LastThursday

What Leo says ^^^^ Imagine you have two friends, one is concious, the other a zombie. You decide to try and work which is which. You watch them for many weeks, but still you can't tell, they behave in very similar ways. Frustrated you start asking them questions. "Are you a zombie?", "No! How dare you!". All the questions you ask come to no avail. You can't tell the difference. You finally come to the realisation that you're going about it the wrong way. No matter how you interact with your two friends, it is always appearing in your conciousness awareness. The appearance and behaviour of your friends is always being interpreted and conceived by you. There's no way around this. Even if you could see through their eyes, it would still be your conscious awareness. There's no way to know if they're concious or not. You can only tell that you are concious. But it gets worse, because you yourself are being interpreted and conceived as well (by your ego)! Consciouness doesn't need YOU. YOU are the Zombie.

Because this solipsism is a total dead end. Why do you assume that she's not having an experience? The only thing worh doing under that worldview is blow ones head off with a shotgun. You missed the point of my question. I'm not talking about solipsism or assumption. I'm talking about direct evidence in your experience. You have no idea whether other people are having experiences, you're just guessing. It may not feel or seem like you're guessing, but you are. You're using similarity to yourself to infer that other people are the same as you. Inference is just thoughts.

That I'm looking forward to, who needs Absolute Truth?

@AngeliteOf course not. Your experience is yours. Mine is mine. I can only experience your "Him" through the words you're writing and my own awareness.

I like to surrender to awareness and just let it unfold through me and try not to resist it. But it's difficult.

You only have awareness, the whole universe is "inside" of it. There's no room left for "outside". God is not "outside" of you, s/he/it is "inside" your awareness. But the awareness doesn't belong to you, not really. You belong to awareness - it is its own end. I believe the same as you, the only thing I can fully trust is awareness.

I do appreciate your answer But I have no way of knowing if it's true or not until I experience it directly for myself.

How would you know if I've read your article or not? You don't. That is my point, it's just a thought you're having about me. If you've experienced the absolute in different ways, I would say that it all happened in your direct experience, and so it existed for you.

How do you know she's having an "experience"? Does she tell you? Or is this just a thought you're having?

@SpiritualAwakening I see where you're coming from. It depends on your viewpoint. Are thoughts primary or is direct experience primary? You know which side I'm on. The three biggest problems I have with relying on thought are: Why can I not just think of something now and it just materialises in front of me right now? Why wait? Why doesn't it work 100% of the time? Where do thoughts actually come from? Are you really in control of them? Where do thoughts go? Why is it thoughts can be completely random and ridiculous and bizarre? How can they be trusted in any way?

@SpiritualAwakening how do you know that "something" exists? The only way to know is to "experience" or become aware of it directly. Thoughts are not good enough. I can easily think about a teapot in orbit around the moon - does it exist - no. You can't trust your thoughts. What happens when you are not directly experiencing "grandma"? She becomes a thought. You actually have no idea if she's making herself dinner, watching TV, or has actually died. You can think about those things - yes - but you don't actually know, you can't trust those thoughts. She has actually stopped existing. Maybe you object and say: "but she can phone you to see how you are". Yes. Then she would come back into existence - because you are having a direct experience of her (not just thoughts). So where does grandma go when she's not existing? Nowhere. She literally dissolves into nothingness. It's not so ridiculous. Where do subatomic particles go when they're not being observed? They have a Shrodinger wave function, which is just a probability distribution (i.e. they become mind stuff, thought). It's only when they manifest in your direct awareness that they become real and exist.

@Consilience I think you understand it well.

To use your analogy I think awareness is loaded "on demand". So nothing exists until you become aware of it. Your grandma doesn't exist until you see her again. Until that happens she's just some random thoughts in your mind. This is not so weird, if something is the same as nothing. Something can come from nothing. Also, your grandma is a concept. The reality of your grandma is that she is a complicated experience in your awareness, which you somehow recognise and then label as "grandma".

@dimitri a dog is a dog on many different levels. It's like a cake with different layers: Nothing/infinity Pure non-duality God's imagination/dream Concepts and dividing up the world (duality, objects and so on) Raw perceptions and experiences and the present moment Thoughts, memories Language and concepts and categorisation (animal, mammal, friend etc) That's just a very rough (conceptual) outline. A dog exists on all those levels.

