Joshe

I wouldn't view it that way. It's not a hierarchy. The best we all (young and old) can do with this is hold onto things loosely and keep in mind that our future selves will likely disagree with many of our current certainties. That said, we have to act on the best information we have. In other words, we have to take risks and act with conviction, but we need to make sure we have the courage to be wrong and not mistake our current convictions with certainty. This sounds like basic stuff, but it's not, because we literally can't see how we are bullshitting ourselves while we are bullshitting ourselves. 5 years ago I was certain I knew why I was pursuing my life purpose. Later, I found out my certainties were justifications for my ego. But they felt completely true. I couldn't know it wasn't true at the time. This feeling certain and the inability to know is what needs to be accounted for as we proceed - being open to the possibility that even our deepest held convictions may one day be seen as the ego doing what it does best: hiding in plain sight.

Time is a prerequisite for some of the deepest knowledge. When I was 18, I saw how I was a fool at 15. When I was 25, I saw how I was fool at 20. When I was 35, I saw how I was a fool at 30. And so it goes. It takes time (decades) to understand and integrate this fully. Once the pattern is crystal clear, one becomes more careful with what they claim to know about the self/subjective experience. Most everything that I’ve ever told myself was important was revealed to be a working of ego and falsehood, including my spiritual search and my life purpose. The very things I staked my life on - for decades - turned out to be built from ego. No matter how intelligent, earnest, and thorough a student is, one thing they can’t see or know is how their beliefs will hold up over time. A mature teacher understands this and is humbled by it. It allows them to see the delusions, not because they’re more intelligent, but because they’ve had more time and experience, which, unlike knowledge, cannot be given to the student. The only way for the student is to live through decades and hopefully they will see. Building metaphysical sand castles is an interesting and pleasurable hobby, but when you look at the why and machinery behind the building over a span of 2 decades, the hobby eventually exhausts itself after one sees all the stories they’ve told themselves were true in order to justify their building. But this isn’t a given - it will only be seen if one is open to it. Now, at 40, this is where I’m currently at. I’m not sure what’s next but I’ve finally learned the lesson and I’m not building sandcastles anymore. Lol, this sounds like something you’d say at an AA meeting. Actualizers Anonymous. Self-deception prefers to hide inside our strongest convictions. There are blind spots that cannot be accessed through introspection alone. There are dimensions of self-deception that only decades can expose. For me, the need to construct and inhabit elaborate meaning structures wound down after enough cycles of watching them collapse, which took a lot of time.

Sometimes the feedback is correct but the tact isn't. I've asked myself: why care what a person across the internet thinks or gets wrong? 100% it's mostly entertainment + ego. In the grand scheme, it makes no fuck. But I'll forget about the grand scheme sometime within the next few days. Integration is continuous but slow.

You encounter perspectives, you integrate them, and your understanding becomes more nuanced. Do you call that "conscious expansion"? Are people who make a hobby out of exploring and integrating perspectives more conscious than those who don't? What actually "increases consciousness"? Intense awareness/focus on specific perspectives? Intense awareness on consciousness itself?

AI bot crawling could slow it down too. If you don't want that, you could add a rule in your robots.txt file to prevent it.

Check out these channels to get a sense for what would go into production of cooking videos without narration: https://www.youtube.com/@cookingeveryday https://www.youtube.com/@cookrate-meatdelish2320 https://www.youtube.com/@michaelandthekitchen.subsc2619 There are tons of successful channels like this. If I were you, I'd find as many as I could and study their production and marketing techniques. I recall seeing one that would was selling their own custom designed cookware at the end of the video, and it was pretty cool. That's just one way you could make money. I definitely wouldn't be trying to sell other people's products though, because you won't make a lot of money that route without a ton of viewers. You'll have a very hard time getting eyeballs if all you do is a blog and sharing images. You'd need to strategically grind out high quality videos. I would mostly focus on Youtube and social media and I'd link to the full recipe on your blog, which gives you the opportunity to capture email addresses. If I were going to do this, I'd get several cameras and mics strategically set up around my cooking area and start experimenting with that early on. Ideally, I'd want my kitchen to be a like a studio that I didn't have to disassemble after every video. You might want to figure out which angles are best for stuff like cracking eggs, whisking, how you add spices, etc. Basically, flesh out the style and common patterns early so you're not always analyzing every little detail. It's a big project, but it would be interesting.

