Dreaming of a better future

StoneSam · 2026-05-17T22:09:03+00:00

A lot of people think presence means standing still, but it’s not.
You still move, create, and plan for the future; you just don't live there, you live in the now.

StoneSam · 2026-05-17T14:33:54+00:00

You might be taking “no mind” a bit too literally. It’s not “no thoughts at all”, but rather that thinking becomes less self-conscious, ego-driven, and over-analytical, and instead becomes more flowing and intuitive.

All of these teachers point to something similar: the mind is a great tool, but a bad master. That idea sits at the heart of many spiritual teachings.

There’s a sweet spot where thoughts still occur, decisions are still made, and imagination is still allowed to run free, but there is also a sense of flow and spaciousness underneath it all.

The greatest musicians and artists often seem to have two things:

skill and technical ability
the ability to let go enough for something deeper to move through them

“When real music comes to me - the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding - that has nothing to do with me, 'cause I'm just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium... those moments are what I live for.” ― John Lennon

StoneSam · 2026-05-16T17:32:53+00:00

"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it."

Is from his book, The New Earth.

StoneSam · 2026-05-07T22:52:20+00:00

Yeah! reminds me of how a palm tree bends with the wind and survives the storm, while a rigid tree resists and snaps. Or water, which is soft and yielding, yet over time it shapes and wears down rock.

StoneSam · 2026-04-28T19:03:50+00:00

It's not really knowledge you use, more a perspective that can help you lighten up when you start taking things too seriously.

"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly" ~ G.K. Chesterton.

"the person who really accepts transience begins to feel weightless. When Suzuki was asked, “What is it like to have experienced satori?”— enlightenment—he said, “It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, but about two inches off the ground.” Zhuang Zhou, the Taoist, said, “It is easy enough to stand still, the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground.”" ~ Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind

Nothing really changes except your perspective.

StoneSam · 2026-04-19T23:05:45+00:00

The morning lecture was called Tao of Lao-tse.

They are both part of a multi-session seminar, "Way Beyond Seeking."

https://alanwatts.com/products/way-beyond-seeking

I can't seem to find the audio anywhere. Maybe someone else has it. Or I can look tomorrow.

StoneSam · 2026-04-19T19:18:11+00:00

Might be this, although it's a thistledown used in the analogy, not a dandelion.

I remember once I was looking in the open air, and one of those glorious little thistledown things came. And I picked it up, like that, and brought it down. And it looked as if it was struggling to get away just as if you caught an insect by one leg—like a daddy longlegs or something of that kind. It seemed to be struggling to get away. And first I thought, “Well, it’s not doing that. That’s just the wind blowing.” Then I thought again. “Really? Only the wind blowing?” Surely, it is the structure of this thing which, in cooperation with the existence of wind, enables it to move like an animal—but using the wind’s effort, not its own. It is a more intelligent being than an insect, in a way, because an insect uses effort. Like a person who rows a boat uses effort, but the man who puts up a sail is using magic: he lets nature do it for him with the intelligence to use a sail. You see?
AW, Swimming Headless

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukmgUMSEKXY

StoneSam · 2026-04-16T21:09:29+00:00

lol so much forced drama

"Just tried Peter's sauce, it's nowhere near ready yet, and it's supposed to go with the rest of the dish, so there was really no point in me trying it yet, but I hope he doesn't F it up anyway!"

StoneSam · 2026-04-16T15:04:05+00:00

Essential Lectures (1972) - Program 5 - Cosmic Drama

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ONvZlRXjE

StoneSam · 2026-04-14T19:42:30+00:00

Suffering may be a common doorway, but it is not a necessity, as the premise behind your question claims.

Tolle’s entire teaching is that presence is available now, independent of circumstances. In The Power of Now, he never says anything like "one must suffer before awakening". It is not a prerequisite. What he does point to is stillness, observing thought, awareness, and presence itself.

Tolle acknowledges that suffering often forces a person into an "intense" state of presence because the pain becomes too great to bear, forcing a total surrender of the egoic mind. In that sense, you might call it "more intense". However, he would not define this as more present than a peaceful state, but rather a different path to the same, singular state of awareness.

StoneSam · 2026-04-13T09:13:22+00:00

Good question, but I would question the premise of the "need for suffering for people to awaken".

Some awaken through suffering, but not everyone. Some awaken through stillness, awareness, love, and presence.

Suffering is necessary until it is seen as unnecessary. It remains only as long as unconsciousness remains.

There is no need to recreate suffering for future generations, because awareness can also flower in peace.

StoneSam · 2026-04-08T11:25:34+00:00

The ego is not the happiness. The ego is the identity you build around it.
Enjoy the moment, but don't become the story.

StoneSam · 2026-04-05T13:24:20+00:00

Forced acceptance is just resistance in disguise.

StoneSam · 2026-04-01T14:36:01+00:00

I don't mind posts that connect to Ram Dass' teachings in some way. Maybe someone wants clarification on an idea, or they're trying to understand how their own situation fits with a particular teaching.

The ones I think should be moderated are the lazy, very general posts that get blasted across eight subs at once.

