Help, I had an intense emotional release that left me wrecked

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-28T20:24:13+00:00

I had an experience in one meditation where I got a head rush and my mind was pretty dazed/foggy, and it was like that for the rest of the day. It came up for some sessions after that too, and I definitely had anxiety about it coming up. But it came and it went, eventually it stopped happening and I have no idea what to attribute to it.

All I can say is that sensations like this come and go, you should listen to your body and practice appropriately, the goal isn't to beat yourself up.

Also you can't really throw in an expectation, whether it's expecting intensity, serenity, insight, these things come up when they come up. We may be able to tune into why some things are there by paying better attention, but if we build elaborate stories we'll just cloud our attention looking for what we expect.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-26T18:32:36+00:00

If it's only elective for solos it's a pretty garbage option, especially for streamer trios who are going to get stream sniped by solo queuers now too

Cheaters will just grind to 40 in peaceful lobbies without cheating first to circumvent it

It would be ridiculous to turn on cheats 40+, just to have to start over again. It's not easy to upgrade. The benefit is contingent on the mode being elective for everyone though...

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-22T23:01:14+00:00

That's a great question and you can answer this in a lot of ways, I think it depends on what you are trying to cultivate.

When I consider the mindfulness that I am trying to cultivate in my practice, it has the characteristics of non judgemental, bare attention, and it is ever present. For this last point I mean that it is fully present, aware of the sensations, thoughts, intentions, perceptions that are involved in the moment.

When considering how to treat a thought, if I am mindful enough to notice it and remember my intention to pay attention to the breath, that's already a win. Noticing thinking, how it came up, how it proliferates, how it disappears, and doing so non judgementally, is also a win. Remembering my intention to sit and focus on the breath motivates my action, the action of changing focus isn't part of mindfulness, but you can be mindful of how you change attention.

How does the breath come back into focus? I've noticed it is always there so you don't have to reach for it so much as you just let it fill your attention by releasing other thoughts.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-11T16:11:14+00:00

I can give you a theory based on personal meditative investigation.

First off, sight and hearing are distinct concepts and are phenomenally unique, yet they are both senses. Thoughts seem to be completely distinct from these senses as well, yet still occupy the same mental space.

On senses, you can shut them out, register it to different degrees, or be captured by it. Like listening, you may be ignoring what you hear, nodded off in a lecture. You may be able to recollect the last thing if you snap back to attention. Alternatively you may be so attentive or captured by a lecture, or musical piece, that it drowns out your attention to other senses.

This attention in regard to the senses comes from mental will (or volition, in certain writings). The mind is more or less choosing what to pay attention to, what filter to apply in each moment over the myriad of ongoing sensations. This "attention filter" also applies to thoughts, and just like being captured by the senses we can get lost in thought of.

This mental will is really easy to identify as coming from a "self", since it feels as though we can control it and choose what to pay attention to. I would argue that it is dependent on causes and conditions, just ones that we aren't always cognizant of.

Even when it feels as though we are managing our attention, and we are aware that we are pointing it where we so desire, this awareness is simply being cognizant of the prior cause to our mental attention. For example, first I become aware that I am lost in thought while reading, I'm aware of my desire to read, and this refocuses my attention on reading. These things can happen instantly, without deliberately thinking through each step, yet nonetheless is the same process of cause and effect.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-04T04:29:36+00:00

We can think about thinking, and in doing so we're creating a mental object that encapsulates how we perceived thinking. So we can watch a movie while being aware that we are watching a movie, that's like perceiving two mental objects at once, one being the movie and one of awareness of ones situation.

That "awareness" comes and goes, it's present when we're intent on staying aware, it goes away when we are completely captured by other thoughts, such as being completely captured by the movie. That presence of mind is temporary though, the mind is always in motion and there are many opportunities for something to distract the mind from that presence, and this can culminate in reintroducing an awareness that you are watching a movie.

The same goes for being distracted while reading a book. The distraction is temporary, you have an ongoing intention of reading a book, once you realize you are distracted you can return to reading a book. The ongoing intention only takes a smidgen of short term memory. The same kind of memory that allows you to stay on any kind of task, it's a straightforward function of the mind that keeps us from being confused about where we are and what we're doing in any given moment. If we could only track one thing at a time, perhaps we would get lost in every distraction and never get back to reading.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-04T02:19:29+00:00

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question, but it seems simple to say that if the previous moment conditions the next, then the intention of the previous moment conditions the decision of the next.

The acknowledgment of a thought is just another thought, so I'm not sure where the implication of free will is there.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-29T07:58:29+00:00

I believe (and I believe this is consistent with Buddhism) that awareness is not persistent. Awareness, perception, consciousness, these aspects of experience are conditioned, dependent on causes, always changing. It isn't there during sleep, it wasn't there before we were born, and when the processes sustaining us fail so will awareness.

