LastThursday

You are all of them. Wherever you look in the universe, you are there.

Big picture thinking allows you to connect lots of smaller things together. It's like zooming out on Google Earth. You get a real feel for how things interrelate and fit together, how Africa relates to Europe relates to Asia, oh and America North and South. You realise there's more water than land. It automatically recontextualises the finer detail. It's a very useful skill to be able to approach understanding from many different levels of zoom, especially in this day and age of narrow specialisation. What's the bigger picture of your university project?

Yes, you're the only point of view. But it only seems that way, because you imagine yourself to be watching it all. In fact, there's no one watching, it is all just pure awareness. By definition awareness is aware of something, the whole of consciousness/the universe is aware of itself. There are an infinite number of points of awareness.

Every story about reality is only partial, what isn't told is everything else.

@Roy Yes, it's like you were appreciating the artists before, but now your realise how deeply personal it all is. I really appreciate where you are now, I had a period of my life were music and art would make me emotional to the point of tears, often - and both how silly and liberated I felt.

Absolute love is just that, absolute. Whether you self-improve or not, it is still there. Self-improvement is a thought relative to who you are now.

All these different things feed into each other and affect each other: Stress Sleep Diet Exercise/fitness Mental clarity They are the actors in the movie of Preety. If you change one thing the others will also change in harmony. Some things you will have control over, some not, so you can only change the things you have control of. There's a lot of easy things you can do in all these areas, that will improve things fairly quickly. I'm no expert, but there are experts on this forum that can help in these areas. I know a fair amount about good sleep hygiene if you're interested (it's my favourite activity).

There's likely a strong influence from diet and fitness on your mental state. The good news is at least you're doing some exercise. I don't know how difficult it would be for you to improve your diet? Also, what are you sleep patterns like, do you get enough sleep?

What are you levels of exercise and fitness? And do you think you have a good diet?

You also have to master patience and mastery also doesn't have a finish line. Why would you be able to play a Bach fugue, solve differential equations, or be the world's greatest footballer right now? It takes a long time for your mind and body to learn the right movements, jargon and thought patterns to do anything. There's a reason it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something. Saying that. If you have previous mastery in lots of different areas, then learning new things can be very quick. It's a virtuous cycle. If you already know how to walk, then running is a lot easier to master.

Dreams have as much meaning as waking reality. The difference is they tend to be more metaphorical right brained than analytical left brained.

It depends on what you mean by effort. I think most people regard effort as an unpleasant activity, usually some sort of activity that you would rather not be doing if you had a choice. So you practise avoidance of effort and then hope for the best. This doesn't work. If you do nothing, nothing happens. If you do something, something happens. Sustained commitment is more important. Even low effort over a long period of time can bring results. The trick is to make the effort seem worthwhile. If you start seeing results from your effort, then this will sustain you. Or if your plan or vision is strong enough, then your efforts are for a good reason. Or you could just redefine what "effort" means to you. If you actually enjoy what you're doing, then it stops being effort and it becomes joy. Go find that thing.

Gamification happens with a lot of apps on mobile phones for example. It's where learning is either turned into a competition against others or yourself, or it's turned into an actual game. So this is more to do with mental learning. With physical pursuits such as basketball, you could shoot hoops from one spot over and over again (rote learning), or you could actually learn through playing the game with other people. Play is a lot more engaging, because there is a lot more going on (energy), but also because there's the flow of the whole situation (context). But the problem with play is that you may not encounter particular situations very often: say shooting a hoop from a particular position. So rote learning is needed to practice those rare situations. If you want to master a discipline either mental or physical, then you need a combination of the two, play and rote learning. In school however, you generally just get one or the other, not both.

The internal voice is a hallucination brought about when we learn to read as kids. We learn to read "out loud", but then later on we're encouraged to "read to ourselves" in silence and that's when it starts. I would say it isn't your ego. Your ego is much bigger than your internal voice. Your ego includes your sense of self and identity and all your behaviours good and bad. Your ego is mostly there to help you stay alive. So most of the things you do for survival is related to your ego. Ego is about separation and identity, and justifying all your actions in the name of those two things. I'd also say that your internal voice is not thought. It is one way of thinking, but there are other ways, such as visually or emotionally. I suspect for a lot of people their internal voice is a running commentary on everything they're experiencing, so they confuse "I" for this voice. But it's possible with training to stop the internal voice at will: it doesn't stop you having an ego though.

