LastThursday

One of my shadows that has haunted me throughout life is embarrassment. Embarrassment, I know now, is closely related to shame, humiliation and fear. I'm not sure of the source of my embarrassment but I'm sure it's from a combination of factors built up over time. One manifestation of this being a reluctance to engage with people and having a certain aloofness as a consequence. I guess the base of it is an inherent shyness either biologically or socialised into me. Another manifestation of my anxiety over embarrassment is my secretive nature. I've recognised my anxiety for a long time and I have done plenty of work to overcome it. My main allies have been a strong curiosity, building a sense of self worth and developing an openness or vulnerability - actively working against all my tendencies. I think in order to try and untangle this embarrassment and finally free myself of it it's worth laying out some of the history of that embarrassment. My mum was naturally a very anxious and defensive person. Unknowingly, I took on that persona from her as a kid. She was profoundly deaf and was badly treated by her siblings growing up. Essentially from what she used to tell me she was ostracised or made out to be stupid. And until she met my dad in her mid twenties her level of communication was bad - she never learned sign language. That history in itself doesn't explain my embarrassment in life, but goes someway to explaining my natural anxiety and fear and suspicion of people. Of course I could have just as easily have identified with my dad and not been that way. But my dad was largely absent and not a strong role model for me growing up. My parents are from two different countries: Spain and England. Since my dad was the breadwinner we eventually gravitated back to England (I was born in Spain). This put my mum in a difficult position in that not only her communication was bad, she also wasn't able to speak English - she never did learn it. But it was the end of the seventies and the man of the house was expected to provide and the woman primarily looked after the kids and kept the house. My dad did anything complicated and worked, my mum took us to school and fed us. As a consequence of the arrangement I would often have to translate from my mum. Whilst this felt "normal" to me at the time, with hindsight I can see that this exacerbated my anxiety and feelings of embarrassment. I was being asked to translate things which I didn't really understand. There was a certain attitude in England that foreigners were dumb and a certain lack of tolerance for non-English speakers. I felt that intensely and was embarrassed by it. That intolerance for non-English speakers is still apparent in 2021, and is a low level form of racism. Of course being "foreign" myself, despite my completely Anglo appearance and fluency, there was casual racism in the school playground. It was minor, but constant. I believe that in itself eroded my self worth and there was a level of embarrassment I felt about being half Spanish. Saying that, I held on to my self worth by knowing and displaying my intellect, I always knew that I was the smartest kid there. But the consequence of all this was that I was always marked as a know-it-all foreigner, and an embarrassed outsider. One of my biggest fears as a young kid was adults and especially teachers. I started school in Spain in the mid seventies and there was a formality to interacting with teachers, very unlike now. I was very young and fearful of teachers. Many times I would need to use the toilet, and would be afraid to ask, and instead would wet myself. Obviously, I found this humiliating and extremely shameful, but my fear of asking was greater. Those incidents I think set up a strong emotional connection between asking people for things and embarrassment. For years afterwards I would wet the bed as a young kid. It was only after my dad took me to a clinic did the bed wetting stop. My mum would always make a drama out of my bed wetting which reinforced the embarrassment. But in the end it stopped. The bullying continued into secondary school, but was less racially motivated, and more because kids don't take well to loners. I had one or two friends I hung around with, but was never really part of any group, so I was easy pickings. I did eventually learn to stand up to myself and toughen myself up, but it ground down my self esteem. Luckily, it was mostly older, bigger kids, and I knew they had to leave school eventually. My last two years at secondary school were easier, I got a girlfriend and life improved. But by this point a lot of my embarrassment and fear of people had taken root and become part of my identity. Around this time, my parents split and I was left as my mum's primary carer. A deaf woman in a country whose language she didn't speak. That time was tough and dealing with adult responsibilities as a teenager was unpleasant. Again, I felt a constant sense of embarrassment when having to deal with authorities and re-explaining the situation every time. For the most part I'd always had other people to lean on after my time at school, to do all the social stuff. I was very sociable at university, but I was still the poor kid amongst middle class friends, I always felt that inside and felt some shame around it. Two close friends lent me a lot of money to keep me going, and as grateful as I was, it marked me out as different. Even after university, I had a long term girlfriend who would set up all the social stuff, I was simply incapable I had that much fear. I finally started to overcome my entrenched embarrassment when I split up with her and was on my own for the first time in my life. I then had to fend for myself socially and to make my own way. That leads me to now. I'm a super capable person and very proud of my achievements, and my social abilities are very good. Yet there is this young embarrassed person still there having to take on adult responsibilities and sometimes just it's too much. Very very recently I've started to realise that the fear and potentially embarrassment that stops me from doing things and talking to some people, is just an emotion - it isn't anything to do with rationality. There are two ways out: one is to eliminate the emotion - because it's not helping me; the other is to push through regardless and have faith that I'm able to handle any situation with confidence. Lastly, whether I choose not to act out of embarrassment or fear, or to take action, it makes no difference, the world still revolves.

