mmm. Yeah, you had me worried. I had some dark nights, but nothing as bad as you had. A warning to be careful generalizing the experience too much, perhaps.
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A lot of people seem to think you can reduce the amount of conditioning. Can't get rid of it entirely, of course, but it does feel like I just have less.
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Any functional human mind has to be conditioned by something, because nothing is independent of conditions. I agree that when you recognize that conditions are not you, then you can reduce or change them, though a lot of conditioning is biological/evolutionary.
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Yep, I'm talking about social conditioning specifically. The more I remove it and expose the deeper biological / evolutionary conditioning, the happier I seem to become. Millions of years of wisdom built into that.
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Agree that suffering decreases when you remove social conditioning, though you also get increasingly more lonely as you realize that everyone around you is fucking crazy.
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this is a really big part of the "waking down is hard" thing.
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Yeah, it's easy to turn it into some kind of superiority complex, but it's not about being better than anyone -- it's about suffering less than most people, and seeing just how terrible people are at addressing their suffering but not being able to do anything about it.
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hmmm, wasn't thinking superiority complex though I guess you're right, spiritual pride is a problem for some people. was thinking more that you need to wake down and reintegrate because you still have your mundane life to deal with (unless you retreat to a monastery forever).
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In a way it's like reprogramming yourself after you de-program yourself. Designing new coats for yourself to wear that fit into society for your intended purposes.
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Awakening is the process of learning the rules of the shed-and-replace game. You can only learn the rules of a game if you recognize the fact that you're playing the game, and that you're stuck in it.
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I think that the despair comes from getting the recognition but not yet having the skills to play well. There's a sense of helplessness as the truth turns out to be that suffering is a fundamental characteristic of experience, not that you can become enlightened and escape it.
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