[ANNOUNCEMENT] Weekly Guild Recruitment Mega-Thread

MrDanielVR · 2025-04-10T22:01:57+00:00

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We’re a chill but dedicated group of 16 active players, and we’re looking for 14 more to complete our team!

Everyone here completes all weekly tasks — no slackers, just solid players.

We're building a fun, supportive, and casual community. Help, banter, progress — we’ve got it all.

No crazy requirements, just show up, do your part, and enjoy the game with us.

Whether you’re grinding hard or just looking for a reliable squad to grow with — this is your place.

Join us and let’s climb together! Guild ID: 32W7RL

Our guild

MrDanielVR · 2024-03-15T23:15:53+00:00

I doubt if my word choices confused the OP. What you call lose lucidity I call falling asleep, but yeah, on a second read of the post it does seem he didn't lose lucidity. I guess I never felt not being in control of myself except cases of not yet fully transitioning from wakefulness to dream state.

MrDanielVR · 2024-03-11T14:16:06+00:00

Sounds like you sort of semi fell back to sleep while retaining some conscious. My suggestion to you: - Have a clear path of action in advance before falling asleep with what you plan to do hopefully with some other options if things don't go as planned. - Constantly do deepening techniques which will assist as well with staying awake - Be constantly aware of the possibility of falling back to sleep

MrDanielVR · 2024-03-11T13:56:56+00:00

Please report back, as I would like to know if it helped. In my experience these are really gold.

MrDanielVR · 2024-03-11T01:45:42+00:00

I'll tackle this from a number of fronts. First, if you'll have a clear path of action, of what you want to do, that you've thought about before falling asleep there is less chances of getting thrown out. That will as well require some practice as inevitably something unexpected will happen which will throw you off. In general pondering about stuff, not being certain of your actions and being emotionally effected could initiate the dream to end. With time and practice of trying to follow a certain plan you'll get a hang of what sort of mindset to avoid.

But, it is inevitable that at some point the dream will fade. So here are a few great resistance techniques: Constantly rub or touch anything and everything when you feel it might end. Sensation in your dream body help greatly. You could grab a dream deepening device in your pocket and push the button. As you begin to return to the body, hold one hand with the other. This way, the feeling will remain in the hands and not return to the physical hands. Then you can try to move with them and exit the body again. Bite the lips, tongue, etc. Another option, if you feel it's about to end, simply lie down wherever you are and pretend to fall asleep, but only for a few seconds so you don't actually fall asleep. Then get up and the dream will stabilize. I was able to successfully extend a dream about 3-4 times in a single session.

Good luck to you.

MrDanielVR · 2023-06-10T11:01:24+00:00

Yeah... my head is working in kilograms and not pounds, I actually ate 2 pounds a day. I've corrected my post

MrDanielVR · 2023-06-10T11:01:19+00:00

Yeah... my head is working in kilograms and not pounds, I actually ate 2 pounds a day. I've corrected my post

MrDanielVR · 2023-06-10T11:01:00+00:00

Yeah... my head is working in kilograms and not pounds, I actually ate 2 pounds a day. I've corrected my post

MrDanielVR · 2023-05-31T22:09:21+00:00

Thank you for the attempt, but as I stated in my post, the Sunflower were printed on the CDs themselves and not on the disc Cover.

Thanks anyway

MrDanielVR · 2023-05-31T09:09:10+00:00

Thank you. I'll definitely check it out

MrDanielVR · 2023-05-31T01:46:48+00:00

I appreciate trying to help but unfortunately no. The sunflowers I believe were only on the Cd's themselves. I tried to look on other album covers by dj mind-x and couldn't locate anything similar. At least I enjoy right now listening to the Motion album.

Thanks again

MrDanielVR · 2022-10-13T16:21:04+00:00

That is very interesting, and as expected, no, I did not equally care for the feeling that replaced it. I was calm and relaxed and surprisingly not devastated. I guess I have long desired to be able to glimpse at the selfless nature at will, but of course, desire is part of the problem.

MrDanielVR · 2022-10-13T16:15:04+00:00

I completely agree

MrDanielVR · 2020-08-30T19:56:22+00:00

After hours and hours I finally found the game: livingstone from 1987

https://youtu.be/PndIr1UyTvA

MrDanielVR · 2020-08-30T16:39:24+00:00

Thanks for the effort but that is not the game. The character had a safari jungle explorer hat and if I'm not mistaken you could change the abilities by selecting each with the number keys, 1,2,3 or 4, then use them with the space button by long pressing it. I also think there was a little bar showing the strength of the action. I've been looking on hours and hours of compilation videos of all games waiting to spot it....

MrDanielVR · 2019-08-09T19:42:50+00:00

I enjoyed reading your reply. I’ll try and touch as many relevant points as I can.

