Letting Go

[DimeBagJohnny]

I feel like my only problem is the inability to let go. Not letting go of some past hurt or fear, but letting go of EVERYTHING. NEVER grasping.... a stream of life unimpeded by mental strain. I've been to a "place" for a few minutes, via meditation, where I feel like I actually achieved this. Everything made sense... I felt no resistance whatsoever and anything that came to mind was immediately resolved. I laughed at the ease of it. "This is IT. It's so easy!" I felt like I was in my proper state. Has anyone experienced this? I really can't put into words, but maybe someone can catch my drift.

 

[Jonneh]

I think I know what you're referring to. For me it's a state of emotional unattachment (although not necessarily unemotional), and of dissolution of motivations and accompanying anxieties.

I suppose it's a relieving state to be in, but for me it feels like I've lost a part of who I am, as those desires, motivations and anxieties are part of what makes me human. I feel something like this about meditation too. It's achieving a state typically reserved as a reward for resolving anxieties through the ways we humans know best: living life.

If you're envisioning it as a state of freedom that is unburdened of common worries while still being functional, then I'm not sure it exists.

 

[herbavore]

I feel like my only problem is the inability to let go. Not letting go of some past hurt or fear, but letting go of EVERYTHING. NEVER grasping.... a stream of life unimpeded by mental strain. I've been to a "place" for a few minutes, via meditation, where I feel like I actually achieved this. Everything made sense... I felt no resistance whatsoever and anything that came to mind was immediately resolved. I laughed at the ease of it. "This is IT. It's so easy!" I felt like I was in my proper state. Has anyone experienced this? I really can't put into words, but maybe someone can catch my drift.

I think we only get moments of this complete acceptance. I have experienced them but they are fleeting. I feel lucky to have experienced them though--as if I were given a brief visit to a completely different level of existence, then yanked back to the shrunken dimension of my own mind's complex chaos of human entanglements. Integrating the awareness of that expansive state more and more seems to me to be what aging can bring if one allows it.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

I feel like my only problem is the inability to let go. Not letting go of some past hurt or fear, but letting go of EVERYTHING. NEVER grasping.... a stream of life unimpeded by mental strain. I've been to a "place" for a few minutes, via meditation, where I feel like I actually achieved this. Everything made sense... I felt no resistance whatsoever and anything that came to mind was immediately resolved. I laughed at the ease of it. "This is IT. It's so easy!" I felt like I was in my proper state. Has anyone experienced this? I really can't put into words, but maybe someone can catch my drift.

I think for almost every human that has ever lived that the inability to let go is the big issue keeping us from contentment. I've been in that place where it was all so easy but it never lasts for long. Too bad that.

 

[silverbirch]

I've achieved it multiple times. It becomes easier the more you practice inducing it, and then it happens spontaneously when you aren't expecting it. Letting go of my egoic attachments becomes a simple affair by recognising the cosmic scale of my life, thereby introducing deep humility.

It is harder to conjure this state of unattachment and contentment when I have many responsibilities to attend to. A stiff dose of LSD always allows me to re-access it.

 

[Foreigner]

I feel like my only problem is the inability to let go. Not letting go of some past hurt or fear, but letting go of EVERYTHING. NEVER grasping.... a stream of life unimpeded by mental strain. I've been to a "place" for a few minutes, via meditation, where I feel like I actually achieved this. Everything made sense... I felt no resistance whatsoever and anything that came to mind was immediately resolved. I laughed at the ease of it. "This is IT. It's so easy!" I felt like I was in my proper state. Has anyone experienced this? I really can't put into words, but maybe someone can catch my drift.

Welcome to being human, where you're not in control. Meditation gives us glimpses of what is possible, but chasing that state with meditation is also a form of attachment. Letting go is a practice in a moment-to-moment way. Recognizing that you are grasping and deciding to not do it. It takes practice. Every second of your life is a meditation, where you're focusing on something. The meditation never ends. You are always the witness.

I think meditation is necessarily, at least in part, to get the ball rolling. It shows us what our base selves, the witness, is like, with no discursive thoughts or interfering patterns. You are always that witness. So it's not so much a matter of trying to grasp onto that meditative state, but dissolving false egoic states of grasping which prevent us from experiencing a core of inner peace across most situations.

Worded in another way... the goal would be to refine yourself (your ego) to be in more close collaboration with the witness, instead of against it. Reducing states of resistance.

 

[swilow]

Worded in another way... the goal would be to refine yourself (your ego) to be in more close collaboration with the witness, instead of against it. Reducing states of resistance.

