galaxy by now. Or at least send self replicating probes around.

So why did consciousness create so much space and so many planets for so little life?

So I'm imagining a vegan world where nobody ever ate meat or cheese, would we have made these imitation products anyway because they're genuinely a good way to arrange vegan ingredients?

I don't eat them very often, but when I do I'm never sure if it's because I actually think vegan burgers/cheese taste better than other vegan food or if it's just because I have the meal in my head from years of being omni. Plus we already know exactly what else goes well with these meals since billions of people have been fine tuning these meals for years so there's more established "meals" to choose from.

I feel like, things like falafel, onion bhajis, veg pakora etc would all happen on their own but I wonder about the imitation stuff. I reckon beanie burgers could definitely arise on their own too but I'm not so sure about the Beyond style ones?

Adyashanti talks about the 3 centres which open, the head opening is usually the first, where you find awareness and can abide here fairly untouched by life. This is the up and out movement.

The heart opening is where you fully open to love and feel a total intimacy with life.

The gut opening is where the personal will disappears and there's no desire to use the transcendent to even escape suffering. This is often the down and in movement.

So within this framework, if someone offered you a guaranteed head opening which would remain stable but no gut opening would you take the deal?

Heart opening wouldn't be part of the deal so it either would happen or it wouldn't.

If you don't take the deal, you just carry on as you are and have the same possibility as ever of awakening

I'm curious to hear how people feel about this. I'm really just asking this out of curiosity rather than to inform practice or anything so would love to hear whether people would take the deal

It was much more impressive than I expected. It's definitely the most serious bit of television to come out of Ricky/Steve.

I found the three dimensional characters to be very well developed, a step up from The Office even (regarding character depth specifically). The characters are so far beyond anything Ricky has ever done solo too, genuinely believable humans with deep complexity which explains why they behave the way they do. Comparing this to the characters in Afterlife it becomes obvious that Steve was the one behind all the character depth in the Office and Extras.

I found it to be more funny than anything in Derek/Afterlife/Alley cats too which is interesting because I tended to think of Ricky as the funny one and Steve as the subtle one which compliment each other to make a good show. But I found The Outlaws to be much more funny than any of Ricky's solo work so it made me rethink that.

It's not a sitcom so there's less moments which are trying to be funny but Steve's character has some really great moments, I'd say equally funny to the Darren Lamb moments in Extras showing that Steve can be really funny on his own too.

The plot was genuinely engaging and I was very invested in the characters. One thing which I didn't quite settle into was how much realism Vs stylisation there was supposed to be.

There was plenty times where the lack of realism was clearly an artistic choice (like in the "sneaking around scenes" where people were hiding behind each other to not get caught) so I don't want to just bash it as sloppy writing when it's clearly supposed to have a more cinematic feel to it.

However there was also times where people say or do things which becomes a bit cartoonish and I'm not clear if this is poor writing or part of the style I mentioned.

For example where Rani basically winks to the police officer that she was involved in framing the drug dealer during the interrogation and the officer just doesn't question it to "take the win". I don't think either character would have been that stupid.

Or when Lady Gabby's dad just loses it in the trial and completely ruins his case in a burst of anger, I think he'd have stayed stoic even when things went bad to not make things worse.

I also found the drug side of things to be extremely detached from reality.

One thing is when they talk about selling crack, they mention their customers being anyone from students to professionals etc, I'm sure they must mean coke here and not crack.

Then there's a big thing about how they're going to "cook" the crack and they get a specialist cook in as though it's like Breaking bad cooking meth, as if only certain people know how to cook crack despite it being something any junkie can do.

Then when they smoke the crack, the imagery is basically them looking stoned and then kind of on a sort of MDMA high after which makes them SLOW to react to the raid even while it's happening. Even though crack would make them more twitchy and ready for action.

Then there's the thing that a high end drug dealer basically hands his whole business to Rani and Ben who are like 18-early 20s and have no experience of dealing. And they just magically run it better than ever, right from the start rather than getting ripped off and scammed for being newbies.

