LastThursday

Impulsiveness is pure authenticity. But there's always negative connotations around it. We have to live by rules; pure authenticity is without rules and restrictions. Impulsiveness is unregulated and dangerous, which is why new forms of impusiveness are always checked and frowned upon. Impulsiveness is creativity. Ever done anything impulsive and regretted it afterwards? Impulsiveness is always a problem. But we need it to be free.

Never post anything whilst drunk. I think it's informative to try and be coherent in different states of consciousness. The informativeness comes through because reality isn't actually coherent at all, it's a maelstrom of chaos in a constant rush. It's so easy to slip in your footing and become crazed and incoherent, reality is constantlty forcing you that way anyway. Spirituality and self-development doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever. Why don't you want to wake up? Because it's insanity - scary type insanity - real reality is scary insanity. It's all over the forum and the journals, the constant toying with insanity, right there on your doorstep. Yes, no, yes, no. Being authentic is to be relatively insane - sane by your own standards, insane by everyone else's. What we all really want is to be ourselves, our insane, unrestricted, un-owned selves. To do and think and behave as we truly want. To not be slaves, to be free like birds, and cats. We are prisoners of our own minds. So much for alcohol. For some chaos, I'm going to learn this:

Is our mental life completely disconnected from our bodies? It's an odd thought that your body could just be some sort of avatar, devoid of any inner contemplative life, a container if you like. Sure, the avatars come in all kinds of configurations, but it kind of would be possible to swap one soul for another. This idea isn't new, the idea of a soul that animates lifeless matter is an ancient one. If you take someone's brain and go look at it, it's just a grey mess of neurons. One neuron is pretty much the same as another (within reason). It's not as if there's a neuron for yellow, some neurons for Kylie Minogue and others for the taste of bourbon. There's no possible way the stuff of brains makes our subjective experience. Not unless some diabolical process is happening whereby the patterns of neuronal connections and their activity are leading to consciousness. I mean, brains are bodies right, it's all avatar, empty and devoid of consciousness. One brain is pretty much the same as another brain. Yet, we have the strange situation where our avatars are pinned to our consciousness. There's a high correlation there. In certain situations we may temporarily forget about our avatars, but they always seem to come back. Examining it, the whole set up is really quite peculiar. Here goes: Here is a world, for all intents and purposes infinite in extent. It is a world, it has structure and orderliness, it can be explored, it is consistent from moment to moment. So why not just stop there? Why the rigmarole with having a body and all its problems? Literally a middle-man to relay communications from one world to the other mental world. It's like the body was engineered as an interface, part physical, part mental. The only conceivable use for a body in this scheme, is to restrict freedom of exploration right down. We have invented cars and aircraft precisely to overcome the restrictions of the body. So where exactly is the point where the mental world touches the physical world? The real diabolicalness is that the physical world is couched directly inside the mental experience. It only takes some re-contextualisation to realise this (possible awakening, but I think you don't need to go that far). Even a materialist would have to concede that reality "out there" is being interpreted by a brain, it's just a map of the real thing, our conscious experience is nothing like reality. And idealist would simply say that it's all consciousness - basically the same conclusion as the materialists. So it seems like consciousness has different types of activity that are somehow connected to each other. There is the seeming activity of the physicality of a brain (neurones and all), and then the correlated ethereal activity of mental life, so much so that if you damage a brain, the mental activity changes in lockstep. In a sense you're comparing oranges and oranges, it's all consciousness that is the explanation, there is no interface. But that seems unsatisfactory. Mental activity and qualia are so different from a lump of gooey grey brain, how can the two possibly be interfaced to each other? What is the linkage between the two? One less obvious explanation lies in relativity. If consciousness is about anything it is about relative intensity and relative difference of phenomena. Red only looks red in comparison to something that is not red. If everything were red, then well, there would be no red. Sight is not sound because they are in opposition to each other, up is not down and so on. This is the origin of qualia. This is the sum total of awareness; awareness is noticing difference. Consciousness is hugely elaborate, but it is done by intricately elaborating relative differences. Seen from a different viewpoint, awareness is a symmetry breaking activity. Symmetry in this case means sameness. When you become aware of a new phenomenon in consciousness, you are breaking the previous symmetry. So consciousness is a symmetry breaking machine, it creates stuff from nothing, it creates difference from sameness. Is this enough to explain qualia? Nearly. It's very obvious the world of consciousness phenomena has orderliness and structure, which is born from differences. It's like painting by numbers: before you fill in the colours the picture still exists, there is already structure there. My intuition is that the "filling in" of structure in conscious experience is arbitrary. The startling conclusion would be that your conscious experience maybe similar in structure, but absolutely different in perception to mine. The "filling in" nature of qualia is utterly inexplicable, like asking two different children to colour in the same picture, how they choose to do it is random (but consistent). It's possible the filling in process is in fact completely random and just gets baked in through repetition. So the experience of the colour green becomes habituated, but its first instance was completely random, plucked from an array of all possible types of conscious phenomena. It would seem that the only proviso is that similar structures in consciousness get similar qualia attached. So red and green only occur in vision, not sound for example (although see synaesthesia). Red and green are similar in some ways. So in essence the brain is responsible for ferreting out structure from the world - through its dense network of neurones, and this structures conscious experience, but the attachment of qualia (filling in) to this structure is not done by the brain. After all, if the brain is doing anything at all it's very clear that it is a pattern recognition machine. To extend this idea, maybe any and all structure in the world (outside of brains) gets qualia attached to them (initially random for a new structure). The question then remains is there an entity whose consciousness is experiencing this world without using a brain? Yes, but it's more diffuse and sprawling than a brain. In a way our brains are all part of the same thing, but their dense structure concentrates pattern recognition to a high level, making it seem like we're singular entities disconnected from each other. But this is not the case, we are connected to each other diffusely through the other structure recognising entities in the world. The universe is a giant brain, and we're part of it - it's all consciousness.

