> Okay, why are you responding to my comment with this? Did I somehow contradict this notion? Because I am doing something similar to when you say, " I'm tryin

> Okay, why are you responding to my comment with this? Did I somehow contradict this notion? Because I am doing something similar to when you say, " I'm trying to explain very real experiences I've had ... " although I am not trying to explain about delayed gratification. I'm trying to state a lot of things that come from mindfulness meditation. Take stories in the head for example: You say, "beliefs are just descriptions about reality that can be either true or false, but we can indeed be fooled by false beliefs or become dependent on true ones which may change in the future." From my experience, any belief is always going to be false. No description of reality can ever substitute for reality. There are no beliefs that inherently exist or are inherently true. When you have a belief, that is something that will always sit between what is present right now. When I say "stories" I do not just mean beliefs. "Story" is a translation for a Sanskrit term with a complicated pronunciation that I have not memorized. They are not just referring to ones you know about. They also refer to these filters that, often, people are not aware of. When it releases, there is a palpable, if subtle, experience as if some guazy layer of perception had been removed. The world gets a little bit clearer, and so does the mind. When you use the word construction, "I prefer to call pain X", and your explanation, "Strain and tension don't necessarily contain pain. During physical exercise the body releases a flood of endorphins (ie natural painkillers) that numb it." That is an example of what I'm talking about. The pain is still present, even when numbed out. There is nothing wrong with pain in and of itself. Pain does not need to be something to avoid, and if anything, should be listened to as a guide for when you are pushing too hard. People usually conflate pain with suffering, and try to avoid the pain because the suffering is associated with that pain. > you don't have to overcomplicate something by alluding to some mysterious methods which you know but won't explain. I'm not overcomplicating this. From my perspective, people who carry a lot of stories in the head look like they are overcomplicating things. I'm not being mysterious. You cannot use another story to dissolve another story unless that story itself self-dissolves. This is why people generally cannot talk their way out of something, and the stories in head goes around in loops. > You find it or you die. This is self-evident, if this wasn't true, then suicides wouldn't happen. This is not true. Suicides do not happen because someone loses motivation to live. It happens because someone wants to stop the suffering. > I have no idea what paradox you're referring to. I'm not seeing one here. If you think that we either objectively have to do things or there's no point in living and struggling, that sounds like a pretty dualist concept to me. I don't think you have come across this paradox in your experience yet. > I have no idea what the "shaiva tantra" is and honestly I think it's best for those trying to find a way out of a dark place, as well as those trying to understand these life principles, to abandon these cryptic terms and speak simply or using well-established modern language. Isn't the point of communication to transmit knowledge? You're doing a poor job when you use obscure terms without defining them. I am not using cryptic terms. I am using very precise terms that points to specific experiences. I can talk about the emotions of "fiero", or "naches", and those have no English equivalent, yet they are very real and precise for Italian or Yiddhish speakers. No well-established modern language has a handle on _dukkha_ or many of the things you might find in Vipassana. Those are better taught with "pointing out exercises", where someone brings your attention to something over and over again, as they arise. Classical, transcendental non-dual Shaiva Tantra is a name for a specific set of teachings coming out of medieval India. It is very specific, it is very dense. If you want to read about it, the best book in English is Christopher Wallis's Tantra Illuminated. If I seem to be obfuscating though, it is because I am, and what I am hiding takes more than one afternoon's conversation to cover. I do not mind talking to someone about it, but it isn't as if I have the skill to condense all of this into a tldr. I'll try to condense some of it here: "Dark places" can be seen as a metaphor for experiencing depression, despair, or learned helplessness. Much of it comes from conditioning from the environment: parents, schools, and the way the reward-punishment system is set up. However, there are other sources in which one can enter into extended states like that. It might be inherited ancestrally, even from someone not directly blood-related. It may be from past lives. (Which, when you consider this frame with suicides, suicide is a terrible mistake because it does not stop the suffering; someone who lost the motivation to live finds that experience continue on eternally and cannot stop it even when they want to). There may be hungry ghosts eating your mind space like a zombie -- often indicated when you get arbitrary thoughts, such as suicide, appear without precedence and it does not feel like your own patterns of thoughts; the more successful hungry ghosts will make it seem like it is your idea. Beliefs in learned helplessness can come from any one of these, or even reinforced by more than one of these. What I included is not an exhaustive list. There are numerous methods developed to work with this. They work at different layers or with different levels of understanding. Some are coupled to "local color", that is, the specific set of cultural beliefs and values. The ones that work all have one essential thing in common: mindfulness. That does not mean that mindfulness alone will take you all the way -- well, it does, just perhaps not as effectively. Some methods specializes in certain aspects of this and can an address those aspects better. So you are right: what you are trying to say when you impart skills and knowledge like this will work for a lot of people. However, there may be other things going on, and require a different way of addressing it.