LastThursday

You help at whatever level you're able and willing to. There isn't some minimum level of help you should be giving. My way of helping @kag101 is to show that the option of walking away is ok. There's no need to try and be a hero.

In many cases that is enough. It's always a judgement call whether to help someone or not. Even if you are well meaning and want to help someone, you may find that you're out of your depth - which is why professionals exist. The person may or may not be ready to receive help. Often people who need help look for it from the wrong people. I can't speak for @kag101, but it seems clear that s/he is not in a position to be able to help and so should be kind to her/himself and cut contact.

That is super clear. So it's just a matter of when you cut off contact. Now or in five years or longer.

An informative overview of the mindset of Russia and Putin:

Hence my lame joke earlier. Although in my case I'm not sure what is coercing me to stay. Maybe I'm being existentially terrorised without knowing it? Although if I was going to be existentially terrorised @Leo Gura 's charismatic expositions would definitely do the trick. I blame solipsism and free will: I've got none and I've only got myself to blame for sticking around. Still not a cult.

I'm trying to convince myself that I have free will? Ok I'll stop joking around. If you were in a cult, leaving the cult would be very difficult. But people come and go here all the time, ergo it's not a cult.

No. I'm free to leave at any time. I'm free to leave at any time. I'm free to leave at any time...

@Someone here practically, the suicide rate is very low something like 0.01%. It can't be used as a good argument for happiness and truth being anything to do with living. But you are right, happiness is not one-dimensional and neither is truth, they have many sources and qualities. How can you judge if one type of happiness is equal or better than one type of truth and that those things are essential for living?

And yet many millions live like this.

Truth has nothing to do with happiness. Happiness and Truth has nothing to do with living. You can be miserable and not know Truth and still live.

It seems clear that you know what you want in this situation. However you distance yourself from him, in the long run the result is the same. Logically, you want to make it as quick as possible for yourself. But you should deal with the situation with integrity and respect. Why not do both? Explain why you're distancing yourself, and that he should get help, but also explain that you are blocking him immediately - don't give him the option of contacting you.

I've missed these free will questions. God wants to awaken to itself, that is the game its playing. The joke is that you're already God with complete free will. But be careful, because the ego wants to believe it is God; avoiding delusion is hard.

Nearly none at all I would say. The only subtle difference is one of "ownership". With LOA/manifestation you simply set things in motion and give up on owning the process, with goal setting you take ownership of what happens with every step. But, the result may be the same in both cases. I wouldn't say LOA is any easier than goal orientation and taking action. It could be that a lot of things have to take place and run their course before the manifestation happens: in some ways the journey is always more important than the end result. Even with the goal orientation/taking action approach, there is a lot of luck, synchronicity and grabbing chances which you can't "own".

I thought I'd pick up on this. If manifestation is true, then this would be exactly what would be expected if God "leaked" into lower levels of being. As a God, you/it would hide its own powers from itself, by separating itself from itself. In other words if you wanted to pretend you were not a god (as a kind of game of forgetting), then you would hive off a part of yourself and make it less godlike and less powerful. This game of forgetting isn't perfect, and glimpses of godlike powers (manifestation) would occasionally happen. It's not perfect forgetting, because God delights in discovering itself again, but only slowly and bit by bit.

The only difference between introverts and extroverts is where they get their kicks from. Extroverts get their fix from socialising, introverts from pursuing their own thoughts. There's no difference in creativity, intelligence, emotional intelligence, passion, focus, strength or any other measure. In fact introverts can be quite social, they just don't get most of their pleasure from being social - introverts can be just as socially aware as extroverts. Also, it's not one-size-fits-all. Introverts are not introverts in all situations, and likewise for extroverts. Maybe you're more extroverted with close friends and less so with acquaintances, or more introverted in a work situation than outside of it.

Whenever I'm introspective, which is a lot, I feel a kind of melancholy. When I'm not being introspective I have a tendency to detach from emotions and analysis and just let reality wash over me. This is something I've learnt to do over time as both a defence mechanism but also as a form of Stoicism. I've come to realise that a lot of my sadness is caused by negative rumination and that detaching from it is beneficial. I don't process emotions too well, I find that they quickly overwhelm me and stop me functioning properly. Stoicism or my version of it has it's pros and cons. One pro is that I have become impermeable to the small problems in life, nothing really fazes me. Yes I get irritated and agitated, but it's short lived and I don't get too sucked into the drama of things. There's a kind of sweetness in not being too fazed by life; I see others getting wound up and upset by things I find trivial and not worth worrying about; I've saved myself a lot of suffering this way. Most things are not worth the emotional energy, they come and they go and they have no long term consequence. The con of Stoicism, is that no action is taken. In a bid to remove myself from my emotions, I have become static and unyielding. I think most motivation comes from the emotions and from emotional desire, and largely from spontaneous thoughts. The process is something like: thought -> emotion/desire -> action. Because I've detached from emotion I've broken that chain. I have thoughts and desires but there's never any emotional impetus behind them. But neither can I pretend to have emotion, I can't fool myself, I'm too aware of what I'm doing to myself. My Stoicism has also been coupled with minimalism. I worked out somewhere along the line that being minimalist in all aspects of my life was beneficial. The benefits are many-fold. I don't take on trivialities and stresses, where I see others blindly taking on things that they regret later. I also don't engage with the consumerist-throw-away ethic society imposes, the things I buy and consume are meaningful and long lasting. I don't try and fill my life with things I hardly need or use, or use as a crutch to prop up my emotional state. I'm more agile and freer when change happens, because I'm not so tied down. But minimalism is stark and unforgiving. I'm confronted directly by life and not blinded by the mask of "stuff". It's painful when it's clear there's nothing to fall back on other than my own wits - the buck always stops with me - and I don't always live up to that responsibility - I'm always exposed to my own inadequacies. Stoicism for me is a rejection of responsibility and a rejection of the stress it brings - I already had too much of that as a teenager. Be that as it may, the one area of stress in my life is work. I'm not allowed to be off the hook there. Yes, when I'm not allowed to hide and have to confront problems head on at work, I step up and I'm always successful. But it's always someone else's problems I'm fixing. This has been the theme of my life: fixing other people's problems. I want to let go once and for all from being a trouble-shooter for someone else, I'm fed up with it. I want to re-orient instead and start to be a creator rather than a fixer; and a selfish creator at that, one that suits my needs and desires.