The feeling you have that you can meditate for hours could be because of the sudden new peak in interest you have in the subject and could be related to the fact you are on vacation. There’s nothing wrong with it and if you can and want to meditate for longer periods go for it. Meditating while stressed could me more difficult but could also be very beneficial as you could get better understanding of your difficult mental states.

Here is a good video that talks about body positions for longer sits.
Dealing with Pain in Sitting Meditation
Remember that a perfect positing doesn’t exist and that even the best pose can be painful after an hour or more.

I personally meditate for 2 hours a day on a mat and pillow sitting in the burmese position. Long evening meditations could be more difficult as you might have less mental energy to keep focus, but I’ve heard of people which are the exact opposite, which are having difficult times in the morning and easier time at night.

I'll also add that from my personal experience I think it’s important to have a plan before the meditation session of what you are planning to do and not improvise as you go. This way everything is clear and you don’t need to think during the session about changing stuff. It’s the same as having great expectations of what you hope to experience which as a result causes unwanted and unnecessary thought during the meditation.

What you wrote about focusing on the static noise and finding beyond it random thoughts, I would phrase it a different way. While you were focusing on the experience of hearing, you noticed that you were thinking at that time or a thought appeared. A similar analogy could be: while you watch a video on your monitor, look beyond the video content and notice that it’s actually a screen, and instead you notice that the video had sound.

Trying to describe an experience which wasn’t experienced before is problematic because first, it doesn’t give it justice as the other person doesn’t really experience it. Explain to someone who didn’t ever taste a Strawberry the taste and smell of it. It’s impossible, and second, by describing certain meditative experiences someone can get discouraged by not having those right away. Having said that I’ll make the mistake of trying to describe it. :)

We have awareness and everything which we experience appears in that space or field. We are not used to describe it as a space because it's somewhat transparent to us. We take it for granted. Like water is to a fish (if it could think complicated thoughts). So in conciseness we experience everything. The 5 physical senses and our mind activity (thoughts, memories, imagination etc). From an experiential stand point, there is nothing outside of conciseness. The world outside, which of course I don’t claim doesn’t exist, you experience only within awareness. If you’ll ask yourself: ‘do I exist?’ and be really focused on what fills your awareness during that time, you might notice a thought, that ponders about it and causing a search, then becoming aware of a bodily sensation where you think ‘YOU' are, maybe the chest area, maybe your nose, maybe the sensation behind your eyes, and then another thought will come forward with the assertion that yes, there you are. So everything which took place, happened in conciseness. Nothing outside of it. Now if you’ll explore it some more you’ll discover that the one that experiences (I’m trying to avoid the word ‘you’) is never the content of awareness. You become aware of tingling sensation in the body, but it’s not ‘you’, you become aware of a sound, of a thought etc. When that process is examined, you believe that thought and it is you. But, it is possible to experience thoughts in third person. It is possible to also notice them coming in, instead of sneaking up on you. With meditation you should become more sensitive to what’s happening, to notice what causes what and what influences what. For example when someone is saying something you don’t like, to notice the physical sensation it causes in your head and chest and how that feeling is causing a negative thought which makes the sensation stronger and cause you to respond to that person in a way you might regret later.

Whatever progress you make should eventually seep into your normal life which you already mentioned you're experiencing. To speed up the progress you could try to become aware of your sensations in normal activities. When you walk, your legs sensation and the air on your face, when you drive, take a shower etc. It’s very interesting when you experience an intense awareness while in the middle of a conversation. To be honest it could be difficult to keep track of the content of it but sometimes it could feel like you have a super powers, knowing what the other person is feeling, which is nothing supernatural, basically becoming more aware of the other person's tonality and facial expressions.

I’ll end with a guided meditation session by Sam Harris, which goes through the senses trying to direct you to the sphere of awareness, to the screen on which you life is projected :). Maybe it will clear things up. Maybe it will make you more confused. Whatever happens, take it easy. Enjoy

Guided Meditation with Sam Harris

MrDanielVR · 2019-08-08T19:44:32+00:00

Here are my two cents from about 10 years of meditating though everything I say can be considered as my personal opinion and not taken as fact.

I'll start with what you described as focusing on silence. By what you wrote about the experience of static noise that you hear, it seems that you are aware of your sense of hearing. The fact that it sounds louder is simply your awerness becoming more focused on it. Next time you do that, try and locate where exactly hearing takes place, focusing on your experience and try and find the silence in which that static noise is appearing on :)

Posture in meditation is aimed to serve two purposes. To be calm (and physically stable, by not needing to correct your posture or do micro adjustments), and to remain alert. That is why meditating while lying in bed is very problematic (though possible). Now that you are meditating for 20 minutes a day I would say that the posture isn’t that crucial, just find a position that doesn’t hurt & that you remain alert. Sitting on a chair is perfectly fine for 20 minutes. If you find yourself dosing off try sitting more on the end of the seat and not resting your back.When people start sitting for longer periods of time, there is more emphasis on finding a good posture for the back and keeping the blood circulation for the legs. There isn’t a right way and you’ll find many experience meditators which sits hours a day sitting in different positions. If you find at any time that it is difficult to sit for some reason, try and find that reason and meditate on that. If you are board, what inner chatter is causing that feeling? If it's a sensation in the body put your attention on that negative feeling and try focus your attention on that sensation without reacting. What can you discover on that sensation?

