A statement can be defined as true only within the limits of a certain system. There can be an infinite number of systems. Which in themselves can produce an infinite number of true statements. For example within mathematics.
Each system is a subsystem (or rather a part) of reality. Therefore no system is able to make a true statement about the nature of reality. The infinite nature of reality always escapes any set number of rules.
Further, each statement about reality is made from a certain, finite point of view within infinite reality. The search for an ultimately true statement always reveals it's own tool or mechanism by which it tries to define reality as inadequate and illusory.
Truth is undefinable. No statement can ultimately be made about it. That's why it is so difficult to talk about enlightenment.
The Power of Yes: An Approach to Mindfulness
All Day Awareness or mindfulness in daily activity is the extension of formal meditation practice into your daily life. Over time I have found this practice to be extremely powerful in transforming my outlook on life, my happiness, my capacity to witness emotions, my ability to concentrate, my contentment in difficult situations, my ability to reason and in general my feeling of well-being.
 |
| Embracing all of (your) reality. |
But there is an important aspect to this practice that I want to talk about in this article. And that is how to approach this state of radical openness of whatever arises in the present moment.
When you practice awareness of the senses and your thoughts, automatically another function of your thoughts will arise. Your thoughts (or your ego) will try to hijack your higher state of awareness. You will start to hear comments about your mindful observer mode. Thoughts will try to take over this new position of being aware of the rest of your experience. This happens in really sneaky ways. If you are mindful you will hear a lot of commentary when you witness your current experience. Comments about other thoughts, about emotions, about sounds, sights and feelings. And those commentary thoughts will claim to be the observer, it is easy to identify with those commentary thoughts. Include those commentary thoughts also in your mindful observation. Treat them as any other sensations. This is difficult step and requires and additional level of mindfulness.
And the main reason for this article is the attitude with which we approach mindfulness. It is like the color of the filter through which we observe our moment to moment experience. As soon as an experience has some special meaning to you, your mind is going to judge and comment on it. And with applying the right filter we can learn and embrace more of what we experience. And the filter I recommend is a Yes to all of your experience.
What does this mean? Welcome everything. Be of no resistance to what appears in your consciousness. Be a superconductor. Let everything flow through you. Open the flood-gates as wide as possible.
A Yes feels widening and freeing, whereas a No feels constricting and limiting. Allow yourself to feel also the emotions that are commonly labeled as bad. You begin to embrace the full spectrum of your humanness. Experience will become richer. You will learn that challenging emotions only become problematic when you try to resist them. We cannot change what actually exists. We can only observe and learn, so that we may create a different future.
When you allow all emotions to flow through you, they quickly resolve and you can observe them with an open and genuine interest, like a scientist who wants to learn more about how his inner mind works.
Learning by observation greatly helped me to understand situations and my resulting judgments and desires. Often times the root causes will be revealed, but without a rational explanation. Instead you will know in every moment the underlying emotions that triggered your current state of mind. This is a kind of self-knowledge that only observation and no rational talk-psychotherapy can teach.
You always have the possibility to control the level of openness though. Should the emotions become too overwhelming ,for example when you are dealing with some serious trauma, you can still put the lid on. But as long as you remain firmly rooted in the presence of wide open awareness, you will feel that none of the content that appears can actually hurt you. Your identification with any content in your awareness will greatly decrease. You realize there is no difference between you and consciousness. There never was any separation. You are consciousness. And all that ever happens IS. Changing, fleeting, ultimately groundless and substance-less, self-aware appearances. On a deeper level of reality consciousness is not separated from that which appears. It is all just ISness as different forms and in different dimensions (as the sensory experiences and thoughts).
