journeyofyamazaki-blog

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Diet

​-small breakfast (2 hours after waking) -normal sized lunch (1:30) -snack for dinner

-don't skip meals, puts stress on the body -no peanut butter or peanuts

-green cabage -celeree -almond butter -carrots -cashews -other nuts (Hazelnuts,) -salmon

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Mind-blowing Dullness Insight

-true improvement happens through i+1, ALWAYS. Meditation is actually easy. Just repeatedly do the simple action that will lead to improvement in that moment. Rouse the mind out of dullness. Bring the mind back to the breath. It doesn’t take striving or hard effort. It’s just a series of extremely simple and easy actions. EVERYTHING is included in this, including dullness. This is what we didn’t understand before. Improving in meditation is realizing that things you thought were problems are not problems. -this includes dullness. Our previous mistake was that when we saw that it would take a i+3 skill jump in order to completely escape out of dullness, we attempted to make an i+3 effort. The right thing to do is make an i+1 effort (keep applying antidotes, attempt to strengthen peripheral awareness even though it might not work, attempt to automatically notice when awareness has weakened, even though we might now), until we improve a little and an i+1 effort becomes BEFORE’s i+2 effort. -This means that I can meditation at any time of the day in any condition, productively and stress free. Just keep doing that one easy thing that is most relevant at that moment -Assume that any time we feel tired during the day, our body and mind do not ACTUALLY need sleep. It’s just a habit, possibly formed in our untreated sleep apnea days. -Dullness has always been our biggest problem in meditation. I am almost always half dull, and after the 30 minute really dull. Dull means no awareness. no awareness means no stable attention. Meditation felt hard because I was dull all the time and couldn’t see what was going on, plus I thought that dullness was しかたない and not something I could really do something about. If I can beat dullness, plus master kinesthetic accuracy, I will be at stage 7 in no time. -“Eventually the mind gets fed up with being jolted awake repeatedly and just starts staying awake” -Dullness is cured by: brute force > joy/energy > internal awareness

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

普通

Yesterday, when listing the reason that I was a big find on すかちゃん, ゆりか said that I am “普通”. This is very interesting, because just a few minutes early she was talking about how “変わってる” I am. Obviously “普通” has two different meanings. I am普通じゃない in the sense that I have weird hobbies and opinions (do drugs, meditate, speak Japanese). But in the truly important sense, I am completely “普通” in the sense of not being a weirdo, in the sense that the person talking to me intuitive gets that I accurately understand THEM. Or maybe that we share the same 常識, even though I might disagree with parts of it. Or maybe that I just have all of my marbles. It is a very hard concept to pin down with words, but I think any other “normal” (in this sense) person will know exactly what I am talking about. What a win: 普通 in the important way but ぜんぜん普通じゃない in the boring way.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

I hereby declare to avoid unnecessarily associating with muggles

Associating with muggles is a harmful waste of time. Even just talking to muggles has the first four qualities below. I hereby declare that it is something I want to avoid.

-The only reason I do it is out of craving, and acting out of craving is bad karma. -Wastes a huge amount of time that I could be using to do something that would benefit me -It causes me to act out of ego and show off, lie, and be disingenuous -It lowers my vibrations and drags me down into a state of low consciousness, which obscures my motivations and aspirations -Often leads to getting high, which then messes up the next day as well, wasting even more time

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Takeaway From My Retreat

-There are truly different “states of consciousnesses”. After that DMT trip, I was in a state where complete acceptance for others came effortlessly. But once I returned to normal it was nothing but a memory, and egotistical thoughts and desired returned. Now we know what is possible, and what we are aiming for. We have to be aware of all the egotistical thoughts, see them for what they are, not identify with them, and fake it until we make it. Also, I want to get serious about mettā, since the closer we can get to that state of consciousness, the better everything will go, especially meditation.

-Sila is important, and I have to start taking it a lot more seriously. I think sila can be broken down into three components. First, not doing things that will create remorse in the mind, such as harming others. Second, to retract from sensual please and weaken craving. And third, to serve others and treat them with loving kindness to strengthen the heart. For the first, it is all about being as mindful as possible when interacting with others, and having the intention to make the interaction all about them. No judging, no trying to change them, no giving them advice they didn’t ask for. Just good listening, love, and compassion. Craig said that for a while he just tried to say as little as possible, a sure-fire way to nail right speech. For the second, the “sudoku” metaphor I came up with applies. Basically, right now I have very limited “will power”. I really learned my own limit and got very humbled during this retreat. I am at the current “level” I am in the present at due to past conditions, and the past cannot be changed. Therefore, it is not “my” (meaning the current self) fault for having weak will power, and one should never beat themselves up for that, since not only does it not make any logical sense, but it will also only create more negativity which will make it even more likely to give in. I simply will not be able to just drop all music, movies, fapping, and time wasting in the snap of a finger. All I can do is start where I am at, and take one step at a time in the right direction. In sudoku, you start by finding the one step you can take in your restricted circumstance, also slowly improve your situation from there, until eventually you are perfect. Specifically, I need to start recording how much I am doing of all the things I want to do and want to stop doing, find my actual average, and try to slow improve it. Also for that second category, the paradigm of “craving and aversion” as simple habits of the mind is a very useful way to view undesirable behavior. Before I used to always look for the “reason” that I felt compelled to do a certain thing, but even if a suitable explanation can be found, an explanation does not serve as a solution. Seeing a craving as nothing more than a craving and trying to greet it with equanimity right then and there is the most skillful option. Lucky, after this retreat it has become much easier to clear see “craving” happening in myself, and the more clearly it is seen, the easier it is to, well, see it for what it is and greet it with equanimity. For these first two, daily journaling should be done as well. The third component will mostly consist of mettā practice, like I said above.