Then they run it so well that the higher up guy again just hands them 10kg of "pure coke" and trusts them with it to go sell that. And the plan seems to have been that they were going to sell all 10kg within Bristol in individual deals directly to customers through a handful of runners.

Now I know this rant about drugs makes me sound like a wannabe gangster, but sue me. Steve just ain't about that life and it shows.

Some of this might be the deliberate choice away from the realism of The Office though but I found it hard to tell what was an artistic choice and what was sloppy writing.

Overall, miles better than anything Ricky has done solo, similarly funny to much of Extras and very enjoyable to watch. Definitely shows that Steve is what made the early work special

So growing up I was a hard atheist, I read The God Delusion and watched Richard Dawkins on YouTube. At school I'd argue with friends and teachers who believed in God and would always bring everything back to "evidence" and "verifiable claims".

I basically thought anything spiritual or outside of what material science was just "woo" and complete nonsense. I had a bit of an identity in my head as being "smart enough to know better than these idiots.

Then, when I was 26 I had a profound spiritual awakening and encountered God and other dimensions within consciousness directly. The catalyst was a mushroom trip which opened me up to something else, from there I wanted to learn more so the focus of my life has been meditation and Buddhist-style practices to see what is beyond the ego ever since.

What I do strongly care about is that they are a good person, living from a heartful place and attempting to live from love.

For me this is more of a "way of being" which I resonate with rather than necessarily which specific side of the fence they happen to be on in particular issues.

The reason I believe there can be a disconnect is we are hugely affected by our conditioning and so someone who has grown up being conditioned one way can still be a good person despite not having yet seen through their conditioning.

For example, I'm a vegan and genuinely think the animal product industry is the atrocity of our era which future generations will look back on and say "how were people ever okay with that?" just like we do with so many things we look back on in history.

With my last partner though, she was genuinely a very good person living her life from love but she also ate meat and dairy. While I think the action is wrong, since we live in a society where it is so overwhelmingly normalised I think we can be blinded by our conditioning just like I remember being prior to becoming vegan.

So in that regard, I would have the same approach in general, I'd care much more about their way of being than what family or cultural conditioning they grew up with and so what their current stance on any particular issue is.

Edit: It has been pointed out that what I'm caring about here is virtue ethics, so the title should say ethical or ideological "conclusions"

Science is the best tool we have for talking about what stuff does. Just like in quantum mechanics it allows us to make very useful predictions, but hasn't got us any closer to knowing what an electron is actually made out of.

It's fundamentally not even possible for science to find the nature of reality because science is already arising inside the thing it's trying to investigate.

Every scientific observation, measurement and theory is ultimately something known through consciousness.

So if all evidence for matter occurs within conscious experience, then how could that say anything about whether matter is metaphysically prior to consciousness?

I get that there's an intuitive assumption here that "it feels like it must be", but people have said similar things about things which turned out to be wrong throughout all of human history. Asserting this as true seems like pulling a bit of a "materialist of the gaps" to me.

So this doesn't prove God or any other metaphysical claim, but it does challenge that science has in any way at all established materialism. Science tells us how things work within the material world as it appears to us, but says nothing about what is primary to that.

This is where an alternative method of inquiry comes in, if you want to investigate consciousness you have access to consciousness in your own direct experience.

Usually direct experience isn't considered "valid" but it's worth remembering that we're all happy to use our own direct experience of consciousness to decide that consciousness exists. There's no scientific proof of consciousness, we just all know it's here because we know that we're conscious.

So to investigate consciousness we can turn our attention onto the awareness within our own experience just as the Buddhists and meditators through history have done. Each person needs to discover this on their own but the common finding among those who have gone deep enough through history has always been that the mind, the body and the world arise within consciousness. Meaning consciousness is at least epistemically primary, whatever reality ultimately consists of, experience is where all knowledge claims begin.