Summary of the benefits to approaching your experience with a Yes instead of a No:
- negative emotions don't last as long the less we resist them
- as an open observer we are not longer fully controlled by our emotions
- we gain the ability to do the best in more and more situations
- from observation we can learn where our current motivations are grounded in
- our experience becomes richer and we act more authentically
- we open ourselves up to have realizations about deeper aspects of reality
- we will feel happier with our moment to moment experience
- fears and worries have less of grip over us
- getting lost in mental scenarios about the future or past is less likely
The Nature of Memories
How our minds construct memories
When I think about my past, I unconsciously assume that what I have in my mind is actually a pretty good representation of the events that happened. You have probably already learned that this is not the case. Our brains are not truth machines. But rather survival-machines. Energy was highly important in our evolutionary past and conservation of energy an important adaptation. This resulted in a sorting mechanism for your memories that is geared towards securing your survival, so that you can pass on your genes and keep your offspring alive long enough so they can do the same. |
| The further we go back in time the more vague our memories are |
This situation is fundamentally counterproductive if we try to remember the past as it actually was. Emotions and sensory input blends into a vague feeling of who and what it was that we encountered in that situation. Inner and outer world have no clear distinction. And to make it worth, every time we remember or tell our friends about a past event, our memory actually changes. What we remembered in the past of an event becomes the event. This is where it get's interesting.
Over time we construct a story of who we think were in the past. The further we go back in time, the more we become the stories which we have told ourselves and others about ourselves. A few of our memories stand out more than others, even though they only represent a tiny slice of our past. We need to realize here that what we think we are, is mostly a self constructed story. Our egos are these self-constructed, biased stories we believe was actually our past. The ego is larger than this, but this is a fundamental part of it.
How this understanding leads to deeper insight into ourselves
The first step is the realization of this. If we understand that the past is mainly a self-created story in our minds, which is geared towards survival and not a mechanism to accurately represent truth, it allows us a greater degree of freedom. In not taking the past so seriously, we gain another degree of freedom. It opens us up to the path of truth-realization, in the sense that we can now begin to realize what we truly are. A story, among an infinite number of stories, playing itself out as it has to. Because otherwise, absolute infinity would miss exactly your current experience. We gain the freedom to realize that in all this, there is no consciousness which is separate from appearance. That appearance is inherently self-conscious, and that what we are is not what we thought we were.We become free from the limitations of the ego through the realization that the self-identification is no more than a story. And this story is playing itself out without a separate I. But with strong attachments in the dimension of thought and with a particular strong emphasis on thoughts about a largely illusory past, which it calls "I".
Further down this path, it opens us up to the deepest insight into our human psyche. Which is the insight that we are not that story and that what we are is not separate from the ground of all being. The stateless state that already existed before our universe with all it's inherent qualities and dimensions of time and space was born. That state where all of existence is fundamentally one and not yet manifested as the seemingly separated world which we perceive now.
The practical methods
There are people out there, many of them following the neo-advaitans, who believe that the logical understanding of this is already enough and all is already realized. In my experience this is not true. The manual is not good enough, we also got to practice. And most enlightened beings have worked hard to reach a high level of truth realization.If you want to improve your capability to deal with your every day life, than I recommend you install a daily meditation practice. Meditate for about 30-60 minutes every day and make it a habit. Largely focus on developing concentration. Sit still and allow yourself to rest in simple being and focus on the breath.
If you are interested in seeing through the illusions of the ego for yourself you got to do self-inquiry and probably psychedelics.
If anything, I would wish that this article gave you some sense of freedom. I hope you were able to realize that you are in the position to choose how much of yourself you want to be defined by this story of your past. Maybe it can even set you free to discover those realization and insights for yourself.
How to prevent muscle twitching on a ketogenic diet
I made a pretty interesting discovery about the mechanism behind muscle twitches (also called benign muscle fasciculation syndrome) in relation to a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet. I gave the very low carbohydrate diet many attempts in the past. Whenever I would lower my carbohydrates below around 50 grams per day, I would get muscle spasms all over my body. A muscle would contract only once and then a few seconds later another muscle somewhere else would contract. Most of the time it wasn't visible but I could feel it every time. It feels like all your muscles are charged and could contract every second.
 |
| With muscle twitching, it feels like your body is always a millisecond before a contraction |
I have discovered what causes this on a ketogenic diet. And even though I mentioned before that salt was helping, it actually has nothing to do with salt. Any relief from a high salt intake was only temporary and I would have to take increasing amounts of it. (At this point I also want to mention that I no longer follow a ketogenic diet, you can read a new blog-post about my current diet.)
