tsuki

Thank you for sharing this. Your sincerity is sensational! Thank you for sticking with us and have a fruitful journey. Godspeed and bless you!

!!!!!!

@Nahm I have a question regarding how you understand judgement. This may be elementary, but it's important to me. Do you understand judgement as: any positive description (as in: "this is a human", "this is a monkey", "this is a thought" etc), a preference (as in: "I would rather have a scoop of ice cream than of dirt", "I would rather be clothed than naked right now", etc), a polarity with one-sided attachment (as in: "Killing people is wrong", "Anger is bad", "You shall not steal", "I must be rich", etc). In my experience, judgement is the whole spectrum of the above. I'm assuming that you mean the option number 3. I'm open to acknowledge that the following is a rationalization: I'm treating anger as a negative emotion because I've been taught that expressing it crosses people's boundaries. I understand that I'm angry when my boundaries are being broken and I should do something about it (express the anger), but for the time being I think that I have so much anger in my reservoir that my reactions are disproportionate. I also think that I'm overly sensitive to external manipulation of my inner world, when someone else lectures me on what is right without my explicit request (this does not apply to you). This goes back to my family situation and the way I've been raised. Even though I love my parents and they are giving me space now, I believe that they are myopic and they've been forcing their limited perspective onto me for years. I acknowledge the possibility of their influence on my growth, by being a "pressure cooker", but I also acknowledge that I'm protecting myself from realizing the depth of their myopia and the damage they've done (unknowingly). Additionally, my wife has symmetric wounds. She witnessed her parents' fights ever since she was three until it culminated in a nasty divorce when she was thirteen. She was emotionally used by her mother as a crutch, to shoulder the emotional burdens of being wife of an adult child of an alcoholic. She's depressed now (very common in such situations), taking SSRI, and struggling with co-dependence. She is hypersensitive to my mood (like she was in her childhood) and deems me as "controlling". I have no space to express my anger explicitly, in the moment, because she is threatened, drops her boundaries, and submits. She feels angry because of that and it turns into guilt, shame and resentment. We had many anger resonances because of that, where we would become periodically mad at each other for trivial reasons. Thanks to therapy and her medication she slowly starts to learn to cope with anger in other ways than disregarding it (in herself and in reaction to its expressions in others). So, I don't believe that anger is absolutely evil, as in option number three. I acknowledge its importance, but I think that I need to manage and vent it in dosages until we heal as a couple. I just hope that I'm not pushing myself too hard and I will not pay too great of a price in terms of my physical health. It's getting better though. Crying helps a lot.

This post is off the rails of our conversation, but I just had a hilarious insight and I want to share it. Hentai is the vegetarianism of masturbation.

As someone who's done a lot of cannabis in the past, I'd say it's very, very difficult especially if you don't have prior experience with other substances. I started doing it for recreational purposes, but I soon discovered its contemplative potential. Unfortunately, I got hooked up psychologically, to the point where it became difficult for me to share the drug with other people. This is when I decided to stop using it altogether. As for the tips: remember that despite its relative accessibility, it's not a toy. If I were ever to try it again, I'd go as far as conducting a one day retreat before smoking and writing proper trip reports afterwards.

Resentment, shame.

@Nahm That sounds almost too good to be true, but I know that it is. Taking ownership of self-created suffering is difficult. I mean, recognizing exactly how I'm doing it to myself so that I can stop. Sometimes, when I'm angry, I know that continuing will bring more negativity, but in the moment I feel that something is very important. It usually happens when I'm dependent on external circumstances and I'm deprived of something I need, or feel entitled to. I am not allowing myself to express my anger because it's threatening to people around me. I think that I will be ridiculed, or that I will have to escalate to be heard and I don't want that. I've been holding back for years, avoiding it until it periodically blows up in someone's face. Am I mistakenly assuming that I'm dependent on external circumstances? Is it the thing that I ought to stop doing?

Are you saying that judgement does not exist? I understand that the labels such as "good" or "bad", or even "human", "monkey", "thought" are insubstantial (relative). That what is, just is, prior to thought. Within that isness thoughts exist as well, prior to naming them, prior to thinking about thinking. Is that what you are pointing towards?

I do.

Is all judgement unnecessary?

