LastThursday

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.

@Preety_India it's definitely a useful exercise to pick out other's blindspots, if only just to hold a mirror up to yourself. Here's some I've noticed, mostly from YouTube videos: Mooji Not engaged with explaining the many aspects of reality - one trick pony. Wants to use self awareness and "noticing" as a "cure" for everything. Which is fine and all, but there's more effective ways sometimes and a lot more to reality. Sadhguru More well rounded. But says some whacky and probably some personally unverifiable things. Only has a simplistic understanding of science, but likes to talk a lot about it. Has a bit of a "showbiz" side to his character which doesn't gel in my eyes. Jim Newman He's good, but again a one trick pony. He is like a walking advertisement for it's like to be enlightened, nothing sticks to him. But this makes it hard to get any juice out of him. Rupert Spira Again more well rounded. Good at explaining enlightenment related stuff, but seemingly lacks breadth in other areas. He is super placid, but this makes him seem aloof and otherworldly - so doesn't have the dynamic range in his character to engage you - and if he does, then he's doing it on purpose for effect. Leo Gura The best of the lot in terms of breadth of knowledge and appearing to be "normal" in appearance. Somewhat impulsive and non-diplomatic - perhaps for effect. Bit of an aloof attitude and holier than though attitude without realising it. Naturally contrary. Appears a little misogynistic without realising it. Ok, that's enough character assassination.

@Tim R interesting take on things by Terence. I think before the invention of writing, language always would have had a visual component. In face to face conversation it still does. So in one sense the invention of writing hugely narrowed down the bandwidth of communication. Indeed writing has to be taught explicitly, whereas speech and gesticulation is learned tacitly. And most likely, before writing, a good memory and recall was a must. Writing was a triple whammy of badness. Writing is of course completely visual, but it is also highly abstract. But the benefits of writing are obvious: it's semi-permanent and is able to be copied and shared to a larger number of people. This is what overcame it's bad points. For much of its early history, writing was done by and for the elites in society. So all that is happening, is now that we have the technology to do so, the less abtract visual component of language is making its way back. Now we can capture visual language for mass distribution, the same way writing did when it was first invented. But even before TV there were plays: visual language for mass consumption. And there has probably always been some form of sign language. So the change is not one of ever increasing visuals, but just in ways of delivering it. Language has always been more than just words.

I made a list of these Free Will posts on my Journal. Just sayin' :

The problem goes much deeper than labelling and using words. Notice in your direct experience the difference between the first line and the second line: Are they different? And shouldn't they be the same? See how conceptualising goes deeper than language? You'll only get this when you have a direct experience without conceptualising.

Just saying it as it is. You can bet there's a big difference between someone who wins the lottery and someone who works for that same money. Anyway, the chance of actually winning the lottery is pretty much zero. And that's the trouble with chasing pleasure and hedonism, it distorts reality. I'd plump for the second, both for the self actualization journey and its benefits and for the chances being bigger than zero.

You wake up and find yourself here. There's a rushing stream of sensation, tick tick, every second. None of it makes sense at first, but bit by bit there's a seeming clarity. Years pass and things are crystal clear: you are a person in this ape body, living in a society of apes all chattering at each other. Not only that but there is this immensity that you're suspended in. Everything is big and so so complicated and intricate and it all runs by itself. You're so good at chattering that you have lead all your life believing in it. See, not only are you in the middle of seeming infinity, but you - the entity - are able to conjure up different worlds and dramas and dreams, and magically deliver these enchantments to the other apes. You just love to confuse yourself and blur the lines between what you sense and what you dream: it's something to get lost in a spiritual drug you're addicted to. You imagine a giant machine of parts is running the show. You imagine an ineffable supernatural ape is running the show and call it God. You imagine hundreds of Gods. You even imagine yourself to be both real and unreal and alive and dead and a thousand other things. You think yourself to be all alone and pine for company, and dream yourself to be in a world of 7 billion other apes and fancy yourself hiding from them all. You know that you are part of all that is happening, yet want and know yourself to be separate from it. You marvel at the strangeness of it all, and how bloody unbelievable it is that you're on a pin-prick of a planet in an infinite cosmos, without any other other pin-pricks to talk to. No other animal walks on two legs, no other animal communicates like you, no other animal inhabits all places on this planet. No other animal dresses to impress, makes televisions and flies to the moon. Surely, this is all some hugely elaborate joke? What the hell is going on?