I will tell you how I discovered this and how you can prevent this on a ketogenic diet.
As I was researching these symptoms in relation to keto, electrolytes and magnesium were always mentioned. But both would not help. So I didn't find the solution here yet.
One day I researched keto in high altitudes because I was planning to go on a hike in the alps. With nuts as my fuel source as they are the most calorically dense whole plant food. I found out that eating ketogenic while in high altitude can be tricky. And here it also gets tricky and technical to explain this.
As the air is less dense at high altitude, you have to breathe a higher volume of air to absorb the same amount of oxygen. This is problematic because the body will lose a certain amount of CO2 per air volume that is breathed in and out. It takes a couple of days for the body to adjust to this and reduce CO2 loss.
In the cells, there needs to be a balance of CO2 and O2. So with the loss of CO2, the cells are also not able to take up enough O2 which can be deadly in extreme cases. That is also the reason why hyperventilation (aka Wim Hof breathing) is dangerous. Don't do it. You won't increase O2 levels by doing this but actually decrease cellular O2 levels exactly because this balance needs to be maintained. In order to prevent the loss of CO2 (and therefore O2), the blood vessels in your brain restrict and you feel dizzy.
The problem with ketogenic diets in high altitudes is that, as the body uses fats as it's the main source of calories, it needs less oxygen for the same amount of energy output. Less oxygen utilization means also less production of CO2. This is widely known and used to measure an athletes state of fat utilization through breath analysis, so I won't go into that here. At high altitude, this can potentially be a problem, because less CO2 is available in the cells. In altitude, the increased breathing volume pulls the CO2 from the body, and O2 levels might drop to critically low levels. But here the body can adapt over time as well and you also require less oxygen, so it balances out.
But what has all this to do with muscle twitches on keto?
I did not make this connection until a couple weeks later. I was trying the very low carb diet again and had the same issue. Muscles started to twitch, salt did not help anymore and so I ended up researching for benign fasciculation syndrome. It is not so uncommon and many people experience it at least once throughout there lifetime.
Probably everyone knows the annoying eyelid twitch. But that is not what I had. My muscle would twitch only once and then another one would twitch.
And then I also found this video. It is in german, but this doctor made a genius discovery. He has discovered that CO2 is relaxing and that low levels of it lead to nervous system over-excitement. He has connected the CO2 loss in his patients to increased breathing, caused by stress. Everybody knows that in stressful situations you increase your breathing. In order to quickly run away from a lion, this was probably a helpful adaptation. But constant low-level stress (where you sigh) has the negative side-effect of increased loss of CO2. Low energy levels because of low cellular O2 levels follow.
Through controlled and slow breathing I was able to completely stop my muscle twitching. It took only about half a day. I guess after a couple of weeks of strict keto this side effect would have subsided by itself. But I never went that long to find out because I was too concerned about it and increased my carbs. Now, after eating ketogenic or very low carb for a long time, I never have this issue anymore. The body adapts to the decreased production of CO2 by holding on to more of it, it seems.
Interestingly, I only get the twitches sometimes after intense exercise. Which, for me, is another sign that this theory could be true. Because, after intense exercise, the increased breathing persists for some time after you actually finish and you lose CO2.
Interestingly, I only get the twitches sometimes after intense exercise. Which, for me, is another sign that this theory could be true. Because, after intense exercise, the increased breathing persists for some time after you actually finish and you lose CO2.
Conclusion:
The adaptation to keto is partly comparable to the adaptation to high altitude. Because less CO2 is produced in the burning of fats, the body has to adapt by conserving more of it. This could also explain why some people feel the keto-flu, where they feel low in energy.
The solution is simple though. Pay special attention to your breathing for a while and breath slowly and regularly. While sitting, I am now at about eight in- and out-breath per minute.
Do not miss any new articles about diet and personal development. Subscribe to new articles for free by entering your email address in the right side-bar. You won't receive any ads from me ever.