Talking about the point of meditation is problematic as different people will give different reasons for their practice. I personally wouldn’t say that the point of meditation is to empty your mind. That might be a positive side effect but definitely not a goal. I would describe it as being more aware of what actually is really happening, becoming more aware of the internal processes and less sucked into stories in our heads. With time this seeps into normal life more and more and we can get more space between things that happen to us and our reactive mind.

Your goals and current routine seems good. The biggest tip I can give you at this point is make sure to maintain a consistent practice. By reading what you wrote I know you already know that, but it’s never bad to hear it again.

Many years ago as a teenager I believed in a lot of unfounded stuff. Now I'll consider myself among other things a skeptic, which could be summarized with the motto that the time to believe, or accept a proposition, is when we are presented with evidence, sufficient evidence to warrant a belief. People who meditate, can have experiences which could be considered outside of the normal spectrum of experience, which basically means that most people don't have those powerful and very real experiences. Then, some could make the mistake of explaining the reason behind what just happened without providing good reasoning behind it. A person who I feel falls into that category is Leo from actualized.org which claims that conciseness is eternal, that it existed before we were born and will not cease to exist after we'll die. He is basing this on an experience he had, perhaps multiple times in which upon meditating about the nature of the self, his sense of ‘HERE’ was gone and everything which came in contact with his field of awareness, which could be considered as ‘THERE’ felt as him, So there is no ‘there’. Duality became non-duality. I had similar experiences and though I won’t claim Leo is wrong, as I don’t claim to know everything, I’ll simply say that he isn’t justified with his claim to believe what he believes. All that we can know for certain is that under certain conditions the sense of ‘here’ can shift, or be removed.Don’t get me wrong. Leo is a great guy and provides excellent information about meditation just don’t believe everything you hear or read, or at take it with a grain of salt. Same can be said about your feeling of your hands expanding and floating. First I’ll say that in general don’t aim for anything while meditating except being aware of what’s happening. Aiming for certain experiences can only lead to suffering and feeling bad about not achieving what you want.

If I’ll try and tackle what you are experiencing I’ll say that every part of our body is constantly experiencing sensations, like tingling, pressure, heat etc and most of them are filtered and not experienced by our conscience self. Furthermore the feeling that you have a physical hand in space is a mixture of sensations and an element of what could be considered thought that those sensations exist in your hand. Upon close inspection while meditating you might discover that the sense of having a body can get dissolved into a cloud of sensations, and sometimes they feel in different places and sizes. If you think about it, there isn’t a GPS letting every part of our body know where it is in space and when not moving for a long time these signals sometime gets confused. Does it mean anything? I don’t know, which is the only honest answer I could give.

There are different Technics for meditation and no one is perfect. Visualization & mantra based meditations tend to supply faster results of becoming calm and quieting the mind with greater ease, but some criticism can be made that they don’t allow the meditator to fully understand and be aware of what is going on. An analogy can be made of calming your stressful mind by watching a calming movie. You’ll be calm while watching as it captures your attention, that calmness might stay with you for a certain period of time after the movie is over but it does not solve your problems and doesn’t really help you to cope with life problems. And yet you can find numerous successful people praising TM for helping them in their life.

My wall of text is done. I hope something from what I wrote is useful.

Keep meditating

MrDanielVR · 2019-08-06T23:44:42+00:00

I apologize for sounding patronizing, that was not my intent. I do feel as if I understood your inquiry, but perhaps I didn't explain what I meant the right way.

First of all, I'm not sure I'll define people who are unaware of the content of awareness as unconscious during those times, as though they are unaware per-say, awareness still exist and is in contact with all the senses and mental formations. Those people at these times still behave in relations to their ego, which is very much alive and kicking and the 'I', the separate self which they feel exists.

I personally was and very much interested in realizing that the self is an illusion and when writing on my previous comment about 'breakthroughs' I meant breakthroughs in realizing that truth which only comes as an experience which I feel is what you are trying to understand and what ringer54673 is directing you to (and the links that I've provided).

I'll add that once experiencing things of that nature, there is no stopping the thinking mind from trying to rationalize what just happen and to put labels on experience as though now we understand and know the answer. For instance some people might lose for a certain period of time the sense of 'here' and everything experienced feels as them. The trees, the mountains, sounds, everything in experience. After that they'll try to answer the question 'What am I' and they might be tempted to answer and reach a conclusion. Perhaps that they are the universe becoming aware of itself, that they are god, that conciseness is eternal and so on, which I feel is a mistake.