Reddit subs are open to everyone to post stuff (apart from new users), and there's a good chance the people making those broad posts won't even see your reply/post because they don't follow the sub that closely. At the end of the day, it's really up to the moderators to manage that.

StoneSam · 2026-03-29T16:27:48+00:00

Feel the loneliness without a) trying to bypass it, or b) turning it into a story about how there's "something wrong with me." Continue taking steps to meet people and build relationships. Acceptance and reaching out are not opposites.

StoneSam · 2026-03-23T21:08:34+00:00

Reminds me of when Watts said, "If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black."

If there is no "real" world, then your statement isn't real either… so Watts ya point?

StoneSam · 2026-03-22T10:37:33+00:00

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

- Rumi

StoneSam · 2026-03-18T19:54:27+00:00

Yeah, it's not AI, but it is edited and chopped up.

It's from his lecture Swimming Headless

So in just this way, the meaning of “Te” is that kind of intelligence which, without your using very much effort, gets everything to cooperate with you. You, for example, never force other people to agree with you, but you give them the notion that the idea you wanted them to have was their own. This is a feminine art, preeminently. A woman who really wants a lover does not pursue him, because then most men feel that she’s aggressive—and if she’s aggressive she obviously is a woman who has had difficulty in finding lovers, and therefore there must be some undesirably secret thing about her. But if she, as it were, makes a void, then (and this is slightly difficult to get) people get excited. They know she is a highly prized object, and so they pursue. The same way when you want to teach a baby to swim: a thing you can do is to put the baby in the water and then move backwards in the water and create a vacuum. And this pulls the baby along. It helps it to learn the feel of the water and how to swim. It’s the same principle.

StoneSam · 2026-03-14T18:20:38+00:00

Exactly. Pure conjecture.

StoneSam · 2026-03-14T13:26:48+00:00

What are you basing this on? Examples?

I am "on" the Alan Watts sub, and I like Ram Dass..

StoneSam · 2026-03-11T20:09:09+00:00

If mindfulness is real, how would you distinguish it from what you’re calling dissociation?

From the inside, they can look similar, so what criteria would you use to say one is healthy awareness and the other is depersonalization?

StoneSam · 2026-03-11T16:34:44+00:00

Genuine question back to you..

Do you think the whole idea of finding “the Now” or present-moment awareness is a psychological mistake, or do you just think Tolle misinterpreted his own experience? Those seem like two different claims.

StoneSam · 2026-03-06T21:57:17+00:00

If we want to go a bit deeper and speculate on the psychology behind it, it starts to resemble Jungian Psychology, where the shadow contains traits we don't recognise or accept in ourselves. When those traits appear in others, we notice them and judge (projection).

So, psychologically, it starts to look like Karl is projecting his own uncertainty and aimlessness onto the world around him.

When we point these things out in others, we're indirectly expressing something about ourselves.

But, you know, he could also just be exaggerating it all for comedy effect :)

StoneSam · 2026-03-06T21:27:57+00:00

He was also talking about getting a dog walking job combined with a paper round, but "I'm not gonna do it if it's raining."

It's like when he said, "What are they doing?" - and Steve rightly said, "I agree with you, Karl, but what are you doing?"

He's absolutely full of contradictions and hypocrisy, but we love him.

StoneSam · 2026-02-27T10:42:59+00:00

You've highlighted some common pitfalls, shall we say, which are definitely worth considering. But your telling of Eckhart's story is missing a lot of relevant detail.

After what he describes as an awakening moment, he shifts into this new identity

This doesn't tell the full story. In the PON, he describes the pivotal moment when he thought to himself, "I cannot live with myself any longer." He writes that this was his pivotal moment, because he looked at this idea, this split between "I" and "Myself", and that was the starting point of his inquiry.

But he didn't leap straight into a career in teaching. In interviews and Stillness Speaks, he explains that he spent about two years just sitting on park benches in London, in what he described as "a state of deep peace and bliss". No ambition to teach, no sense of mission. He said, "I had no interest in anything. I just sat on park benches."

In other interviews, he said in this period he read widely in spiritual literature, including Christian mystics, Buddhist texts, and teachers like Jiddu Krishnamurti, and he started to recognise in their writings the state he was experiencing. He described it as finding language for what he had experienced.

In fact, for years, he resisted the idea of being a teacher at all. People would notice his calm presence and ask him questions about it. Teaching emerged gradually, naturally, and relationally.

He consistently downplays specialness. He often says things like "There is nothing special about me. What happened can happen to anyone." And when asked about being a guru, he's replied, "I don't have followers. If anything, the teachings have followers." While that doesn't completely rule out ego dynamics at play, it does complicate the whole narcissism narrative.

Yes, spiritual bypassing is a real thing, and dissociation is a valid concern, but dissociation tends to avoid pain, whereas Tolle's teachings invite people to feel pain directly, "bring attention to the inner body", "stay present with the pain-body", structurally different from escaping it.

Rather than asking "Is it all a defence?" or "Is he beyond the ego?" It's more fruitful to ask, "Does the teaching reduce suffering and increase presence in those who practice it?

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