Awakenetwork Improvement Project

Noah wrote: Can we reduce the number of tabs visible at the top of the forum functionality to have only these: Index, All Recent, My Topics, Search ?

At a minimum we also need to keep New Topic.

Andy wrote: We're starting to get multiple threads going in this topic, but I'd like to follow up on this one:
.

Chris Marti wrote: Time to talk turkey:

Why participate here any more? No one starts new conversations. There aren't enough participants to keep existing conversations alive for more than a few days. I helped start this place so I have a deeply emotional and nostalgic connection to it. If I'm thinking this way, well, you are all voting with your time and effort. I don't blame you.

Why participate here? It's not so much about participating here as why should I participate anywhere? Here are some things that came up for me when I tried to write to understand my motivations. Maybe someone can comment on some of these?

- I don't have the same motivations to talk about my experiences as before. Before, awakening was a "project" that I really wanted to complete, and (looking retrospectively) there was this "look at me, look at me, interact with me" vibe.

- So what's my motivation? I sometimes distrust my motivations as somehow ego-supporting in a pathological way.

- It often takes me a day or two after reading a comment and letting it percolate before I understand what I have to say about that comment. The opportunity passes in that time.

- I don't have that much time at work most days, and I feel guilty when I do more than a quick reply. When I get home, I've already spent 8+ hours in front of a computer, and I want a healthier relationship with computer use. Not spending time on AwakeNetwork is a consequence of that.

- It's hard to open a conversation topic I feel good about. I have the sense I know less and less about what's going on with me as time goes on, and have more and more confusion about it. Whenever I post about something that's clear and current, a few days later that clarity goes away and I regret posting. It's also often hard to describe what's going on -- writing and thinking becomes so reductionist as to lose that deep connection with what I'm trying to describe.

- Often I don't think I have much, if anything, to add to what's being said.

- The insights I've had past second path do not seem to correspond to what others had. My initial efforts to discuss those came during the honeymoon, high motivation, big impact phase of the insight, and were often highly charged and perhaps off-putting. Now, those insights keep deepening, and sometimes even changing. New stuff comes up.. So much water under the bridge.

Comments? Questions?

Belatedly responding to this: Andy, part of my absence (only part) over the past two years included some of these things you list. I could have written much of it. It's natural to have periods where nothing makes any sense, everything seems confusing, and trying to articulate anything seems useless. And periods where one is excessive chatty. I do think that there is value in 'retreat' - that is in the naturally arising periods in which one feels less inclined to speak, wants more silence and time alone, or whatever else, even things like depression and so on.

One advantage to being more open about these kind of things (re: "do not seem to correspond to what others had...") is that there may well be others out there who are also disinclined to speak up because they feel like their path is a big #fail. I am no example, as the desire to be private was too strong for me to write anything, and the revulsion towards all the stuff I'd written before was also very strong. I have more patience with the messiness now, but that arises when God pleases, not by force.

Sharing mistakes and difficulties is hard when one isn't sure who all one is talking to, either. I see and know some of the more active people, but there may be dozens reading whom I've never met, and there are times when insight cuts so deep into ones sense of who one is and what life is about that it doesn't feel good sharing it with others. There's also the tendency for people to want to fix your stuff if you admit to difficulties, and that can feel overbearing. Sometimes what you need, like I said above, is to spend a day curled up staring into the unknown. And if people keep saying you "just need to get out and get some exercise" or "what are you lazy" or "why don't you see a psychologist" it feels unsympathetic rather than helpful. Sometimes you just need silent company, or just to be listened to without being advised of anything. At least I felt like that sometimes.

Putting this out there too for others reading who might feel reticent to post because they don't have "good practices" or "achievements" like they think they should.

Thanks, Ona. Replying on my phone. Editor very $&$^#*#*#* mobile-unfriendly.

Helpful to read your reply and lots of interesting threads to can be pulled out. Not at a keyboard I his weekend, but will reply eventually.

Tom Otvos wrote:

Ona Kiser wrote:

Noah wrote: Can we reduce the number of tabs visible at the top of the forum functionality to have only these: Index, All Recent, My Topics, Search ?

At a minimum we also need to keep New Topic.

Does everyone else feel this way? The motivation for the tabs is to allow easier access to comment “sections” of content, including practice journals, and Kenneth Folk Dharma (which we host here, for newbies). I definitely want to keep KFD to help surface that content to Google for indexing, as the KFD content is (deliberately) visible to all.

Agree both that site is a bit unfriendly and has lots of choices and words when it doesn’t need so many, but also that I want content indexed and visible.

Tom Otvos wrote:

Ona Kiser wrote:

Noah wrote: Can we reduce the number of tabs visible at the top of the forum functionality to have only these: Index, All Recent, My Topics, Search ?

