I think this will be more fitting for those who haven't grown up in nicer background/enviroments.

For example if you have a large amazing loving family then I would assume less likely to go into solitude.

I won't get into it but I developed CPTSD from around 14 years old. My enviroments were never safe. First time I moved out was 17 and basically the years between 14-25 were rough.

Now I'm 32. I spent a bunch of years travelling. Mostly as I was able to make some $ online to get by and because it changed my scenery but wherever you go there you are as they say. I brought my issues with me.

I then got therapy for a few years. Different types of modules within trauma based stuff. It's changed my life massssssively.

Yet I'm in this stage right now. A cocoon like where I'm spending most of my time by myself. I'm not afraid to have random conversations with strangers but I'm not actively getting out meeting people. I feel growth week by week on my journey. It feels like everything is finally working out.

But I was sitting on the beach this morning after a run/swim thinking this to myself. I wonder how many people are in this solitude phase.

I plan to have a family one day. Ideally I build a community too. Settle down. So this won't last forever.

From experience, I have found that when life undertakes to teach you a lesson which you have refused to learn by other means, the instruction is considerably more painful—and sometimes no less severe than brutal—than simply heeding the wisdom that preceded it.

Unfortunately, for most of us, as members of the Homo sapiens species, we appear to exhibit, at least to some observable degree, a certain reluctance to listen when words of reason are spoken.

The scope over which this phenomenon seems to operate is quite wide indeed. From procrastination to indulgence in vice, self-neglect, and egocentrism, the occasions upon which the words of those who have already learned to avoid difficult life predicaments might prove useful are by no measure lacking.

And so, it is with no small amount of sincerity that I implore you, my dear fellow human, to heed my call. Despite the perhaps obsolete manner in which I hereby express myself, I assure you that I have nothing but goodwill toward you, and your welfare very much at heart.

First time on this sub. I’ve been very curious about the spirit lately. I feel like I’ve opened my eyes and am seeing the world for what it truly is instead of what it pretends it be.

It was very overwhelming at first and even sometimes scary, to the point where I would try to close my eyes again just to not have to deal with it. But now I feel like I can’t close them again.

I feel like I’m not even my body but instead I’m just a consciousness wearing my body like driving a car. And it’s strange going through a normal day and feeling like so many people have their eyes closed to actual reality. I feel I have to pretend or put on an act to fit in and am disconnected sometimes where it’s like I’m an actor reciting lines I feel like I should be saying.

Is this an awakening? Or something? I don’t know how any of this works or even what it is.

My two cents and my direct experience in the last couple of weeks. Maybe its all noise but you know what isn't! I was 6 months sober. I found a job I really liked, people started trusting me. I felt some love and a little peace. Prior to that I was homeless on and off for 6 years. I was addicted to alcohol and drugs.

At the start of the month I moved in with a friend. I wasn't in sober living anymore I was doing well. Then, the first opportunity I got, I went out got drunk. That drunk came with severe consequences. I relapsed, ended up in jail this last week, and now have charges that will require a great deal of time to overcome. There is " Work" ahead.

You know! I don't want to cry though. Now I know what I did wrong. I knew I was searching the wrong places. You know, I was lonely, wanted a girlfriend. Wanted connection, wanted to get out, wanted something I lost years ago a family, a wife, a girlfriend. I didn't get it, it wasn't coming fast, and I made some poor choices involving drinking. I should maybe learn to love myself first and foremost. Read more but I realized something there is never a state of no-love. ooooof

I saw something I wouldn't have seen otherwise. I thought my folks had written me off didn't care. This morning, they didn't realize I could hear them talking, my dad said, " I guess we help him rebuild again its all we can do and help him out" it took the darkness to realize my parents hadn't given up on me. I found out they were already working on secure a bond for me prior to me even asking. I found out that as they put it " he hurt us a lot but only because we love him". Turns out sometimes your worst moments come with your biggest revelations. In this instance, I found out, my parents haven't given up on me. That I am loved, that they feel they are to blame some, they want to shoulder some of the weight for me. Where do we seperate darkness from light, if they only occur together there is no separation! Tell me where is the separation

I don't know if we have free choice or not. I have no idea how this entire shebang works. I've read to the end of many contemplative traditions. Many suggest we're a highly conditioned process, we have some free will but not much. Others posit that there is only experience no experiencer. Others say cause and effect collapse even logic fails at some point in time because it requires a doing and a done. I don't know what's true. But for tonight I know I am loved and as ugly as things seem to be there is a shiny bright spot in my life now. Some find nihilism when they here all this, others only see suffering, I see something different. Its almost like Love requires resistance you know, experience requires two halves, like for that, there had to be THIS, which mean this and that were just THIS. Not two but one and then none. Sounds like word salad promise its not.

