Extreme Z7

<07-24-16> Just Keep Growing Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing. . . Growing. . . Growing. . . Finding the truth about my life. . Hmm . . . hm hmm. .hmm Hmm. . .Hmmm. . . Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing. . . Growing. . . Growing. . .Hmm . . . hm hmm. . The words above are just a tune that popped into my head when I tried to think about something to write today. It's a simple tune inspired by Dory from Finding Nemo's "Just Keep Swimming" song and Leo's new video about the 3 Levels of Personal Development which I absolutely recommend you check it out. I can talk about what I thought about the video but I really don't want to. What I want to do right is to just post this entry. Turn off my laptop and lie in bed, relax, and enjoy the night. P.S. Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing. . . Growing. . . Growing. . . Finding the truth about my life. . Hmm . . . hm hmm. .hmm Hmm. . .Hmmm. . . Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing, Just Keep Growing. . . Growing. . . Growing. . .Hmm . . . hm hmm. .

<07-23-16> Experiencing Some Backsliding This Weekend I've been backsliding back to my soft addictions again today, and something tells me tomorrow isn't going to be any different because I p;an to visit the mall again to play around in the arcade. I remember Leo making a video on this once. It would be best to watch it again to keep myself on track. Oh yes and tomorrow is Sunday again which means an exciting new episode of Actualized.org is coming! Also, I'm making a new blog post detailing progress I've made on my game again. I have nothing else to say. As I said, I backslided in some of my old habits today. Not completely, I did spend most of the afternoon walking outside so I could relax, but tonight I'm kind of falling back to my YouTube pleasures again.

I've been meditating consistently for 1 hour everyday for almost an entire year. The more I do it, the deeper I feel I go into exploring the nature of my human experience. Today I want to share just another epiphany I had while I was having an unpleasant experience. Just a few hours ago, I washed my clothes by hand which is a chore I always found to be very unpleasant. I hate how tedious it feels, I hate the feeling of having water splash on my arms and my feet. As I finished and started to pick up the clothes to hang outside the house, I started to notice very subtly how my body tries to avoid these certain feelings, I noticed that when I walk barefoot on the wet ground, that the soles of my feet where slightly lifted up to prevent my feet from feeling the water around the dirty ground. My body was trying to avoid a pleasant experience. I decided to instead release my feet to feel the wetness of the ground. I suddenly felt a release from suffering. I could actually see that the entire time, the experience was not the thing causing my suffering at all, I was creating it out of my own resistance! The suffering was artificially created, all I had to do was to let go and accept and. . . . there was no more suffering. It made me think about all the other times I've "suffered" in life. Of course, the story above involved a very small and petty kind of suffering but what if the more significant problems we see in our lives are actually just combinations of numerous small, petty, self-created problems combined into huge messes of complicated suffering? Furthermore, if it is the case that it's always been created by the self, then that kind of means we don't really have to expend any effort to get rid of suffering (besides the consciousness work required to see this, of course). All we need to do is recognize that we are creating our own suffering and . . . that's about it, actually. The question that comes to my mind now is, "Where does it come from?". Do we, as human beings, have good reasons to create suffering in our lives. Our do we really just create it out of freaking nowhere?!! I'd love to know what you think about this.

I honestly wish 99.99% of people I meet would read that.

Easy there buddy . . . that's great and all but I'm sure you know that you can't control your level of suffering even after you realize this because there isn't anyone there to control your body and mind. If there was, then both of us would be perfectly capable of stopping suffering completely, no exceptions! But we're still not perfect at it, all there is now is a small step towards letting go of resistance and big bags of thought.

What? What's going on? What is this?

<07-22-16> Do We Create Suffering Out Of Nowhere? (Link Below) One weird thing about me is that I'm a lazy yet hardworking kid. (I prefer not to call myself a "man" because I don't feel like one). I can spend hours a day working towards a huge project by myself while at the same time, I'm always looking for ways to cut the amount of effort I have to put into something but still maintaining the quality I want out of it. One thing that non-programmers don't know about programmers is that all we really do when we try to invent new programming technologies (e.g. a new programming language or a new API system) is to find ways to make things more convenient and require less effort. Why do I mention this? Well, I'm too lazy to actually write a journal entry today. So instead I'm going to link to a thread I recently made on the 'Self Actualization' sub-forum. Hey! I made some effort to make content, that new thread is basically my excuse not to expend more effort in today's entry.

