I came across someone on here the other day saying they felt like they were being 'raped by the universe'.

I know Daniel says that once across the a&p one doesn't have any choice in the matter but I just wonder, if you knew what you know now re: DN and cycling, time lost sitting in the dark when you couldve been doing something else etc, would you have ever started meditating at all?

Yes.

No regrets

Absolutely.

Definitely. No matter how bad it gets, when you come out the other side you have grown and learned. Each time you go through some terrible experience DN or whatever, it sucks while you are in it but the pain is temporary and what you learn, at least the important stuff is more or less permanent.

Yep.

Yes. If anything, I wish I'd started actually practicing when I first skimmed through Jack Kornfield's Living Buddhist Masters when I was 17.

Nope! Not at all.

Could you elaborate at all?

In the history of civilisation, a certain anology has been repeated. In a bunch of catapillars, the one that begins the process of metamorphoses goes through irritation and arkwardness, in becoming cacooned. The other caterpillars are disturbed and think it is dying. It eventually comes out a butterfly, infinitely greater than any caterpillar. Your question is essentially asking butterflies if they regretted the whole thing.

No regrets here. But I see this as a bit different. If you use the caterpillar analogy: You start out as a caterpillar, begin metamorphosis, and then come out a caterpillar still.

Russell, honey, you're just going through a bad patch. You will be fluttering those wings of yours again soon. I'm fluttering mine part of the time, and I'm not done yet either.

My one regret is that I wasted so many, many years suffering through bullshit dukkha trying to chase my own tail. Now I know there's only one thing that can get a person past all that. But the past is gone; in fact, it never really was; it's just part of the causes and conditions leading to my practicing right now.

You are correct of course, but analogies to describe enlightenment will always be absurd. The butterfly aspect is to show sheer betterness of existence after attainments. Saying you remain a caterpillar seems to give the implication nothing much important has happened. Of course it's all just to transfer your gist.

Also, to the OP. you said you read somewhere it is like rape by the universe onto you. I'm certain you have read this the wrong way than the writer meant. I imagine when you see the word rape, you imagine hell. I think an author of such a sentence would mean it in the sense of being overwhelmed with forced upon pleasure and knowledge, like the cacooned creature feel like leaving the shell is rape or death. All babies experience a feeling of death/'rape' through their own birth but arguing it is better to remain u duly in the womb is absurd.

Anyway, if you're posting on this forum, then it's more than likely you will get into real mediation sooner or later, so these questions are just the vestiges of your habits not wanting to let go, like the unborn baby or cacooned creature.
Of course, when Russell says you remain a caterpillar, it is correct also. This language is just a device...

Joshua

I had the worst phase of my life before I started meditating. It has been getting better since then. But then I don't practice according to MCTB.

Hey Laurel, thanks for your kind words but I am not going through a bad patch at all. Just some readjusting. Send me a message if you want to chat and ill explain.

My life became far, far worse as a direct result of getting into meditation. Although I made a lot of progress on the paths as talked about here, my life as a whole still ended up being generally worse (although I didn't think that it was at the time) than before I got into meditation. After I stopped meditating and instead set a goal of actually enjoying my life, my life has been gradually improving, and it doesn't seem that any of the things I learned how to do as a result of meditating are still useful or still affect my day-to-day life. (Actually I would say there are a few remnants but they are all unproductive mental habits, nothing positive really.) So, if I knew then what I knew now, I'd go straight to doing what I'm doing now as it has actually improved my life vs. going down the meditative path instead.

Yep , the deathless is to die for

Hey I'm the rape victim, and the thread is Alchemical Taoism --- website of great value.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to ask what I would do back then if I knew what I know now, because my present knowledge is informed by having gone through A&Ps and Dark Nights and having gone through those I am highly motivated to solving the issues that were seen/created/whatever.

Before going through the A&P, there was not a lot of interest in meditation, I had no reason to do it and I thought of it as a merely religious activity. II had no reason to do it, and knowing that it would likely involve all the weird and difficult experiences it does, I would likely never choose to get into it (furthermore, people who get into meditation before going through A&P are usually very religious). But after the A&P, there was clearly something wrong, and I was convinced that meditating was the only thing I could do to fix it.

So it's not like at some point I pondered on whether to meditate and came to a conclusion, I was basically thrown into it by circumstances (as is the case for most of us I think).

And meditation does seem to help, at least to me.

But what do you do when you run out of ice cream?

Yes. I wish I would have done it earlier. All that time as a teenager playing video games and watching movies was hardly better time spent.

Was it a legitimate rape? Or more like a Gift From God rape?

hey , movies are that craving thats going to get me another million births

How can I ever run out of ice cream? There are gallons and gallons of it at my nearest convenience store. Combine that with the fact that I don't actually eat much ice cream and I think I'm all set in the ice-cream-having department.

Wouldn't another million births be pretty great? You could live life all over again! (And we haven't even finished this one yet!)

Watch this one in repeat for eons :

I dont believe in rebirth yet but surely in this very birth, craving for movies leads to stress..maybe just need to
get this craving fixed because the craving-less state is much better..after that whether there is a rebirth or not
wont matter !

@ Richard Zen

LOL!