LastThursday

@RendHeaven would you say that a friendship involves less fantasy than a sexual relationship?

Precisely. And that, is exactly why most relationships end up being dysfunctional. You are never good enough for each other. The best that can be done is to raise one's own awareness so that at least half the relationship is not dysfunctional. Or you go find a partner who doesn't want a fantasy. Good luck with that! And my friends and family don't understand why I'm single...lol.

Go for the path that will expand and develop you the most even if it hurts. You know what that path is. Start: Make a decision now, it's easy. Carrying it out is hard, but that's for tomorrow to worry about. Then you'll truly be free.

Resistance is a quality of consciousness. It comes from the stillness of the nothing you really are. Mu. Everything else is chaos and change. To re-state Newton: to every change, there is an equal and opposite non-change.

Relationships are odd really. The more you try and force them to be a certain way, the less it works out well. When you first meet someone, it's like perfection, you don't question each other and you're just in the flow of mutual love and admiration. But after a while some sort of reality kicks in, you stop being one unified being, and separate out into two again. The pain of separation then shows itself as insecurity and irritation and questioning. A relationship - friends or lovers - either flows or it doesn't, there's really no middle ground. And the both of you have to flow together or it doesn't work. If you want it to flow and be meaningful, then you only have to do one thing: keep being the best version of yourself you can be. She will find that attractive. Don't try and be her best version of you. If you think she's beautiful then that's an incredible and rare gift, maybe she's not ready to receive it?

There is a lot of love on this forum. People on here (strangers mostly) honestly want to raise others up and that's love in my books.

Then you have further inner shadow work to do. How was that for Virtue-Signaling? Ho ho ho. Certainly this forum gives you a very good grounding in constantly going meta.

This forum is very open minded and accepting and forgiving. Very much unlike the rest of the world. There is a lot of bickering and I'm more turquoise and super enlightened than you type of strutting. But the beauty is that their bravado is not taken too seriously and they can honestly learn to raise their consciousness if they stop and listen. Even Leo himself is not immune to being "talked down", and it's beautiful that he allows it.

@Aakash spirituality is actually insanity in the deepest sense. We are all using this forum to encourage each other to go insane, mostly by talking in riddles and relativity. But as long as I keep talking like a regular human being and walking like a regular human being, most other people won't notice and I won't have to wear the straightjacket. Stay on the path my friend, there's nothing 'traditional' about enlightenment.

@Aakash nah man I don't believe you, you can't give up. It's everyone's personal gift. Just keep poking and proding until you have exhausted all logic and common sense and then keep going.

There's boiled eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, omelette, maybe even meringue. Each one a very different experience, but it's all egg. There's nothing to do. Being is everywhere and everything, and you.

@Aakash I believe you are not disagreeing with me. You could easily just as well say that your belief in absolute self deception, is itself a self deception; ad infinitum. You don't even know if you are being deceived by your awareness - unfortunately, it's all you have. Self referencing logic explains nothing.

@Aakash you're preaching to the converted and I'm in total agreement with you. Except for the part where I take my knowledge as a belief as opposed to a certainty. But there's nothing wrong with belief, where would god be without it? Don't you after all believe you exist? I re-iterate: A belief is just a part of the present moment which is stable and persists.

@Aakash you say "identify", I say "belief". You believe in a future where you could be absolute infinity actualised. It's just a belief. The basis of your belief is an extrapolation based on another belief that your awareness is expanding and will continue doing so, until your reach absolute infinity. Please tell me that you're currently experiencing absolute infinity and you're no longer human. I may not believe you. But I will at least give you the benefit of the doubt.

The present moment is a fine balance between stability and chaos. You only think you have a future, because you believe the stable aspects of the present moment will persist. The future is just a belief, nothing more. A belief is just a part of the present moment which is stable and persists.

Offence is in the eye of the beholder. But don't go out of your way to offend, it's not nice. And if you offend by accident, then surely just apologise? Even an Enlightened one can have manners. Tread lightly in the world, don't blunder heavy footed through it.

You could also avoid a linear story, by saying that (our) consciousness dissolves into infinity at the point of death; it becomes everything and omniscient until it spontaneously chooses not to be. That is only an illusion though, because (our) consciousness is already just a compartmentalised infinity. There's no difference really, you are both alive and dead.

Excellent! The exact same thing is happening in normal waking life. The mind is constantly "coming back" from the void, with an arising awareness that "something was known". That sensation is of course consciousness/awareness itself. But the paradox is that the sensation is always retroactive. It's never now.

Paradoxically, there is a part that likes to be flumoxed, there's a part that says 'whatever dude', and another that actually understands it.

@Shadowraix yeah. We wave this conciousness word around as if we all know what it means and we agree on it. I get what you say: my argument is being preached to the converted. But really I'm just trying to put some weight on the paradigm scales, to even them up a bit. I'm going to pull out the old trope however. I hope you don't roll your eyes: 'What is the thing that finds a very big distinction in the word consciousness?' And does it come from your body? Or is it separate from it? Hahahahaha....

God feels lonely. And god feels all the other feelings. And god feels everything at once.

@mandyjw Nice video. Sitting by the loom of the present moment, god weaves the story of its creation. Would you say that Enlightenment is a new story, or just the shedding of old stories? Or is Enlightenment itself just a story, in hindsight?

There is an assumption that consciousness is somehow produced by the body, because normal 'baseline' consciousness seems to be dragged around by the body. No matter how we try, we just can't shake off this pesky body of ours. And even when we shed the body in night dreams, it still somehow manages to sneak back when we wake up. We are very confused. But consider: is the physical body trapped in consciousness? Or even better: is the whole universe trapped in consciousness? In this case to say that consciousness is 'produced' by anything starts to become absurd. And to speculate that there might be 'gaps' in consciousness also absurd; mostly because the gaps themselves would have to be contained 'within' consciousness (which indeed they are).

Isn't the root problem that you think you should be 'doing' something? Aren't you 'doing' plenty already? Or is the problem more about mastery? You wish to be a master at everything you 'do'? My advice is that mastery does not have a timetable and there's no end goal. You will need a lot of patience and practice on the long journey. And naturally you can master more than one thing at a time. For example I've been programming for over 35 years, have I mastered it? Yes and no, there's plenty still to go. I've also practised playing piano for a similar length of time, and I'm nowhere near mastery, but I'm good, yet plenty still to learn. Take it easy on yourself, don't make a decision now, just carry on doing what you love.

I think to know what a camera is taking pictures of, you need to understand deeply why there are cameras in the first place. The idea that springs to mind is that a camera turns impermanence into some sort of permanence. In other words it's a trick to allow us to keep re-experiencing a thing over an extended period of time. It's the embodiment of a tug of war between the ever-shapeshifting forms in the world, and the source of our completely unchanging stillness. How could the forms of the world ever create permanence? No, the permanence comes from elsewhere. So looking at a photograph is to look into the stillness of the void - not into a reality that it supposedly captured. The reality is inks on a paper or pixels on a screen.