If Consciousness is the Ground of Reality, can we explain everything with it?
Theories of everything have an interesting aspect to them. Whenever someone tries to explain the universe, he has to be granted at least one ultimately mysterious agent. In the religions, it is god that is never questioned. But where did he come from? That can never be answered within the religious world-view.
In the scientific world-view, we could say it began with the big bang. Where did it come from? What was before the big bang? We don't know yet. And, if our theories ever predict what was before the big bang, than what caused that thing? What was before that? This line of reasoning will also never end. You can always ask another why.
At one point every explanatory model, a so called "theory of everything", has to be granted it's one free and unexplainable variable from which the theory can then explain everything else.
Now it gets interesting. Once it is understood, that we will always have one fundamentally mysterious and unexplainable event that "caused" everything or with which everything can be explained.
In the scientific world-view there is a physical universe outside of ourselves, which needs to be explained and it should have started with the big bang. In the religious world-view there is also an independent outside world and it was created by god.
What do both of these have in common, making them a very risky model to base our world-view on?
They are both events for which we, in our own experience, have no direct evidence. Where is the big bang or god? Do they really exist? No. Not more than any other idea. They might be true, but we have to say that we do not know. If we could see visions of god or the big bang, does that proof that those visionary impressions of ours had anything to do with creating the whole thing? We can never know.
The thought of a physical, material world outside of our perceptions is already a believe. Empirically we can never know this. Postulating this and then trying to explain all of reality on that underlying, unspoken assumption is never going to be successful. Science is hiding it's most basic assumption from us. The assumption that there is an underlying, independent physical universe. Science, in the field of quantum physics, has also already shown that everything is based on consciousness.
The moon really is only there when we look at it.
So it would be wise to base our explanation of the world on something we know for sure, 100%. What is it, that we unmistakably know for sure? Imagine you had an accident and all your sensory inputs would be wiped out. Imagine that that accident even wiped out your ability to think. What would be left? What could you still know for sure? If the world does not exist anymore, what remains?
I am conscious. I am. I exist. Could anything else ever be known for sure? Everything else arises within consciousness. But it is possible to explain everything from this knowledge:
If this interests you, I can really recommend you read Bernardo Kastrup's book: "Brief Peeks Beyond".
In the scientific world-view, we could say it began with the big bang. Where did it come from? What was before the big bang? We don't know yet. And, if our theories ever predict what was before the big bang, than what caused that thing? What was before that? This line of reasoning will also never end. You can always ask another why.
At one point every explanatory model, a so called "theory of everything", has to be granted it's one free and unexplainable variable from which the theory can then explain everything else.
Now it gets interesting. Once it is understood, that we will always have one fundamentally mysterious and unexplainable event that "caused" everything or with which everything can be explained.
In the scientific world-view there is a physical universe outside of ourselves, which needs to be explained and it should have started with the big bang. In the religious world-view there is also an independent outside world and it was created by god.
What do both of these have in common, making them a very risky model to base our world-view on?
They are both events for which we, in our own experience, have no direct evidence. Where is the big bang or god? Do they really exist? No. Not more than any other idea. They might be true, but we have to say that we do not know. If we could see visions of god or the big bang, does that proof that those visionary impressions of ours had anything to do with creating the whole thing? We can never know.
The thought of a physical, material world outside of our perceptions is already a believe. Empirically we can never know this. Postulating this and then trying to explain all of reality on that underlying, unspoken assumption is never going to be successful. Science is hiding it's most basic assumption from us. The assumption that there is an underlying, independent physical universe. Science, in the field of quantum physics, has also already shown that everything is based on consciousness.
The moon really is only there when we look at it.
So it would be wise to base our explanation of the world on something we know for sure, 100%. What is it, that we unmistakably know for sure? Imagine you had an accident and all your sensory inputs would be wiped out. Imagine that that accident even wiped out your ability to think. What would be left? What could you still know for sure? If the world does not exist anymore, what remains?