The manifestation spreads to everything, the probabilities shift so that everything aligns with your goal. So to manifest a ring, you will manifest skills first then manifest a well paying job after. LOA says it's not necessary to concentrate on the intermediate steps, these will come about as a consequence of the goal. The bigger or more unlikely the manifestation, the more intermediate steps it needs, the longer it takes. I would say there is a delay to all manifestation, either short or long, nothing is instant. Personally, I think would try and manifest some of the intermediate steps, because than can have other beneficial side effects - but it could affect how long it takes to manifest the end goal, because you may take a less than ideal path. There's also the "be careful what you wish for" effect. Sometimes, you get what you want manifested, but there's negativity attached to it in other areas. For example maybe you want to manifest a great paying job, and find you get fired a week later, have to wait six months for another job and then get that great paying job.

I have a strong interest in manifesting objects (materialisation) and want to be able to do this if at all possible. One way to start is the slow way. Reality likes to be coherent. Manifesting from thin air is very incoherent, so it doesn't happen very much if at all. Say I want to materialise a gold ring, I can go to a shop and buy one. The reason this works is because it's very coherent and conventional: there's a reason and cause and effect, I pay money, I get gold ring. So the way to start is by bending the probabilities of reality. There is hard scientific evidence that thought alone can affect the probability of quantum randomness. Quantum randomness is the base of reality (don't tell the Idealists!). So thought bends the probabilities of reality. The way to increase the effect of thought is through intensity of emotion, ritual, and by associating other thoughts with it. For example if I want to manifest a gold ring, I wouldn't just think of a gold ring, I would imagine my excitement and me wearing it and showing it off to others etc. You create a powerful story and framework around the thought. Once you bend reality, it takes time to manifest stuff, because it has to seem plausible and coherent. The more implausible the longer it takes and the less likely it will manifest.

Hey @Esilda, thanks. The way out of being stuck is to improvise. As you put it, the mind and body are part of one thing and one affects the other. Why not act out your thoughts and analysis through your body? You may have different insights and solutions. Use different positions in the room for different thoughts and try different body postures and movements to walk between the thoughts.

It really depends on which perspective you want to take. No perspective is true though. A perspective is just one way of slicing reality. On one level time doesn't exist, so any talk of simultaneity, or not, makes no sense. With no time, nothing is happening at all. But that perspective is too mindfucky to work with sensibly. Reincarnation or ideas of living the life of everyone eventually are out. Another perspective is that consciousness cannot be counted. Stuff inside consciousness can be counted, because consciousness has the property of being divisible. But consciousness itself is unindividuated (a.k.a. non-dual), it doesn't belong to a me or to a you, we all belong to consciousness. Ideas of there being only one consciousness don't make sense either, because there is nothing beyond consciousness - counting requires comparison. But the real consequence is that there can't be a me and a you, we are figments of some divine imagination: divisions within a timeless consciousness.

I thought I'd improvise. Everything is an improvisation. This happens at a human level and at a super-human level. Improvisation is the enmeshing of several different impulses. There is the creative spirit, where new things are forged from re-configurations of the old, but also plucked from a pool of divinity: brand new and never seen before. There is the spirit of the master who lives and embodies her craft in her very being, every action and thought guided by a deep well of understanding and experience. There is sensitivity, where there is subtle and near supernatural intuition to ones environment and equally subtle flow back into that environment. There is playfulness, where new ways of being are experienced and absorbed, and there is constant interplay between me and you, this and that, past and future. There is a fundamental love in all its forms, joy in every thought, delight in every movement, surprise in every change, appreciation and gratefulness in every act. We live in a beautiful constantly unfolding improvisation.

This company called easyJet, they've figured it out.

Never feed a troll. You've put me in an existential bind. Will my executive control functions win over my lizard brain?

The other side of the argument is that if you've never had an orgasm, then having someone describe it is useful. It lets you know that an orgasm is possible and it gives you encouragement to try and have one for yourself. Personally, regarding solipsism I think it's a lot of hot air about nothing. It's just that people don't have the mental and emotional apparatus to work with it or even understand it. It's exactly the same with the free will discussions (which have thankfully gone away). I'm tempted to be a huge troll and start a thread about how solipsism and free will are connected. But I wont! I will resist...

I think @Preety_India also wants to learn to be extremely feminine, so until she embodies it naturally, it will be a game and an act. But it's always going to be a game, because femininity is socially constructed in the first place. An interesting question would be what (straight) women think being extremely feminine is, because that would take the attraction factor out of the equation.