Cloudflare is cheaper for domain names because they don’t price gouge on renewals and they offer free whois privacy and SSL. Plus, they have free DNS and your site is way faster with their CDN, and more secure because they have free bot fight mode and lots of other stuff. It’s crazy what you get for $10/yr. @Judy2, some of the best cooking channels I’ve ever seen are faceless. It’s like ASMR cooking. Many of them have millions of subscribers. I’ll see if I can find them.

"I will not be moved by this" - said with serious energy and conviction about how unmoved one is. Feedback only stings when it's possibly accurate.

I was actually just fleshing out an insight regarding perception, using people in cars in traffic to illustrate how what we see visually obscures what's actually there. It goes something like this: "Imagine you're driving in traffic. You look around and all you see are cars — a sedan, an SUV, a big semi-truck. You don't really see the people inside them. Logically you know there's a person in each one, but your visual experience is dominated by the vehicle. The car becomes the thing. Now imagine a big semi-truck cuts you off. You feel intimidated, maybe angry — and without thinking, you've already built a mental image of the person behind the wheel. Probably some big aggressive guy. Then the truck pulls over and a 5'2 skinny dude hops out. You're surprised. Why? Because your brain assigned the properties of the container to the person inside it. Now imagine the tops and sides of every car on the road suddenly disappeared. All you'd see is a bunch of regular human beings sitting in chairs, gripping steering wheels, spaced out in rows — not interacting, just sitting there. The whole scene would look kind of absurd. But nothing actually changed. You just removed the layer that was distorting your perception. Now go one step further. Remove the skin. Now all you see is muscle and bone. And suddenly everyone looks the same — the person from the truck, the person from the little sedan, all of them. The differences that seemed so significant vanished because they only existed on the outermost surface. That's what's happening with hot girls. Beauty is the car. It's a surface layer that dominates your visual experience so completely that it replaces the actual person in your mind. You're not 'looking up to' them — your perception is being hijacked by the outermost layer, the same way the semi-truck hijacks your perception of the driver. You don't need to fight it or be angry about it. You just need to see it for what it is — an incomplete perception, not a hierarchy." Surface layers are real, but they are just a fraction of the whole story. The mind compresses reality into usable symbols. The most salient symbol often becomes the operative agent. Projection fills in missing depth. The symbol replaces the underlying complexity.

Maybe something to work with and build on: A thought is a unit of cognition. It is an intangible, abstract, representational unit of cognition that occurs in consciousness. Other units of cognition: mental images, concepts, intentions, judgements, predictions. Perception is different than cognition. You receive it. Cognition = organization / manipulation - it works on what shows up in perception AND on prior cognitive products Intuition is the perception of pre-conceptual cognitive organization. Consciousness - the field of appearance and experience Perception - direct apprehension of what appears (external and internal) Intuition - understanding before it becomes something you can think about - maybe unconscious cognition, lol. Cognition - manipulable representations (thoughts)

There's nothing wrong with it but to take it too seriously isn't a good idea IMO. I wouldn't mess around with plastic surgery or injections. You end looking like a fuckable 50 year old lizard (Bill Burr joke). Everyone ends up looking the same, stretched out puffy faces. It's sad to see. Maybe get your ears pinned back if they stick out too much. Hair transplant. These are fine, but I wouldn't mess with the face too much. Maintaining a tan can do a lot, but then you gotta worry about skin cancer and leather skin as you age. Putting lots of energy into what you're going to wear, what color accessories you should buy, what shoes to wear - it's just all too much work and not enough pay off. The older you get, the more precious your energy becomes, and ain't nobody got time to be matching outfits. Commiting to and maintaining a project all about managing other people's perceptions probably isn't a good idea long-term. Your comfort and resources are more important than managing expectations. You have to manage some, but habitual looksmaxing is not the right balance. If your body and attire are clean and you're not overweight and pasty, and you keep up basic hygiene, good enough. I've always kinda pitied women for basically being forced to live this way.

No bro. You gotta take the stick out of your ass. Say: "Sup? I'm that guy you exchanged numbers with". And wait on her response. If she doesn't like that and don't respond, wait a day and say "Sorry, I just realized you might have given your number out to multiple people. I'm the guy from freemasons."