I am conscious. I am. I exist. Could anything else ever be known for sure? Everything else arises within consciousness. But it is possible to explain everything from this knowledge:
If this interests you, I can really recommend you read Bernardo Kastrup's book: "Brief Peeks Beyond".
Why I no longer eat OMAD and what I do now
In the past, I have experimented with eating one meal per day (OMAD) on a ketogenic diet. And I am sure I will at some point in the future go back to eating only once a day. But why did I stop and why doesn't it fit my current situation?
Energy in = Energy out
This simple equation explains why I cannot eat only one meal per day at the moment. When I was eating only one meal per day, I had a sedentary job and was doing only about 20 minutes of body-weight exercises per day. Now on the other hand I lift heavy 6 days a week and ride my bike for about 40 minutes and swim in an ice-cold lake on a daily or weekly basis. This and the goal of gaining muscle requires me to eat a lot more on a daily basis. If you are not interested in either a lot of daily activity or in gaining any weight, then OMAD is probably the best diet for you to gain maximum longevity- and health benefits.
Lowered digestive capacity
For many years I struggled with Crohn's disease and still do to some extend. Which means that I have to be very careful not to eat any foods that trigger a bad reaction in me. That shows me that my digestive capacity and the robustness of my digestive system is lower than in other people. I have found out that it is better for me to eat a meal that is below my digestive capacity, which means smaller portion sizes. It takes me unusually long to digest large meals and this shortens the fasting part of the OMAD approach which is the whole point of doing it.
Constant muscle twitches with a high-fat diet
In my experience, the OMAD approach is better suited for a relatively high-fat diet. I tried out a low-fat approach, but it was absolutely impossible to eat enough calories that way. Eating a diet high in fat though is perfect for intermittent fasting. While fasting you utilize mainly fat for energy and therefore eating a high-fat meal allows the body to efficiently use that fuel. Switching back and forth between carbohydrate- and fat-metabolism gives many people a feeling of low energy.
I had the additional problem that my muscles would start to twitch all over my body when I ate a high-fat diet. I have tried many different things to solve this, but have not found a solution. The only thing that stopped it was going back to a mainly carbohydrate-based diet, which is better suited for eating several meals per day.
I actually figured this problem out. You can read about it here.
What I do now
I adopted a flexible approach to fasting. I like the feeling of fasting. Therefore I do about one 24 hour and two 16-18h fast-days per week. I closely monitor my weight though and if I do not see a slow but steady increase in my weight of about 1 kg per month I will have to reduce that even further.
Diet
I also switched away from the high-fat approach back to a high carb diet. My diet is about 70% of calories from carbs, 15% from each protein and fat. Some days my fat intake might be around 20-25% though.
I am still eating whole plant foods, but I have also found that I need some fatty foods like nuts and seeds in my meals in order to feel satisfied. But the main component of my diet are foods high in complex carbohydrates. I eat a lot of lentils, peas and beans. I combine those with grains like millet, buckwheat, oats, whole wheat pasta and granola in order to adjust the calories. Most of my meals also contain several hundred grams of different vegetables. I eat some type of cabbage almost daily, red cabbage, brussel sprout, broccoli or cauliflower.
 |
| Beans and lentils are a major part of my diet |
Energy in = Energy out
This simple equation explains why I cannot eat only one meal per day at the moment. When I was eating only one meal per day, I had a sedentary job and was doing only about 20 minutes of body-weight exercises per day. Now on the other hand I lift heavy 6 days a week and ride my bike for about 40 minutes and swim in an ice-cold lake on a daily or weekly basis. This and the goal of gaining muscle requires me to eat a lot more on a daily basis. If you are not interested in either a lot of daily activity or in gaining any weight, then OMAD is probably the best diet for you to gain maximum longevity- and health benefits.
Lowered digestive capacity
For many years I struggled with Crohn's disease and still do to some extend. Which means that I have to be very careful not to eat any foods that trigger a bad reaction in me. That shows me that my digestive capacity and the robustness of my digestive system is lower than in other people. I have found out that it is better for me to eat a meal that is below my digestive capacity, which means smaller portion sizes. It takes me unusually long to digest large meals and this shortens the fasting part of the OMAD approach which is the whole point of doing it.