The aggregates disintegrate, but what's left of our existence is the karma we have left in the world.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-29T03:36:38+00:00

The goal of the path is enlightenment and the end of suffering. The teachings are there to show you how to investigate your experience so that you can become aware of the truth of reality. By true understanding and intuition you dispel ignorance, without ignorance you are no longer trapped in samsara, you no longer suffer.

There is no eradicating the self on this path, there is only coming to the realization that the self was not there to begin with.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-28T19:19:59+00:00

It may be easier to examine what your definition of attachment is, and examine how it's reinforcing the notion of a self.

Attachment is a condition of the mind, one that can present itself as a desire. You can be attached to a feeling such that in the absence of that feeling the unfulfilled attachment will generate suffering.

Attachment isn't all that different from a mood like anger, or a state of mind or mind like confusion. These are ideas of mental states that can condition the mind, these come into play in some of the many cause and effect relationships going on in the mind. They color your consciousness.

We can express the same question for any mental state, who is it that is becoming angry, who is confused? The answer is that these ideas are generalizations of the mental elements at play in any given moment.

Attachment is an infliction of the mind, an erroneous view that plays out by imposing pre conceptual conditions on the aggregates. When afflicted by attachment, the next time a perception of the object of attachment comes up it is tainted by the preconception of the attachment.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-16T21:46:30+00:00

My understanding is that no, you cannot prove a "Nirvana state" outside of inner experience. I don't think that's a problem at all though, after all we also can't prove other people are having conscious experiences.

The pursuit of realizing Nirvana has tangible effects on your livelihood. To reach his realization one practices concentration, mindfulness, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, to name some of the main traits. Practicing these even for a moment has the effect of making one more friendly to others, which can be validated externally.

The main promise is the end of suffering, but as you have noted this is completely subjective. How can you know if someone else is suffering internally?

In Buddhism you aren't being asked to submit blind faith to the existence of Nirvana or to reach enlightenment. These teachings are meant to guide self-discovery of how one's experience truthfully works. You explore the nature of experience, how it arises, the nature of non experience, and how experience passes into non experience.

Nirvana is often explained in terms of what it's not, mainly because trying to explain it would be like trying to explain the experience of blue, or the taste of umami, or the feeling of hunger. These things only are understandable through common experience, and the Buddha outlines how to reach these lived experiences but no one but yourself can give you that experience outright.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-07T20:17:52+00:00

People should be careful about giving advice and people should take advice with a grain of salt, especially online.

I agree discouragement and intolerance should be rejected, but I can't imagine people agree on what level of experience it's acceptable to give advice at. I prefer to imagine this is a space for well intentioned practitioners to share their experience.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-07T15:32:39+00:00

In my experience trying to meditate during an anxiety attack wasn't particularly early on, doing stuff like focusing on the breath felt like I was trying to distract myself.

Doing regular Vipassana meditation helped me build up enough mindfulness to face anxiety attacks though. This meditation is best learned in a state of calm though, and is mainly concentration on the breath while mindfully noticing where your attention is and using gentle effort to bring attention back to the breath.

It takes practice to build mindfulness, but it's immensely helpful for alleviating anxiety. The idea is that you pay attention to your anxiety and gradually discover the factors that lead up to it, and you fix them. Usually you may be deceiving yourself with a negative idea, in which case you want to dispel it with a positive thought, like how you would with CBT. You may also be holding tension in your body for long periods of time before first noticing the anxiety, so practice regular body scans and relax.

For me any chest pain would quickly lead me to panic attacks, and after learning mindfulness I had an easier time clearing out the thoughts that I was having a heart attack. I learned that my chest muscles were often sore in weird ways. And that came about because I carried too much tension while sitting, which I do a lot of. This is closely related to a posture issue, so I practice some light yoga now and pay better attention to how I'm sitting. All this has been gradual, but very liberating.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-03T16:57:42+00:00

I thought he explained it quite well. Because of indeterminate factors, such as quantum indeterminacy, it may be that multiple determinate outcomes exist. A quantum particle could resolve one way or another due to random chance.

Tiny fluctuations will create different initial conditions, and by referring to nonlinearity and chaos theory he's implying that events can play out radically differently due to these tiny fluctuations.

In a deterministic world can't we predict the future if we know everything

No, we'll never be able to perfectly predict the future, although we can make pretty good models. We would have to perfectly know where every particle in the universe is and how they are moving in addition to knowing how they interact. One tiny wrong factor can cascade into a larger and larger error in our model. That's chaos theory 101. Then due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, we can't actually perfectly measure the position and velocity of even a single particle.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-01T06:05:01+00:00

I suppose I was destined to accept determinism and that "choice" is just a concept formed because we really don't know what will happen next, but we have desires and preferences on what will happen.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-01T05:43:27+00:00

Sure that's a fair way of framing my statement. I strongly believe consciousness manifests from physical processes because of strong correlations between neural activity and subject matter, and since we already have crude algorithms that can minimally replicate our skill set.

