tsuki

@now is forever Come on, don't be shy .

Now I'm curious. Tell me! Not deliberately. I took journaling because I got a beautiful pen and wanted to write with it. I also studied Japanese for half year and remember having half of my notebook covered in hiragana characters when I practiced. My signature was also something that I put my heart into.

You're very young and you are probably still struggling with establishing your personality. Fighting with others for its independence may seem like inevitable, but I assure you that it's not. It is perfectly fine to just go through the motions if you feel coerced into practicing religion against your will. Your parents are what your life is still revolving around and hurting them is not a good idea (for your own safety). I suggest that you take this opportunity to contemplate what religion is about, if god does not exist. Also, here is a helpful fragment from /r/atheism's FAQ:

That is insane. You are out of your mind and I love you .

You aren't disturbing me (yet ). Lately, I've become passionate about knife sharpening and bought a waterstone. Paper was my victim . Hey @now is forever, do you feel the pressure in the temples when you stop by to visit my journal? My energy is going off the charts lately.

@now is forever Yes, why? I'm supposed to sleep, but came here to write this: Change is when something is itself, even if it isn't. <~ that is the perfect way to explicitly write the obfuscated paradox.

Today, I was contemplating what is motion in relation to the conceptual framework of separate senses. My method was quite unorthodox, as I was walking around my house and observing how a blanked moved as I kicked it. I brought the sensation of short-circuiting to my direct experience by touching my fingers and looking at them. It reminded me of the illusion of separation of senses. It the struck me, that motion is nothing else than the recognition that a blanket remains a blanket - even if it is completely different after I kick it. In other words - motion is the possibility of recognizing something to be itself, even if the experience of it had changed. The blanket keeps being a blanket even if it looks like something different (after I kicked it). A song keeps being a song, even if it keeps sounding nothing like itself. Something keeps being itself even if it is something different. Motion/change is a paradox in the conceptual framework of separate senses. Yet another obvious thing turns out to be a misconception.

I've been observing this inner movement of mine and its relationship to emotions. I'm starting to observe that there is, in fact, a correlation between the two. Today, I was having a shower and remembering a situation, where a guy from work said something along the lines of 'taking me along to some clients' and I was getting angry for being treated like some sort of a briefcase to be taken. Immediately, I noticed the boiling sensation in the area of my chest and tried to move it down along the spine. It calmed me down immediately. Yesterday in the evening I had a headache and noticed that it is a good opportunity to experiment with pain. I sat down to meditate and tried to evenly distribute the movement along the spine and widen it as much as possible. Then, I tried to transfer the headache down the spine and move it towards my left arm. I was successful to some degree, but it stopped in the area of my left shoulder and started radiating along the whole of my arm. Then, I centered it in the heart area and again, tried to overwhelm this sensation by creating as much movement as possible, but the pain remained centered after I got exhausted. I could not feel the pain during the stirring, however. I tried to move it down along the spine to the base and it seemed like the pain had stopped, but as soon as I lied down on the floor - it was back to the head. When I was running some errands yesterday, two relevant thing happened. First, when I was going down to the garage in the elevator, some sort of alarm went off as if the elevator was broken. It triggered an emotional response in my chest. Second situation was when I was parking near the grocery store - a car honked at another to stop him from driving back. I also observed the inner motion in the chest area and recognized to be fear. Interesting that I automatically started looking around whether it was me that caused the trouble or not. It seems like the area of occurrence of emotions does not correspond to their 'flavor'. I can feel anger and fear in the chest, and in the area of my navel.

So, It had occurred to me that normally - I think that this intersection of the disjoint spaces of senses is understanding. I 'understand' the text. I 'understand' where I touch. I 'understand' that the dinner smells delicious. I can correlate the sight of the meal with its smell. I can do this, because: yadda yadda yadda... Sense-spaces appear to be separate, but they aren't. The everyday name for short-circuiting is 'understanding'. Understanding is seeing through the illusion of separation of senses. The other thing is that I recognized direction to be short-circuiting of sight and touch. Direction is the answer to "Where?". I wonder whether the other pronouns are also short-circuits? Like "When?" and "Who?".

@now is forever If you find my insights useful somehow, then I'm glad that I could be of any help to you. However, if they create confusion, then you must understand that they are contextual to what I experience. There is no way to translate them for you and I'm not going to attempt to. I write this journal for myself as a way of extending the lifespan of my insights and integrating them into my everyday life. Explaining them to others (even if I find them to be wonderful people) is not my priority if it doesn't serve the above purpose.