I say go for it. Being alpha is a double-edged sword though. To be alpha, you have to be accepted as being alpha by your peers. So in a way you can only be alpha by getting the approval of your betas. If they don't accept your alpha qualities then you've lost and you're just a beta or less, time to move on. Saying that, you do need to have an alpha mindset to even get there in the first place. That just means you actively want it, which you clearly do. I don't think you need to be alpha to fuck a lot personally, but it probably helps. For example, you could just be a beta and hang around with an alpha and get his spoils. Human inventiveness doesn't have any limits. A real alpha is someone who is comfortable and in control in any situation they find themselves in. That mostly takes intelligence and experience and a shit load of confidence.

Your dog only exists in your thoughts. The past and the future only exist in your thoughts. Your thoughts are always in the present moment. It's easy to confuse thoughts for the things they stand for. Your thoughts about your dog are not the same thing as your dog.

There's a kind of rabbit hole you are not entering here. Take an activity such as driving a vehicle. I think you'll agree that you need a certain level of proficiency behind the wheel, otherwise you are likely to die or at least be badly injured very quickly. Maybe you'll also agree there is very little "thinking in words" going on when you drive. Maybe just the odd mental note like "I'll take the next junction", but otherwise not much. But you must very definitely still differentiate the world in to concepts. You will need to have concepts such as other vehicles, pedestrians crossing the road, speed, weather conditions, time of day, traffic lights, police, vehicle handling and so on. Without these concepts you would die. The differentiation doesn't just go away because mental verbalisation stops - it just removes a layer of interpretation.

Strange isn't it? You think you are dead and yet your mind is very much alive. The question is, how strongly should you identify with your thoughts? Where are the thoughts coming from? But if it is truly causing you distress, then you should drop meditating for a while. Wait until some sort of peace returns.

If someone tells you there's a million dollars buried in your yard, is that Truth? Obviously, it is probably BS no matter how sincere or confident they seem. You may even convince yourself, in which case it's probably also self-delusional BS. But you should actually start digging anyway...

The you that is sad is not alone, go make friends. God cannot be alone, god is everything, including you.

@FourSeasons I think it's interesting that you think being more masculine is a problem? Personally I'd be very happy to be with a woman who could use a screwdriver or is willing to take control in a difficult situation. But then I'm all for equality. I don't think you should see your masculinity as the problem. There are masculine women and feminine men, so what? If you want to explore being more feminine, then that's great! You should be able to choose when to be more womanly or more manly, whenever you need to be. If I can make some points from what you wrote: Some people are addicted to drama. It makes their lives seem more interesting and emotional. But it's quite dysfunctional behaviour. It comes out of insecurity in yourself and the relationship. You need to work on yourself so that you can talk about your needs in a calm and relaxed way. You can be sensitive without the drama. That can be a big problem. But maybe part of the problem is that he doesn't communicate his needs to you? But you can help him by asking him: "What do you need from me? Why are you upset?" and then just listen to him. It sounds like you both need to learn how to communicate well together - not just for you to become more feminine.

So which one is valid? They both are. But only at the time you are experiencing them. That's what living in the moment means. To be able to judge something as valid or not, you need to compare two things. But in order to compare two things, you need to have a "memory" of both things. Do you trust a memory? But acceptance is kind of the opposite of judgement. It means you stop comparing two things which may be distorted, and just accept what is in front of you right now. That acceptance is truth or validity or non-judgement. Acceptance doesn't mean that it's meaningless, to the contrary acceptance has more meaning than judgement.

See, the problem is deeper than you think. How do you "really know" what happened to you, when your perception of what happened is distorted? In fact, how do you "know" your perception is distorted? It's not like you have a clean and clear and truthful version of what happened and a distorted version to compare with each other. So say you have a psychedelic trip and lose your identity and become one with god and so on. You then come back down to normality and you have a dualistic ego driven experience. Which one is distorted, which one is truthful? You can't experience both at the same time.

That's an astute observation. When you wake up from your sleep and remember your dreams, did they really happen? Did they really mean anything? The point of having mystical or psychedelic experiences, is not actually for the experience itself. It's for the after effects - the things that permanently change after the experience has gone. So you do it for the permanent change in your experience of the present moment, nothing more.

It's tricky, because there's two types of mastery. One type would be like tying your shoelaces or riding a bike. It's a very defined thing, you can either do it or you can't. You know when you've mastered it, when you can do it. The other is less defined. This would be like learning a language or a martial art. You can always learn more words or new moves or whatever - it doesn't end. But in this case mastery would be fluency. So the test is, can I do this thing without thinking about how to do it? Instead you are able to think about what you want to do. It's kind of like autopilot, that's mastery.