I am finding this amazingly difficult at the moment. I feel like each moment I am pushing against it, I am never feeling quite content. There are weekly periods of utter black depression, so deep that it does not feel surmountable. It fades though, so it must be. But, I think there is something of note in the fact that the black moods 'fade' rather than actively expire. Its like I can try and force the blackness aside, and it just gets stronger, but I go to sleep, wake up and through the day find myself more and more light-hearted until the depth of the depression is just a memory. Its when I stop forcing it away that it leaves me.

Ah the utter paradoxical madness of life. I need to meditate more. Non-attachment; simply reminding myself that 90% of the bullshit I am concerned by is useless garbage, is the only thing that seems to help. Its one of the only remedies that you don't have to take, but have to give...

I really can't let go either. I cannot relax into my life. It feels like a mechanical and valueless thing to me so often now.

 

[DimeBagJohnny]

I'm going through a severe bout of depression too, Swillow. Trying to let it go never works. Making any sort of attempt at letting go is a contradiction. After all, if I am trying to let go of something then then whatever it is I am trying to let go of has precedence in my mind. So how do I do it? It's pretty difficult to find peace when you are trying to let go of trying to let go and so on. I think true joy is spontaneous and can never be attained through the force of will. I know these things deep in my heart, but something prevents me from being at peace.

I think people like Jesus, Buddha, and other sages were the ones that were completely in the moment, completely at peace because they were in that stream of consciousness that has no barriers.

 

[Foreigner]

I am finding this amazingly difficult at the moment. I feel like each moment I am pushing against it, I am never feeling quite content. There are weekly periods of utter black depression, so deep that it does not feel surmountable. It fades though, so it must be. But, I think there is something of note in the fact that the black moods 'fade' rather than actively expire. Its like I can try and force the blackness aside, and it just gets stronger, but I go to sleep, wake up and through the day find myself more and more light-hearted until the depth of the depression is just a memory. Its when I stop forcing it away that it leaves me.

Ah the utter paradoxical madness of life. I need to meditate more. Non-attachment; simply reminding myself that 90% of the bullshit I am concerned by is useless garbage, is the only thing that seems to help. Its one of the only remedies that you don't have to take, but have to give...

I really can't let go either. I cannot relax into my life. It feels like a mechanical and valueless thing to me so often now.

I realize this contradicts what I previously said, but the truth is that we aren't in control. Things arise and dissolve and we do or don't have ego-based reactions to them. The witness always remains the same, the ego freaks out, or laughs, or cries, or does what it does. In the absence of ego, there's nothing in here doing anything. So ultimately nothing is wrong and nothing needs correcting. So whatever you end up doing or not doing is already perfect, in that sense. The difference between realizing this or not realizing this is one's potential ability to sink into suffering, knowing that they are not responsible for it. Suffering doesn't end, but attachment to what it means can end.

And know that there is no failure or success. That's irrelevant. What's happening is just what's happening. Meditating won't change that, it just momentarily changes the scenery. Nobody is above the system, even realized people. No matter what happens next it's already perfect and you can't fuck it up. Did the ocean fuck up when it created that wave over there? Or the trees when they blew in the wind? Or the volcano when it erupted? Your varying states are no different.

So get depressed as shit, or get happy, it's all held in proportion. Ultimately, nothing is wrong here, only the story that something is wrong.

 

[swilow]

So ultimately nothing is wrong and nothing needs correcting.

Yes, that is true. I've struggled to enunciate that idea. The ultimate truth of our mind, when uncoloured by anything of the physical reality, is flawless, but nor perfect, just an existent state that is always the same. I get a lot from udnerstanding that human thoughts do not really reflect reality; language is so imprecise and often walks past truth. And we happen to usually think and reason in human language, which uses sweeping cliches and rote phrasing as symbols of something we may not entirely comprehend, but with which we assess the world. And yet, there appears to be consciousness operating deep beneath thought, non-verbally and dispassionately but astute. I wish I could tune into that fuckers thoughts a bit more.

I'm going through a severe bout of depression too, Swillow. Trying to let it go never works. Making any sort of attempt at letting go is a contradiction. After all, if I am trying to let go of something then then whatever it is I am trying to let go of has precedence in my mind. So how do I do it? It's pretty difficult to find peace when you are trying to let go of trying to let go and so on. I think true joy is spontaneous and can never be attained through the force of will. I know these things deep in my heart, but something prevents me from being at peace.

Even the clinging to peace is enough to disturb it! The immense paradoxes that sit at the centre of consciousness are so baffling at times. But learning how to be conscious is an amazingly engaging and fucking interesting process.