Constant muscle twitches with a high-fat diet
In my experience, the OMAD approach is better suited for a relatively high-fat diet. I tried out a low-fat approach, but it was absolutely impossible to eat enough calories that way. Eating a diet high in fat though is perfect for intermittent fasting. While fasting you utilize mainly fat for energy and therefore eating a high-fat meal allows the body to efficiently use that fuel. Switching back and forth between carbohydrate- and fat-metabolism gives many people a feeling of low energy.
I had the additional problem that my muscles would start to twitch all over my body when I ate a high-fat diet. I have tried many different things to solve this, but have not found a solution. The only thing that stopped it was going back to a mainly carbohydrate-based diet, which is better suited for eating several meals per day.
I actually figured this problem out. You can read about it here.
What I do now
I adopted a flexible approach to fasting. I like the feeling of fasting. Therefore I do about one 24 hour and two 16-18h fast-days per week. I closely monitor my weight though and if I do not see a slow but steady increase in my weight of about 1 kg per month I will have to reduce that even further.
Diet
I also switched away from the high-fat approach back to a high carb diet. My diet is about 70% of calories from carbs, 15% from each protein and fat. Some days my fat intake might be around 20-25% though.
I am still eating whole plant foods, but I have also found that I need some fatty foods like nuts and seeds in my meals in order to feel satisfied. But the main component of my diet are foods high in complex carbohydrates. I eat a lot of lentils, peas and beans. I combine those with grains like millet, buckwheat, oats, whole wheat pasta and granola in order to adjust the calories. Most of my meals also contain several hundred grams of different vegetables. I eat some type of cabbage almost daily, red cabbage, brussel sprout, broccoli or cauliflower.
This is my current diet and I feel quite energetic on it. It is also very affordable as I buy only basic ingredients and cook most of my meals at home. In case you have any questions or want to know about how to start a healthy whole-food plant-based diet, feel free to shoot me a message through the form on the right (not visible on mobile version).
The Psychology Of Daily Cold-Exposure
I started winter-swimming in a nearby lake six weeks ago. During the last two weeks I have been doing it daily and I plan to continue to do so. In this post I want to reveal the insights I had into my own psyche from this experiment.
 |
| Test of your mindfulness |
What happens in your mind when you face a painful and counter-intuitive challenge every-day. As I am practicing mindfulness throughout the day it is especially interesting to observe my mind when faced with such a challenge. The water has a temperature of around 4°C. Outside temperature is often between 3-9°C the last couple of weeks. On some days I encounter the additional joy of strong winds, which make the time after swimming equally cold until I am dressed up again.
Your mind makes you suffer not the experience
What I found is that the mind is inherently bad at predicting the degree of pain and suffering. When approach the lake and getting undressed my mind comes up with all sorts of excuses of why it is better not to do it today. This quickly becomes tricky business. The mind is quickly deceiving you into believing something else than the truth. The exaggerated fears and the anticipated pain quickly becomes entangled with all sorts of other excuses, like catching a cold or freezing to death. Which of course is mostly non-sense if you approach it with careful and gradual cold-exposure.
This practice makes it unmistakably clear that thoughts have nothing to do with who we are. The decision to go into ice-cold water every day is not made by the thoughts. If I were the thoughts, I would not go in the water. The doubts and the thoughts that say no are in the mind-space while something else just goes in the cold water and stays in there for as long as the timer demands.
Becoming a superconductor
Make no mistake, the water causes you a lot of pain, especially in the hands and feet. The meditative practice here is to become a superconductor for this pain. As long as you don't resist it, it isn't painful. This is a beautiful experience. You experience that the sensation we call pain is inherently empty. By staying with it in every millisecond without resisting it, there is no pain. But as soon as the mind fights it, wants to change it, can't accept reality and wants the present moment to be something else than what it is, there comes the pain. Shinzen Young talks about this in his meditation technique, which he calls strong-determination-sitting. You can experience something similar within seconds of entering ice-cold water. It's a true test for the strength of your mindfulness-muscle.