This experiential finding isn't an argument which can convince anyone else, it's different from typical science in that you can't really show your findings to someone else in a way that will convince them so it needs to be done for yourself to see. It is in a way, the most rigorous use of inquiry though because you are looking at the nature of your own experience to determine what's real rather than just blindly trusting your experience and taking that as a given.

So if meditators inquire into their own direct experience of consciousness and find that consciousness appears primary and unified in direct experience (some might call this God), then nothing science has demonstrated has in any way rebutted that finding.

Edit: I'm realising the majority of what I'm saying doesn't meet the standards for public persuasiveness so I'm going to mostly step back from this now

My dad always used to talk about how bad his dad abused him to kind of give me some perspective. He hated his parents and his whole orientation to life was basically to be nothing like them.

He'd say about how horrible they were and want me to understand how grateful I should be for how much better my life is. The true part was that he'd grown up poor and worked hard to get a good job so we weren't poor, however he was also raping, sexually abusing and torturing me at times too so my life wasn't as amazing as he portrayed.

One time when I was around 11 he was talking about how bad the stuff his dad used to do it him was in the abstract and I was kind of challenging him on whether it could even be much worse. He was looking very serious and said "you've no idea what happened to me", so I asked him to tell me then.

He basically said that it would be inappropriate to tell me because I'm just a child and I couldn't handle hearing it. And I was saying but surely just hearing about what happened to him couldn't be worse for me than actually going through everything he does to me. Eventually he accepted it and told me. He sort of paused to show how big it was going to be and said "My dad raped me." and looked at me as though he had just dropped a massive bomb and expected me to be shocked.

I was completely speechless because he was already raping me regularly anyway so I didn't understand how this was supposed to be "so much worse". My dad saw that I was speechless and stared smiling saying "yeah, exactly". And I said, "no, but isn't that just what you do to me??"

Then he looked surprised and said "yeah I suppose it is". And I said "so how's that worse?". And he kind of defeated, said "yeah I suppose you're right, okay it is the same then".

"animal-loving vegans"

I can't stop commenting "here come the animal-loving vegans 🙄" in agreement with any fellow omni's post/comment when they say something that'll trigger the vegans

My dad would often get it in his head that I'd done something which I hadn't, or that I'd done something on purpose to annoy him when it was an accident, or something that I'd said innocently was meant as a dig against him when it wasn't. Then he'd force to "admit" it through sustained violence until I realised that the only way out of this would just be to say that I done it. Then I'd get in trouble from him for it, and he'd tell my mum and I'd get in trouble from her too. She was a narcissist and so when she'd tell me off she'd tell me off she'd really tear me down and make me feel like such a bad person.

Another thing would be if I told my mum how he'd been abusing me or my sister and then he'd use the threat of violence to make me tell her I lied and then I'd get in trouble from her for "lying".

I always found this to be the most frustrating and unfair thing ever to be getting in trouble for something I didn't even do! Sometimes if my mum was really pushing really hard on saying how bad I was I'd break and tell the truth that my dad was forcing me to say it but that would lead to me getting hurt so badly by him later than I was usually too scared to.

My mum knew that this sometimes happened and when I broke and told her I always begged her not to tell him that I told the truth and just pretend she was still annoyed at me but she always told him, and he always got me back.

Has anyone else experienced this with getting in trouble for things you didn't even do? What was it like?

(30m)

Both my parents were pretty horrible people, but my dad was particularly competitive with me in terms of wanting to "be the man" etc, which is what led to these kind of petty things. This was when I was around 8 or something though.

I was often blamed for things I didn't do and in trouble when I hadn't done anything wrong or just him being nasty to me for no reason so it led to me wanting to antagonise my dad for a sense of control. Especially in front of my mum because she didn't approve of lots of anger etc so I wanted her to be annoyed at him.

So the first time he threw my food on the floor was when we were sitting at the table (mum, dad and sister) and I must have said something to piss him off in response to someone mean he'd said to me so he threw my food on the floor. My mum got really upset with him saying that she'd just spent ages making the food and asking what she'd done to deserve that. He said he wasn't thinking about that and was just angry at me.