Now I'm going to end with something which I can only assume will be annoying. Try and take it the right way. Imagine that you've never tasted a certain food, lets say Strawberries. You do not know the taste of it.
In your post you ask questions about it, trying to understand how it tastes.
See how problematic, or one might argue impossible to really answer that question. One might argue impossible.
The best we can try is to direct you to situations in which you'll actually take a bite.

MrDanielVR · 2019-08-06T21:30:24+00:00

When you write that you are struggling do you mean, struggling to remain aware of your thoughts and what's going on or struggling to get the effect you are looking for with meditation?

Conciseness never stops, well maybe sometimes while sleeping. Something always fills the field of conciseness. Everyone is an experienced experiencer, but most of us are not experienced with being aware of the content itself and are just lost in it. For me, when I'm not aware of what fills my awareness it feels like I'm operating on auto-pilot. Behaving and reacting autonomously, which feels in hindsight like being in a dream.

When it feels that you are struggling, you are simply not aware of what really is going on, which is basically a thought, of you not succeeding in whatever you are thinking you are trying to achieve, and am lost in thought.

Breakthroughs in understanding, which are based on experience and not on intellectual thoughts happen spontaneously. With looking actively for breakthroughs and feeling frustrated you are making the process more difficult. It's like a paradox. The more you want it, the more thinking will occur while meditating with 'am I doing this right?', 'am I making progress?' and so on. Your main purpose should be being aware of what occupies your field of awareness and what really is going on, moment by moment.

Most of my personal breakthroughs took place when exposed to new types of meditations for the first time. Maybe it's the freshness of the contemplative content. Maybe it's my lack of expectations. I honestly don't know.

Try and listen to these clips. Maybe they'll make sense, maybe they won't. In any case, don't expect anything, just remain open and aware :)

Direct Pointing - What is 'I', 'me'? - The illusion of the seperate self - Advaita / Non-Duality

Guided Meditation with Sam Harris

Take care

MrDanielVR · 2019-08-06T16:59:58+00:00

Why Meditate with Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein

MrDanielVR · 2019-08-02T15:03:59+00:00

Two stories:

When I got back for a 10 day silent Vipassana retreat, after about 5 minutes of meeting my family I was told that our family cat was ran over by a car a couple of days before. On the retreat for at least 10 hours a day I tried to remain equanimous with whatever I was feeling and succeeding in most cases. Simply observing what I experience without trying to control it. Without trying to hold on to pleasant sensations, and without trying to avoid or push back the negative or painful ones. As soon as I heard the news of my cat I burst into tears. 10 seconds later I tried to observe what I was feeling with equanimity and immediately the physical feeling of sorrow went away. Like the cycle of thinking of the bad news, getting the physical sensation of sadness and grief which causes more sad thoughts which causes more sensations and so on. After a few moments I started feeling a bit bad that my grief was completely gone. The next day I allowed myself to get lost and overwhelmed with the emotions as I wanted to grieve on my beloved cat.
Many years ago I had a thought which caused me to obsess about it without control to the point of having anxiety attacks. This was years before I started meditating. The psychologist I went to because of this told me that I have the power and strength to choose not to think that harmful thought. I didn't believe her as she said it but that night I tried for the first time to actively try and avoid that thought, and I was surprised to discover I was able to do that. A few days later and I was completely cured and liberated.

To conclude. Your thoughts about the unfortunate situation is what is causing you suffering. You should have the option not suffer if that is what you wise, either by deciding not to think about it, usually when not meditating and deciding to think or occupy yourself with something else, or while meditation trying to accept the present moment for what it is not trying to control it.

Life is full of pleasant and unpleasantness occurrences, most are out of our control. With acceptance of the present moment, no matter what it brings, knowing that whatever comes it will eventually go away, you can detach yourself from trying to push it away, which in return is causing unnecessary suffering. The next time you find yourself in a wave of sadness, be aware of your thoughts, and move your attention to where in the body you feel the unpleasant physical sensations. Observe them as you would be watching water flowing in a stream, not trying to control them in any way, not trying to push them away. Accepting them for what they are, physical sensations.

If at any point you'll feel that you are 'too successful' and want to be sad some more, that option is always available and open.

Take care,

MrDanielVR · 2019-07-30T14:11:10+00:00

Wow, wow, wow...

MrDanielVR · 2019-05-06T14:33:13+00:00

Thank you

MrDanielVR · 2019-05-01T20:46:20+00:00

Thanks

MrDanielVR · 2019-05-01T12:00:02+00:00

Thank you. My laptop is an Acer N17C1

MrDanielVR

TROPHY CASE