@now is forever Nothing. It just is. I suppose that I've chosen sensations as a framework to describe myself with. Touch is one aspect of 'me'. In this perspective, everything is reduced to one from of sensation or another and I establish relationships between them. I have already convinced myself that short-circuiting is the experience of falsehood of this perspective, a paradox. Senses are not disjoint like this perspective assumes. Short circuiting is a form of obviousness and in this particular instance - obviousness masks a paradox. If I am the obviousness of things, then am I a paradox? A false assumption? Do I feel this? Kind of... It is mostly a logical reasoning for now.

@Zweistein I can't really say that I am nothing, because I cannot locate it in my direct experience for now. Anyways, thank you for reading my journal @Zweistein and @now is forever. It is a pleasant feeling to know that some people find my thoughts interesting.

Close your eyes. Touch your index finger to your thumb and start moving them in circular motions. Concentrate on the feeling of touch. Stop touching your fingers and listen to your thoughts. Concentrate on them and notice the chatter. Open your eyes. Look around. Notice that you are seeing. For me, these are three distinct areas of senses. Normally, I think of them as separate spaces that are disjoint. Sight does not appear in the space of touch. Thoughts do not appear in the space of sight. Etc. Now, start touching your fingers again, but with your eyes open. Look around. Can you see where your fingers touch? The assumption that senses are disjoint is false. You can clearly see where the sensation of touch occurs. This knowledge is not 'visible' and you cannot 'touch it'. It is simply obvious where your fingers touch. The intersection between the sight-space and touch-space is what I call a short-circuit. This particular sight-touch short-circuit is what I recognized to be direction. There are other short-circuits, such as sight-voice. There are sights that you can witness that will trigger an inner dialog. This very text is a sight-voice short-circuit because (at least for me) it triggers an inner dialog that I recognize to be this text. You can start touching around things and seeing where they are in the touch-space. This is how you can know the extents of 'your' body. Touch is only associated with a certain shape in your sight-space. It is a sensation. I cannot explain it in terms of anything else.

@Nahm Beautiful. Thank you ?

Is the inner and outer sphere of "Me" really separate? Since there is an inner and outer "I", and all senses seem to have an inner and outer counterpart, then maybe I am my senses?

I was just reading about that earlier today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense

So, what am I? A thought came up that I am a thought. Lets investigate that. What is a thought? There is the inner voice, inner sight and inner hearing (like a catchy song gets stuck in the mind). To some extent, I can conjure a taste of yesterday's dinner, or the smell of my wife's hair. So - thoughts are a space of sensations. How are these sensations distinct from the 'outer' ones, so that I classify them as thoughts? There is the social aspect - the imaginary sensations are not shared with others. People do not hear my inner voice. I can call them all kinds of names and they do not react to them. They do not react to what I imagine. I can visualize all kinds of situations and they stir emotions within me, but others do not seem to be receptive to them. Are emotions thoughts? I can bottle up my emotions and not let others see them (up to a certain point), so they can be private. However, I can see somebody else's emotions if I know them well enough. I can also share what I feel by talking, or through actions - like displays of affection/love, or outbursts of anger. It is then immediately clear what I feel even if I do not describe it. In intimate relationships, my emotions can even get interlocked with other people. Their sadness is my sadness. Their anger is my anger. Emotions seem to be this grey area between private and public sensations. Are they special in this regard? Perhaps there are also inner and outer emotions, like there is inner and outer voice? That is an interesting way of seeing it, I have never thought about it before. There seems to be a connection between emotions and this inner feeling that I can induce along the spine. When I'm being mindful when I am angry, for example, I can feel the boiling sensation in the area of my chest. I even successfully extinguished my anger/fear/anxiety in the navel area once by stirring the inner feelings. So, maybe the inner feelings should rather be called inner emotions? Again, it hits me how strange it is that I can locate sensations between orthogonal spaces such as touch and emotions. Anger in the navel area. What?! So, sensations seem to be divided into two spheres - inner and outer. Private and public. The private sphere is what I call thoughts. Am I a thought? If thoughts are defined like that, then no - I am not a thought because other people seem react to what I do. If that is the case, then I am not private (at least not entirely). So, perhaps there is the inner I and the outer I? This reminds me of the Jung's model of the psyche: EDIT: Now that's an interesting thought: maybe, 'the social aspect' is a way to divide 'me' into inner and outer sphere?