<07-21-16> Still A Slave To Foolish Human Desires I was a Windows 8.1 user last night and after reading that the Windows 10 upgrade offer would cease to be free by July 29, 2016, I decided to get my ass excited and start downloading it. The download and install process took so long, I literally stayed up until 1:00 am, even though I knew that I would have internship duty today and I need to get up early. All that hassle just so I could monitor the installation process and be there the moment my new OS was ready. Also, isn't it interesting that I didn't give a shit about Windows 10 for months but the moment it was announced that it was going to be gone in a couple of weeks, I suddenly want it very badly, human psychology is a bitch. I know deep down that this wasn't a very wise choice to do. Giving away hours of sleep time just so I could see my shinier new OS quicker. Now I believe that I may have to suffer the whole day at internship duty with sleep deprivation. Fortunately, I don't really have much work to do at that job but sleep deprivation still feels awful. It's quite important that I stop writing this now and get to meditation. Every time I fall off track, I think it's pretty wise not to stay off-track for way too long before something I might really regret happens. See ya and have a nice, hopefully sleep-deprivation-free, day.

<07-20-16> I'm Scared Of Suffering I don't have much mental energy to write about anything today. I usually just let my mind flow and words come out giving details on my reflection of today's experience. But today, I don't feel like anything's coming out. I didn't even have the motivation to draw anything today. Oh well, at least I meditated properly, today. What's that about the title you ask? Well, I do remember thinking a lot about suffering and what it really is and how do I lessen it today and especially during the last few hours. But then again, everyone does not like to suffer so it's nothing special. But I do feel a lot more conscious with my suffering than with most people but that's a different topic.

@Lorcan There's a very simple yet tricky way to see if you're lying to yourself, raise awareness of your monkey mind! If you have a lot of monkey chatter, I can almost guarantee that you're going to lie to yourself about different things during the day and sometimes do some pretty irrational stuff on varying degrees. If you have little monkey chatter, that makes you a little closer to truth than most people.

<07-19-16> Close Encounters With Ego Kind I forgot my smartphone on my way to internship duty today. When I realized, I felt my emotional self fire up with anxiety, my mind jumped up and down like a monkey, worrying that maybe I didn't leave my phone behind, it may have actually dropped off my pocket somehow. Good news was it did turn out I forgot it at home and my irrational chimp mind couldn't help but fire up my lower self. Even after doing so much personal development work, I'm still amazed at how little psychological development I actually have. In fact, the more I grow with this journey with the help of Leo's content, the more I see how little growth I actually have. If I was more conscious, something as petty as losing my phone wouldn't bother me so much. I'm not even addicted to my phone, I don't even use the damn thing that much. It's just become so routine for me to bring it around whenever I go outside that the thought of doing something even slightly different from how I usually do things already feels threatening to me. On the brighter side of things, though. I'm not actually that worked up about it. I actually sort of accept and am not too emotionally guilted that my mind is still basically a chimp mind. I owe it mostly to my consciousness work. When that experience about forgetting to bring my phone happened this morning, I actually was able to become conscious of all the different thoughts and emotions that went on in my experience as it happened to the point where half the time, I didn't feel like I was suffering. Of course, I was not perfect at it, I did suffer a lot and I did have all these different negative thoughts come up, yelling at me for being careless. But ultimately, in the end I actually just felt it as just another experience. Really just another experience that happened, it wasn't bad, it wasn't something that shouldn't have happened, I still learned from it though. The aftermath of the experience, when I got back home and found my phone on my desk, was relief and for a while, I could actually feel emotional neutrality in my body and it was. . well . . peaceful. I didn't feel good or happy, I just felt nothing. My awareness started focusing on my vision for a while and my emotional center simply remained still, almost non-existent. So that ends my story of my close encounter with ego kind. I'm sure you can think of similar experiences in your life. I kind of like to know what your own experiences of your lower self do you remember vividly. If you're willing to share, go ahead and leave me a reply if you want.

@ZenBlue Good Luck, pal! What benefits can you say you've developed through meditation so far? Specifically the psychological benefits. Because that's ultimately what we want to get out of this habit, at least that's what I want anyway.