Isn't pleasure just the bodily manifestation of reward? It's like a pat on the back or thumbs up for doing something positive. So eating is pleasurable, sleeping is, and being in love is, and so on and so forth. These are all healthy pleasures. They're healthy because you have to put effort in to get the reward. The feeling of pleasure is an emotional reminder to do the same thing next time. Hedonism lacks the effort and/or positivity. It's all reward and no work. So you get pleasurable feelings for drinking alcohol or taking hard drugs or having easy sex with many people or breaking the law or whatever. I'm not talking morality here, just the buzz you get from the behaviours. The behaviours are low effort or potentially physically damaging; a lot of hedonic pleasure is reward that reinforces negativity. In a way, the immorality of hedonism comes out of recognising this negativity - although there's a strong element of religion attached here too. It would seem like pleasure is not the goal, but actually behaving in a positive way is, and putting effort into things. Positivity here is relative to survival.

Use the DE force Luke. Go look at your hands for a bit. Then repeat the word "hands" for a few times out loud. Heck say it in Spanish for clearer effect: "manos". If you like, I'll do the same but I'll say the word "truth" instead.

As soon as you put anything down in writing it becomes philosophy, and philosophy is serious work. Unless I'm missing something, truth is that which is not false, i.e. certain, undeniable, 100% evident. But all truth has a framing associated with it, which makes truth relative to its framing. This Absolute Truth business is supposedly special though? It doesn't have a framing, because if it did it wouldn't be absolute. That is except for these three framings: nothing and everything and itself. So, Direct Experience, does it have a framing? Is DE couched in nothing, everything or itself or something else? My point is, Direct Experience is a concept and as such it's philosophy and as such its truthfulness is framed, which means from a different frame (viewpoint) it could be false. I can't experience my hands, because "hands" is purely a concept. But I'm not so thick as to not understand what you are pointing to. It's just that anything I or you say about the experience of it is false.

Bingo. Only permanence can be Truth.

Ok, so Direct Experience is an indivisible whole? And in being such an unchanging unity it is therefore Truth? (Two levels of indirection). The fact that it changes constantly is simply an unchanging attribute of DE?

Ah, one level of indirection, I like it. So perception itself isn't Truth, just the fact that it's constantly changing?

Would one objection to perception be: how can something be Truth if it's always changing?

I don't have my own visuals to add, but the scene in the video with the guts, kind of reminds me of the Philip K. Dick story The Electric Ant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Ant Where the man/robot tampers with his own internal workings and changes his reality: a metaphor for psychadelics I reckon.

Great. You won't regret it. Sign here in blood...

Man that's hilarious. I gave a super literal answer (when clearly the OP was looking for something else). And in turn you took my answer super literally. Sorry for being a devil myself. Can I have your soul? Pretty please.

One observation is that gender is partly cultural. Men and women dress differently, talk differently often using different words and intonation, and have different manerisms. A lot of the cultural aspects of gender are in fact not biologically based. So just as with your insight that you are whatever culture you identify with, so it is with gender culture. For example, to a degree, although not fully I would say, a gay man may approriate some of the cultural markers of female identity: potentially make up, manerisms and intonation. But, you don't have to be gay to do this. Things are fluid, just generally not practised, the need to conform is strong.

Lately I've been getting snatches of a weird kind of dissociation. It always happens in that inbetween state straddling wakefulness and sleep. It's the odd realisation that I'm just inhabiting this shell called Guillermo with all his baggage and history. In that instant there's a kind of distance as if I were thinking about another person. The implication being that there is separate entity that is making this observation. This is so out of my normal experience that I find it jarring, but it's always followed by unconsciousness. This doesn't stop in my dreams themselves. I have had dreams where I had breasts, that was definitely an odd sensation in retrospect. There was a weight and tangible feeling to them; despite being a bloke, I think I could explain what it was like to have breasts. I have also looked in a dream mirror and seen a female reflection. Basically I was a young Keeley Hawes, but with shorter hair (and a shameless excuse to show one version of an ideal looking woman): Also in that hypnogogic state I get glimpses of old feelings. This is hard to describe. But think back to yourself ten years ago say. Notice that there is a definite feeling of being you at that time, and that that feeling is different from the you of now. But it's more acute than that, it's more of a feeling specific to a definite situation in time. All these sensations are always annoyingly fleeting. The impression I get is that if they weren't fleeting, I would effectively be able to re-live them in their entirety. What all this pontification shows is that the very character of Guillermo is a fantasy and completely malleable. Given the right nudge and impetus I could suddenly become someone/something else, with the real possibility of not being able to "go back". Or instead I could just wait another ten years.