-Stimulus, especially things that are really low consciousness and in-your-face like YouTube and the internet in general are harmful and distracting. You could put avoiding these things in the second category of sila. Low consciousness movies and things as well. They drag you down to their level and lower your vibrations. There is something to be said for making sure to feed your mind good food, and even more to be said about not feeding your mind too much in general. Getting accustomed to silence and stillness is crucial and extremely beneficial.

-One more thing about the point I talked about above that one should have complete and total acceptence and equanimity for the present self since it was created by the past and since the past cannot be changed, it is not “your” fault. This is especially important to apply to meditation. If your sit is going shitty, it is not “your” fault. How good one is at meditation is entirely determined by which habits have been cultivated in the past. All one can do is control how they respond to the current situation, and cultivate the right intentions so that better meditations can be achieved in the future. Basically, no desire for good sits and no aversion towards bad sits. These are simply hindrances that get in the way of progress. This is the single more important key to progressing in meditation.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

As long as you can successfully do these two things, you will not be “crazy” or insane (no matter how much time you spend in the astral plane and have your world view changed by it): 1) Know what and how other people think and function, and 2) know why/how you know where all of your beliefs come from. never be 100% positive about anything; hold everything as a tentative hypothesis and keep track of the current evidence for each hypothesis.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Insights about Awareness

-Take everything as a tentative hypothesis, and don't be certain about anything. When judging the validity of something, you are 照らし合わせるing it to the rest of your web of believes to see if it fits or not. But your web of beliefs is just the snowball result of something that was started randomly and arbitrarily

-I used to be worried about doing astral projection and stuff and becoming a “crazy person” who can’t tell the difference between reality and hallucination. But with awareness this becomes a non-issue. First of all, it is important to always remember that all beliefs are mere beliefs and that hard facts about reality cannot be known, and therefore take everything as a tentative hypothesis. Then just stay clear about what reasons you have to entertain different tentative hypotheses. The only real danger is having total confidence in any one idea of belief. The key to succeeding in this is awareness. (A great example of this is Kenneth Folk on that podcast; he said he can talk to scientists about science, and Buddhists about past lives, because they are all just different paradigms that he can plug into whenever he wants, and can’t give more credence to one over another.)

-Through awareness, you become able to better know what your mind is actually doing, so you can see beliefs for beliefs, and don’t mistake them for reality. You also become able to see where beliefs come from and why they are held. What happened to me on shrooms yesterday was my awareness became so heightened that I could see the circular reason of my own web of beliefs.

-The gap between raw sensory input and our experienced reality is much larger than most people realize. The more awareness you have, the more you can see through fabrication and not mistake it for reality. The closer your internal map of reality is to the way things actually are, the more able you will be to know how to achieved desired results, because you will be better able to see causes and effects. This is especially true when it comes to self-control. The illusion of being a single coherent self is a huge factor in issues regarding will-power: you see the urges to do undesirable things, as well as the story created to justify those things, as just as much “you” as the intention to not do those things. Put another way, the more awareness you have, the more sub-minds will be participating at any one time. This will decrease blind spots (such as eating chips out of a bag with only the “I want to eat chips” sub-mind on), keep you more in line with your goals and values, and lead to better results. The more you see what is actually going on, the more empty and unskillful the urge will seem, and the easier it will be to be unaffected by it.

-Another key to will-power is being able to cultivate joy. Sometimes seeing through the urge to do something alone will not be enough, because the desire for the pleasure it would bring, or the aversion caused by not doing that thing, is too strong to bare. The strength of the desire to act on an urge is inversely proportional to the current satisfaction of the present moment. If one can internally cultivate joy and improve the satisfaction of the present moment, the desire to act on the urge will automatically decrease.