The thing with depression, or my own experience, is that I feel like I have no capacity to initiate anything. No will, no drive, no desire. You'd think that would be a freeing sensation, and maybe it could be if the world did not expect shit from me. But the world is as it is. I just find it almost impossible to accept this fact, I sometimes feel like an alien walking through an incomprehensible landscape that is so impenetrable that even speculating on its true nature is overwhelming but I am programmed to endlessly do so. I feel like from this depressed state I could move laterally into a kind of calm neutral acceptance, but often when I start feeling more positive and focused, I begin to feel hyperfocused and consequently unsettled. Its like I never find a happy medium, its either too low or too much. The brief moments of completeness, that I value deeply, do show me that there is something there that I can fall into and find safety, I've just searched my entire life for this and can only find it ever so occaisionally.

I've learned some shit about the multi-layered nature of the mind, and some of it very troubling indeed and some of it really tripped out, an thought provoking shit. Some of it comes down to the idea that basically nothing conscious can ever really examine or understand consciousness and the deep mirroring effect that trying to do this has. Like two mirrors facing each other, endless reflections but I swear the most distant reflection could almost be doing something a little bit differently to the rest. Its like the subject of a painting trying to analyse the painting itself. Or something. Rambling a bit here.

I really hope you find that little way of tricking your mind into that Place. For some reason, in the last 5-6 months, I haven't meditated consistently, and I had been having pleasing rsults from it by doing it daily for the last 5 years or more. I wonder if we could both benefit by doing this? By definition, meditation appears to be doing 'the absence of something', in effect, letting go of everything. Fucking appealing idea.

* I had an interesting day today of no depression or thoughts of death/dying, but a fair bit of extra anxiety and stimulation. Its about 2 hours from bedtime for me and I feel totally awake and wired.

I think people like Jesus, Buddha, and other sages were the ones that were completely in the moment, completely at peace because they were in that stream of consciousness that has no barriers.

Yeah. One thing that makes me find the Buddha amazing is that he is "famous" for a state of mind he attained. Think about the people we uphold now, and the things they are famous for. Fuck.

I tend to believe these figures were humans (and don't mean to sidetrack topic) which gives me immense hope, that this elusive state of peaceful consciousness is achievable by any human.

 

[Cosmic Trigger]

That is if we are actually getting the truth about these "enlightened" individuals. I prefer getting things from the individual at least instead of others attempting to remember what they said 40 years later or some such.

Really for me it's Schopenhauer. He wanted no material gain and that is very easy to see was the truth. He wasn't after a fan club either which will be obvious when you read his Studies in Pessimism. Yet his message is one of the most uplifting I've ever come across once you take the time and make the effort to grok what he's on about. But he's not sugarcoating anything ever. All that and he was a huge fan of dogs. Almost any animal over humans really and his reasons make sense.

So for anyone intrigued by the above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t9HaH7Iiic The first 6 chapters of this one and this second vid at 1:28 until the end for a rockin intro to the great man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKDGzrgGZPU

He was a big fan of the Buddha but takes it deeper imo and without the funny robes, hats, demons, and other nonsense that has diluted the message.

 

[swilow]

That is if we are actually getting the truth about these "enlightened" individuals. I prefer getting things from the individual at least instead of others attempting to remember what they said 40 years later or some such.

Yeah, I think scepticism is a viable attitude for these enlightened figures. I don't really know if Jesus or Buddha was who they and their followers say they are, but I find the idea that we uphold figures such as this (mainly buddha) really intriguing. Its like we actually do value people with good ideas, rather than just good tits.

Many of the famous and remembered characters from history are known simply for their thoughts, from Aristotle to Plato to Schopenhauer and, of course, the mystics. That is somehow heartening.

He was a big fan of the Buddha but takes it deeper imo and without the funny robes, hats, demons, and other nonsense that has diluted the message.

I think that's the human tendency towards ritual coming into play with the robes and rules and whatnot. We like playing make-believe even as adults. I think its possible to look past that and try to examine the ideas themselves though. I get something from much of the more practical buddhist ideology, but nothing much from the ritualised or supernatural bits. I've yet to derive much value from christianity but I hear that it is present. The practise and the ideologies often seem remote and distinct though.

 

[dopemaster]

It is better to find a way to cope.

For me it is my imaginary friend Jesus and well he would want me to forgive and move on.

It is that simple. I would be a murder without Jesus in my life and I don't care if he is a figment of my imagination or not.

My life isn't worth revenge on pathetic people.