It's probably good advice to know that it's almost never a good idea to try to recruit someone engaging in low consciousness behavior into personal development work because it usually doesn't end well. Its common for these people to act offended, deny their need to improve, or at the very least just flat out ignore you. I've personally experienced these kind of reactions from people during my first months of personal development. I would like to know what your thoughts are on this topic though. My personal thoughts are: "It's good advice but there's a much bigger danger to not ever speaking about it. You can talk occasionally about personal development to people who need it but don't expect them to like what you have to say. Leave the information like a seed in their minds that may or may not grow into something useful someday."

<07-17-16> Perseverance, Patience, Persistence NEW INDIE GAME BLOG POST: LINK Whoops, I forgot to write this entry last night. Now I'm writing this about a half day too late. There are still stuff I want to say about yesterday, though, so I decided not to skip this one. Yesterday was a "good day". Not good in a sense that I felt good, it's just the day pretty much went as I planned. It was a Sunday and I wanted to take a break from all the things I work on during the week. I spent the morning working on promotional content for my game, though, made a few screenshots and recorded gameplay footage. In the afternoon, I went to the mall and played in the arcade for a long time. Then I got back home, edited the final gameplay video (I actually had fun doing it). I scheduled my day that way because at the time, that's what I felt I should do to make the day feel full of substance. But by the end of it all, especially after the mall time I spent, I still felt hollow inside. Then I watched Leo's newest video and I felt like I was blind-sided again by Leo's wisdom. This new video talked about something I have never heard before in my life. Why hasn't anyone else taught me this before? <07-18-16> Pain, Power, Pressure Things are getting really difficult now. Most of the things I thought I knew about reality are crumbling down if not already completely obliterated. Now, I just kind of realize how lost I am, and just how much pain and pressure I'm going to have to endure to have any sense of real life again. I'm hopeful, very hopeful, obviously. I'm not the type of guy who easily gives up. But I'm also not the type of guy who's used to extreme emotional labor. But then again, I highly doubt anyone I've ever met in real life can even begin to handle the stuff I've been through already so I do have some form of competence. Basically, what I'm trying to say is, I'm way too tired to really write about anything but my emotions and reflections today. I can't seem to focus on anything else but mindfulness work, too. Mindfulness or Consciousness work, in a kind of twisted way, is something I use to help me through the difficulty but at the same time, it is the reason why I'm even going through difficult challenges in the first place. Without it, I would still be a hedonistically-driven stimulation robot who really doesn't need any help with anything because I wouldn't be going through anything really demanding anyway. I can't think of anything else to write anymore. I hope I feel better tomorrow, to be honest.

Find my true self Express it ???

I think Leo would sooner become enlightened than make an episode on feminism anytime soon.

I'm pretty lazy when it comes to taking notes (although I do do it sometimes). Mostly I just listen then watch the video again on another day if I really want to internalize the message. Heck, sometimes, I'd even watch a third time but that's pretty rare.

<07-16-16> I'm pretty much getting to a point now that everything I see in the world, my behaviors, and just pure experience in general is directly affected by monkey chatter. I guess my mindfulness practice has really gotten my "being" to be very disconnected from my ego self-agenda. I find myself craving stimulation a lot more than I used to simply because I've been decreasing the amount of entertaining content I consume very drastically. I don't see the point of engaging in hedonistic behaviors anymore. Even a few months ago, I told my self that there is still some good side to having a little fun every now and again, especially with someone like me who suffers a lot from stress and anxiety issues. I used to tell myself that entertainment was a very easy and effective way to ease stress so I can end up being more productive. I was right about the "easy" part, but I was dead wrong with everything else. All these stimulating activities we engage in, most of which are perpetuated by modern day technology, are actually making our monkey minds feel more alive and excited. Not only does the result make us less productive, but monkey chatter keeps us too distracted to feel any sense of satisfaction in life, which is ultimately the entire reason we want to keep being productive and creating value in the first place, isn't it? As for stress and anxiety, well they are only temporary distractions. They can numb as emotionally to make us stressed out less and worry less but no amount of watching your favorite shows will ever make you realize that they're actually making you more miserable in the long term. You might be reading this right now and thinking "You don't need to tell me this. I already know how to properly moderate the stimulation I engage in to make sure I don't get distracted too much and still optimizing my level of happiness. Don't be such a smug arrogant smartass!" That is, assuming you are very unaware and probably have never tried doing mindfulness work in your entire life. (If that was an accurate representation of your thoughts as you read this, I strongly urge that you stop reading and ask yourself what on earth you're doing with your time) . . . actually, you know what?, I completely forgot where I was going with this paragraph. Nevermind. . . Anyway, long story short, practice of mindfulness to combat monkey mind turned out to be lot deeper and more profound than I originally thought. I found that raising awareness on monkey chatter does not actually weaken monkey chatter, it just makes it more apparent and less likely to trick you like it does to billions of people around the planet. I still don't know where this practice will take me in the next few months, though, let alone the entire fucking journey. But let's not think about the upcoming months, let's stay in the present. See you tomorrow, which does not exist because by the time tomorrow comes, it would have become the present.