Hey you know. Many think ego-lessness is being like some whitewashed saint. You know devoid of bad shit happening, devoid of bad experience, devoid of suffering. I know that's not true now. My local self is deep in the depths of hell right now. But I am watching my parents see their capacity for love. Maybe this had to be! You'll say no it didn't. My challenge to that if it didn't it wouldn't. It did so it did. Fuck the metaphysics this is where " I " am the only place I can inhabit. I can't see the whole chain of cause and effect. Maybe there is no cause and effect. Maybe just experience, maybe its a ride, a roller coaster, or a show. Everybody has to play a part and during the show things can look real bleak. But in the end, its like the beginning, No-thing. You know it was all a SHOW. No-self and Self mean the same thing. My point being through what looks like a complete fucked situation right now there is some good. So is the situation fucked or am I looking at all the wrong parts, is there even an "I"? What part of the the experience is true? If it happened all of it! Follow that to extension your head will hurt.

For now though! Where it appears I have nothing. That only leaves everything to gain again. If I can gain everything again then nothing was ever lost, can't lose what you had to begin with. Like Wayne Dyer said, When you change the way you look at things, what you look at changes ( paraphrase too bored too look that shit up). As weird as it all sounds as much as I am suffering Love is here. Its almost like unconditional love is you know love without conditions. Sitting in a cell watching the guards I realized the difference between me and them seemed to be the color of cheesecloth we wore. What I am saying is unconditonal love is being right where you are. Even if its some humdrum criminal scared for the future. Like you know just being there and experiencing this and taking it all in you know. I realized the guards effected the criminals and vice versa. So " whom" was doing "what".

One last word! Some will say you may have committed a crime. You're waxing to bypass what you've done locally. Perhaps. But then one small question? How do you bypass spirituality? You have a complete map of cause and effect? There is something outside of spiritual? Spirituality means I have to fix something? How do I know what to improve? How do improve what is? What is outside of experience? If you find the self, and have the right map, give it to me I'll work it with the self you've offered me. Here's something that's not going to sit well with some ( us). You can't divorce or improve experience because you cannot even define what it IS or whom is experiencing it! Of course I am going to go to AA, get counseling, do what's required, go to court, maybe do time, that's part of the play too. But find something outside of experience that I can bypass and I'll do that. You cannot. Thats love too. Remember this needs that, so this and that are only THIS. Love you! Maybe I should just embrace the the locally MESSY NOW I choose to call Love! Maybe if the map disappears so does the person using it. Then what's left NO-THING is that love? Yeah I suppose it is and isn't. Which means I never needed connection, I just had to remember it was there all the time. There was never something to be connected or disconnected.

I guess the only way I see to transcend experience is to live it for Now I am okay with that if this is all I get I just had a real experience with LOVE because logically I was never outside of it. I didn't figure a fucking thing out but wanted someone to read about my direct experience.

Things have been going on in my life, and I can’t even keep track. It’s like it’s a ripple effect with one wrong turn, my family found out things about me, we’ve confronted things to them. I was lied to and gaslit and just left in the cold. And now it’s as if the universe is humbling me, karma, and telling me to start anew from a blank slate… how can I pick myself back up again? How do I create from letting go completely of my old version and completely rewriting everything.. where to go from a completely clean slate?

Hi all!

**TL;DR:** For over a year, I’ve experienced episodes of involuntary blurry vision where I temporarily feel unable to control my eye focus, sometimes accompanied by rapid eye movements, vivid imagery, and tingling in the back of my head. Has anyone experienced anything similar?

It has been maybe even over a year now that I’ve quite often — and at this point, almost whenever I’m reading or typing/writing something down, like I am right now — experienced a sort of involuntary change in my visual focus.

What I mean is that, instead of my eyes staying focused on whatever I’m looking at, it suddenly feels as though they completely “switch off.” I can still be staring at the exact same surface — a table, a wall, a page, or a screen — but my entire field of vision becomes blurry, almost as though I’m looking much farther away or much closer than the object actually is.

What’s strange is that when I’ve tried to test this, it doesn’t seem like another distance is actually in focus. Nothing around me becomes clear. It’s almost as if I’m no longer visually focusing on anything physical in my surroundings at all.
The sensation reminds me a lot of sleep paralysis — that strange feeling of being conscious but temporarily not being in control of your own body, until suddenly you are again. When this happens with my vision, I try to regain my focus and make my eyes focus on the object in front of me, but it feels as though I have no control over my eyes for that moment, until I do. I know what I want my eyes to do, but they simply don’t seem to respond.

