Extreme Z7

<10-07-2016> Spent 3 Hours On A New Avatar I'm late with today's entry again. Ironically, it's not because I felt lazy but the opposite. I spend about three hours working on a pixel art animation for fun. 16 frames of crazy cartoon coolness. . . Its fun to think about the fact that I just made this for fun. I'm aiming to become a professional artist. I'm excited to think about the stuff I can create as I grow my skills over the period of years. I haven't even bought Leo's life purpose course yet. . . the things in life that may be possible. . . But this is just dreaming. . . I've got more work to do. See you tomorrow.

I recently re-watched Leo's "My Enlightenment Experience" video and I got to the part where he started talking about the 10 ox picture story being explained to him by a zen master. I decided to pause the video and google search said pictures and I thought what I ended up learning about them was pretty cool. Definitely would love to see Leo make a video on it. I know he said in the above-mentioned video that he may talk about it in a future episode but I just thought it'd be good to bring it up here as a little suggestion.

@dude Partying seems to take the energy out of you very quickly.

I have them printed out so I can check them anytime.

<10-06-2016> Digesting Leo's Culture Rant Episode Another profound video by Leo as always. I find that culture has been a massive limiter in my life especially in my childhood. I've only started pursuing my life purpose seriously last year while in college where many people I see pursuing their creative dreams started at high school or sometimes even middle school or younger! When I think about it, I don't have myself fully to blame, the culture I grew up in as a kid was not conducive to creative energy. Nobody I knew when I was a kid was pursuing creative goals. Of course, I liked my video games and cartoons but it never occurred to me of considering a lifestyle path of actually developing the skills needed to produce artistic products. When I was in high school, I started having dreams and ideas on different games and cartoons that would be fun to play and watch. But did I really think about a future of creating art? No. I was so naive that I thought it was perfectly fine to have these dreams but instead spend the majority of my time distracting myself. Of course, this is not to say that I should not hold 100% responsibility over what I create in my life despite a huge factor of my lack of growth in my past has been external. Because you know what? I'm going to be 20 years old next year. I still have plenty of time. Assuming I live to 80, I've got 60 years worth of time I could put to good use. I should probably be happy I'm not having the life shift I'm having right now in my 40's. That's a pretty scary thought for me. Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go play some video games. . . . . . . . What? Hey, I worked hard today. I even practiced art some more as I do daily. Here take a look: I am just taking a break. See you tomorrow.

@John Flores Thanks. I've had thoughts of stopping it sometimes and even have missed a few days recently simply because I keep falling into laziness and "I'll just do it tomorrow" syndrome. I can't really find high motivation to write about my personal development but I guess I should just stop pressuring myself too much and just write for the fun of it.

<10-05-2016> Striving to Become More Creative. . . Is Impossible For Me Right Now I want to become successfully creative before I die. It is one of my main goals in life. But I also want food to eat and a house to live in. So its difficult for me right now because I still have college work that is eating up a lot of my daily time and effort and its making it really difficult to spend the required amount of daily focus to achieve mastery in any field. I can't just drop my college work, I have to see to it that it's done. I'm not sure if I should be pursuing a riskier strategy but right now, I can't seem to see in myself the emotional passion to really pursue my life purpose as a main driver for waking up in the morning. And you know what? It doesn't feel good. Still, I hold a very dear virtue of patience. patience patience PATIENCE. The time will come when I get the time to even just work on my small motivation issue. I have the will to keep a daily habit and I have been keeping my creative practice consistent for about two months now. Still, I don't think I'm operating at the right amount of effectiveness to really see massive gains within a few months. I've certainly improved but I could become far more, far quicker.

@Light Lover Its probably a good idea to place consciousness work as your main focus in life but at the same time, don't use at as a distraction from your creative work.