Is non-duality really about counting? The duality in non-duality really is mislabelled. It should read something like non-multiplicity. However, the underlying notion is based in arithmetic quantities. The non part of non-duality is also mislabelled. Again the ambiguity is caused by mathematics and more specifically sets. If you have a defined set of items, say different breeds of cats, then the "non" signifier is useful. You could have a non-Siamese and understand that you talking about all breeds of cats except Siamese. It works because the set of breeds of cats is finite in size. But when talking about unbounded (infinite) sets, then non becomes non-sensical. What is non-3? Is it 2 or all positive numbers except 3. Or all positive and negative numbers - except 3. Or all complex numbers except 3+0i? Or what. You see that taking the inverse of a finite item in an infinite set is nonsense. So what does non-duality actually mean, if anything? More strictly what does non-multiplicity mean? If we take multiplicity to mean infinity, then what is the non of that? Is it zero, one? Is it a number at all? What the hell do numbers have to do with transcending everyday reality? Nothing in my opinion. Numbers are simply a mental construct, whether that's zero, one or infinity. And mental constructs are something we are trying to point away from in spirituality. The word non-duality is leading us down the wrong path. Instead there should be a recognition that there is an underlying sameness to all of experience. "Sameness" seems dull and drab, but it's a much better descriptor of where we want to get to. It signifies the strange fact that no matter what seems to happen in our conscious awareness there is this sameness that permeates it at all times. For example, we recognise vision by the sheer fact that it shares a commonality in itself. Red may be different from green, but they share a kind of sameness called colour. And, we can climb this ladder of sameness until we reach a summit where the whole of experience shares a commonality. But there is a paradox to sameness, in that it's defined in terms of itself. We can't use the word colour without invoking the idea of reds and greens. In other words, the differences are involved in the sameness and vice-versa. To have a difference you need to compare to members of the same class. Duality is couched in sameness (or unity) and unity is composed of duality. And that is the key insight or paradigm. We don't care about sameness or difference, unity and duality. We care to recognise that we can't have one without the other. The deep truth is that we are able to recognise non-duality precisely because of duality; and that we're just playing mind games with numbers and ourselves.

@InterruptReQuest it seems like you could figure out two things. First, each situation you're in is unique. To fail at something you must know what the desired outcome is for that particular situation. Most of the time, you're a winner, because a lot of goals are easy to achieve or familiar to you. I'm sure you're not fearful of winning? Occasionally you will fail. Maybe because you didn't put enough planning or effort in, or you didn't have the skills or knowledge, or you took on too much. Or just blind bad luck. Maybe even other people you were relying on didn't do their bit. Second, who is judging your failure at something? Either it comes from yourself or from other people. If it comes from yourself, then your fear of failure is a fear of your own judgement - you can work on this then. If it comes from someone else, then you should ask yourself: "Why do I care about this person's judgement?". Also, you should look at the goals you're trying to achieve, and ask if you're doing it for yourself or just to please others - different people have different motivations. When you're trying to achieve anything, it's always an opportunity to learn something new. Whether you fail or win, you will still learning something. And you will apply that new learning to other things in your life; nothing is ever wasted. There is something to be said for taking on goals that motivate you and are aligned with your values. That will overcome any fear you have.

Is it precognition or law of attraction? Sometimes we have glimpses of the future. We get clear sensations that something is going to happen. And then it happens. We saw the future. Other times we just wished something would happen, and then one day it happens. We affected the future with our thoughts. What if both were true at the same time? That there is a kind of loop where the future affects the present and the present affects the future? How could this be, isn't there a paradox here? Questions questions. Maybe our thoughts and will is directed precisely so that the future occurs. Occasionally that future leaks into the present moment, it's smeared over time and space. Unlike the disconnected still frame of a film, the present moment is an alive process. The present moment has tendrils of possibility growing into the future. We are not disconnected observers of the present moment, we are the present moment, the present moment is us. When a feeling or thought arises about a new potential future, we both affect and are guided by the tendrils feeling their way forward. We both have free will and not. The future is both fixed and totally unknowable.

@Persipnei what would happen if you just gave up trying to fix your autism?