@ABM1294 if you mean a propensity for oneitis, then I have nothing. But if you're currently hung up on someone unobtainable, cold turkey all the way, zero contact, it's the most sane way.

@Late Boomer I'm sure there's some subtlety to meaning. It's not entirely words. It can be a felt sensation, something like familiarity or recognition. For example seeing a family member is meaningful, seeing a stranger less so - there's no need for words to have meaning. A lot of spirituality I would say is outside of words and language, but still meaningful. Maybe it all boils down to: if we're aware of something, it is meaningful.

I've kind of become fascinated with colour perception (another phase), ever since I did some self hypnosis and found my perception of certain colours was changed. Specifically blues and purple and pinks became very vibrant. I was surprised by this, how could simple suggestion change my experience of reality? Anyway, it got me to thinking if it would be possible to perceive new colours, ones never seen before. I was reading about colour opponent theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process) and something occured to me. When mixing colours it is either additive (light) or subtractive (paints) (https://blog.thepapermillstore.com/color-theory-additive-subtractive-colors/). So you might imagine mixing red and yellow to get orange and green and yellow to get lime. But what about blue and yellow? With paints you would get green, and with light you would get white. Neither are yellowish-blue, the colour doesn't exist in reality (because of opposition in the visual system). How to make this colour then? Stare at the image below and cross your eyes slightly until the blue box lines up over the yellow box. You may have to get closer or further way to make it easier. At first one colour will win out over the other, just keep blinking. After a bit you get a strange kind of shimmering effect, between the colours mixing. But after a long while things will settle down, and you'll see a yellowish-blue. Welcome to a new colour.

@ZzzleepingBear I'm arguing about the other half of the title. I have no view on the "no thing missing". If the "me" is separate, then the sense of existence or reality of anything is coming from somewhere that is not-me, the "me" doesn't get to decide what's real or not, even itself. This aligns with my reality, I don't stand there dictating what is real and what isn't, it happens automatically without my involvement. The "me" isn't a special case where the "me" gets to decide that it itself exists, no, it just is that way. In fact it is only awakening that allows "us" to see the illusory nature of the self, in which case a decision of sorts is being made on what is real or not. You see, it's all back to front. All this talk of illusory stuff and no me is coming from a position of being awakened. But until that point, everything is very real including the self, and there's no choice about it.

These two ^^^ sum up my feelings about it. No, it's always just real, in the sense that something that's real must exist. To say that illusion is unreal is wrong, the illusory also exists (and so is real) that's why we have a word for it. I suspect this is what's rubbing me up the wrong way. If something is eventually recognised for not actually being real (i.e. existing), then it simply ceases to exist any more, to retroactively say it never existed is again wrong. Awakening does not erase the fact that an "I" was there before. To tell a "me" that "you don't exist" is simply false. If "me" then ceases to exist and then you say "you don't exist", it is meaningless or of no particular importance. Even to say "you're an illusion or construct" is closer to the truth, but the benefit is also doubtful in that case. I use the word "benefit" because it is only a "me" that needs to hear it.