Does this influence my notion of what I am? Not really? Kind of? I feel differently. Am I my body? Why is the touch so important to me? It fascinates me that there is this visible surface area around 'me' that I can feel. I can see two cupboards that touch in front of me, but I can't feel it the way I feel when I touch something with my hand. Do they really touch if I can't feel it? What does it even mean that two things that are not me touch? Do they? I'm getting sidetracked again... Why do I so stubbornly insist that I am the body? Oh right - I don't. I just flipped back to being obviousness, huh?

Oh shit. I just realized what direction is. It's a short-circuiting of senses! What the fuck! There is this obviousness related to where sensations occur. They occur in one field, but this field is partitioned into various categories such as sight, sound, thoughts, etc. Direction is the obviousness of simultaneity of sensations. Hahaha what the fuck?! Direction is a paradox. It doesn't exist!

Now, that I think of it, these 'inner' feelings actually do have a kind of directionality if I can shift them around on the inside of my body. This directionality is defined, again, by touch. I can see my hand touching my chest, feel the touch on the hand and on the chest and induce the inner feeling in this area. The inner voice also has a kind of directionality, because of reading. hmm... Does this somehow help me answer the original question?

The inner voice is a different thing, because it has no locality. It is not conflated with sight in the same sense as touch. As I look at my hand that touches a keyboard, I can see where I feel. With the inner voice however, there is no such place wherever I look. Or rather - all places speak equally. There is no difference between how I hear my thoughts, regardless of what I see. If that is the case, then why do I (again) locate my thoughts in the space orthogonal to sight? I usually perceive my thoughts as if they were behind my eyes, inside of my skull. Does the inside of my body have any sensations? There is a sensation of movement when I tense my muscles and it is often conflated with sight (I can observe my body moving). There are other feelings however that are not observable via sight. I used to describe them in terms of spaciousness in this thread: Again, these feelings are not conflated with sight in the same sense, as the inner voice. Their intensity is not directional and I recognize them to be inside of my body. There's been a progress in development of these feelings. They are not only located inside of my skull and stop at the throat, but also expand down to the base of my spine. I can shift these to my arms and to my legs. They seem to be conflated with my breath, because when I focus on inhaling and exhaling, I can make these feelings more intense. They can become so intense, that I cannot stop myself from tightening my chest, the back of my neck, and my anus.

Is obviousness a product of the functioning of my body? There is a brain, but the appearance of this 'solution' is not rooted in anything. It just is. It is obvious that the brain creates consciousness. That is, until it is obvious that it is doubtful that it does and I start to question this assumption. This questioning of the assumption is not questioned, however. When I am convinced that it is not obvious at all that the mind creates consciousness, I do not ask questions about whether I should question it or not. I just do. So, obviousness is something prior to body - body is rooted in obviousness. When I try to locate the feeling of I, I usually focus on my sight. Then, everything I look at is not-me, so 'me' is located to the space orthogonal to sight (like touch, hearing, thinking). It is strange how touch is conflated with sight when it comes to the feeling of spaciousness of the body. I can see my hands move to touch my keyboard and I can feel the pressure of the keys. It seems however, that sight and touch are somehow separated, orthogonal. Like they occur in different spaces, even if the sensation of touch is exactly where I would expect it to be given the motion of my hand. Touch is somehow on the inside of my body and sight is external. And yet - I feel the touch in the same field where I see. In space (?).

@who chit What if you recontextualize this neo-advaita saying into Ralston's words like so: there is nothing to do -> you should realize who you are RIGHT NOW! You are IT! You do not become anything else! etc.

So, ever since it came to me that I may be the obviousness of things (their -ness), I found myself in a new perspective. Whereas before, I've been kind of 'stuck' behind the eyes, inside of the body - now, I'm 'out there', intertwined with things that "I" perceive. It is not a new state for me, but the last time I've been this way, it lasted for several hours. Now, it's the second hour and I can't shake it off. As I look around, it seems like the things that "I" look at are somehow accented. Everything seems to 'stick out' from its background (unless I look at the background). It kind of reminds me of videogames where the hud is contextual and objects are highlighted when you hover your crosshair over them (minus the explicit glow).

@winterknight Can you re-phrase this sentence and elaborate on what do you mean by realness? Is seeing through the falsity of the mind related to polar thinking?