LastThursday

A man with honest intentions, charm, can laugh at themselves, playful, reliable, good at logistics, focused and present.

My vain attempt at self-love: A conversation between me, myself and I I love you. No you don't. Ok, I'm very interested in you in a special way You know nothing about me... Prove it. Well... there's something in the way you move. Not enough. Smell? No. How about the way you you use your words? What's that got to do with love? "A rose, by any other name would smell as sweet" Go on... It means that whatever I call it it's still love, for you. You can't love my words that's silly. Ok, you look nice. Nice. Nice? Nice...!? That's not what I meant. I meant beautiful. No you didn't you said nice... I'm not beautiful. Nicely beautiful? Eurgh. Why don't you just admit it? Admit what? You only love the idea of me! I don't, I mean I do... you know what I mean. You're utterly deluded and you just don't realise it. How can I be deluded when I love you so? You're an idiot and you need your head examined. Pleeeeze! I really do love you. Still an idiot. Anyway I can't. Can't what? Just can't, I'm indisposed permanently and you're not normal. WILL YOU TWO STOP YOUR BICKERING? I'M TRYING TO REACH GODHOOD HERE!!

It's fine I understand what you mean. I'm just arguing for the sake of it. But for the sake of argument if existence is everything without exception, then of course it has meaning, because everything has everything in it. That's the issue with A is B argumentation, once you make A identical to B the argument is meaningless, because to argue something you have to have distinction so you can compare two things. Anyway pedant mode off.

Random stuff this morning. I like this photo of me sometime around 1976. It epitomises the warmth and connection to family I had around then. My aunt is carrying me and my sister is tootling around entertaining herself. That rooftop terrace was always hot and we used to love playing up there, it was a safe space for us. My uncle kept pigeons there for racing too. It was my grandparents' apartment block and they lived one floor below the terrace. The terracotta tiles were dusty and scratchy and warm to the touch, the white walls blinding in the sunlight. The sky was always pure blue. In one direction was the sea, in the other a huge imposing citadel on a hill: La Alcazaba de Almería. To my mind as a little kid there was a certain magic to the place, but it was also normality. I miss it.

The argumentation is circular: the meaning of existence is existence. But it's not all lost, existence is huge and there's a lot there to have meaning about. Meaning is inside existence. Existence is the ground, meaning is the figure.

Unpredictability is a sign of complexity and nuance. To an outsider a person can seem unpredictable, but that is because they don't understand what they don't understand. A self-actualised person tends to be more complex and nuanced in character than average. An actualised person has a greater range of choice of behaviours and can afford to be more spontaneous.

The fact is spiritual growth can come from anywhere including suffering. Suffering is not a necessary prerequisite. Suffering works because it can cut away the fluff and sharpen awareness - but there are other methods.

What is a bias? A better question is, what is not bias? Who or what determines what a completely balanced and clear view of things really is?

I wouldn't get too confused. Truth is just something that holds true, something that is self evident. Having discipline or not having discipline has nothing to do with some spiritual Truth. Having discipline will allow you to achieve certain things, that is a truth. Not having discipline may lead to a less stressful life, that is another truth. The Truth that everyone keeps going on about here, is a different animal. It's something that holds true no matter what, which is a much harder form of truth. You have to seek it out because it's not obvious. But it isn't some magical substance, it's just something that is true rather than false.

