tsuki

@integral It's difficult to give stories of a world without stories, but here I go. It starts with the lack of seriousness and humor. Occasional dancing, without the need to perform. Relief and total immersion. Experiencing yourself not as a separated entity trying to guess the next step, but totality expressing itself necessarily as the continuity conventionally seen as evidence of objective existence. You fit. There's nothing else to do, but to find what's missing in the context and filling it with the best you have. Just moment to moment, without hesitation. If hesitation arises it's because it's needed. No opposition. Being grateful for fear and pain for showing me attachment and dissolving it. This is the conscious part - dissolve. The I sees the I and it chooses to go.

@integral If your framework is supposed to guard you from self-deception with regards the validity of your realization, then there's a different "danger" you're not addressing. If you base your success on the external achievements you limit the depth of what you can accomplish by social acceptability. What if what you understand is so alien to society that they would crucify you if you really pursued what you thought was "right"? This is said with tongue in cheek, but the notion of pursuing the "hot girl" is quite funny tbh. What if it's genuinely not what you value? What if what you value puts you as a bluepill beta because some insight revitalized some value that fell out of favor? I think there is no substitute to self-honesty and a spiritual practice grounded in truth. After all, apathy is an emotion and reclusion is a form of avoidance. You can always become conscious of what you are doing. In the end, what if you find yourself in a place where emotions no longer guide what you do?

I can't make this shit up 😂 Look at this poor woman thinking that Newton invented gravity, being laughed at on Youtube: And here's a master, talking about the invention of gravity with his disciples 😂

@integral I think we’re discussing different questions. My cancer example wasn’t meant to argue against engagement or relationships. It was meant to question whether the presence of negative emotions is a good measure of relationship quality. It was a rhetorical question to illustrate a counterexample.

@Natasha Tori Maru Thank you for your recognition, I appreciate it. As for guilt and shame, our Western society allows us to have thoughts of our own, so it's not too inconceivable to garden your skull with flowers to your own liking. Having genuine insight grounded in spiritual practice oriented towards truth helps a lot. With time, you will feel less need to explain yourself to others and act in your best interest nonviolently. People think in black and white without realizing there are tons of shades of gray in between and it's a very good hiding spot. Ultimately however, you will need to admit to yourself where you stand in relation to society, to what most people understand about themselves. Standing on your own two feet is less of an ideal to follow but something very practical at that point.

Is a 20-year relationship with your wife that ends with her painfully dying of cancer a bad relationship?

@integral Practically speaking, I've given up on relationships with just anyone and became at ease with my own presence. After a while, I think that this is the only way to find a healthy relationship - by finding someone that really is okay by themselves. This leaves me at a strange predicament where I can only accept and give love that does not make conventional sense. Because if I'm so okay with myself, why do I want to be with someone else and why would they be with me if they are the same? Love does seem to defy reason, doesn't it?

Notice that the existence of a leader is predicated on the existence of followers - people who are unable to lead themselves and make correct choices that impact their own lives. In this light, I'd say that leading is only authentic if it helps others achieve self-sufficiency and maturity. But then you must notice yourself that by making choices for others (even in the noble pursuit of liberation), you are acting out your preconceived notions of what their life should be, don't you? Why would you let your uninspected ideas direct your behavior to direct others? Maybe looking inward, understanding yourself, being responsible for your own mind is the key aspect of leading? You may inspire one or the other to do the same in the process. Feelings (emotions) are the experience of participating in a story that you believe in. Various feelings arise when there is a discrepancy between what you see and what you think. Modern Western pop-culture tells you to arrange the world in accordance with what you think so that your feelings are positive. The contemplative traditions tell you to rearrange what you think so that you understand what you see (and in the process, your feelings stop nagging you). Can you see what I'm pointing at here?

I've been in therapy for a better part of the last 10 years, been diagnosed with a personality disorder and successfully healed it. I know what emotions are very deeply and intimately. If you read my posts from few years back I think you'd appreciate what I'm saying a little more. Few years back I'd agree what's being presented here but I see it more clearly now. I don't think you do. You know it, but you don't understand or experience it. You can sit with an emotion and see it unravel into a story rooted in belief and assumption. The truth is that you don't know. To be fair, I think being paralyzed with fear would slow you down more 😂. But I'm being cheeky here. Even relatively speaking, tigers are a real threat - it is reasonable to expect to die when facing one. Most human emotions are reactions to imagined stories that have no ground in reality whatsoever. They are mostly reactions to past experiences that have little grip on what's happening now. I can't believe you don't know this and call me out on lack of emotional intelligence. Preposterous!

Sure, hugging helps to relieve the tension that created alongside emotion, but it is just temporary relief from it and does not address the underlying issue. The issue is that you're confusing objective circumstances with your reception of it and that you have no command of your own mind. You're thinking that feelings happen to you and that it's good that you feel, and that you're trying to opimize life for good feelings. This is a mistake. I am not speaking from a place of rejection of feelings. Feelings are an amazing, holistic, insight into your beliefs that happens instantaneously. There's nothing like it, really. I appreciate them. But they are only as smart as your beliefs, which is not very smart at all. It's a low quality culture soup, programming and prejudice. I'm not speaking about this in terms of the absolute, so don't bring maya into this. This is a practical matter. You will never build a peaceful, loving, relationship based on emotions alone. The content presented in OP is a fantasy.

