Essential Buddhism text?

>>9276924

i'm also interested but just the practical elements of it, with zero woo woo. is that even possible? maybe i should stick to cbt/mindfulness/stoicism?

>>9276924
I'm halfway through "food for the heart - the collected teaching of ajahn chah". Pretty good so far.

I started with "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Gunaratana and "What the Buddha Taught" by Rahula. The former was critical, the latter less so, but it's very easy and short to read, doesn't hurt as an introduction.

>>9277039
What do you mean by "practical elements"? It's all meant to be practiced.

>>9276924
read from chapter 12
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/

then apply what you read, after you cut ties to normie life.

>>9276924
https://youtu.be/vGPmqdsCy1c?t=1466

When I was 17 I went to a party, and we did a lot of what we thought was mdma. It wasn't, I came down within 2 hours and had complete anhedonia. I took more, eventually wound up feeling totally terrible and mental, and in desperation smoked some weed with my friend and tried to go to sleep which made things much worse. I lay down to go to sleep with some others, the lights were turned off, and for the first time in my life I swivelled my attention back on my thoughts and considered, properly not intellectually - what the monologue in my head was. Fast forward a couple hours of intense thought loops - my mind started to scream 'what is that noise' 'what is that voice' 'stop it' and after a while I tried stopping it by doing things like internally saying 'right, so after this sentence ends, I'm going to stop, that's right - stop. right. now'
Obviously this didn't work, and the show went on with some minor visual hallucinations joining the party. This realization that on some level I had no control over my compulsive thinking shook me to my core. I ended up just 'letting it happen' and over the next couple of weeks recovered a bit though it tooks months and months to 'push the instability away'. Interestingly from my point of view I so easily ended up going back into identification with thoughts now they were a little bit less crazy, and actually for a long time just tried to normalise things. Now thinking back, I see just how conditioned I was to want to be 'the same thinking self' I had felt like I was my whole life. This isn't even about insight into no-self, its just about the inability of me as a human to even accept that the thinking 'me' isn't really always under my control + may have a sensory/non-voluntary aspect. Strange how much resistance there is to seeing things as they are.

>>9277167
3) I've had good experiences and bad experiences with low dose psychedelic drugs. The first time I took just one gram of magic mushrooms with my friends was truly mystical. It felt like I had broken out of my conditioning to take life for granted as 'just the thing that's happening' and completely normal. Instead all of us found complete wonder and joy in experiencing sensate reality and the freedom we felt from having the agency to 'do things' ie. we found profound joy from being able to collectively decide and point to a hill and then 'actually do it, go there'. Also the profound sense of the immediacy and ridiculousness of being alive, weird, ape like beings - and some deep rooted compassion and gratitude stemming from the ludicrousness of it all that I really try to maintain whatever I do. Also on barely hallucinogenic doses of acid I have had this experience: I'll be feeling anxious about someone, for example, walking there dog near us until the anxiety is quite pronounced. Then suddenly the anxiety goes away as at the same time my visual 'separation' of them and me, me and that tree etc. seems to drop off and I really feel a sort of 'how could I be anxious - that's part of me/I am that' feeling (not sure how this corresponds to genuine insight experiences, feels like just barely a taste). But: I've had some intensely bad, fucked up thought looping trips on mushrooms and to an equal extent high doses of marijuana - my brain is also on a physiological level probably not in the best state from stimulant abuse in the past.

>>9277098
>not even bald

>>9277039
Daniel Ingram is for you then, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha : http://integrateddaniel.info/book/

>>9277328
Oh look, a scam artist.

Ingram is odd because he says that ''defilements did not come back so far, after X years, so that's the real stuff'' which is really not how epistemology, certainty works for nirvana.

Also, he says the usual definition of nirvana is bogus, because he does not reach this state + he does not imagine he will reach this state, so this state is not possible.

Al of his inferences are usual inferences done rationalists, which is again an habit to intellectuals, but nirvana is not like this...

>>9277619
>>9277674
Yeah, he got a few things wrong imo, but he does have a pragmatic vision of buddhism.

You practice Buddhism, not read it.