Posts by amberharbor70

urbanlynx23 said:You’re out here acting like you own a medical degree while I’m sitting here in my sixth year of med school, forced to scavenge the internet and bug people on forums just to get a straight answer.😢

I’ve been through just about the same thing, urbanlynx23. Honestly, you don't really get it until you're the one actually dealing with the illness—then you realize modern medicine is basically just one big pile of S*****.

Honestly, you probably need to stop obsessing over the medical jargon for a bit and just focus on what’s actually going down in this thread. If you can manage to tune out the clinical stuff and pay attention to the vibe here, you might actually start feeling better.

Look, if I were in your shoes—especially with all those psychosomatic symptoms flaring up—here’s what I’d do. You might think I’m out of my mind, but hear me out. If you can swing it, just disappear for ten days. Find some peace out in the woods or somewhere quiet in the mountains, leave your phone completely dead, and just reset. Spend a few days strictly on veggie juices, then follow that up with seven days of nothing but water. Basically, do a total system reboot. And I mean it: no meds, no smoking, none of that stuff. Throw in a daily enema routine too—you can grab a kit for that at any CVS or Walgreens. Just take some damn time for yourself. At the end of the day, a human being isn't just a collection of physical matter.

You’ll be back to 100% after that, no question about it—but you're probably going to have to shake things up a bit and actually stick to a new routine if you want to keep it that way.

Anthony Perez9 said:Hope this is actually on topic. 🙂

What's even the point of me typing this stuff out?

This question actually cracks me up. It’s pretty obvious someone ran out of actual arguments and has nothing left to do but nitpick my post count.

Maybe hanging around this forum just proves you aren't actually sure God doesn't exist. If that's the case, go right ahead.

I'm definitely not 100% sure about anything, just out here learning until the day I die. 👍

Just type it in and it’ll open up. Search, find, done.

If they don't open up, just kick the door down.
Don't act shocked when you end up catching these hands.

It happens to the best of us—I've been there myself—so you just have to try a different entrance. But make sure you're absolutely certain there's an answer waiting for you, because the truth really does set you free.

And yeah, I get it, he's a bit much🙂, but I think his spiritual path before he moved to the USA was pretty solid. He was basically sent out as a lamb among wolves.

My bad for keeping track of your posts...

Anthony Perez9 said:Here’s a clip of a certain chubby Yogananda telling us how to get some shut-eye: 😉

"You people do not sleep correctly."

"You people don't sleep right."
"If Americans learned yoga, they would live hundreds of years in perfect health."

Except he didn't hit a hundred, nor was he exactly healthy—he had diabetes and passed away at 59.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feh3wPk3oCo

Too bad he didn't show off any of those "other" yogic powers he wrote all about while he was in New York City. 😢

So, let me ask you something.

What's the actual point of you flooding this religion and spirituality forum with thousands of posts if it's just to mock anyone who even glances toward something beyond this flat, two-dimensional illusion?

Maybe the fact that you keep showing up here proves you aren't entirely convinced that "God" doesn't exist. If that's the case, just keep going.

Keep typing, keep searching, and eventually, things will open up for you.

Kate Peterson5 said:You cited the Gospel of Matthew, yet you seem to be advocating for impersonalism? In the Bible, God is decidedly personal. Jesus' teaching centered on love for God as a person.

Yogananda belongs to the mayavadis, whose teachings are rooted in Shankaracharya's commentary on Vedanta Sutra—the so-called Advaita Vedanta, or monism. According to that doctrine, God is formless and this world is merely an illusion. They suggest that once we are liberated from our material bodies, we become Brahman; essentially, they claim we are all God, but we have simply forgotten due to an illusion.

Mayavadis reject the existence of a personal form of God, which stands in contrast to the Brahmavadis (such as the four Kumars before they became devotees) who do accept a personal form of God, even though they still share the ultimate goal of merging into the impersonal Brahman.

The mayavadi teaching is erroneous and born of ignorance. God is a person. He can be realized in three aspects: as the impersonal Brahman, as the localized Paramatma, and as the personal Bhagavan.

Impersonal Brahman possesses the attribute of sat (eternity); the localized Paramatma possesses sat and cit (knowledge or consciousness); and the personal Bhagavan possesses sat, cit, and ananda (bliss).

Not really, I have no idea where you're getting that from...

Here's a quick verse from the Bible:

God is spirit,
and those who worship Him
must worship in spirit and in truth.

Kate Peterson5 said:You cited the Gospel of Matthew, yet you seem to be advocating for impersonalism? In the Bible, God is decidedly personal. Jesus' teaching centered on love for God as a person.

Yogananda belongs to the mayavadis, whose teachings are rooted in Shankaracharya's commentary on Vedanta Sutra—the so-called Advaita Vedanta, or monism. According to that doctrine, God is formless and this world is merely an illusion. They suggest that once we are liberated from our material bodies, we become Brahman; essentially, they claim we are all God, but we have simply forgotten due to an illusion.

Mayavadis reject the existence of a personal form of God, which stands in contrast to the Brahmavadis (such as the four Kumars before they became devotees) who do accept a personal form of God, even though they still share the ultimate goal of merging into the impersonal Brahman.