Not believing the fearful predictions of the mind
Very quickly we believe in the scenario that our mind presents us with. You think about some future dream of yours but your mind comes up with all sorts of bad consequences that might happen... Don't be so quick to believe what your mind is presenting you with here. But don't go to the other end of the spectrum where you do not think at all about the consequences of your actions.
What you can do instead is ask yourself: How likely is it that the scenario my mind has come up with will happen? And if it happens, would it even be as bad or painful as my mind makes it seem at the moment? What can I learn from my past experience? How have the situations I encountered actually turned out when I predicted them to be bad, fearful or painful?
It is funny to be in ice-cold water and to experience that very thing you feared. I already started laughing about myself several times and thought: What? This is the thing I feared and wanted to avoid? It's not inherently bad at all. And afterwards it feels genuinely good to have overcome and seen through the fear and pain once again.
Strange Loops
Everything goes full circle.
It has to, because everything is you.
You can't go anywhere, whatever it is, it is here and now.
You stare down the infinite, right now.
Who says, there must be knowledge about the infinite at every moment.
The finite couldn't be any other way.
Without this finite, the infinite had a hole to fill.
This finite, you call your life. Your now.
Infinite freedom from nothingness springs forth from this very moment.
Without creator. Without creation. You created you.
Inspired by:
The Legacy of a Truth-Seeker:
Something To Be Inspired By
1000 Days Of Hiking To Enlightenment
I am pretty sure the above article will be a great inspiration for every spiritual practitioner.
Considering this monk started his 1000 days of hiking up and down a mountain, 100-200 days of every year, when he was 24 years old, reading the article strengthened my desire to do a long-term hike myself.
So far I feared to face and the pain and suffering involved in a self-supported, long-distance hike. But Stories like these show me that I, as a human being myself, probably have similar strength in me.
Doing a long-distance hike is not uncommon. Many people do it. But, as I know from myself, it is easy to get lost in thoughts most of the time. In order to raise your consciousness, the technique of All-Day-Awareness or constant mindfulness, makes all the difference. Not letting the mind wander and staying focused on the present moment is the goal. All the time.
These monks represent a state of mind that is truly worth aspiring to. So I recommend you read the article. And let me know what you think of hiking as meditation in the comments ;)
Someone else who is hiking and meditating: http://thewalkingmonk.blogspot.com/
I am pretty sure the above article will be a great inspiration for every spiritual practitioner.
 |
| She would be up for a long-distance hike every second. |
Considering this monk started his 1000 days of hiking up and down a mountain, 100-200 days of every year, when he was 24 years old, reading the article strengthened my desire to do a long-term hike myself.
So far I feared to face and the pain and suffering involved in a self-supported, long-distance hike. But Stories like these show me that I, as a human being myself, probably have similar strength in me.
Doing a long-distance hike is not uncommon. Many people do it. But, as I know from myself, it is easy to get lost in thoughts most of the time. In order to raise your consciousness, the technique of All-Day-Awareness or constant mindfulness, makes all the difference. Not letting the mind wander and staying focused on the present moment is the goal. All the time.
These monks represent a state of mind that is truly worth aspiring to. So I recommend you read the article. And let me know what you think of hiking as meditation in the comments ;)
Someone else who is hiking and meditating: http://thewalkingmonk.blogspot.com/
The Beauty Of God
Everything in existence is beautiful. And I mean everything. The problem is only that we humans like to put things into categories and divide them. The good and the bad are human concepts which do not apply to the outside world. They purely exist in our minds. But the Truth is what exists within consciousness is just so and there is no arguing with reality. For god, everything is terrifyingly beautiful.
I like this as a pretty good example of what god would call beautiful art:
Mature art transforms what we usually call ugly into something that can be seen as beautiful.
I like this as a pretty good example of what god would call beautiful art:
Mature art transforms what we usually call ugly into something that can be seen as beautiful.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)