LastThursday

Have you tried? It's clear that if it's possible, then it's not easy to do because we would all be doing it. My idea is that the world you experience is a habit. From repetition the world learns to behave the same way each time. By repetition I mean that consciousness becomes aware of certain aspects of itself and expresses those more strongly (structure and laws). It's like a river stretching out and carving out a landscape, over time the branches get deeper and more defined. One way would be to jolt yourself out of your normal reality, like re-routing a river. That would "loosen" the habits of the world. On the other hand, there are things we can all do, and that's already magic.

Meditation is about pulling yourself out of your normal "everyday" mode. By doing that you allow yourself to become aware that you're more than just that. It's a process of stepping outside your normal self (transcendence). By stepping outside yourself you can also become aware of your own behaviours and thoughts and gain insights. This process of transcendence purifies because you're always looking to go beyond who you are already.

I think like waves lapping a beach, surrender and attachment come and go as you "awaken". You have to surrender when beginning the journey, but then appreciate attachment for what it is. You do both on one level, but identify with neither on another. You even give up on the "process of awakening" eventually, because that's not it. But you have to have a process to even begin.

@Ulax here are some thoughts that come to mind. When you re-live an event in your memory, the event always gets transformed in some way. For effective journaling, there are two parts to it. The first part is accurately and fully describing the event, especially focusing on capturing the emotional aspects of it. Just the act of recall and writing things down in detail, can make you consider things differently. This can start to loosen the emotional hold the event has over you. The second part is to step back from the event, and describe what the motivations were of the people involved, why did they do what they did? But also describe your feelings in detail. And to finish off, write down what you wished would have happened instead had you been able to affect things: what would you have said to those people? The idea here is to fully immerse yourself in the event, describe it, and deconstruct it, then reconstruct it in a more positive way. Often when recalling negative past events, we get stuck in a vicious cycle of reinforcing the negativity. We feel the emotional pain, but we don't deconstruct or re-contextualise what happened. Here's a hypothetical example of a journal entry I would make (it didn't actually happen): "I broke my leg when I was seven years old. I had been playing piggy back and fell on concrete. The pain was horrible and my friends ran away, because they didn't know what to do. I felt abandoned by my friends. Even when my Mum came to help me, all she could do was shout at me for being stupid. I was in the hospital for what seemed like eternity and I couldn't play and see my friends, I felt so lonely. Even after when I was on crutches I had to stay mostly indoors because I couldn't move very much. But all my friends came round and wrote their names on my plaster cast. Sleeping was painful and uncomfortable, and nobody seemed to ask me how I was feeling or care about my pain. Even after I got better, some of my old friends had moved on, and I felt betrayed by them." and so on, feel into it. That's my thoughts!

? The truth burns make it stop! ? I don't know man. Ultimately, my "truth" is just a judgement. My friend has a complex dynamic going on (she has four kids, messy divorce etc.). I suppose I could throw in a monkey wrench into that dynamic and see where it lands. Anyway, I'll stop derailing the thread.

My friend is never alone, she's always in a relationship! She just doesn't have lasting relationships. Life doesn't end when you're 50, it ends when you die. Trust me when you reach 50, you'll feel no different. My grandmother remarried in her 80's ?‍♂️ If you want to die alone, then go for it! Whatever makes you happy.

You're definitely appealing to my monkey mind. But my higher self is resisting the temptation. Most people don't like being told "you're an idiot". I'd like to keep her as a friend. Yeah I'm just mentioning it as a case study for dramatic effect. I think I had a point somewhere... oh yeah, it's the converse of what I'm saying. Some 21 year olds, I'm sure, can have mature relationships relative to their age group. Definitely when I was 21 I felt quite mature and I had a ten year relationship, so it's not completely impossible. Was I immature as hell at 21, yes.

It's no different at 50. A friend of mine is constantly going "through the mill". What she doesn't realise is she's more emotionally mature than the men she dates and they end up pissing her off. She also doesn't realise her taste in men is immature. I don't have the heart to tell her.

It looks like you know exactly what you want. Go do it! Be true to yourself. It's also the perfect time to experiment with lots of different things and people and not to tie yourself down too much. If your intuition told you the guy wasn't right for you, then it was the right decision, you will manifest other amazing people in your life in due course.

In a debate you have two sides with different points of view. Each side then tries to convince the other that their point of view is the right one. The tendency is to fight and defend your point of view, even if the other side is being reasonable or has some good information. It tends to shut you off from learning and deconstructing. The opposite of debating is to be open to new ideas and possibilities. Even if you have your own point of view, you still listen to what others have to say and you have some curiosity about their point of view. You ask them questions to gather more information, and you're prepared to admit you might be wrong, or admit you don't know everything. You go away and integrate the new information, and deconstruct yourself. The only way to improve yourself, is to change. The only way to change is to kill off bad ideas and take on new ones. You have to want change. New ideas come from other people or your own insights. You have to listen.