You can't knock a good ritual. There's a reason it's so prevalent especially in the occult. My opinion is that it bypasses the thinking mind and gets you into the right "state" or "alignment" to make things happen more easily. If you're sitting there at your laptop wishing that you could attract a million of your currency into your life, then you're doing it wrong. Inject a bit of ritual into it for improved performance.

If you look in the mirror at yourself who do you see? Who is doing the looking? Is it really you (subject) looking at the mirror (object), or is it really the mirror looking at you? When you look at your feet, is that you (subject) or just flesh and bones (object)? Are you your body? When you (subject) notice yourself having bad thoughts (object), are the thoughts you or not? Are you (subject) separate from yourself (object)?

What makes Beethoven's music great? It's his great dynamic range in volume, he can be quiet and sweet and loud and obnoxious. And so it is with great people. Are you one dimensional? Do you know how to be quiet, pensive, listening, receptive? Do you know how to be brash, abrasive, loud, in your face? Does it feel comfortable to be stupid and unintelligent and a joker? Could you be an intellectual praying mantis, ready to cut the head off people less intelligent than you? Could you change your wardrobe and hairstyle tomorrow? Can you be non-judgemental and diplomatic? What about a rude dickhead? What about a flexible political attitude? A person with criminal tendencies? Or a pragmatic rule follower? No. We are fucking multidimensional entities. There, I swore, so there. I hope you weren't offended?

To get the bottom of it you have to work out what you think exists actually means. To me if a person is standing in front of me, then they exist. But if someone tells me about a person I've never met, they may or may not exist - maybe I'm being gaslighted. The only way to verify they exist is to meet them in person. If a person dies do they still exist? So if by exist you mean having a direct experience of them (or it), then what happens when the person goes out of your direct experience? Could you call that a different type of existence? It's like existence has a sliding scale of 100% exists to 0% no chance. Anything less than 100% is just inference and thought, and outside of direct experience. But not even direct experience is 100% certain. You only have to look at optical illusions to see things that don't exist. And there are many every day situations where you could misjudge things and believe something exists when it doesn't. In a way other people are "optical illusions" because you are inferring things about them that you are not directly aware of - such as if they have consciousness.

@ajs dealing with the unknown is definitely a life skill.

Successful couples avoid the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: It's a bit ELI5 but hey ho.

It's easy to confuse drama for emotion. Drama is just a story people get lost in and it's possible to detach from it and reduce suffering. Emotion arises from nowhere and makes you pay attention and pushes you in a certain direction, that is its purpose. Drama can be emotional, but emotion is not drama.

The only decision you are really making is: should we go? But it looks like you don't have enough information to work out if moving is a good choice. Here's a few ideas to add to @mandyjw's: Forget about it, drop the idea, stay put Flip a coin: stay or go, heads or tails Ask your children, ask your wife what they think and want, so you have more information Choose a date to move on the calendar, but make it in one or two years' time Go live for a fixed time period in your home country by yourself and see if it's a good idea first - maybe try and find good work there Either you or your wife secures a good job in your home country first and then move Is there an option for working remotely in your existing job from your home country? Use your intuition, wait until the answer comes to you, don't force it Use your intuition, sometimes the scary choice is the right one These may or may not be useful to you. But you always have other options than can remove stress.

Is wisdom a shared experience or a personal one only? If it's shared then the wisdom is only as good as the person receiving it. Consuming reinder blood is not wisdom for a towny like me. Yep, I said it, wisdom is relative.

That our society constantly sits on a knife edge. It makes me grateful to have what we have already. But Corona has made it obvious that society could change very quickly for the better if the will is there. We just need the right people and the right focus.