Interesting. Never thought of that of before. Thanks! I'll need to let that idea stew for a few months, lol.

Think of a dream. It's common in dreams for the "I" to be very thin, or even non-existent, and there's just perception with no I. That's what my mystical states are like. It's only when I wake up from a dream and the "I" comes back online when I start adding stories about what the dream meant. Saying "oh, I was infinitely intelligent in that dream", but in the dream, the "I" wasn't really there.

Because words mean things. Anytime I've witnessed deep states of consciousness, there was only experience, not experiencer. There was no "me". I was not it. It just was. The moment you say "I am infinitely intelligent", you are back in your ego - as far as I understand. And that understanding is from experience, not spiritual frameworks or doctrine.

Let's be real here. A better, more fitting term would be something like "perfect clarity". There is a big difference in saying, "the universe is infinitely intelligent and I am one with it" and saying, "I am infinitely intelligent". This is not merely a matter of style either. One is about the experience, the other is about the experiencer. "Egotists rejoice!!! Your folly has been laid bare!" - Vernon Howard 😂

@LambdaDelta Of course there are times when "you have to experience it for yourself" is the only real answer. I'm confused by the word "infinite". The most charitable read I can come up with is people mean there is a state of being that you realize is itself infinitely perfect/intelligent and that thing is you, but you don't actually have access to functional infinite intelligence. Is that it? Or is the claim literally that one's own intelligence is functionally infinite in that moment? I mean, this question sounds so absurd I feel stupid for asking it, lol. Surely that's not it, right?

TLDR: Intelligence is an activity You can't do two complex things at once (verifiable) 5-MeO doesn't change this You can only be intelligent about what's on the slate Meta-awareness doesn't escape this Intelligence = structuring, manipulating, navigating the abstract It manifests as compressed gestalt "Infinite intelligence" - what does that even mean? They can't answer, tell you to experience it Ask real questions, they shift to character attacks. When people can't escape conceptually, they escape socially. The real explanation: they're high on insight --- Explanation: Intelligence is an activity. Have you ever been able to hold onto some deep awareness of your metaphysics while simultaneously equally engaged with something else complex? No, because consciousness has limited bandwidth. When you try to do it, one thing or the other will always dominate your consciousness. This means you cannot be intelligent in more than one complex domain at a time, because how can you do multiple activities at once??? 5meo does not provide this ability. You can only be intelligent of what is on the slate of consciousness at the time. Since you can't be simultaneously engaged with multiple things at once in a serious way, you can only exercise intelligence upon that one thing. And meta-awareness doesn't escape this - it also competes for bandwidth. Intelligence is something like the ability to structure, manipulate, and navigate the abstract and to see clearly what is happening with the thing on the slate. IME, it manifests as a gestalt of knowing about a particular thing. And it has to be a compressed gestalt where things are just "known" because not many things can be on the slate at once. However, the things in the gestalt are available to be retrieved if you need them, but that process isn't necessarily effortless like the term "infinite intelligence" implies. This begs the question, what do you mean by "infinite intelligence"? I think no matter how many times you ask it of those who say it, they'll just say they can't tell you what it means and you just have to experience it for yourself. And if you start inquiring with questions like: "When you were "infinitely intelligent," could you solve any mathematical problem instantly?" "Could speak Japanese?" "Did your "infinite intelligence" give you the ability to predict the stock market or see what the cure for cancer was? When these questions come up, there's a pattern of shifting the conversation from substance to your level of development or character, call you silly, assert their hierarchy and tell you to go deeper, etc. To understand the grandiosity behind such claims, I think it helps to realize that some of us can get extremely high on insight and knowledge. Psychedelics can amp this up to 11. This alone likely explains the bulk of it. The honest position is: "I took a substance. My sense of self and limitation dissolved. I felt like I understood everything. It was the most profound experience of my life. When I came back, I couldn't verify or demonstrate any of it, and couldn't even articulate it, but it felt infinite." But obviously, this doesn't give the ego much to work with lol. "Consciousness is infinite" is fine. But "I am infinitely intelligent" is just someone high af with temporary (hopefully) delusions of grandeur.