-The content of average people’s bad trips are probably real most of the time, just most people don’t have enough awareness to see that, and forget it all once they become sober

-Meditation trains the faculties of stable attention, awareness, and mindfulness. These faculties are entirely different than the intellectual faculties, and never get trained in modern society. In a way, these two kinds of faculties are opposite. Meditative faculties deal with the accurate knowing direct experience, reality at the rawest level; intellectual faculties take certain assumptions, which could be based on direct experience, but most often are based on information from outside sources or previously acquire concepts, and build upon those theoretically. Of course, if the initial assumptions are wrong, then all conclusions arrived at will be wrong as well. Since the only real, reliable basis for assumptions is direct experience, having strong meditate faculties is crucial for arriving at the truth. 

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Mini Insights

The mind is like a company, where each worker doesn’t know what the company does. Each worker only knows their one individual job. With awareness/mindfulness, each sub-mind learns what the rest of the sub-minds are doing, and they learn to work together. Fucking of course people have a hard time getting a good accent in a foreign language! The sound that arrives into consciousness is a highly, highly processed (by the auditory sub-mind) version of the original input, optimized to the native speaker’s language. You can slowly, slowly break that down, but only as much is necessary to understand input. This is a problem with sankharas in the auditory sub-mind. If you could penetrate the auditory input and hear the unprocessed version, maybe you could acquire the perfect accent.

JA-dark: why don’t you think to train your mind, the tool you are using to acquire the language? All of those studies are based on people with fluff-mush minds. Say language learning is like moving 5 tons of rice across one mile. If you are weak, you will have to make more trips, and it will take much longer. The stronger you are, the more you take in each trip, and the faster you accomplish your goal. Training your mind is gaining strength. Why does this not occur to anybody?

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Meditation Instructions

Focus on the SENSATION of the breath (following and connecting) while keeping internal and external awareness open, being sensitive to joy.

-When distractions (including doubt) arise, note it, then go back to the breath, letting it come be and go. -When dullness arises, apply antidote as soon as possible -If agitation is present, cultivate joy

Whatever is happening is what you need to work on; everything is progress; stage 3 is A okay. There is no "you" who can meditate well or bad; never blame yourself or feel bad. No matter what arises, see it has fueling you and throw it in the chopper. Be diligent but don't strive.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Mini Insights

-it's dangerous to indulge in thought, even while being kind of mindful, because the sub mind that is in charge at that moment may be a bad one

-everyone is different, literally. What you need to do to yourself is completely different than what other people need to do to their selves. Comparing yourself to others with objective measures is completely pointless, because how long "one inch" is (the distance between each stage) is different for everybody

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Lately I feel like shiiiit after every conversation I have. This is because I make it my goal on the conversation to have people understand how cool and advanced I am. It just feels silly and egotistical. Most of it is a desire to have myself understood by others, which is indeed based in the delusion of a self. Most of the time it just makes things awkward because the other person doesn’t really care. Deriving satisfaction from what another human thinks is so ludicrous. The other half of this is that I am starting to get peaks of a baseline state of consciousness that is far beyond what I have ever known. All this wrong speech is getting in the way. For my own sake, from here on out, I vow to only speak to others for their own sake, and not my own. I will just write all the things I would want to say otherwise on here.

Dude, in one scene in Welcome to the NHK, Satou does 5meo-DMT on top of 5 grams of shrooms! Shrooms and DMT were legal in Japan until 2002! That’s insane!

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

"Bless the YouTube gods”

Obviously there are no Gods of YouTube; what they are referring to is simply an algorithm. An algorithm that, to the subjective experience of a human, despite our intellectual understating of the reality of what is actually taking place, appears to function as a God. Well then couldn’t what Christians call “God” be actually something more like an algorithm as well? Just one that we simply have yet to fully comprehend.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Language Ability and Subjective Experience

People have to take subjective experience into account more when talking about language ability. This will most likely be a gap between how good they sound and their subjective experience of how proficient they are at speaking.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Psychedelics did me nothing but good

in hindsight. The reason it appeared to be the case that psychedelics  caused me to started having problems/getting depressed was because they started to shake up my old paradigm. Although my old paradigm was harmful and had many problems, it still served the function of allowing me to function in a decent way. I got destabilized during the period where that faulty paradigm was in the process of eroding but was still partially intact. It was Psychedelics that did a lot of that eroding. Who knows where I would be now if I had never done them.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

The Problem With Spirituality

is that since mainstream culture is so caught up in it’s “scientific” paradigm, you have to be pretty “out there” in the first place to even consider spirituality as a possibility. So most of the people who believe in the parts that are legit also end up believing in the bullshit, since they are gullible and stupid. Sorting out the bullshit will be hard.

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

What would chimpanzees rap about if they could speak? Probably mating and hording resources. What about human rappers? Oh......

[journeyofyamazaki-blog]

Yoooooooo

I’ll post my ideas that are too long to tweet but not long enough to write up real post on here from now on