I disagree on a very deep level. This whole dynamic where one partner is responsible for how the other party feels is the definition of unhealthiness and is exactly what is wrong with the current relationship market. Nobody has every made you feel anything. You are creating your own feelings in response to what you think is happening. The sheer lack of responsibility towards your own mental state is staggering. And all of this is packaged from self-help standpoint? Ridiculous! The other thing is the deeply troubling depiction of a relationship where the woman is both: The caretaker, the worrier AND the conflict initiator The child that needs to be hugged and cared for emotionally All of this is a fantasy packaged as a neat mind-bite that on the surface shows us that it's okay to be vulnerable, but in reality keeps you stuck as a mental child. Really think about this: when things feel difficult, does it really help to be hugged and cry? Or that someone lists the things you might have thought that worried you? Why would it? Why do you need reassurance that what you are feeling is real? I'll tell you why: because it isn't, because you need to make yourself believe that it is real to avoid understanding that you are creating your emotions in the first place. You are not a victim of your circumstances and a victim of your mind, emotions don't "happen" to you. You think that you know with absolute certainty that your spouse will die in a car crash on a trip and your mind obsesses over it and you create fear. Fear is the consequence of this certainty and the truth is that you don't really know. You don't even know if it's bad if he or she crashes! Nobody teaches you the self-honesty required to be at ease with yourself. This is why you are a mental child and why you need reassurance that what you feel is real. You are better than this.

I will now tell you everything I know, definitely, through self-observation and participation in the unfolding of the mind. If it seems difficult, it only seems so because it is usually unnamed, too obvious to notice so it is not discussed. Try to see it in yourself as you read this. The most basic unit of the mind is a story. It has a past, present and a future. The present moment is always infinitely small in it, unnoticeable, fleeting and valueless. The most important feature of the story is that it wants to be played out, it needs to reach its conclusion. All stories have a charge, innate motion which is a compulsion from its origin to its conclusion. They grab us and take us places, we participate. The experience of participating in a story is called emotion. We can always make the story explicit with language by experiencing the emotion. When the story is expressed, we can inspect it more clearly. In inspecting the story, we make it into an object of the mind that we can manipulate. In doing so, the underlying emotions change. We can completely decouple stories from emotions, which is to say that we stop participating in them, by not believing them. The more we believe a story, the less it is an object of the mind, the less we can manipulate it, the more real it appears and more emotions arise. We build stories ever since we were born as a person and a lot of stories have not been expressed and are still believed/participated in. There are no emotions apart from participation in a story. Identity is the character of the story. You only have an identity because you do not realize your true nature. This "hole", or "gap" needs to be filled. It will never be filled with the mind because what you are is more basic than the mind. Thinking "I" is like having a pen and a piece of paper and trying to draw paper.

How is it possible for something to exist and appear as real while its nature is nothing? If nothing did not appear as something, it would not be infinity. This is what time is. It is the resolution to the necessity of something to be and not-be itself without contradiction. Everything is nothing in absolute terms. Yet, everything is a process in relative terms.

If you loved someone and their head hurt, what would you do? You'd give them painkillers. What if their head hurt because they didn't drink water? You'd give them water. What if they had cancer? You'd distract them. What if you had healing powers and it wouldn't cost you anything? You'd heal them. What if they were hitting their head with their own fist? You'd stop them. What if they were convinced that they HAVE TO, or else they would die? Clearly, love looks differently depending on the depth of your understanding of the issue. What if the deepest understanding of the issue is that the person is an appearance? Wouldn't love look like death?

@Joseph Maynor What do you mean by having more of a choice? I also appreciate your response Joseph, your style of communication has changed a lot over the years.

On one end, "feeling about" things is within the domain of stories and there is a distinct story of becoming more conscious, abiding in not-knowing, seeing through things, that I am engaged with and enjoy. It came about by wanting to end suffering at the deepest level that I can dive into. On the other hand, I recently came to understand that suffering is love and I find myself quite perplexed. Finding enjoyment (appreciation?) in pain seems strange but I see new possibilities in it. There's still much more openness to be had in this regard, I am very scared of suffering, after all. Still, what else is there to do other than create and participate in stories? It's not like I have a choice.

@Breakingthewall So, what do you want in the end? Im a bigger fool than you are ❤️❤️❤️

@Breakingthewall What are you on about? I have zero interest in this intellectualizing. Just tell me what you want to hear and I'll say it and we can be done with it. Or are you trying to get this topic closed?

@Breakingthewall Yep, nothing to see here, move along ❤️

@Breakingthewall Sorry mate, you’re not conscious of the nature of existence. There’s no way around it and no amount of arguing will change that. I really am sorry. Contemplate truth. Process is not the truth, it is becoming and survival, not being. Good luck 👍

@Osaid Nah, I just wanted someone to interact with ❤️

Why is that unfortunate? 😂

Love is misunderstood. Conventionally speaking, love is codependence. It is finding another person that has what you need and having that person give it to you. It is co-survival. That is need. The truth is that a person is appearance experienced as something real. Conventional love in this sense is externalized reification. I tell you my story and you reflect it back, you make me believe myself by believing me. This way we have the same emotions and survive dissolution together. What happens when this needy dynamic is stopped? What is the reason to be together where there's no reason at all? When the reality of the person is seen through, the story is seen as a delusion in its entirety, absolutely, with unwavering conviction? When it is remembered what it's like to take the person seriously, it does not take much to want to see through it, through "another". Love is death. It is the only possible relation between nothing and something. It is the primordial relation of letting something be itself completely, expressing its true nature through to the very end (or depth). It is consciousness. It is truth. it is is. Every time you took yourself seriously, and were yourself, you took your problems seriously. You fought your problems to survive as you are. What you did not realize is that from the other side, it was Nothing, loving you, wanting you to let go of attachment. Maybe next time, you'll be grateful?

Don’t believe that you are not a person. Just investigate it for yourself. See what you really are. You can do it.

@Breakingthewall Nah man, you used up my good will. You're here to disprove, not to learn and I'm not wasting time for that. There is zero reason to care what he's saying unless you want to increase your own consciousness and get these things for yourself.