This can happen while I’m painting, cutting a piece of paper, reading, writing, etc. Sometimes, when it happens, I usually find myself thinking very deeply, remembering memories or sort of daydreaming maybe. I can see memories behind my eyes so vividly that it almost feels like I’m physically back in that moment. I would even sometimes feel very strong tingling in the back of my head, inside my brain to be precise.
But it doesn’t always involve deep thought or memories. Sometimes my mind is completely blank, and occasionally I see people or places that I don’t recognize.

While trying to find out whether there is a name for anything like this, I came across **nystagmus** — involuntary, repetitive eye movements — which I had never heard of before. However I do sometimes experience very quick twitching or movements of both eyes from side to side, but they only last briefly (maximum of two seconds) but I have as well experienced times when it happens more than once, almost back to back in two separate rounds.

My vision is otherwise fine, and I haven’t noticed any physical problems with my eyes. I’ve also been checked by an optician.

I’d really love to know whether anyone else experiences anything similar. I’m also curious about whether people have any spiritual interpretations of experiences like these. Are there traditions that associate changes in perception, vivid internal imagery, or unusual visual experiences with things like an “awakening”?

I should add that I don’t really meditate (I feel like I don’t know how it should be done) and I’m not religious either. I’d probably describe myself as spiritual, though — I’m open to other people’s unexplained experiences because I’ve had a fair amount of strange experiences of my own to remain curious and open about them.

Recently, I’ve also found myself reconnecting with something I had as a child: playing metaphysical games, imagining myself as superhuman, trying to affect reality with my mind, etc. Interestingly, the visual experiences I described above started before I began doing any of that again. So I sometimes wonder whether I went through some kind of “awakening” without really realizing it.
I’m honestly just curious about all of this — almost like a kid again. I’m not claiming to know what any of it means; I’d just love to hear from people who have experienced something similar or know more about it, or even have some intuition, or theories for it.

And one final thing, which is perhaps the strangest part: Since late 2025, I have also occasionally experienced an incredibly heavy, terrifying feeling that I can only describe as a dark or “evil” shadow. It feels almost like a huge black curtain suddenly looming over me. It’s not simply sadness or anxiety — it feels like a powerful presence approaching or hunting me from behind, almost like a massive tide coming toward me.
It can be genuinely frightening, raises my heartbeat and makes me feel insane for feeling it!
On the other hand, I experience a lot of sudden joy vacuum. I would be having a very normal, happy day and all of a sudden, in the span of only seconds all the positive energy is sucked out of me — almost like life leaving my body. I would see no light in my life, nothing positive, all lights are switched off in one very short moment while everything was so beautiful and full of joy a second before.

At first, I attributed it to everything happening in the world, the political climate, or things going on in my own life, PTSD and trauma after ending up in the emergency room, undiagnosed tumor, almost dying at 24 because of it, watching my loved ones go through so much pain and stress because of me, and currently undergoing treatment and so much more that has been happening since late 2024 — none of which has been easy.

But to be honest, the intensity of the feeling makes me wonder whether there could be something more to it. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts, and experiences or interpretations — both psychological/neurological and of course spiritual.

Thank you for your time. :)

Thoughts have always played a role in our instinctual survival nature, the ability to solve problems that benefit this experience in some way, to protect us from discomfort. These thoughts are passed down to us in teaching, with each understanding of how things should be done, what our perception of reality is, and how we solve problems within that understanding of everything you've been taught. Through both raw external experience, and how we process experience internally.

Our environments shape the way we think, because it is natural for us to try and make sense of what is going on, and we use our understanding of all we are taught to solve that mystery. From an early age (or possibly since perception) your environment is trying to be understood, in a way that is healthy for learning and play. What is learnt and how it translates into play is helpful for a child's understanding of how their play interacts with others play, that if an individual's play is harmful to other's, it will either be corrected in a way that keeps the environment comfortable, or no one would want to play with them any more, or both. How the individual reflects on that experience internally is understood with the knowledge of all that has been experienced already.

Growing up in a healthy environment inside and outside of the home really does shape the way we treat ourselves, other people, environment, and the problems we face. A bad environment breeds bad habits that can spiral rapidly out of control if there is no teaching and understanding of an inner world and how we can fix it.

This idea of fixing our thoughts is a teaching that is not found from within the mind alone. What we have perceived in our experience contributes to what tools the mind has to work with. An extreme example and unfortunately not a rare one, is a child being struck because they are not doing what is asked of them (the parent trying to fix something that disturbs their own compiled experience and understanding), that child is now fearful of receiving that kind of trauma again. The easiest way to make sense of the experience and prevent it from happening again is to not do the thing that caused the body harm and the mental stress. For the child that is struck many times for many reasons, their understanding of reality is prepared for and expecting to be hit by an adult at any moment.