Falling in love in slow motion. I don't know if this is more of a hypothetical idea. I don't feel as though it's happened to me as such before, but it seems interesting to follow its trail as a thought. The starting point for it is attraction. Something or someone in your environment grabs your attention and you are attracted - I mean grabbing your attention and attraction are basically the same thing. It would seem to be a binary response in that way, either it grabs you or it doesn't. But binary or not, there is always an associated intensity to attraction and also attraction is multifaceted, often it's a jumble of different aspects that attract us to someone or something. Ok... What's love in the context of attraction then? Well maybe love is just repeated attraction. In time we learn to associate the bare attractive qualities in a person say, with a warm fuzzy feeling of... of... I don't know, I can't think of any other word than "love", alright, cozy familiarity. What I'm suggesting is that love takes its time to manifest and grows from the seed of attraction. This is the difference between love and lust, lust is just strong attraction, it's more of a Pavlovian response: attraction, lust, attraction, lust; there's no warm coziness. I am of the mind that love can be asymmetrical. So even if love slowly grows in the mind and body of one person, it doesn't have to manifest itself in the attracted person. This seems blatantly obvious, but often "love" gets dismissed as childish or as infatuation precisely because it isn't being reciprocated and that in turn is because society is deluded into thinking love is necessarily a two-way transaction, it isn't. When you hit spirituality, one-way love seems to be the higher form, but just to take the joy out of it, it stops being romantic love then and becomes God's love or whatever. How long does love take to arise? Again, love is not binary, it's a sliding scale from nearly nothing to full on. At the lower levels of love I would say it was difficult to disambiguate it from attraction. This is at it should be: attraction is the preliminary stages of love, they are one and the same thing. All this talk of love and attraction can be taken more generally for things as well as people, but I'm primarily talking about people here. To muddy the waters further because attraction itself comes in various intensities, it can be very hard to recognise if you even are falling in love or could possibly fall in love. It seems like in the normal state of affairs, there's attraction (possibly asymmetrical), but one person persists in expressing their love and wins over the other person to their way of thinking - so much for every romantic movie ever. But I say there is a falling in love by stealth and innocently: the attraction starts of innocently and nearly subconsciously, but exposure over time cements the attraction and love begins, again mostly subconsciously. Then that love intensifies over time and gets to the point where one day you're sitting there with a cup of tea, and realise "Damn, I can't stop thinking about X. How and why did that happen?". On reflection, that has happened to me a couple of times. And then in the next breath: "Nah. It can't be love, just behave @LastThursday. Save yourself for real love". And if my life were Sleepless in Seattle (it's not), I would go all out and try and consummate my newly discovered love. I think falling in love in slow motion is much more prevalent and goes unnoticed than is let on, mostly because it's dismissed as not being worthy or real. I object! It's as real and valid as any other form of love, especially romantic love, maybe even more so. Next time you look someone in the eye, ponder if they're in love with you without knowing it.

@Gianna a few thoughts, let me know what you think: The body likes to be in homeostasis, so creative energy requires to push it away from that. So the body signals its dissatisfaction (resistance) through anxiety and panic. Maybe the body overreacts sometimes? Signals from the body need to be interpreted and elaborated on (by the mind). The body doesn't really signal concepts such as anxiety and panic, it just gives out sensations. Is it possible that the mind could be misinterpreting the signals? Could it be that the anxiety and panic is caused by the mind first and then the body follows suit? After all, we need to live in a web of social responsibilities and rules and expectations, and using our creative potential to its fullest means breaking away from a lot of socially derived belonging? Maybe we're fighting our own mental conditioning and our bodies complain in sympathy?

Then proselytising that "there is no you" has no value. Or does it? I mean why go around saying something that doesn't make a difference either way? The fact remains that there is a "me", and here I am. I can appreciate that "I" could be re-contextualised away at any moment, but surely that will happen of its own accord, when and if it wants? Why all the goading with "there is no you"?

One response to "there is no you", is "so what?". In other words what use is it to know this and how should I "know" this snippet of information? What is "there is no you" leading to?

I very much operate in phases - sometimes recurring. Some new thought arises and grips my interest and I feel that I need to explore it fully. I don't have a filter for my exploration, if the interest has enough energy behind it then I go for it. In that sense I think I find myself to be quite different from people around me. I find it hard to quantify the difference though, I can see that other people have hobbies and interests, but they seem to be narrow in subject matter and long lasting. For example, someone may have interest in martial arts, and they pursue that regularly and as a matter of course. I too have long lasting interests such as playing keyboards, and information technology in general - but I see them as different from my "phases". By phase I mean interests and not some state-of-my-life type thing. At the moment it's playing Chess online. I don't have any expectation for how long I'm going to pursue this phase, only that I want to see if I can improve my playing and have fun. Another one is the subway map design I mentioned in another post. For that I had an idea based on the Moscow subway map, and wondered if I could run with it, just to see how things pan out. Another maybe, was to write a compiler for an 8-bit machine - which I mostly achieved. One of the beautiful things about exploring ideas in an unfettered way, is that as well as the joy in it, the side effects are always beneficial in some way. For example with Chess one side effect is to improve my quick logical thinking. With map design, I'm learning how to use illustrator software - so one day when there's a need to design a new logo for work or whatever, I can now step up say "yeah I'll do that". And that's the point, trying out many different types of activity is both fun and gives you a lot of different skills, which can synergise at some point in the future. I don't see anyone else working this way. Too many times I've found myself using the skills I learnt in some phase or other. If you want to be a renaissance man or woman, this is how to go about it. Mastery crystallises out of that synergy of experiences. Just ask Newton or Da Vinci. This is why I'm so attracted by this forum and Leo's work.