At a minimum we also need to keep New Topic.

Does everyone else feel this way? The motivation for the tabs is to allow easier access to comment “sections” of content, including practice journals, and Kenneth Folk Dharma (which we host here, for newbies). I definitely want to keep KFD to help surface that content to Google for indexing, as the KFD content is (deliberately) visible to all.

We could narrow it down: Index, All Recent, KFD, New topic, Search

Rules are available on the welcome page and are common knowledge/boilerplate.

We can add back the Recent Dharma, Recent Practice, My Topics and Favorites if the site gets very active and people start having trouble finding stuff. But in it's current usage it's not really necessary to subdivide/sort so much, I think.

Thoughts?

Every time I look at this thread to see what else has come up, I see the name of the topic “Awakenetwork is dying” - well, from all this to-ing and fro-ing, of people trying to make it work, it doesn't seem to me to be dying, but seems very much alive!

I feel very motivated to keep reading, and to try to contribute. Now I just need to feel the same about my practice!

Sometimes it just feels like I am constantly going back to the beginning!

I like the new simplification, Tom. Thanks!

Just to chime in....

I'm a voracious lurker. I'm here several times a week, and read everything that's posted. I have a practice that is sometimes steady, sometimes not, and currently is in a long period of basically not existing in any kind of formal way.

I don't post a journal, or many questions, because I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said. Why go through the exercise of posting a journal, if I have nothing new to offer? Why ask questions about these basic stages I'm in? There's been so much written and said, and I've read so much of it, that I don't know what I can contribute.

That being said, I deeply value this forum. I like that it's a calm and reasonable place. Even r/streamentry has become a place I don't like to visit much anymore. It seems like, as Noah mentioned, there aren't a lot of people doing the simple, direct, linear thing (I also know, saying that, that it's not actually that) that I fell in love with with when I discovered PD.

I am also a long time lurker - I often drop in and check some posts and almost always come up with absolutely nothing to say of any value - silence! Ha!
Pretty much the theme for post awakening for me in general - any advice or comments I have for those around me are either vehemently rejected or silenced in some way. I got the message pretty clearly that a teacher/mentor I shall never be and that's ok. I assume this is some kind of Prachecka Buddha path thing.... It used to bother me but now it's the source of comedy as I can rely on being silenced one way or another at any attempt to suggest any spiritual path related advice to anyone. It is what it is! The message among many - just shut up and listen in silence and enjoy the experience.

Just a thought regarding 'appropriate subjects' - in another thread on Lucid Dreaming the poster said he wasn't sure this was the right forum for such a topic. I hope that despite some of the more frequent posters having secular sorts of practices, that isn't to say that all of the normal things that can happen in spiritual practice are not okay to talk about. Otherwise I don't know how I ended up here, because I've never had a dry or secular practice. People can get overly focused on strange phenomena, which are largely distractions or just normal side effects of practice, but the opposite problem is dismissing the reality of their experiences. In some cases people (like me) can have very frightening or strange things happen and worry they might go crazy. And thus one feels terrified to say anything especially, I recall, in the US, where a great number of people are not openly religious. Though the reality is if you have those conversations you realize lots of people are just pretending they don't know about it so as not to be thought crazy.. so it's kind of circular....

Thoughts?

Hey Ona, my thought was more whether people might want discussions on a particular topic to be more private or more public. Something like lucid dreaming practice might be more a private thing, and yet these days it seems anything you post on the internet could potentially be read by people you don't intend. So that left me a little unsure about the public/private distinction.

As for varying spiritual practices, the more progress I make, the more relevant they all seem to be! So I for one am very interested in the practices from other traditions, including Christian mystic and Sufi and so on. The Christian tradition seems very deep to me, with much to offer. For example, I loved your comment on deepening spiritual practices so that they were upheld into the dream state, and then Noah said something that I thought was really similar, about ensuring the defilements don't arise during sleep. Both views are pure gold!

I never quite keep track of the 'tree structure' myself, sorry, tending to deal with it as if all categories are top level.

Is it just me, or has the “My Topics” tab been removed?

Also, I can’t seem to figure out how to find an older thread, or to see threads past one week on recent posts.

Tom Otvos wrote:
To change the "recent posts" duration, click on the "Recent" tab, and then select an alternate time period from the dropdown that defaults to "Week". Note that due to a bug in the software, you cannot do this from the top-level "Discuss" link, even though you appear to be in the same place.

Can’t get this to work no matter what I do; get Kunena whatsis (don’t know what that is, but seems like an error message). Want to change from week to month. I’m on an iPad, in case that matters.

Also, would the group allow us to bring back the “My Topics” tab? I miss it.