Some of the work I'm doing on myself has prompted me to think about the process of "getting what I want". There's a clear progression in my mind from how a child gets what they want to the ways of an adult. For children it's quite simple: you're generally not in charge and the adults determine what you get and what you don't get. But there are options open for children, mostly emotional manipulation through crying (albeit that's a natural not contrived reaction), or sustained nagging and begging, or maybe even belligerence. Looking back at myself I was more of the begging type by nature, my sister was a crier (we didn't change lol). I would get laser focused on wanting certain things and would just not let up. I got my first computer (c. 1982) that way, but I had to nag and beg for about a year on and off. I finally achieved my goal and got it as a combined birthday and Christmas present (my birthday timing sucks). Strangely enough that specific nagging has changed my life, so I was right to do so! After that point I entered a new phase, nothing else really mattered much. You have to understand that having a computer at that time was like receiving alien technology. I poured all my nerdy "wanting" energy into that alien technology. What it taught me was a certain process of wanting that was quite effective: I would visualise what I wanted, I would experiment with and program the alien technology, eventually I would learn its ways, and finally get the result I wanted. That cycle of vision, experimentation, observation, feedback, result, embedded itself into my psyche. In that small domain of life that I built for myself, I always got what I wanted. I'm an effective well paid coder because I always get the result I want. In my own small way I learned to wrest control from the adults around me, and I've been super independent ever since. The problem is I never really learned well how to get what I wanted from other areas in my life. I was a social young kid, but that stopped overnight as a teenager. I remember the day clearly, I've probably journaled about it already. I think my deep introversion and relative isolation as a teenager made it difficult to get what I really wanted, and I was ensconced right of the middle of a shitty family dynamic, something which I desperately wanted to escape. I learned helplessness at that point. That even if I knew what I wanted and had vision, I didn't have the means to execute on that - and this was largely true throughout my teenage years. Despite eventually escaping into adulthood it has taken me the rest of my life to chip away at that sense of helplessness. It's still there. There's many things I've wanted that I didn't get. I had a dream as a teenager that by the year 2000 (a mythical date in my young mind) that at 28 I would be married and have at least one kid. I thought about how grown up and responsible I'd be. It never happened. One way or another I've seemed to have dodged conventionality when all those around me went hell-for-leather into it. Saying that I did get a lot of what I wanted: peace, stability, financial reward, girlfriends, pursuing my interests. But there's a lot missing. There's plenty of friction and cognitive dissonance between my conformist and non-conformist parts, I'm living in a kind of uneasy truce between the two. It's not lost on me that I have a perfectly good process for getting what I want: vision, experimentation, observation, feedback, result. It's largely how I've handled my social relationships and got people to like me and want to spend time with me. Albeit, that some relationships have been more organic and less process driven (what a yucky thought). I think applying my recipe for getting what I want from people has been good and bad. It's a perfectly valid if not autistic way to go about things given my previous lack of social awareness. To me it feels completely natural to treat people as a project. But whenever I've properly sat down and actually examined that pattern it's never sat well with me. People are not projects, or experiments or things to be observed. But it is the way I've learned to be social and it has allowed me to push through my autistic way of dealing with people, and become a lot more natural - I've leveraged my natural tacit analytical intelligence as a proxy for social intelligence. Go me! I think I've always felt that I needed to convince people to like me, because of a deep embedded lack of social self-worth. Interest from others never seemed to come naturally, except in rare instances, I have been largely invisible. Although, I did learn eventually that the reason for this was not me as such, people are just so self-absorbed that they either don't have the bandwidth or perception to see others clearly. However that feeling of being invisible is hard to shake for me. What other ways are there? I've been ruminating about this a lot recently. Synchronistically, reading The Alabaster Girl and splurging out ideas with ChatGPT (talking to the alien technology is so me), the idea of Invitation came up strongly. It's sort of new to my way of thinking. You see I'm so used to waiting for feedback on my experiments, that I have a kind of neurotic need to know now. I can see that throwing out an invitation is a lot gentler and natural way to go about things socially. The idea of an invitation has several distinct meanings to it. It could be a literal invitation: meet here at this time. It could be more like "I'm interested in XYZ, are you too?". Or it may just be "This is me warts and all, what do you think?". The crucial bit is not to wait on tenterhooks for the result of that invitation. This is the bit that will be hard for me to take on. In fact there may never be a result at all and it's ok. It's more like a game of catch, I throw to you and you can choose to throw back to me or not. It's simple and uncontrived with far less mental and emotional effort. It will stop me getting hung up on the result indefinitely. It's more mature. An invitation also requires initiative or initiating. This is something that has never come to me naturally socially and I've very often let others do that. It doesn't mean that I don't initiate, but it requires mental effort and some amount of anxiety on my part. Of all the things that I need to solve (it's that process again) it is my reluctance to initiate. For me it is dealing with the consequences of initiating something, whether that be starting something that I will have to be responsible for, or the possibility of rejection: both are painful. But if I disengage with the result of the invitation and learn to sit with the ambiguity, then initiating becomes less of a burden: a non-result is not a rejection. An invitation is also about sharing responsibility, reciprocation, a toing-and-froing, it's less harsh. I don't have to throw my process away, it's good for my paid work. And, potentially it could be very good for the practical aspects of getting my life ship-shape - but that's a different nut to crack. How do I induce a good vision and hence motivation for stuff I don't want to care about? That's the other half of my life.

@Leo Gura the thing that always gets my attention about you, is your defensiveness, there is certainly a bias towards that there. There is a sense in which you're always having to fight against something that is attacking you. I notice this in the argumentation in your videos and I notice this on the forum. I have my pet theories as to why that is, maybe you actually are having to constantly defend yourself, although I suspect it's a deeper issue I'm happy to be wrong. I don't know if you yourself think it's true?

The Process continues. I'm exploring switching things up with each phase to have clear demarcation, and I've had a transitioning ritual with each phase. So far I've stuck to exact seven day phases, so my mind has a clear and fixed boundary in mind as I go through things. I use a fairly fixed ritual for each phase as a familiar way to slide into it fairly easily. I've tried both working with entities externally, but also with embodiment of some of those entities or a combination. With both though, there has been a fairly large amount of interaction with my internalities: body, spirit, mind etc. This work is about improving things for me so that makes sense to me. I do wonder if I should work with externalities though: my environment, where I live, what I do with myself and so on, who I chose to spend time and associate with and so on. It occurs to me now that maybe that's best left to the Rebirth phase. I'm definitely struggling at some kind of definiteness for this current Opening phase. I know the broad strokes, but the lack of a set of things with clear definition that I want to explore is taking the wind out of it. The broad strokes are connection, alignment, divinity, love, empathy and self-expression. Maybe the issue is more of overwhelm? All of those things are big areas for me and I could probably spend a week on each one! This is all experimental and I'm a complete rookie at this stuff, so spending the next six weeks on all that stuff would require serious commitment and goes against my original plan. I'll just have to give a day to each instead and just let this phase play out I think. The real life consequences so far are that I'm finding that I'm being a bit more interactive with strangers, and my old curiosity about people is returning which is fun. I even flirted a bit with a waitress in a pub restaurant - she enjoyed the attention - I haven't done that in a very long time. Maybe my mojo will return in due course.

You didn't answer my question but that's fine you have your point of view. Satisfying your body is quite normal and healthy, but that's my point of view; when you're hungry you eat.

@Atb210201 would you agree that you do an experiment in order to find out something new? Would you agree that humour and feeling good can improve your wellbeing and your attitude to life?