The mayavadi teaching is erroneous and born of ignorance. God is a person. He can be realized in three aspects: as the impersonal Brahman, as the localized Paramatma, and as the personal Bhagavan.

Impersonal Brahman possesses the attribute of sat (eternity); the localized Paramatma possesses sat and cit (knowledge or consciousness); and the personal Bhagavan possesses sat, cit, and ananda (bliss).

That's actually exactly what the Bible teaches:

PSALM 82
I said, "You are gods,
sons of Vishnu! All of you will die like mere mortals,
falling like any other great man!",

34Jesus answered them,
"Is it not written in your Law:
I said, you are gods!
35If the Scripture cannot be broken,
and it calls those to whom God's word came 'gods'
- and the Word is absolute -
36then how can you say to the one whom the Father set apart
and sent into the world
'You are blaspheming!'
- just because I said, 'I am the Son of God!'
37If I am not doing my Father's work,
don't believe me.
38But if I do,
even if you don't believe me,
believe the works themselves,
so you can see and understand
that the Father is in me
and I am in the Father."

You should probably check out Thomas' Gospel too; it goes even deeper into what our existence is actually about.

placidwolf27 said:A person can never truly grasp reality in its raw, unadulterated state—we can only perceive it through the various mental frameworks we build for ourselves. In essence, what we call "reality" is always just a construct... a sort of elaborate psychological game

You can slap whatever labels you want on it, dress it up in mystical terminology, or spin endless complex theories to explain it away, but in the end, you’re really just spinning your wheels in the same cycle

Sure, but that’s exactly why enlightened people use parables. They talk about a heavenly Father or Mother—using concepts familiar to us humans to paint a clear picture of what reality actually looks like.

Take my favorite parable, for instance:

The disciples asked Jesus:
“Tell us, what is the kingdom of heaven like?”
And he replied:
“It is like a mustard seed, which is smaller than all other seeds,
but when it falls into fertile soil, it grows into a massive tree
that becomes a shelter for all the birds of the air.”

You could easily compare Maya to the Matrix from the movie Matrix..

Jeremy Alvarez5 said:I wonder what a Hare Krishna follower would make of this?

I’ve been sitting here thinking about this one; it really sticks with me...It's better to live an imperfect life that is truly your own,
rather than living a perfect imitation of someone else's existence. Bhagavad Gita

From where I'm sitting, Krishna is just one of those many names used for God, so I'm guessing they'd be on board with that idea🙂..

I haven't spent a ton of time diving deep into Hare Krishna's teachings, but I dug up a link that might give you the clarity you're looking for:

http://www.harekrishnatemple.com/chapter27.html

2) Every single person isn't just some physical body, but an eternal soul—a piece of God (Krishna). Because of that, we're all interconnected through Krishna, our common Father.

Jeremy Alvarez5 said:I wonder what a Hare Krishna follower would make of this?

I’ve been sitting here thinking about this one; it really sticks with me...It's better to live an imperfect life that is truly your own,
rather than living a perfect imitation of someone else's existence. Bhagavad Gita

That’s an interesting way to look at it, but I can't quite get on board with it. I don't really buy into "Destiny." To me, everyone has a choice at every single moment, and making the right choices is what eventually leads us toward Perfection.

"Be therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect!" (Matthew 5:48).

Regardless, there's no point in trying to live someone else's life, since everyone's got their own unique path to walk..

I just transcribed this bit from the autobiography of a Yogi, by Yogananda,

I really dig how teachings that are thousands of years old line up perfectly with what Jesus taught (both in the canonical and Gnostic Gospels). It basically proves there’s this universal consciousness living inside us—some kind of Absolute Truth..

Maya is essentially the cosmic illusion, which literally translates to "measure." Think of Maya as the magical force behind creation that makes it possible to perceive boundaries and divisions within something that is actually immeasurable and indivisible. Modern science is actually starting to uncover how this magic of unreality permeates atomic matter. For us mortals, we're constantly under the thumb of maya—this principle of relativity, inversion, and opposites. When Biblical prophets spoke about Satan (which literally means "adversary" in Hebrew), they were talking about maya. Satan, or maya, acts like a cosmic magician, spinning a web of diverse forms just to mask the one single, formless Truth. In God's grand design and game, the whole point of Satan or maya is to try and pull a person away from the spirit and toward matter, from reality and toward the unreal.

Christ describes this deceptive force—this veil hiding the eternal Truth—like this: HE WAS A MURDERER FROM THE BEGINNING AND DOES NOT STAND FIRM IN THE TRUTH, BECAUSE HE IS A LIAR AND THE FATHER OF LIES. Since it's baked into the physical worlds, maya doesn't really have a starting point in that sense; it’s an eternal, fleeting flow that stands as the antithesis to God's unchanging nature. FOR THE DEVIL HAS BEEN A SINNER FROM THE BEGINNING. THE SON OF GOD APPEARED TO DESTROY THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL, which is to say:

The manifestation of Christ consciousness within one's own being is the only way out of maya.