WooWoo Stuff - All Things Woowoo

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701

My search for answers recently took me to Dhamma Kunja Vipassana Center in Onalaska, Washington for a ten day silent “retreat.”

First of all, they’re a bunch of lying bastards. It was twelve days, not ten, and hardly a retreat.

In summary, it was twelve days of misery. No phones, computers, no reading material, no writing material, two meals a day, and ten hours of meditation per day.

I was close to leaving on days three, seven, and ten but the sneaky bastards actually gave me some tools to deal with my discomfort and I actually managed to stay for the entirety. They recommend sitting for a retreat once a year but after nine days I was thinking, no way, I am never coming back to do this again.

I got out this morning and am already planning my next trip.

702

What sort of stuff did you do with the rest of your time?

Did you find any answers while you were there?

703

It’s a little weird to be excited to have some down time, to retire to your cell, and have nothing to do but meditate.

Yes - I got the secret.

704

It sounds kinda like going to jail. You can learn some secrets there, too.

I’m glad you got your downtime. Let us know if words exist to transmit the knowledge you just gained.

705

In my experience, very similar.

It is difficult to put into words. Vipassana has been around since before Gotama Buddha and the guy that repopularized it in the 20th century, S. N. Goenka, has tne discourses of one hour each on Spotify if you are so inclined.

I will attempt to summarize as succinctly as possible but will indubitably miss some important points.

Basically, it is a meditation technique that trains you to be equanimous (mentally stable) rather than reacting habitually.

Before you can learn the technique and implement it, you need to be living a moral life (there are eight precepts - no killing, etc…) Then you can train your mind experientially to be equanimous and recognize the impermanence of everything.

There is more to it, but that’s the main idea. The secret is that there is no secret. I summarize by saying:

1 - play stupid games, win stupid prizes (karma).
2 - train your mind.
3 - purify your mind.

The Pali words are Sila, Samadhi, and Panna.

The hours of no mental stimulation left my brain in pursuit of things to do, so it went up in the attic and pulled out a bunch of unprocessed shit for me to work on. Then down in the basement for more unprocessed shit. Then started in on all of my closets.

I would say that it shifted my paradigm. I would not say that it was transformational, but that it can lead to significant transformation if the practice is continued - like most self help programs.

The biggest difference, as I see it, is that through the seminar you are practicing the technique and learning it experientially rather than just intellectually. Reading or hearing something and understanding it is not the same as doing it and experiencing it.

A side benefit is that the lack of mental stimulation is a dopamine fast and results in some amazing experiences - oatmeal never tasted so good.

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706

Have you ever tried solo backpacking? You can do the same sort of stuff, but instead of spending thousands on travel and accommodations you can spend thousands on backpacking gear.

For something more accessible, I foolishly enjoy taking night walks in my town, especially this time of year. Walking and listening to the sounds around me, often as a low-level operative in my dog’s grand strategy of scent marking in a never ending struggle for neighborhood dominance, is probably the closest I venture into those meditative waters these days.

I’m just a guy who did some psychedelics in the 90’s and read a lot of books afterwards, but I’ll offer a bit of my perspective.

“Tripping out” is a blanket term used to describe what happens when the following conditions are present:

  1. You are on psychedelic drugs.

  2. You start thinking about something, which leads to thinking about something else, and so on until you get to some pretty wild thoughts. These can be new thoughts that lead you to better actions, or not.

  3. You might be hallucinating to varying degrees as this occurs.

Eventually, some external stimulus causes you to snap out of it, like your buddy Trenton saying “Hey fucker, you haven’t moved in three hours” or you need to take a piss really bad.

It is my opinion that the people who say you can reach the same sort of states with meditation are doing the same basic thing, often with lots of fancy words to describe self-reflection. You can trip out on anything if you put your mind to it.

It is my belief that turning all of that off is probably more important than figuring out how to do it. Endless navel-gazing is how one can arrive at some rather wild and impractical ideas that do not contribute positively to the wellbeing of yourself or those around you.

I think there is some truth in the feelings I’ve had of personal connectedness and the sense that a fabric exists that connects everything in the universe. I first experienced those in a visceral sense on some LSD in the mid 90’s. It is good to be aware of that and I think a lot of people across time and space have come up with all kinds of words to describe it, some getting quite wealthy in the process.

Caddyshack still offers a good cosmic perspective in 2024.

Be the ball.

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707

We are of similar minds in many ways. I did a four day/eighty mile section hike on the Appalachian trail a few years ago and can appreciate the similarities.

I am well versed in the idea of altered states of consciousness giving the protagonist objective space to conclude they have been fucking up their life. Stanislav Grof developed holotropic breath work as an LSD substitute when LSD was outlawed. I did a ten month training in breathwork. Conscious connected breathing for twenty minutes shuts down the pre-frontal cortex and allows for objectivity without crushing inner critic activity.

I believe I have mentioned my heroic dose of mushrooms a few years ago with the intention of healing my mental health issues. They were helpful.

When Ram Dass was in India a yogi requested nine hits of LSD and Dass obliged. The yogi seemed unaffected. The next day he told Dass “medicine good. Meditation better.”

The beauty of the Vipassana sentence, er retreat, is that it is free. I am still processing all of the information and the experience but have concluded that it is not just the meditation technique that make the retreats effective and memorable.

Post heroic dose, I was more settled and more clear on my path moving forward, and was equanimous most of the time. When I wasn’t equanimous, shit got ugly fast.