A large part of learning anything is pure repetition, especially so with physical activities. So it comes down to how that repetition is presented to you. Probably the best way (for retention) is through play and engaging curiosity. I think that's why there's so much gamification of learning nowadays. It's self-directed rote learning. The problem with the way most rote learning is presented, is that it lacks context and a certain energy. Context gives you lots of hooks to tie together bits of information, making the process more memorable. The energy is how much effort is put into making rote learning engaging, this is the problem gamification tries to solve. A lot of school teaching neither has enough context, play or energy. No wonder you hate it.

Communicating the incommunicable. I don't normally let what happens on the main forum influence what I write about here (because I don't like repeating myself). Normally, it's the other way around if at all. By way of example I'm going to recount something that I'm feeling today. There's a distinct difference in the way I feel nowadays to how I felt a few years back. Back then I felt stressed and depressed in general. That depression had a tangible increase in a sensation that I now seldom feel. We all having an underlying "mood" so to speak, during different periods of our lives. It's often connected to our circumstances and environments, the people and drama, but it's a felt sensation rather than thought. In terms of this particular mood, I had felt it at least since my teenage years. But I was completely unaware of it until I became depressed. It was that mood that made me mentally unstable and miserable. I had been anxious and felt off most of my adult life until then, but it was normality for me. To describe the sensation is like comparing the difference between Summer and Winter. In fact Winter used to increase my sadness. Winter here (UK) is cold and desaturated and claustrophobic and isolating. I used a S.A.D. light for a number of years to counteract it - and it helped. It's hard to know whether the mood I felt was like the Winter weather or was triggered by the weather, strange isn't it? I just felt in myself, desaturated, disassociated and an inner coldness and negativity that was hard to shake off. Two things helped flip me into my current sunnier mood. One was that my circumstances changed, some of the people and events that had triggered and prolonged my depression went away. The other is that I started to take St John's Wort regularly, knowing it was a mood lifter. Slowly slowly I began to feel different. It was like the colour and warmth was being turned up inside me. After a year of taking the wort, I decided to wean myself off it. It's non-addictive from my experience, but I was apprehensive about returning to my former depressed self. I had a few false starts, and went back on it after a month break here and there, because I could feel myself slipping back. But eventually I won out. My new mood was installed and permanent. Very rarely do I slip back nowadays, it's especially if I'm tired when I wake up, or there's a certain chill in the air, or especially dark days outside. But I'm acutely aware of it now, I know it will pass and any negativity I feel in the moment I just recognise for what it is and let it go. Ideally, I have a nap and all is right again. I don't need St John's Wort or a bright light in Winter. So what is the feeling? It's incommunicable in itself, to be honest I can't even describe it to myself very well, it's simply an all-pervading sensation that doesn't easily shift. Scientifically, it's probably related to decreased Seretonin levels, so doing things to increase that probably helps. I suspect I've trained my body to have a new set-point in my Serotonin production and I feel all the more sunnier for it. May it long continue.

As someone who used to suffer from this, I feel genuinely happy that you have some peace and harmony. Just letting your ego and body do its thing in the moment is key. The mind is there to pull you in a certain direction, not to micromanage and be fearful.

You don't make a joke funnier by analyzing it. Instead of analysis and judgement you're looking for better communication. There's absolutely nothing wrong with questioning things in a relationship though, it's healthy, but the only reason to question things should be to improve things for both of you. Let the relationship flow and let your roles within it naturally change over time, don't force it.

And likewise, you are being a little uncharitable and naive. "Truth" is a word no? It is all language and words. Using words to tell me otherwise just doesn't wash. Whatever precipices are being scaled (nice metaphor) it has nothing to do with the word "truth". Truth is just a convenient label to slap on an experience, so you can communicate some aspect of it to someone else. Exactly it. Which is why there shouldn't be pessimism about communicating profound experiences. This is my entire point. You have to assume there's even a remote possibility of a shared experience (prior to separation as you say) otherwise you wouldn't bother to communicate at all. Leo needn't be so dramatic and pessimistic about it: By doing so, he is artificically separating himself out from the rest of humanity.

@mandyjw It's communicable, just not transferrable. You'd have to communicate to "go eat your own ice cream cone" to get close enough. Even then it's not verifiable that you're sharing a similar experience. Most probably not. Of course, that realisation is just guesswork on Leo's part. It's a little bit of "no one will ever understand me" type of melodramatic talk you get sometimes. Naturally he can share them if he wants, there's nothing to stop him. Who cares about being understood? You won't know if someone understands you or not, especially with an audience of millions. You just have to communicate and hope for the best, it's the best that can be done.

Welcome. Age is no excuse for not interacting with us younguns. Just get stuck in.