@Leo Gura Sounds good. I've been practicing being more extroverted lately. It's a lot more difficult to do than I originally thought. I realized that it's quite challenging to act fully authentic in front of other people.

<07-15-16> Delayed Gratification I've been getting quite a bit of those "This is taking a really long time" moments. My ego wants perfect meditation skill NOW! Expert drawing skills NOW! A decent and uncomplicated way of living NOW! And most of all, it want my fucking indie game project to be finished NOW! To be really honest, I still find myself trying to accept just how slow the results I'm getting at personal development is. Don't get me wrong, I do love the stuff I've already got. Like, for example, an huge decrease for a need for entertainment of any kind which has given me more time to do more positive habits like creative work or reading books, and of course, mindfulness work. But my level of suffering and lack of happiness in life is still great. I still feel that I have a lot more years of pain and difficult growth to even feel anywhere near as good as I imagine is possible for a human being. And sometimes, thinking about how long it really is going to take can be emotionally painful to think about. On the other side of the coin, though. The fact that I recognize that it will take many years before the amazing results really start coming' actually gives me a little more motivation. It basically means that I'm not necessarily doing anything wrong. I'm likely headed in the right path but it's just a really really really long path. I just have to keep on pushing and take things on little by little instead of thinking I can accomplish everything within a year. Heck, I don't think my game project will be anywhere near done until next year but it's still worth working on. That's all for today. Until tomorrow. . .

<07-14-16> Slowly Realizing What Is Real My habit of having a minimalist entertainment routine seems to have opened up a pathway to a new perspective and a new way of living that is completely new to me. Even just 3 days of this has already given me more mental clarity to be more focused and achieve flow in whatever work I'm doing, it has helped me feel a lot more laid back although I still very much worry a lot, and most of all, I've begun to notice my monkey mind a bit more and not only mine but also other people's. Actually, especially other people's monkey mind, I can't help but notice everyone around me engaging in unconscious monkey mind behaviors. I'm glad that I only get to hear the monkey chatter that comes out of physical mouths because I world in which everyone's mental chatter was heard by other people as actual auditory sensation, then we would live in a significantly more chaotic planet. Basically, I want to say that I had a pretty quiet monkey mind today. I can't help but compare how my mind was like just months ago. I thought months ago, I was already conscious but I can see just how much monkey chatter was driving my behaviors back then. And I can't help but think about my future self looking back at this moment and noticing how relatively more monkey chatter there was right now than there is in his point in time. And ultimately, I've slowly been noticing what's actually real. I felt oddly absent in my meditation session today. It was like the person sitting there and experiencing the meditation was not there. But yet, it still felt like someone there exists and is aware of things happening in experience. I still can't seem to get to that fully aware point of becoming what is real. Right now, all I had was just a small realization. I want to keep going. I want to see what on earth is actually real and what is the truth.

<07-13-16> Can't Afford To Fuck About Anymore I can't afford to even spend an hour a day with entertainment anymore. Not with my current life mindset anyway. I've really been gaining awareness of my future for the past few days. Not in a neurotic way though but in a healthy way. I've been develop a higher tolerance for lack of titillation in favor of having a stronger work ethic and more importantly, having a much clearer head. I really wish I had this mindset years ago, I would have been exponentially more productive and a hell of a lot more happier for sure. I find myself slowly gravitating to what Leo said his life was like: boring. Not only do I perceive the world as quieter but I also feel like my mind is a lot calmer, almost like in a Zen state. I have gained a higher tolerance for pretty much any emotion I can think of and experience on a daily basis. If I had spent my past months just fuckin' about. Downloading entertainment via torrents and spending hundreds of hours playing video games, I would be so far down the "rabbit hole of unawareness" that I wouldn't even know I was falling. Again, a little reversal, I still am very much aware of how distracted I am on a minute-to-minute basis. I still very much have monkey mind which is constantly thinking about work and sometimes very petty stuff. And I do still very much enjoy a little entertainment every now again, except now it feels more like special occasions rather than daily habit. That's all for today. Don't forget to read about my personal indie game project in my blog. That would be really sweet!