Aging is entropy in action. The body constantly fights destruction from entropy using energy from the environment (food). Entropy is destructive because it is easier to break things than to fix them. The environment doesn't care about your body, it is constantly under attack (viruses, bacteria, temperature, cuts, bones breaking etc). In order for the body to keep fixing itself it needs an abstract notion of a template (self-identity) to work from. If the template (self-identity) was perfect, then it could indefinitely undo the damage from increasing entropy (it always increases). But it is not perfect, so entropy and descruction wins in the end. Interestingly, some animals can win at this game of entropy: some types of jellyfish. They are effectively immortal. But even they probably couldn't survive being cut up into small pieces (another form of increasing entropy). To reverse aging would require us to have a better knowledge of the body's systems than it does. And even then we would have to find a way of making those repairs happen. That's a very tall order.

In fact self-awareness is primary. The idea of information lives inside awareness. Imagine a screen full of pixels (information) a million of them. Then you have a million screens. At which point does all this information become self-aware? How can it?

disjoint with ok enough of this madness

disjoint with

@UpperMaster this is a great insight to have about yourself. The sensation you're feeling is that of "levelling up", it can feel weird and confusing for a while. Success can be scary. It requires commitment, responsibility and it may require you to keep fighting to stay successful, it takes work. Success can also be an anti-climax, the journey can be more exciting than the result: some people fear that. But not achieving success or even trying can also be suffering in itself. When the vision you have of being a successful self doesn't match the reality, it can drain your emotions and chip away at your self-esteem. You may get a short term hit of pleasure by being defiant and talking yourself out of success, but there is a longer term price to pay.

Thanks ChatGPT. The irony is that technical jargon is used exactly because the words have very specific meanings, and if you know the jargon you can communicate more clearly. I'd say unless you're using very well defined words, there's no way of escaping potential confusion. Just look at the use of the words: God, consciousness, Devil, enlightenment, nothing, free will, vibration on this forum. They cause no end of noise in threads (personally, I enjoy the semantic chaos), but they lead people to go round in circles with no resolution. It's a miracle we understand each other at all!

Good use of language requires the speaker and the listener to be at the same level. For example, if I talk about how to build an aircraft engine, I'm expecting that the listener has a certain level of understanding. Most confusion arises because the listener is not on the same level as the speaker (in terms of understanding). The listener either doesn't understand, misunderstands or doesn't bother to listen - but that is not their fault (it's no-one's fault). If you want clear communication then, you must match your speech to the listener's level. That's one aspect. That takes skill on the speaker's part though, to both gauge the listener's level of understanding, and to be able to speak at that level. It's not easy. Scientists can fail here (e.g. John Vervaeke, Joscha Bach). Another aspect to good communication is being semantically clear. Usually, this involves not contradicting yourself. But it also involves clearly and deeply understanding the connections between ideas, and being logically sound. Most people either don't have enough depth around a subject, or don't know how to be logically sound. It also often involves having a bigger picture view of a subject. Most good communicators are able to switch up and down their level of communication, and to zoom in and out of a subject. Also, to be a good listener requires some amount of curiosity. If you're not understanding something, then you should be questioning the speaker. In a more formal setting you would take notes to ask at the end or to go and investigate further yourself. Ideally, speaker and listener should question each other. Ultimately, communication is always two way. There's responsibilities on both sides to create decent communication.

An expression of my more hippy side

That is rough. Why are you homeless, what happened?

I see, I understand thanks. If God itself doesn't know, then there are things beyond God's knowledge and/or abilities? Or would God choose not to know?

@EugeneTheSage I try and practise dream control, or dream affirmations. Before I fall asleep, I talk to the dream part of me. I literally address it directly: "Dream part. Are you there? Yes. I want my dream characters to be interested in me and to go on adventures with them tonight. Is that a deal? Yes..." If you ask for the same things every night, eventually it starts working. My dream characters are a lot more pleasant and approachable nowadays, some of them are even too nosey. Another thing you can do, is review your dreams and every time you had an unpleasant or annoying situation, picture a bid red cross slapped over it. This gives the "dream part" feedback that you don't want that again. For example, I had a lot of dreams of unpleasant toilet scenes and these have stopped now. I guess it's the dream version of affirmations.

I must say this is a great example of how threads should be on the forum. It's like a breath of fresh air. Anyway, ignore me, carry on...

Except that most self-help material I've come across is not targeted at a particular sex. Self-help is broad and includes lots of categories. You're right that some categories may be biased towards one sex or the other, but on the whole it's not. Nutrition or improving mental health or having "rules" for life has nothing to do with sex. If you look at the top selling self-help books, like "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" or "Atomic Habits", these are gender neutral and have nothing to do with what you're saying.