Inside all of us sits the kernel of our own actualisation. Like the egg and sperm that made you and me, that potential inside us is the entire thing. Feeding and nurturing that potential and giving it the right environment leads every time to an actualised human being. It's never too late, whether you're 20 or 80. It's a long and winding path, but that's the joy if it. At some point it becomes self-sustaining. Instead of passively depending on environment and circumstance to actualise, you gain enough experience and insight to organise your environment and circumstance actively and a virtuous cycle is set up. It's a cumulative process of ever increasing awareness and experience. At the start of the process there are many low hanging fruit. You start by learning that your mind and body are intricately connected. You have to treat the body well and not let it languish or innocently poison it. The body is the vehicle for your self-actualisation. If the body suffers, the mind suffers in synchrony and it works in both directions. It is easy to fix these problems but it requires ongoing commitment. That commitment gets easier over time, until it becomes who you are. Next you realise that you are incarnated as a human being. That human as a whole needs feeding, it needs love and attention from others, novelty and purpose and belonging to a tribe and identity. Without those things it's hard to actualise any further. Some of these things are pitifully lacking in our Western system or at least are not freely obtained. They are hard to put in place if any of the pieces are missing, but they are necessary. We know that by helping others we help ourselves, that reciprocity underpins our humanity. Along the path we learn that we are creative creatures and that improvisation and living by our wits feeds our sense of excitement and feeling alive. We don't do this naturally as adults. We are fearful of making fools of ourselves and of not being good enough or being ostracised. We realise that to actualise we have to combat our deepest fears head on. We have so many of them embedded in our behaviours and the way we think. The irony being that if we unleash our creativity and improvisation abilities our fears disappear. We don't need to be heroes or fearless warriors, just aware enough to know that our fears are mostly are mirage. Talking of heroes and fearless warriors, once we have enough provisions for the journey we can take our stories and uses them as a base for actualisation. The stories we tell ourselves are incredibly powerful. They are the operating system of human beings. When you change the stories you change your very core being. We use that creativity and improvisation to muster up a grand opera for our lives. It drives us, orients us and gives us context and purpose. Without a good story we are left languishing and directionless - that is not actualisation. We go further and become aware that everything that drives us to actualise is constructed in our minds. And that we are free to construct and deconstruct anything we like to serve our purposes. The mere fact of this makes us realise that "we" are really outside of the constructs, we can choose to see reality at any level of detail we care to. And we can play with reality itself. We a free in a deep and fundamental sense. And we begin to redefine what being human is. Maybe, finally, we get that we're totally interconnected with everything. Everything is affected by everything else at every level; and that we are playing a game when we isolate a thing from everything else. We cannot say we are just human any more, in a real sense we are everything all the time. It's all one grand flow. We are not observers of reality, we are reality.

It gets catchier each time:

Made me think of the reason why I came across Leo at all. I used to be on the Glitch In The Matrix Reddit site all the time. The stories on there can be truly weird, so many good ones. One day some user posted a video about weirdness about not existing at all and Leo's head appeared for the first time. I made a post in my journal of some of my glitches: My feeling on it, is that we all want normality and continuity, so that's all we are "tuned in" to. We see only what we want to see. The minor weird stuff gets ignored, because it doesn't fit our expectations of normality. Occasionally major weird stuff happens, but we still scrabble to "make sense" out of it and normalise it - and very rarely we can't make head nor tails of it.

Ever find yourself in a conversation where you've already reached the punchline? Yet, the person insists on rambling to the conclusion anyway? You wait impatiently. This is something I've experienced most of my life. I'm used to it. For me I don't think it stems from having a quick mind per se, sometimes my mind is quite slow and deliberate. But it definitely stems from paying attention and from absorbing a huge array of information. In one of my previous jobs, at one point my immediate manager became very annoyed with me because I was pre-empting him so often - by already having finished a task he was going to assign me. I thought it was amusing. I was simply good at paying attention to "what was in the air" at any particular time. Even in my current job, I have meetings lasting hours, where I got the gist in the first few minutes - some people just need to talk it out (sigh). I think I mostly stopped watching Leo's videos for that same fact. I started to know what was coming and I didn't need to suffer two hours of talking head to be told what I already knew. Naturally, I may be missing the odd nugget here and there, but I find I pick up those things somewhere else eventually anyway. But it's nothing to do with Leo, and all to do with me. I'm a fast learner and I have good recall. And so it is with spirituality and understanding myself. I understand myself well. I get the main thrust of spirituality. I get it. All that's happening now is a layering up of information in the hope that some spiritual magic will happen. I think, like money and happiness, words and explanation will only get me so far in this work. I'm not sure what's left, I could navel gaze forever and not get anywhere different. That's not to say I've reached the pinnacle of my spiritual journey, just that all the foundations have been laid and actually erecting the building itself is a completely different animal. I'm not sure how to do that, for once I haven't got to the punchline already.