So then my mum made me pizza since I hadn't eaten yet and I sat down to eat it. Just as I sat down with it I said to my dad "see that didn't work out very well did it, now I have a lovely pizza which I want even more". Then my dad threw my pizza on the floor! And I told my mum and she was so annoyed my dad for doing it again after she's just spent the time making me two meals. On this occasion I kind of found it funny to see him getting in trouble so I didn't really mind.

Then it happened more often and it started to really get to me. I wasn't being fed very much to begin with because my mum was a narcissist and had some weird ideas about how she thought it makes her look like a good parent if me and my sister were as skinny as possible so she fed us basically the absolute minimum. I wasn't dangerously underweight but very skinny and always hungry so it was a big deal when my dad would take my food.

For a while it would happen quite a lot and then I'd throw my dad's food on the ground after. Or sometimes after he threw mine on the ground I'd try to quicky grab his and eat his instead, or if he was guarding it I'd take my mum's and eat hers. So our dinners got pretty crazy for a while.

My mum was getting really upset that she was spending all that time cooking when a lot of the food would always get thrown around so she kept threatening to stop cooking.

I started asking if I could eat my food separately and my mum said yes but my dad wasn't keen. So then he'd come through to the other room I was eating in and just stand and stare at me to make me uncomfortable. One time I carried my plate back through to make sure he didn't knock it over and come to tell my mum he wasn't letting me eat Iike we'd agreed and then he just knocked it out my hand on the way to tell her.

My dad would often be quite mean and patronising to me and when telling me off for something (when I was a child) and he'd turn to my mum and say "it's like talking to a child", and I'd always say "I am a child!".

So then one time at the table just before dinner I said to him "DO NOT THROW ANY FOOD ON THE FLOOR TODAY" and turned to my mum and said "it's like talking to a child".

I don't even remember what happened after that but I know he went crazy, then probably threw me on the ground and really hurt me but most of the violent side of things usually gets blocked out in my mind.

One time then after we'd agreed to stop this we were all sitting at the table about to eat and I was feeling a lot of tension so I said "let's just hope none of it ends up on the floor today" and my dad went crazy and my mum was just asking why I'd say that.

My mum always treated us "as bad as each other" and thought it was immature and like neither of us were doing anything to stop it.

All my cheeky comments would be after my dad saying something really mean though and he was always calling me pathetic/a buffoon/a useless article/retard and impersonating me for my stutter to mock me.

How does all this sound to you?

(30m)

Both my parents were pretty horrible people, but my dad was particularly competitive with me in terms of wanting to "be the man" etc, which is what led to these kind of petty things. This was when I was around 8 or something though.

I was often blamed for things I didn't do and in trouble when I hadn't done anything wrong or just him being nasty to me for no reason so it led to me wanting to antagonise my dad for a sense of control. Especially in front of my mum because she didn't approve of lots of anger etc so I wanted her to be annoyed at him.

So the first time he threw my food on the floor was when we were sitting at the table (mum, dad and sister) and I must have said something to piss him off in response to someone mean he'd said to me so he threw my food on the floor. My mum got really upset with him saying that she'd just spent ages making the food and asking what she'd done to deserve that. He said he wasn't thinking about that and was just angry at me.

So then my mum made me pizza since I hadn't eaten yet and I sat down to eat it. Just as I sat down with it I said to my dad "see that didn't work out very well did it, now I have a lovely pizza which I want even more". Then my dad threw my pizza on the floor! And I told my mum and she was so annoyed my dad for doing it again after she's just spent the time making me two meals. On this occasion I kind of found it funny to see him getting in trouble so I didn't really mind.

Then it happened more often and it started to really get to me. I wasn't being fed very much to begin with because my mum was a narcissist and had some weird ideas about how she thought it makes her look like a good parent if me and my sister were as skinny as possible so she fed us basically the absolute minimum. I wasn't dangerously underweight but very skinny and always hungry so it was a big deal when my dad would take my food.