True. True. All judgement is relative to the self(-concept) and its survival. Feeling good, or being a good person is good, for the self. Nonduality is not relative to the self-concept and is not dependent upon its existence or non-existence.

I'm confused. You sound like @Nahm, but it clearly says @mandyjw. Have you been sniffing @Nahm's and @Faceless' posts all night again? @Marc Schinkel You just completely blew my mind! Talk about joy, huh? It's a thread between threads! WOOOOOT?! AND I GOT A GAY SPIDERMAN! WOOOO! AND A FUCKING MASTERPIECE TO WATCH! DUDE, IT'S VALENTINE'S DAY BABY! I love you! I LOVE YOU! So much confusion!

@Marc Schinkel AWESOME! Thank you!

I wonder whether it fits to this sub-forum, but I find them endlessly fascinating. Cellular automata are discrete models studied in computer science. What they are is basically a lattice with cells that in the simplest form can either be dead or alive. Then, there are rules that define whether a cell changes its state depending on the state on the nearest cells in its neighborhood. For example, a cellular automaton called "Game of Life" is defined as such: Any live cell with two or three neighbors survives. Any dead cell with three live neighbors becomes a live cell. All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead. The lattice is then, either seeded with live cells randomly, or created manually to engineer specific behavior. I find these automata to be fascinating because these rules are so easy to understand, and yet produce remarkable, life-like complexity. Here are some examples: Someone even understood these rules and built a programmable computer in it: Mandelbrot set: And finally, "Game of Life" described in terms of itself, simulated in itself: There are other rule sets, also in 3 dimensions. This one is called "Accretor" and is simulated in a comprehensive program dealing with chaos theory:

Today I had a conversation with my wife about joy. I'm really good at identifying negative emotions, but positive ones elude me. Joy is a spontaneous fascination with details, a non-discursive immersion in their depth. I think that the most profound joyfulness I experienced was on LSD. My wife says that she notices that I'm joyful at times, but I'm oblivious to it.

What do you mean? I agree that the mind is already whole. Contrary to @Faceless' post, division and separation are not in opposition to it.

I feel inferior to women because women feel. That doesn't sound right, but it is. Sigh... I judge myself to be inferior to women because I envy their ability to feel themselves. Without this self-knowledge, the mind is just a tool for survival that can only transform and never create.

Time is imagination constrained by self-concept. Past is the analysis of the self in terms of its strengths, while future is the analysis in terms of its vulnerabilities.

Monks and outcasts realize what it's all about because they have no stake in it. You can even figure out what life itself is, if you practice death (meditation). What is the reward? Nothing.

I just realized that I feel inferior to women. I need to contemplate that.

I remember @Serotoninluv posted this playlist once: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KWf8H2pM0tlVd7niMtqeU?si=yhKSXy4mQyGhzyORnl0jGQ

Knowledge implies subject-object separation. You cannot know the Truth, but you can know that you are it.

Yes, I believe that these observations are valid. It is much easier to destroy ourselves nowadays because the technology is much more advanced. Technology is a lever that multiplies our capabilities, but if the intent to use it is unwise, then it creates all sorts of problems. Some say that this is what happens when the rate of technological growth is greater than the rate of cultural growth. I don't view this problem in a linear way like that. Spiral dynamics is a crisis-driven model and I believe that the mass destruction of environment and mental health is one of them. It resembles the shock that needs to happen for a stage orange ego to evolve into green. I believe that the solution to this problem does not lie in more technological development. Stage green is a very strange stage because it had collected a massive shadow and the only way to proceed is to backtrack, acknowledge, and heal it. I believe that this is the only way for us that is predicted with this model. During the first couple's therapy session, I was confronted with my shadow regarding women. It traced all the way back to my early childhood and to my relationship with my mother. I'm still healing it.

Definitely not an expert on feminism, but the mother's behavior does not surprise me. She was probably letting her husband exploit her sexually, without having the freedom to express her preferences. Not saying that it's her fault, this pattern goes thousands of years into the past and each generation was re-creating the conditions to repeat it. She woke up to that. When I wake up from unconscious behavior and see the harm it created, it's difficult to not try to go to the other end of the spectrum. When we repress a part of ourselves, we become an expert at recognizing and judging it. Doing that outwardly, towards other people, is a natural consequence.