<10-04-2016> Workaholism Strikes Again I've gotten into a neurotic obsessive productivity phase again where I keep pushing myself to work on an agenda every day with little time to contemplate life. I'm doing it right now because its nearing the end of the college semester for me again and I'm rushing to get everything done. I sure hope this isn't going to create any detrimental long term effects for me but it surely is putting me down in the short term. I sometimes look down on people who have productivity issues and have difficulty putting themselves into action but I've found that workaholism can be just as bad.

What isn't enjoyment? A person with a high level of awareness should be able to enjoy everything, even suffering.

Quite a nice read. But do you think that you're attached too much to the actual phenomenon that is going on? What did you learn from the trip personal development-wise? It'd be a shame if it was just intense sensations, visuals and trances. Also, you should know that I have absolutely zero experience with psychedelics so forgive me if I'm asking naive questions.

Ideas are nothing on this topic. Simple direct experience should be your only focus to find the truth of existence.

<10-03-2016> Still Moving On Despite Feeling Shitty What gloomy weather I'm having over here. I always feel awful whenever cold weather comes along. I tend to become more anxious too. Still, it's no reason to discontinue my habits for a day or for however long the weather lasts. Today, I mostly did studying for academic life. But I also spent about an hour each on my 3 major habits I have at the moment, Meditation, Drawing, and Personal Indie Game Project work. I want to be able to spend more time on personal development reading but my academic studies are eating up a lot of my time. Maybe when this semester ends, I'll have more time to catch up on what the gurus read for a living.

British People live in London

Can't disagree with that, actually. But then again, I think Leo might have used the word 'serious' in a different context. Either way, still don't disagree with what you said. Taking life too seriously leads to misery in my experience.

You're doing good. Just keep moving.

@Leo Gura It can vary depending on the stuff you follow and what pops up in your feed. For example, I follow a lot of hobbyist cartoonists and entertainers on Twitter because I dream of becoming a cartoonist myself and I've had fun seeing other people's work so far without being too distracted by it. Even then, I still don't spend a lot of time in it. Facebook seems to be a real chimp stadium, though. Unlike Twitter, you're given content shared by people on your friends list giving you less control over the content on your feed. I mainly go there to share my drawings with my relatives, not to consume content.

REALLY? Are you sure? I don't see it. Oh. . .Oh wait. . . huh. . . .

<10-02-2016> Getting Lost In Distraction Got lost in a party. I need to focus. Future depends on it. I need to sleep.

I feel so inspired right now.

What?

@Neill What makes you think you understand ego when you clearly don't bother trying to study it first?

<10-30-2016> Not All Cravings Are Bad I want to write about cravings today. I've come to a realization today that just having cravings is not inherently bad. Especially if you do consciousness work and have some level of mindfulness, they aren't going to hurt you that much. What's bad are just cravings for the wrong things. For example, no matter how good you moderate, smoking is still going to have an adverse effect on ones life and it must simply be dropped. Not because having the craving must be shamed but simply because it is not conducive to someone's well-being in life. Moderation is only good when the habit has some benefits to be had but can be counter-productive when taken too seriously or had too much. Like say, entertainment or even personal development content. That's all for today. Be back again, tomorrow.

We can't really help. Your emotions and your thoughts are your responsibility. You have to know how to put the work and effort to handle them.

<10-28-2016> Walking And Seeing The Miles Ahead Had to calm myself down again and remind myself to be extremely patient with my results today. I experience this everyday but I had a particularly strong fit today because I reflected on all the creative work I've done so far but contrasted it with the very little success and recognition I've had so far. I had to remind myself at just how little work I've actually done despite how much I've made and am not even a kilometer near fulfilling my life purpose. I'm pretty excited for 2017, though. Because I've been planning some big life changes when I get the chance and 2017 seems have the perfect times to implement them. Right now, I'm still bogged down by many obligations and projects that are eating up my time. I unwittingly fell into the trap I'm in noe because of lack of foresight. I hope that I won't make the same mistakes or at least fail at a lesser degree on the coming year.