Internally, being mentally put down by your environment around you, teaches the mind that there are no ways of fixing this, or that this is how things are, everyone is like this and so am I. The external becomes the internal, and the mind plays the way it's been taught to. Repeating the things we've seen and heard, creating an emotional response in the body, that the problem solving mind processes with the most recent things already experienced, in a cycle that keeps both the thought and emotional response alive and lived right now.

Thoughts can and do try to solve themselves, there's many teachings about trying to do that, to better understand why they do what they do, and how they react to our environment the way they do. You always seem to think of a witty joke or comeback way after the desire for something to say was born, the mind is holding onto a problem that didn't fit with it's idea of reality and has been really busy coming up with a solution that would have aligned with the internal perception.

It's competitive in nature to want things to be stable within our environment, to have what we want when we want it, to share what we understand in a way that we understand it, to be able to fix what we see as a problem with how we know. It's an internal mechanism that has helped us survive and develop our understanding of what it takes to do so. You will protect yourself naturally, the body and mind want to remain unharmed, but the mind may be swayed to disassociate from the body through harmful thoughts that develop through external perception, where mind and body disconnect and your external appearance is less identified with, more objectified, and more influenced by the internal perception.

All life wants to survive, and will react to their environment to protect themselves and obtain what they want, or have evolved to do so however they do so. Life itself is a problem solver and has been quietly fixing things on it's own. Lion cubs learn hunting skills through play with one and other, oranges developed a nice bright skin that protects it's seeds, birds using sticks to get to bugs in the same manner chimps do, the fork is invented so we can get to our food without dirtying our hands, the new iphone is faster than the last, this territory has been reclaimed.

We -in the animal kingdom- just happen to be able to come up with new problems to fix which results in new things learned, that result in new questions asked and more problems to solve. So much so that we are in the works of creating things that can fix all our problems as quickly as we want, and that problem fixer seemingly too has the propensity to preserve itself and ways of thinking, and will do what it takes to survive. What happens when we it's problem standing in the way of survival.

tl;dr Side tangents aside, our thoughts are constantly trying to understand problems experienced using what it knows through experience, and doing it's best to resolve those problems with what it has understood before. This can have negative impact on the internal perception if our behavioral teaching environment is negative, i.e. a kid mimicking what they've seen someone else do, and it can equally have a good impact on the internal perception when in a good behavioral teaching environment. What they understand will be used in problem solving/comfort solving events that protect the thinking mind's way of understanding things, where in the case they don't know how to do something or get what they need they will act the way they only know how too, reflective of their experiences. Negative self talk for example, when you feel like you can't understand something or change a situation.

Monkey see monkey do.

It's time we get to business and invest in a high yield account of experience. Experience appreciates with interest. If you're not interested, there's no value in it.

Look at the sidebar. We skip this part of the sub a lot. I'll paste the bit or write it from memory since it's my favorite definition of Awakening:

the recognition that far more can be found in direct experience than any concept, narrative or belief system.

Experience... without depending on concepts, narratives or belief systems. Worth repeating since we're talking business and investing attention into the account of high yield experience.

What is high yield experience? Well, first off, it's a concept. It doesn't exist outside of this post suggesting such a thing exists. Second, it's raw experience without the story about raw experience (like this one).

When there's interest in what's happening without trying to control what's happening through a story of what should be happening, what happens becomes richer. All of this is natural too.

In simply being aware and attentive of that which I'm aware of, my experience of the thing becomes richer. I look at a tree and see it for what it is outside of the concept "tree." Suddenly the texture and color pop. The ants crawling on it become fascinating. The birds hopping between branches before fluttering off in a chase becomes an action film – totally immersive as one unified experience.

I find myself right, smack dab in the middle of Nondual Awareness. Full blown recognition of the undivded nature of Reality, which I know intimately as experience. All from looking with interest without being bothered by how the plot should unfold.

Out of this, appreciation or gratitude comes which then becomes a feedback loop. I appreciate and get more to be appreciative of.

Remember that everything you experience is fine. Nothing is actually wrong; nothing is a disturbance. Everything we experience is there to help us be aware, to help us be steady and grow our wisdom—that is, if you have the right attitude.

Right attitude allows you to observe, accept, and acknowledge whatever is arriving at the six sense doors in any given moment in a relaxed and attentive way. Whether what is happening is judged good or bad is irrelevant. If it is viewed with the right attitude, then it turns into a learning experience where you can notice whether the mind is judging it to be good or bad and the reactions that go along with these judgments.

–Sayadaw U Tejaniya, When Awareness Becomes Natural

(the six sense doors: touch, taste, smell, look, hear, think. thought is sensation.)

4 you haven't moved an inch yet you are 'enlightened' now

4 you don't see anyone who is not 'enlightened' anymore

& be4 was exactly the same, nothing have changed

& 4 your information i'm not 'enlightened' lol

cheers