From the outset this journal has been a dumping ground for ideas. Really, just another way for me to introspect. I love symbols and writing and languages, so I wondered if there was a way to re-invent writing itself. The alphabet is truly a wonderous invention. The fact that it allows a faithful representation of spoken speech, or at least enough to capture most elements of it is astounding. For example written Spanish is very close to spoken speech. What it has in its favour is a small vowel inventory and straightforward consonants. These are relatively easy to transcribe - although there is a small amount of variation between Spanish speaking countries. Another wonderous invention is the Chinese character writing system. Its main feature being its compactness in print. However, it also has a large aesthetic component to it: it has partly evolved over time to be able to be drawn well in ink. As such each character is composed of a number of strokes taken from a small set. Another feature is that each character has to be able to be distinguished well enough to avoid confusion with other characters. This feature it shares with spoken language. Spoken words have to be distinct enough from each other so that they are not confused. I believe Chinese writing has a huge number of characters. But only around 2000 characters or so are needed to read a newspaper say. My main idea is can we better Chinese writing? Yes and no is the answer. One scheme would be to encode each spoken word in say English using a unique number. So for example "the" would be 23 and "cat" 127 and "dog" is 56. What's the best way to encode these numbers? Well, we could actually write the numbers in decimal: 23, 127, 56. But that's less efficient than just using an alphabet. Another way is to use a different number base, base 2 or binary. That would seem even less efficient: 10111, 1111111, 111000. But the idea is to assign one stroke to each binary digit position. Now we're getting somewhere. Imagine a square. This has four sides. You can remove sides in different combinations. There are 2x2x2x2=16 ways of arranging the four sides of a square. So one square alone can encode up to sixteen different words. Not too many, but there's more. If you join opposite corners of the square that would give two extra diagonal strokes: 64 words. So the last word in this list would look like a box with a cross in it and the first word would be a blank character with no strokes. Now, there is a minor point about ambiguity. How would you distinguish a word with one horizontal stroke (top of the box) from another (bottom of the box)? The simple solution is to place a dot in the middle of the box. Now you can tell which side of the dot a stroke is. We can use this dot to actually break up the two diagonal strokes into two parts each, so we increase our total inventory of strokes up to 8. This gives us 256 words. It's starting to be useful. The final piece is to stack two boxes with a gap between them. This would give up to 16 strokes (8 for each box). This would in fact give 65536 words. That is probably more words than most everyday speakers of English know. 16 strokes is probably less than some Chinese characters use (I'm happy to be corrected here). Again there might be some ambiguity when stacking boxes about which strokes are being represented. But some system of dots could be used to remove the ambiguity. In terms of actually using the system, I envisage more common words using less strokes. So the first 256 most common words only need up to 8 strokes. At a guess that's probably about 80% of words. Of course the system suffers from the same problem as Chinese characters in that it requires rote learning, but so do alphabetic characters and English spelling to a degree. It would also be possible to encode the IPA symbols in this system. So words of any language could be alphabetically spelt using my system. This reminds me of Japanese using both Chinese characters and Katakana. What the system lacks that the Chinese writing system does have is both aesthetics and an inbuilt semantic component (i.e. radicals). But it would be possible to map certain phonemes in English more closely to certain strokes for a hint at what the word might be - making learning slightly easier. It's a work in progress. I think it would be possible to use an evolutionary algorithm or neural network to both map more common words to use less strokes, but to also have some correspondence between different strokes and phonemes. Obviously with only eight strokes per box, mapping to 40 odd phonemes that's a tricky thing to pull off. But this is really only for hinting purposes.

I think I've mentioned before in this journal that I'm not big on schemes for living life; because it's too rigid. Saying that even I have a loose set of values, guiding principles and foundations. Some nominalisations are: Respect Minimalism / Simplicity Automation / Routine Self reliance Openness / Approachability Optimism Pragmatism Intuition By themselves the above don't mean much. Even if were to explain them from my relative standpoint, it still wouldn't mean much to you. So you are free to fill in and interpret the list above. I can say that these ways of approaching life have been picked up over time. Although a few such as optimism and openness I feel I've always had. I have also probably taken all the above to extremes at one point or another in my life. So mostly its been a struggle to regulate all these things so that I'm not too minimalist for example. They can all be bad or addictive taken to extreme. Sometimes I've had to learn the hard way, too much openness can put people off or being too optimistic goes against being pragmatic. I think a large part of my maturity is due to my improved ability to keep all my built in tendencies in check. To do that requires some amount of negative feedback learning and also to be aware enough of my own internal state to stop myself going too far or being impulsive. But at times self-regulation can fly out of the window, and so I've learnt to have better coping mechanisms in the aftermath of bad decisions or extreme behaviour. In turn this has improved my social skills and emotional intelligence. I still have some way to go with the list of my guiding principles. Some need their setpoint adjusting up or down; say, a bit more optimism, or being more open to help and advice from others. Other aspects I would dearly love to add: leadership and organisational abilities and strong motivation. I can step up and do these things when needed (such as at work), but they have never sat with me comfortably. My only friend here is more experience in these areas.

A few things to note: The Universe is outside of time. "Nothing" is the same as "Something". Self awareness is the Universe. If you like, a new Universe is coming (or unfolding) into existence fully formed in every moment. Existence is a synonym for self awareness. The Universe comes from nothing and goes back to nothing in every moment - there's no time line.