For a while it would happen quite a lot and then I'd throw my dad's food on the ground after. Or sometimes after he threw mine on the ground I'd try to quicky grab his and eat his instead, or if he was guarding it I'd take my mum's and eat hers. So our dinners got pretty crazy for a while.

My mum was getting really upset that she was spending all that time cooking when a lot of the food would always get thrown around so she kept threatening to stop cooking.

I started asking if I could eat my food separately and my mum said yes but my dad wasn't keen. So then he'd come through to the other room I was eating in and just stand and stare at me to make me uncomfortable. One time I carried my plate back through to make sure he didn't knock it over and come to tell my mum he wasn't letting me eat Iike we'd agreed and then he just knocked it out my hand on the way to tell her.

My dad would often be quite mean and patronising to me and when telling me off for something (when I was a child) and he'd turn to my mum and say "it's like talking to a child", and I'd always say "I am a child!".

So then one time at the table just before dinner I said to him "DO NOT THROW ANY FOOD ON THE FLOOR TODAY" and turned to my mum and said "it's like talking to a child".

I don't even remember what happened after that but I know he went crazy, then probably threw me on the ground and really hurt me but most of the violent side of things usually gets blocked out in my mind.

One time then after we'd agreed to stop this we were all sitting at the table about to eat and I was feeling a lot of tension so I said "let's just hope none of it ends up on the floor today" and my dad went crazy and my mum was just asking why I'd say that.

My mum always treated us as "as bad as each other" and thought it was immature and like neither of us were doing anything to stop it.

All my cheeky comments would be after my dad saying something really mean though and he was always calling me pathetic/a buffoon/a useless article/retard and impersonating me for my stutter to mock me.

How does all this sound to you?

(30m)

I know I am definitely attracted to women, but trying to figure out if I could be bi

My dad was sexually abusing me anyway so it didn't only happen because of this.

He was really homophobic, I remember one time when I was around 8 or 9 we were in a changing room and he saw me looking at a man who was getting changed and I think the man might have noticed which is what made my dad so angry. Then he threw me hard against the metal bench in the changing room and I really hurt my head.

Another time, he had again thought I'd been looking and when we got home he was telling me how bad it is and how bad gay men are. He was saying "this is what these kind of men will do to you" and raped me saying it was for my own good because he can't let me grow up thinking it's okay to be gay, and that what they would do to me is much worse so it was for my own good to realise never to do that.

There was other similar things too and so by the time I was old enough to understand sex and think about it consciously I basically just considered myself straight and never questioned it. I had relationships with women and never gave any consideration to my sexuality, then in my 20s I had a sort of love affair with a gay man but it was mostly just emotional. We'd hug and sometimes kiss when drunk but it was really just an emotional thing, I did feel like I loved him though. He was interested in the sexual side but I didn't feel drawn to that so we kept it just emotional really.

Then, now more recently I've started enjoying watching gay porn sometimes so I'm thinking there must be at least some attraction to men. But the feeling is quite different, I'm more into it in a sort of dirty kinky way than I would be watching straight porn where I'd enjoy intimacy and kissing too so I don't really know. When I think about hooking up with guys I don't really feel like I want to but I don't know if that's partly because of my association with being told it's shameful, plus I've been sexually abused by a lot of men as well as my dad so I think I also just don't really feel safe with men.

When I had initially fallen in love with the guy before I'd sort of thought maybe I was bi but then the sexual side never really went anywhere so then I thought maybe not so much and was left confused. Now I'm thinking maybe there is something to it but I only get off to men in quite a narrow way since it's just kind of a porn fantasy at the moment. My beliefs are completely progressive around sexuality but I wonder if the physical and sexual punishments as a child for looking at men could have taught my body that it isn't okay at a level deeper than my own personal beliefs.

Does anyone have any insights on this?