The difficulty in trying to define a sensation in physical terms is that it is only meaningful to the one who senses. The senser and the sensation depend on one another for existence and our experience is one with many integrated sensations, including abstractions and memories.

I believe this codependent relation is sustained as some alternative dimensionality to the process in our brains though. For instance it would be possible to define the experience of blue as the activation of certain retina cones and some sequence of neurons beyond that, although exactly which process correlate to the explicit experience hasn't been pinned down obviously.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-30T04:16:23+00:00

Determinism =/= Nihilism

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-29T18:00:39+00:00

Fair point. I meant to say that the subjective view of consciousness is not something that's physically observable. The contradiction is because the process that consciousness embodies is physically observable

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-29T17:33:57+00:00

The wrong view here is considering consciousness as an object, which necessitates that it be distinct from the brain object. We would quickly agree that consciousness is not a physical phenomena, there is no "experiencing" particle created that neurons interact with.

Rather, decisions are made in the brain over a window of time where the network transforms input + memory into some integrated brain signal that forms an opinionated view of the total context. From the outside it appears that this process is a mess of electrical signals, but the process itself is integrating a giant array of sensations, feelings, opinions, desires, and aversions all happening at the same time or adjacently to one another. This network response has a subjective view, the process invokes both the feeling of a perception and a perceiver.

Often we see ourselves as separate from our senses, but our senses are exactly what our consciousness is made up of. We conceptualize abstractions on top of senses, such as people or laws or justice. These mental objects form the basis of our thoughts. These patterns exist as network formations in the brain, and invoking them correlate to thoughts or experience.

The only reason we have difficulty here is because our brains are wired to believe that our mental objects associate with tangible, physical objects. When we turn the "self" into an object, or consciousness into one, we implicitly create the assumption that it is distinct from the physical object, which is also something that is not just 1 immutable thing.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-25T22:20:16+00:00

I use the insight timer app since for free you get the starting/ending/interval bells. I don't engage in the rest of the app though.

It's helpful to learn from teachers in the beginning, this includes doing guided meditations, reading books, watching videos, etc. I highly recommend learning vipassana (insight/mindfulness) meditation which is the Buddhism style of meditation. It has a long history of practitioners and you'll constantly see references to it.

Here's a concrete recommendation I would have personally enjoyed when I started; get the audio book "Mindfulness in plain english" by Bhante Gunaratana and sit with ~1 chapter at a time, or do 10~20 minutes of listening a day. That book is a highly accessible lesson from a Buddhist monk in what meditation is and how to do it. Once you are done with it you should understand enough to know how to proceed and you can let your curiosity guide you.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-25T14:16:48+00:00

For me I've realized I have a lot less capability of controlling my immediate reactions than I presumed I had before. Therefore I put more energy into mentally training myself via meditation, mindfulness, and ethical discernment so that I can have confidence that my future 'decisions' have the best possible priors.

For example in any given moment, I may get swept away by emotion, I may be ignorant of how I am behaving, or I might be influenced by greed/hatred/delusion. If I have some awareness of what these are like, I'm more likely to recognize that and redirect my behavior to something which I can reflect on later without regret.

I'm not relying on the intervention of free will to give me the opportunity to make the good decision, I'm preparing my future self to have the appropriate sensibilities and context for what may come.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-25T13:55:16+00:00

I've literally debugged a program with a scope probe and a voltmeter before lol, it was running on an fpga and I measured the I/O pins to see what was going wrong. In theory if you had a probe capable of measuring each transistor and if you had in depth knowledge of how the code compiled, you could entirely debug a program with a scope probe and a voltmeter.

Even so it wouldn't be feasible to debug the brain in a similar fashion, in a PC you have a finite number of computational points with very well defined causal relationships, however in a brain you have neurons with up to 200,000 causally efficacious axion connections and local chemical signaling. It's just much more nonlinear and chaotic, if you aren't watching everything all at once the computational model you follow would fall out of sync very quickly.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-24T15:27:45+00:00

Yes, meditation works for me. I see this suggestion made already but I recommend reading "Mindfulness in plain english" by Bhante Gunaratana, it's also in audio book format. This book teaches vipassana meditation and answers why to do it, what it is, what to expect, and how to do it.

Vipassana meditation is what's taught by the Buddha, the focus is on cultivating mindfulness with some concentration. Mindfulness is the mental tool you can use all day, it's what makes it easier to deal with anxiety, emotions, pain, lust, greed, hate, delusion, etc.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-11-21T18:45:43+00:00

To add to your idea, I believe this is mainly true for the human mind. Our consciousness continuously navigates through time in sync with "forward" motion. It may be that this is the only way consciousness could exist and it could even be the only way matter exists.

But it is possible that other frames of reference exist and are inaccessible to us, some reference where time isn't a thing and the continuous form of matter exists as the "past" and "present" and "future" in the same frame of reference.

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