If you wake up and "remember" you're God-realized, that's just you waking up and loading GodRealization.exe into working memory and allowing it to run the cognitive and emotional processes you've built into the runtime. If you were "God-realized", you'd wake up as God-realized and not have to remember it because it would just be how you exist. So it seems to me God-realization.exe is like an anchor point or a package of all prior experience, interpretations, and conclusions of the deepest felt realizations around reality - and it arrives as a gestalt that feels like certainty because you remember what you saw and how it made you feel and how certain of it you previously were. The honest way: "I wake up every morning and remember that I believe I am God, and that belief feels coherent". But that's not very impressive, is it? The innerworkings of the mind are subtle, but they're there, and you can see them if you try.

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/strategic-thinking-skills

This is the fkn jam right here.

The truth-seeking narrative is cope. What you call spirituality is just preference-driven consciousness training. The only difference between a spiritual teacher and a psych patient is which direction they train their consciousness in. One aims at love, hits love and calls it truth. The other aims at threat, hits threat and calls it truth. Both trained consciousness in a direction. Both arrived exactly where they pointed. Both claimed discovery. One gets a retreat center, the other gets a prescription. lol "Seek, and ye shall find." How does this insight get so little attention? Go looking for rocks, find rocks. Go looking for love, find love. Go looking for threat, find threat. Go looking for God, find God. Go looking for meaninglessness, find meaninglessness. Ask this community what spirituality is for and they'll say equanimity, peace, love, presence. Interesting how these just so happen to be things they desperately want. People rig the game so that winning = getting what they wanted all along. When they hit the target they're aiming for, they call it "discovery of reality". "Seek and ye shall find" is not a strategy to acquire something. It's a fucking warning😂.

Good questions. Thank you! Yes, ultimately, from the absolute level, this distinction doesn't exist. Obviously, creation and discovery are the same thing from the absolute. But here's the thing, I believe a lot people here are playing a relative game while claiming an absolute position. These folks were the intended audience. So yes, this entire exploration is about epistemic accountability in the relative domain (where they actually reside), even if they claim otherwise. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone here, but most. --- I'm not saying all perspectives are equal or that there's no truth. I'm saying: how do you know you've found truth rather than constructed something and labeled it truth? If you construct long enough with the goal of "discovery", there is a mechanism where you forget that you've constructed all that you have, and then new "generations/constructions" feel like "discovery" because of that forgetting, and you call them "absolute truths" because it feels like making contact with reality because you have forgotten all the accumulated constructions. And what happens is these newfound constructions get mistaken for discoveries, and are very often then used to build a spiritual ego and hierarchy. This is a deep mechanism I'm talking about here. It's not just "bias". It's akin to how a virus enters the cells, replicates, hides itself, resists antibodies, goes dormant when antibiotics are administered. Just like how that is a very complicated process, so too is this. It's not enough to say "Oh, you got a virus" or "Oh, you're biased". If you don't understand the mechanism, calling it "bias" doesn't help you see it in yourself. You have to see it. And when you see it, it will die. No more spiritual ego, no more hierarchy. Or at least, significantly diminished. There's actually a lot more to this than I've mentioned here. I've been working on a "8 Steps from Worm to God" piece that I might drop when spiritual egos start irritating me again. lol

It's called consciousness. You should look into it sometime. 😝 IDK if you know it or not, but you operate from a fixed definition of spirituality. I think what you call spirituality is "spiritual religion". What I call spirituality is consciousness itself. "Spirituality" is to be in "spirit" - to be aware in consciousness. There are all sorts of "spiritual practices" you can do while in "spirit". My entire position was constructed by being very aware while in consciousness. The process of forming the position was spiritual. But I don't practice spiritual religion, as of yet. One could argue that my OP, which examines how consciousness generates experiences, is more spiritual than you memorizing "love is the first knowing", lol. Do you know how ignorant I'd have to be to think it is literally the "entire" community? If this is the best critique you got, I don't think you're engaging seriously.

You've successfully baited me! If you have zero recollection of this original knowing, how could you ever verify that you're "returning" to it rather than constructing something new and labeling it as a return? We don't have to go down this road, lol. I've got shit to do. Edit:@Natasha Tori Maru Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive. I'm just burned out from work and everything. I shall return.