tsuki

And how do you know that your memory of it is correct and you simply don't fit your memories to what is currently happening? You need reference to claim consistency and your memories are indistinguishable from fantasies. Are you going to claim that your memories are consistent? Consistent with what? Memories?

There is no reason to go through chemotherapy if there is no reason to live. Holding your loved one's hand and cleaning his/her vomit for a five years is as much of a commitment as sitting through med school. Committing to seeing through chemotherapy is not a decision that is made in the past, but a one that has to be made each morning when you look in the mirror, unsure, whether you are saving your wife's life or wasting your own.

The paradox of valuing enlightenment vs materialism comes from the fact that you see it as a binary choice (or non-choice in your formulation). Your life is both materialistic and spiritual and growth occurres from your recognition of the latter and incorporation in the former (or vice versa).

Dabbling and jumping around for your whole life is a world-class performance in itself. By introducing stability via the LP course, you are effectively admitting that you can't even do that! Commitment is not determined by the amount of time you do something it in a streak, but how much are you willing to gamble on it. Commitment is intensity, not duration. You are committed to saving a person if you are willing to sacrifice your life for that person. It doesn't matter how long it took you. You can be committed to saving a child in a burning building, or to saving a person having cancer.

Inner conflict is the creative force of growth. You transcend yourself by seeing how conflicting perspectives are actually one. By committing to recognizing enlightenment of ordinary, everyday, people you effectively surround yourself with enlightened people. There is no difference between them being enlightened and you seeing them as such. There is nothing stopping you from pursuing entrepreneurship and enlightening others at the same time if you accept this. I'm not too familiar with life purpose course, but here is my second advice: Why does "life purpose" have to be something constant throughout your life? If it doesn't have to be constant, then what is the correct constness period? Does it have to be a year, or can it be a day? Or a minute? If you would commit 100% to what you are doing every minute of your life, you would become an outstanding person even if your LP would change every minute. It's called multitasking

I wasn't serious. Thanks for sharing.

In other words: it works only if you don't need it. Brilliant!

To maintain the cycle. The lower is the receptive one. The one that follows. It thrives in order. The "unconscious" one. The higher is the leading one. The one that creates. It thrives in chaos. The "conscious" one. The lower one needs a discipline to become the higher. The higher needs expression to become the lower. When the lower resists discipline, it stays low. When higher resists expression, it stays high. Being high is not the ultimate goal. When you stay high too long, chaos becomes the order of things and your life falls apart. Being low is not the ultimate goal. Death is the ultimate stability. Seeking of the higher self is an expression of the lower self. If you mistake the cycle (or simply change) for progress, you always seek the higher self as the other always seems better than the current. Progress in this sense is simply observing the cycle and letting it run. Once you let go and let the lower and higher do their things, the cycle speeds up and life "smooths" out.

Dark souls!

@egoless hahaha, no! Our abstract thinking is so bad, that we don't even see it as thinking sometimes. It's like speculative storytelling. You just tell yourself a story that this thing is going to play out exactly like this and there is no helping it! This is a very specific form of overthinking that I catch myself wrapped up all the time. I used to have imaginary arguments with people and was angry all the time hahaha. Try winning an argument with yourself by telling yourself how stupid you are - that's how bad it can get! What I imagine in INTPs is overthinking in form of carefully exploring all options with equal considerations. INTJs just steamroll into one option and produce a story that is so convincing that we don't even see it as a story. Having a script like that can be powerful sometimes, but usually, we just keep getting frustrated that things don't go the way they are supposed to go! Letting this story go is an important skill that I needed to learn. What I learned over time is that all I can do is to simply let go. If you gotta overthink, you just gotta overthink. Just make sure that you put that thinking into good use and actually pick the best fucking juice in the god damned shop! Mind has its strange ways and this juice may actually be very important, but you don't realize it until later on. If you stop fighting yourself amazing things may happen. As for some more confessions, there are two stories with a common theme of swings + unsupervised children = injuries to the head. They both happened when I was around 7-10 years old: I was playing on my own in the playground near my home, swinging a swing while standing on the ground. I tried to swing it as hard as I could and saw a little kid (2-3 years old) approaching, interested. So the genius little me started to swing the swing even harder because I saw that the little guy was interested in it. Lo and behold, this little creature waltzes right into the moving swing, getting hit in its little head. As I ran away I saw its mom running in terror to help him. The other story happened a few years later during holidays near our summer house. I had a female childhood friend that I used to meet each summer. One time she had a younger girl to take care for and the three of us went to a playground. The little girl sat on a rotary swing, so of course I would push her very fast and try to impress my childhood friend! Inevitably, the girl fell off and the swing hit her in the head. Impressive little me ran away, leaving two girls behind. Actually, the second story has a follow-up. When we met after a few years I learned that she suffered a mild concussion resulting from hit and that she didn't tell anybody who did it. She threatened to tell my parents that I was the culprit unless I did favors for her. I saw right through that blackmail and told her to go ahead. My mother was very scared/sad, but nothing bad for me came out of it. Ever since then my policy would be to not negotiate with terrorists. Looking back, I think that the girl might have thought that she saved me from big trouble back then and demanded something in return. It didn't occur to me back then what could have happened, but still - I was a scared stupid little shit that didn't know any better. I don't even remember if I apologized to her or not. So yeah, don't try impress ladies with swings. It won't work .