Post Vipassana I feel more settled but realize there is no secret life hack to happiness. It takes hard work. Luckily, the benefits are worth it.

The Vipassana experience gave me more insight into my own mental pathology, a better understanding of why I was/am so angry, reactive, prone to addiction, being a victim and playing the blame game. Knowing how and why I got to where I am, and being given a path out, has the potential to be transformative. That is a burden lifted.

The new burden is recognizing how long the path is and how much work is involved. Fortunately, I clearly see the benefits of pursuing happiness rather than enjoying misery.

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708

The path may be long, but if your head is in the right place, which it sounds like it may be, I’m not sure the work is going to be hard, or even “work.” I think if you’re really ready to give up blame/defense/attack, it might feel more like a pleasant walk to a place you want to go. Hopefully, at any rate!

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709

Trudge the road of happy destiny.

710

I guess it isn’t very woowoo, but the opposite of reflection often works well for me if I’m stuck on something.

Is this something I actually care about? Like not just in a moment, but in the big picture does it matter? No? Fuck it.

If yes is it something current or historical? If current get on top of it, if historical fuck it.

I guess prioritize and act, with the goal of living forward?

It’s very zen.

711

I agree with all of that, @Njord.

Breathe in strength, breathe out bullshit:

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712

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:upside_down_face:

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713

It actually was, lol. I tried a gram, and then two grams with no effect. So I tried three grams (low end of “heroic”) and that was enough for me.

I go to a mens support group through a Psychedelic society - a guy there is “experimenting” with high dose treatment, not sure what for. Said he has taken up to 13 grams.

Hard pass for me.

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714

I found that with shrooms, more was better. But I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything spiritual, just trying to get very high on hallucinogens.

Escape velocity! :rocket:

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715

I have a friend that is going through some rough times and was scheduled to have a psilocybin session with a facilitator two days ago. He had to come off SSRI’s because they block the effects of the shrooms, and he started to get anxious and fearful, cancelled his journey, and is now severely depressed.

I did a journey solo a few years ago and it helped me tremendously. I still have asshole episodes, witness the fact that I have guard rails up on my postings here, but that journey set me on a better path.

I very much want to help my friend and am frustrated that he is in such a dark place. It made me realize how accurate Plato’s Allegory of The Cave is. It seems like my reality is limited to watching shadows on the wall and believing that is the entirety of existence. Understanding that they are just shadows is a first step.

This reflection is the result of a night in a sketchy Day’s Inn on Long Island.

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716

It might be for us on this plane of existence.

Like, what if it was the spirit world casting the shadows?

I haven’t read Allegory of the Cave in a long time, so I could be screwing up the interpretation.

And

That shit (brain chemistry) is not something to be tinkered with by amateurs. Really sorry to hear that this is happening to your friend.

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717

I am not sure about this, but for me, it works. I recently had an ex-friend (I seem to have a lot of those these days) call me and leave a scathing voice mail because I had called him out on some behavior. It was an “Eff you, you’re an effing piece of sh*t” thing, and he was probably right.

But it really doesn’t matter because it’s all shadows.

I think you have it.

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718

There’s a really good Copernican doomsday argument that’s a little woo but still very good.

Suppose you had a big list of all the people who have ever lived and will ever live, and ordered it by when people were born. You’d be on that list somewhere, and since you’re not special in some kind of grand cosmic sense relative to all other people, there’s only a 1% chance you’re in the first 1% of that list. That means there’s only a 1% chance that the list of people born after you is more than 99x larger than the list of people born before you.

In effect this means that if only 100 billion people have lived so far, you can say that there is a 99% chance that there will be less than 10 trillion people who will ever live.

Even spookier, there’s a 50% chance you’re in the last half of the list, meaning a 50% chance that there will be less than 200 billion people to ever live. Total death for humanity in less than 1000 years.

The woo tends to come in where you can deny this if you claim to be cosmically special, or you can accept it, and deal with a real pending impermanence of humanity as a whole. Your works will run out of people to appreciate them.

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719

:man_shrugging:t2:. Friends are state dependent.

I had a buddy for years through sobriety. Hit tons of meetings, Best man at my wedding, lifting buddy, all of that.

Unbeknownst to me, he had constructed a timeline of recovery for me, of his own, with regard to my heart stuff.

So I do all of the cardiac rehab. A year later, another blockage forms, and april '21 i have another go round. More cardiac rehab. More of my regular weights & cardio. All of the stuff in my log.

All the while the pandemic is taking out people with heart/lung stuff left & right.
The church about 100 feet from my doorstep that takes overflow is running funerals back to back, 3 & 4 a day.

And I’m homeschooling my son, doing my best to guide my family through this shitstorm in a way that nothing gets broken and no one gets hurt.

And THATS when this motherfucker decides to start giving me shit about not doing enough to recover, maybe I should do this, why haven’t I done that, etc. Like he knows better than my cardiologist and rehab team. :rofl:.

Well, that motherfucker had to go. His time in my life and our friendship had run its course.

It was all good when I was all good, single, healthy, strong, etc. and we were cool bros getting jacked and tapping ass. But as life changed and I changed with it, it was no longer all good.

My state had changed. In a lot of ways. His kinda did too, but not really in the same ways.

State dependent.

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720

This is infuriating. I run into this with family all the time.

Hope all your health-related issues are going well.

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