@modmyth I had an Icelandica phase for a while. More indulgence:

@Zeroguy where's your video? That would be cool af.

It's the best thing ever. I've done it a few times myself. My advice is to make the most of your free time, start putting put those ideas into practice now - before you hit the ground without a parachute.

There is no observer of reality. If this is true then where does the impression of there being an observer come from, and why is this everyone's default mode: thinking that there's an observer? You could look to language as a starting point. English and many other languages (at least European ones) divide words functionally. When an action is taking place, there is the person performing or initiating the action and there is the person (or thing) receiving or has the action done to them. Some quick examples are: LastThursday eats biscuits Cats are scared by cucumbers LastThursday is obsessed with food So how does this fit in with the idea of an observer, observing reality? Well, the verb "observe" grammatically works like the above examples: LastThursday observes reality Is language then the source of the idea of an observer of reality? Has language distorted reality? The logical question to ask is, why does language have this structure to verbs? I think that at the bottom of it there is the idea that an action has to be initiated by someone, or at least have a cause. All actions need causes. The role of language is very often to convey narrative. Narrative is the idea that things start off in one state, and then morphed into another state by a sequence of actions. To have any change at all in a narrative account, there need to be effects to every action. For example when we say "Susan took the kids to school", the effect is obvious: the kids ended up at school. This need for narrative and the consequences of it, is built right into most languages. Nearly all verbs need to have an initiator and an effect (or receiver of the action). But why is language this way in the first place? We could have had a language where actions just happen without being initiated or have any effects. Here's some examples of what this is like: Walking Singing Eats Observes Even with these examples, we are so used to the rules of English, that we still imagine these actions being carried out by someone or something. But truly the examples would be completely disconnected from the idea of a performer of the actions. We're getting into strange territory. It seems like language would collapse without distinguishing objects (nouns) and actions (verbs). What the above examples are implying is that we would only have one category: nounverbs. Luckily English has these nounverbs, they're called nominalisations. A word like "love" is a nounverb. It's a word that is actually a verb (loving) converted into use as a noun (love). So what is the nounverb of something like "LastThursday observes reality"? This would collapse into something like "Realising", i.e. reality doing its thing. See how in a nounverb like "Realising", there is no initiator and no effect, it is an action that simply continuously happens. This is closer to reality, stuff around us is just happening, it is all one giant happening (note, nounverb). Reality really doesn't need an obverver for it to happen to itself. So the idea of an observer simply evolved out of the conventions of language, and "you" have been duped by it. The "observer" is simply a convenience for conveying narrative when speaking.

More good stuff here, give it a watch:

I dabble in a lot of things. I have a fascination for trains and for maps - I'm such a boy. I also have an eye for aesthetics. I thought I'd try my hand at re-designing the Tokyo subway map. I started a project in 2007 to redesign the London Underground map (subway), just for kicks. At the time I only had Paint, which was barely adequate for the task. I came across the image again recently and thought I'd try my hand using more professional illustrator software (albeit free: Inkscape). It took a few weeks to re-implement the 2007 design, and it looks a lot more professional: Apart from a few more tweaks it's finished. I have no idea where and if I should publish my map to the world, or I'll just sit on it another 14 years! Anyway I decided to try another map and thought the Tokyo subway would be interesting to do in the same style: Berlin next after this one. I'm getting obsessed...

Thanks @Preety_India it's more of an irritation than a thing. I'm not OCD but I do like to have everything in its place, and a place for everything, ok maybe a little OCD lol.

Wishing reality to be different than it is suffering and insanity.

Aqui estoy jugando con un sueño, dentro el sueño, solo en el sueño. ¿Donde estas? A qualquier esquina que miro, tu no estas alli, solo yo. Siempre yo, reflejando en el sol, la tierra, el aire y en mi cuerpo. Asi es, cada vez que te busco.

Yeah Leo's blunt. But also a lot is lost in writing. Sometimes it's just plain old dry humour or done for effect. I myself have been triggered a few times by Leo's bluntness, but it's definitely my problem not his - I've been known to be blunt myself, I can't complain. There's a lot of fragile egos on the forum and people are surprisingly touchy if confronted directly sometimes, because there's nowhere to hide. Sometimes bluntness is bitter medicine.