@Joseph Maynor I know that feeling. The hard part is to let go of letting go and going back to sleep. That always gets me. @egoless @molosku INTJ reporting in! I can relate to your feelings - connecting with others has always been my biggest struggle. What I learned over the years is that It's not even enough to say what you think. You have to literally think out loud to connect with people. Total authenticity is what what did the trick for me. Even the dirties corners of your mind - this is what started to attract people towards me. It only started to happen when I finally let go of what I thought I was and let myself be who I am. As for confessions - here it goes: I bite my fingernails. I'm ashamed of the state of my hands and I try to fix them by biting them, haha! When nobody is looking, I pick my nose. And I eat it! Fuck me, that felt good to say out loud! I pick my scabs. An I god fucking eat them! Oh god, that may very well be my last post on this forum. Future me - sorry for ruining it for you! Future stalkers, here is your gold mine to ruin my life. Start picking it, but don't fucking eat it! hahahaha

@starsofclay Your encouragement is scripted as well. The real mindfuck is that cause and effect is also an idea to explain reality, just like free will. Reality has no clue about it other than through your concepts. It all just happens.

@Nahm I think that you used up your ❤. Here, have some~~~~ @Stoica Doru There is no free will. Any conscious action is rooted in unconscious movement. Any thought is rooted in unconscious bias. Any bodily movement is rooted in movement of muscles that move by themselves. Any use of language is rooted in belief that you share understanding of words that are used. Any "action" is impossible.

To think is to perform an action. You do not think to think, do you? If you do not think to think, then why do you do thinking in order to do doing? When you move your arm, muscles move by themselves. Meaning relies on symbols. Symbols like words are things that are something that they are not. The word-symbol "bird" is not a bird, but a set of letters, and yet - it moves your mind and produces a bird. There is no "unempowering" meaning, as meaning is not present in symbols. Meaning is you/"I".

Like I said - there is no difference between the two. If you change yourself enough, you won't even recognize your "outer" problems anymore. If you solve your "outer" problems, you won't see them. Fixing is fixing. I feel you. The most profound, mystical, experiences are found in everyday experience, unbeknownst to everyday people. Seeing the world transform in response to your stillness is the best thing that happened to me so far.

@Joseph Maynor @egoless Finding a new exterior to be in harmony with your interior is no different from changing your interior to harmonize with your exterior. There is no need to embark on a physical journey if you can venture within. Some people prefer to move the outer, some prefer to move the inner. Movement is movement.

Thoughts come and go. If you wish them to come, you regret that they go. If you wish them gone, you regret that they came. Thoughts wish and regret.

@EmptinessDncing Keeping the vacuum empty is like building a dam - a damn tiring way to live! What you need is to be a river that flows, yet its bed is still. It fills the ocean, but the ocean is never full and the river never gets empty. Hey! We're here for you if you want to talk. Have a seat with us .

Believe me, or not, but you will feel this each time you awaken. Yes, there will be further awakenings and each one will show you how immensely ignorant you ("I") are. Don't throw away too much, as one day you may see things you threw away as things you could use.

I can relate to this experience. The "I" never goes away. The more you try to empty it, the more empty it becomes. What is emptiness other than willingness to be filled?

What sort of experience do you expect to live once you are enlightened? Over the course of your 10-year journey you left the world of polarities and experienced the state of oneness by (presumably) seeing how polarities are alike. There is no polarity to be pointed at to show you what enlightenment is. The more undifferentiated the world becomes, the more enlightened you are. The paradox is that noticing the progress of oneness is rooted in differentiation. To hinge on what enlightenment is, is to introduce fragmentation. In my personal opinion, the fact that you need to quench your thirst is enough evidence for being thirsty.

Hi @Sirius! Here is my advice: If you want to surround yourself with wise people to follow, then monastery may be a good idea. If you want to run away from your past - your past will follow you wherever you go. You won't run away from yourself. If you feel sick, your city will be a diseased one. If you feel fucked up, you will see that people are fucked up. You want to bury your past. That's radical. I advice you to sit on this idea for a few months and see if it sticks. You may feel like it couldn't possibly get any worse, but trust me - it always can. You know the suffering you're facing now - imagine swapping it for one that you don't know. When everything is truly meaningless, so is having meaning in life.

I would start by acknowledging the reason why I did it. Then, I would acknowledge how it made sense to do such a thing at the time. Lastly, seeing that I reject what I did at the time would hint to that I am a different person. If I rejected it back then, It wouldn't have happened. The only reason to willingly hurt others is that they reflect a part of you that you reject. Rejection of self is self-hurt, regardless of whether you lash out against yourself, or against others. Rejecting what you did only serves to perpetuate the cycle. Instead of hating yourself for your own stupidity, see yourself as your own victim. Don't be like people that want to murder the murderer.

@Ether No, not really. The world is a mirror, so is the art. All we see is a reflection of ourselves. What led me to the conclusion of author's disillusion is this fragment: The freedom entails possibility to become a slave. Either willingly, or ignorantly. What the author does in my opinion is to show us that once you look deep down into yourself - you see that all there is is society that is composed of individuals. That society is so intangibly insane that it doesn't even matter if you are insane by following it, or rejecting it. That the ultimate freedom lies in total conformity. After all, we are living in the society that promotes individualism. Isn't that crazy? To be normal is to be abnormal. Ha!

Beautiful. What I really like about it is that the author does not seem to be deluded into splitting the world into good and bad. The people in suits take the suits off when they return to their homes of cards.