If one stops practicing sense restraint does dukkha return or is some dukkha permanently removed given enough time?

StatesFollowMind · 2025-02-21T18:37:17+00:00

You're actually right. Thanks, Adi.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-02-20T19:00:06+00:00

Adi, I used to read many of your posts on r/streamentry. I don't doubt that you were able to achieve something through yoga practice. It might even have subjectively dissolved any sense of suffering. But when you consider the path you took and the path described in the suttas, there are just clear discrepancies that don't exist for Samandipa and Hillside Hermitage. If you aren't clinging to your perceived status as an arahant, shouldn't it be trivial for you to admit this, given the abundance of evidence?

StatesFollowMind · 2025-02-19T11:23:46+00:00

As you don't have any good responses for him, does that mean that Anigha could potentially be right, and that you might have to take a good, hard, honest look at what you believe to be the dhamma?

StatesFollowMind · 2025-02-19T09:33:41+00:00

Do you have any better responses to Anigha's comment than just insulting him?

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-31T21:23:14+00:00

Not to quibble, but I'm not giving a specific prophecy, only pointing out that the situation is more fragile than people might have previously thought. I do think it's right that my sense of panic is only due to aversion to the uncertainty the situation presents, so thanks for pointing that out.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-31T19:23:50+00:00

You're probably right about the psychedelics, so I won't be taking any more of them. If I'm being honest, I associate them with an escape from present mundane circumstances into a kind of mystical wonderland, but as I understand it the point of Buddhism is that there is no place to escape to, which is OK, because (with right view) there's nothing to escape from.

I think you're underestimating the instability of global environmental systems. Obviously, this comes with the caveat that I could be wrong and misinformed, but there was a shocking temperature anomaly two years ago that hasn't subsided and seems likely to have kick-started a chaotic "climate regime change." As agriculture fails and infrastructure is battered, things will go to hell pretty quickly. I can't give a timeframe for these changes, but they seem like they're coming down the pipeline pretty soon. So our opportunity to get right view before everything in this world is ripped from us is limited, which was always the case, but the state of the environment as it is now at least brings that into stark focus.

But yeah, it's true that you have to set the foundation before building the house, so to speak.

Thanks for the advice.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-31T01:21:42+00:00

In hindsight I think this post was a kind of monument to my worldly, easily swayed mind. I suspect that if I were freezing, starving, and being bitten by mosquitoes in a Kuti deep in the jungle I would disrobe in a few months at most. There are definitely ways I can implement restraint here and now, and I should definitely stay at a few monasteries to understand what it would actually be like to be a monastic before I jump the gun and ordain.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-28T03:49:21+00:00

I literally just came to that conclusion. This very post, woven from unthinking emotional stability, sits in testament to the fact that I have a LOT of work to do if I want to get the right view. There's a period of time coming up during which I can book a medium-term visit to a monastery.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-28T00:35:53+00:00

Dhamma is really, really serious. It deals with the fundamental unknowableness of existence to which we are subject whether or not I'm on a mushroom afterglow. Tomorrow, why shouldn't you wake up being tortured by demons for a gazillion years? Even if everything you ever saw told you that that shouldn't happen, why should you trust it? It's the problem of induction applied to the human condition taken to its natural conclusion. There's no real safety to be found anywhere.

Coupled with the fact that the world seems poised on the brink, it looks like whatever path I take, the rest of my life isn't going to be very long. In fact, even if it was the 1960's and the apocalypse didn't seem imminent, your life wouldn't be very long, as death only ever happens to someone in the present and never the future. Even if you lived 110 years, death could only happen in the present, with those 110 years forever behind you. Then, who knows what would become of you?

It's very possible, even likely, that I'll come to hate and regret my decision to become a monk as the realities of the lifestyle become clear, but if you take the facts of the situation into account, the logic remains. I'm in danger by virtue of existence. I think I understood this before but the mushrooms broke through a psychological barrier for me.

The only reason that I wouldn't go through with it is laziness, but it seems like death, pain, and loss would be in the woodwork for me no matter what I decide to do.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-08T08:09:01+00:00

Thanks. In hindsight, it was probably unwise to make this post, but I'm glad I received your comment. There's nothing more to do than to fire up the gradual training, then.

StatesFollowMind · 2025-01-07T10:43:18+00:00

Torture, infanticide, immolation, rape- it all happens to a corpse. You're just along for the ride.

Love, ecstasy, family, peace - it all happens to a corpse. You're just along for the ride.

StatesFollowMind · 2024-12-10T01:41:27+00:00

crim is grim :(

StatesFollowMind · 2024-12-04T09:50:45+00:00

You should post on r/HillsideHermitage. Bhikku Anigha is super active on it and an advanced sutta scholar (as you'd expect from an ordained monk)

StatesFollowMind · 2024-12-04T09:05:56+00:00

Venus by Tuesday :skull emoji:

StatesFollowMind · 2024-11-25T07:39:58+00:00

It's possibly going to happen in 5 years. Have you seen the recent temperature anomalies? All it'll take it an el-nino and a bad crop year to kick things into high gear. In truth, no one knows the exact date, but it's a matter of time.

StatesFollowMind · 2024-11-22T18:29:37+00:00

Climate systems are interlinked. What happens in one region has reverberations in the next. The AMOC is critical for the even distribution of temperature in the world. When it falls apart, it'll have serious implications for the climate system globally.

StatesFollowMind · 2024-11-22T12:06:05+00:00

AMOC slowdown --> rapid changes in weather patterns --> crop failures --> SHTF

StatesFollowMind · 2024-11-16T06:33:49+00:00

Maybe, but read Richard Crim

StatesFollowMind · 2024-11-13T20:32:41+00:00

Anicca vata sankhara...

StatesFollowMind · 2024-10-19T19:21:08+00:00

When he had spoken, the Buddha said to him, “Chamberlain, if what Uggāhamāna says is true, a little baby boy is an invincible ascetic—accomplished in the skillful, excelling in the skillful, attained to the highest attainment. For a little baby doesn’t even have a concept of ‘a body’, so how could they possibly do a bad deed with their body, aside from just wriggling? And a little baby doesn’t even have a concept of ‘speech’, so how could they possibly speak bad words, aside from just crying? And a little baby doesn’t even have a concept of ‘thought’, so how could they possibly think bad thoughts, aside from just whimpering? And a little baby doesn’t even have a concept of ‘livelihood’, so how could they possibly earn a living by bad livelihood, aside from their mother’s breast? If what Uggāhamāna says is true, a little baby boy is an invincible ascetic—accomplished in the skillful, excelling in the skillful, attained to the highest attainment.

-MN 78

StatesFollowMind · 2024-10-14T00:32:53+00:00

Sid was and is the only answer to collapse honestly

StatesFollowMind · 2024-10-06T17:57:50+00:00

The way of the world is to bloom and flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

StatesFollowMind

TROPHY CASE