People surprise you. For example on this forum people I thought were shallow and looking for attention and could hardly put a sentence together, suddenly come out with well structured and thoughful prose. I'm guilty of the same. I spent a big part of my life dumbing myself down to fit in. I have to keep reminding myself that first impressions or even second impressions are not always correct. Just a few seconds of contemplation should make this obvious. Imagine you are thirty one years old today. But everyone thinks you are shallow, needy and uninteresting. One day, someone who cares enough asks you to recount every day you have lived. Wow. How much depth is that? Thirty years of depth. And that's just what you did. What about what you thought and felt as well? See, we are all exactly like that. What makes us shallow, needy and uninteresting is purely an opinion, not an actuality. Being patient and unjudgemental from the moment you meet someone new, gives them breathing space to show you just how deep and interesting they are. It's a prerequisite for loving others both equally and unconditionally. But you should also love yourself unconditionally, and that means not dumbing yourself down to fit in and be loved. Love is being able to express and expose your hidden depths and letting others do the same.

The thing doing the observing, is the same as the thing being observed. That's how you get something for nothing. To have something you need to be able to distinguish it from everything else. Imagine that the full black page is able to observe itself or more accurately be aware of itself. What is its experience of awareness? Who knows. But clearly it's aware of something, because being able to distinguish something is implicit to being aware. However, the full black page has no distinguishing features, a.k.a. nothing. So the page is both the observer and the observed, both nothing and something. Pay attention to the bold bit. Because, there is no restriction to what the black page is aware of, it is completely free to distinguish and be aware of anything it likes. And, because it's unrestricted that is an infinity right there! It is literally aware of an infinite number of somethings. It seems like a circular thing to say that something is aware of itself, but that inbuilt relativity is what generates everything.

Smoking is an excellent example. You know what you want: to be a smoke free. That is the decision, no? How many times do you have to make that decision? Just once. Yes, you could re-affirm the decision regularly if you like, but it makes no difference, it's the same decision - why suffer? What makes the difference is what happens after you make the decision: you either do something or you do nothing. Until you actually start doing something, you are effectively doing nothing. So why suffer about doing nothing? Hopefully, you can see that the suffering is caused by an anxiety about when exactly you will start acting on the decision (the procrastinator's dilemma). The decision itself is nearly irrelevant in the scheme of things. The doing nothing is also not causing you suffering. It's the uncertainty of exactly when you are going to act on your decision that is causing anxiety. The only cure for removing uncertainty, is certainty. In this case breathing air the way nature intended every waking moment. The beauty about giving up smoking is that all the time you are not smoking, you have effectively stopped. Build up your resilience, stop for longer and longer each day until it hits 24 hours and then 7 days and then 12 months. But I feel your pain it took me six years to give up smoking on and off.

It's not the decision which counts. It's the moment you start creating when it matters. Why suffer? Make a decision then let it go.

"How to make a guy squirt" (?)

I'm clearing my schedule - if I had one.

Sometimes events happen that suddenly change your worldview. Or at least destabilizes it until it re-adjusts itself. You may have held a particular worldview for decades or a good part of your life. After some time it seems like you don't hold a particular worldview, instead you think you have a neutral standpoint on how you orient yourself to the world - but it's just autopilot. The trigger for the change can be the sudden removal of tension or worry or expectation. For example when I graduated from university the constant need to study and the duty to turn up for lectures suddenly evaporated. Instead of feeling instant relief, I felt a strong disorientation for a few months. I would get pangs of anxiety about needing to be studying something, and then immediately realise there was nothing to do and feeling a kind of loss or emptiness. You could call it a bereavement of sorts, but it wasn't exactly like that; I had become accustomed to the stress of being at university. I have had the same disorientation a number of times since. It never gets easier because each time it's about different circumstances or triggers. But each time after the period of disorientation ran its course I would see the world in a different light. The peculiarity is, the change in worldview itself often precipitates a drastic re-organisation of circumstances. So the process is something like: trigger -> change in worldview -> re-organisation of world. From this the realisation comes that the view of the world you hold, moulds the circumstances in which you find yourself; this can be both mental and physical. The other realisation is that yes, the change happens because of the trigger, but the change itself is organic and usually uncontrollable. The most common trigger is changing jobs. Work takes up a huge chunk of waking life. It takes up both mental space and also the daily logistics of preparing for work, and of interacting with colleagues, let alone doing the work itself. In a sense it forces a certain perspective, dependent on the factors and people involved. When you change jobs, you are suddenly exposed to the worldview you held (company culture) and it becomes apparent that it was just an illusion: and you are not that person anymore. I've learned to just let the period of disorientation run it course without forcing anything. It can often be quite unpleasant and you want it to end as quickly as possible, but being stoic about it is best. Eventually a new perspective on the world asserts itself, and all is good again. But just remember you are not that perspective, it will pass and another comes along; you are something else, something without a perspective or worldview.