<07-12-16> To Tube Or Not To Tube? I've been trying to pretend that YouTube doesn't exist lately. Basically, I've been trying reduce my habit of not only watching YouTube videos but even just checking the site which I normally would do regularly if I'm online. (I did check once today which, I'll be honest, I did feel a slight pang of guilt from) I didn't actively choose to do this, though. I just somehow feel like I'm naturally inclining to a life with less and less external distraction, although there are still a lot of it around me, cutting almost 90% of my YouTube habit is already a big plus to other aspects of my life that I've been wanting to distill. That's all I want to talk about today actually. I plan to doodle a bit in my sketchpad then go to bed quietly. Nighty night. . .

<07-11-16> Sacrificing a Lot Of "Fucking-About-Doing Stupid Stuff" Time I'm pretty sure I just spent the entire day with basically zero entertainment time. It's very rare when I have a day like this. In fact, I don't even remember the last time I've ever spent a day without entertainment at all, it feels like my first time. The more my life gets closer and closer to the more boring but natural lifestyle Leo keeps talking about, the more I just keep noticing everyone else's deep distraction in modern society. Don't take this the wrong way though. I still was very much distracted today. Entertainment is not the only source of distraction. I have an internship this week so working a lot to learn the necessary skills to accomplish the internship is putting my mind in distraction. Heck, I didn't even meditate properly today. One word: Mosquitos. They were everywhere and halfway through the meditation session I couldn't help but keep shooing them away by flailing my arms at them and at the 45 minute mark of my supposed-to-be one hour session, I gave up. I'm reminded of Leo's old "Lower Self vs. Higher Self" video where he talks about his experience dealing with insects during a meditation session. Long story short, today was a small step towards a big goal. A goal to just stop "fucking about" in my life and start living! Even after today, I still feel like I'm not even close to the kind of life that feels truly alive. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more work to do. REAL work. Mindfulness work. I'm going to sleep early too. Good night everyone.

<07-10-16> Fighting Comfort I'm going to be blunt here. All I want to talk about is Leo's new video. That's it. I have a new blog post but I'm going to say no more and just link to it. Leo's new video both helped me to stay on track while at the same time made me question if I know if I'm on the right track. At first, I thought that it would be just another self-affirming video I could use to keep myself away from the falsehoods and distractions in modern society, and it definitely did that, but it also made me realize just how much stupidity is going on in aspects of my current life strategy. Leo listed 10 things I really want and don't know I want and even though I fully believed him in everything he said, I still noticed just how ignorant I really am about how I should live my life. Right now, psychologically, I can see that I'm still attached to and am chasing: Stimulation, Achievement, Identity or Ego Aggrandizement, and above all, Comfort. Oh man, I just can't live without my comfort. Even though I always tell myself that I love pain and that I'm really hardcore and I do all of this difficult things, I still really hate to lose my comfort. I can't imagine being like a bum on the street who would have to beg for money so I can eat, that would be a complete nightmare to me. I am not talking about physical comfort, by the way, I'm talking about lifestyle comfort. One of the biggest problems I have in my life right now which goes against the 10 things Leo listed, is that I don't want to give up my lifestyle comfort. This means that I subconsciously try to defend any lifestyle or routine change. Especially if it would mean that some of my other false goals (Stimulation, Achievement, Identity) would be compromised. In fact, that's the entire reason why I want to keep my current lifestyle, because my current lifestyle, I can see, is me just chasing these things like a monkey chasing bananas all day. I want to be really strategic, and if I'm going to pull through with this goal, I really have to make sure that my current goals get shattered and exchanged with real goals. This, I find, is so important that I'm literally going to link to Leo's "10 Things You Want But Don't Know You Want" video 10 times to really get the point across that I really want to take this seriously.