IJB063

Anyway I'm going to bed it eleven and I got shit to do tomorrow, and I've spent the last hour and a half going over the "overcoming addiction" video and my book notes, so anyway goodnight & godspeed

Shouldn't we attempt to explicate this feeling, this is the entire point of actualised.org, to attempt to convey the physiology of ego dissolution.

@Natasha Thanks for the recommendation of "The Root Cause of Every Addiction and on Distraction." video, I've listened to it twice to day and I can see why you come back to it. It literally the perfect recommendation for what I wanted so cheers, its really appreciated. So above I linked the video to the timestamp where @Leo Gura diagnoses the root cause of addiction. I linked Leo if he sees this because I've just last Sunday finished Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer and I found it eerie the parallels made by Leo and Schopenhauer in his essay "The Vanity of Existence" in this essay to the point it sent shivers down my spine, and gave me that light bulb moment I was looking for, so maybe Leos interested in the similarity's. I recommend reading the link of the essay below and watching the video and comparing the points made. I think its important to mention Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the first Western Philosophers who took seriously Eastern Philosophy and traditions and venerated them. The entire point of the video (I think Leo's making) is that the fear of boredom stems from an fundamental existential dread that we run away from in the form of distractions, this "emptiness of existence" which Schopenhauer instead uses the term "vanity of existence", the two mean similar things. Here's the essay link, its not the original, but I can't be bothered to transcribe from the book the exact quotations so I'm just gonna copy and paste here, its a simplified and shortened version of the essay. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vanity_of_Existence "In the ever-passing present moment as the only mode of actual existence; in the interdependence and relativity of all things; in continual Becoming without ever Being; in constant wishing and never being satisfied; in the long battle which forms the history of life, where every effort is checked by difficulties, and stopped until they are overcome. Time is that in which all things pass away" The quote above is practically making the same point about the transient present that we empty to escape from, Leo makes this point at the 10 minute mark 10:00 "You can't really be satisfied in life without sitting in an empty room without cravings" - Leo "The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present--the ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops" "The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off. So, to gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim: they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed, was just the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!" "Life presents itself chiefly as a task--the task, I mean, of subsisting at all, gagner sa vie. If this is accomplished, life is a burden, and then there comes the second task of doing something with that which has been won--of warding off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure from need. The first task is to win something; the second, to banish the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden" 13:00 "You can't fill that emptiness of being with more doing or with material external passions or activity, no matter how much you try you can't do it" - Leo "The nature of being itself is emptiness" - Leo This is why at the deepest level I think boredom is uncomfortable because boredom is the realization of the emptiness of existence. 14:28 "Nature of being itself is emptiness but see most people don't like this idea at first it seems kind of negative and it seems depressing actually it's not it's a very beautiful and incredible experience to fully realize the emptiness of being and to be one with it this is a very profound experiences of what spirituality is based upon but most people aren't mature enough to grasp this" - Leo "And even sensual pleasure itself means nothing but a struggle and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is attained. Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast upon existence itself, its vain and worthless nature is brought home to us; and this is what we mean by boredom. The hankering after what is strange and uncommon--an innate and ineradicable tendency of human nature--shows how glad we are at any interruption of that natural course of affairs which is so very tedious." 19:15 This is where Leo gives the solution to all addiction which is to sit with the emptiness of existence. 23:00 Amazing quote on the very basis of this addiction, is the avoidance of the realization of our ambiguous, fleeting and dream like existence, and instead we choose to distract ourselves with base hedonic pursuits. This is the fundamental root of addiction, and that this is why we can't cure our addictions by doing the very thing that caused them in the first thing. This bit of the video was an epiphany moment and ties in great with my book notes. I think tying in with my current reading of Mastery, the avoidance of boredom and the avoidance of the emptiness of existence is in it of its self the tool to reclaim that "first time childlike intense magic experience", as what sitting does chip away those layers of ego as @Gili Trawanganmentions but bring about that necessary silence as to hear the noise that is the primal core of your being that actually gives life meaning, if that makes any sense. Here some quotes on found in my googling “Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.” - Kierkegaard “Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.” - Schopenhauer “Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.” - Schopenhauer "Want and Boredom are the twin poles of human life" - Schopenhauer Thanks again for the responses

I've just started reading a book called "Mastery" by Robert Greene on my commute to and from college, found and highlighted bits in this passage that relates to this topic of how to have the that "childlike intense experience". Robert says that most people experience this intense experience and it takes the form of a idiosyncratic interest in our lives, which emerge particularly in our childhood. "For Einstein, it was not physics but a fascination with invisible forces that governed the universe; for Bergman, it was not film but the sensation of creating and animating life; for Coltrane, it was not music but giving voice to powerful emotions." We lose touch with this experience because of the conditions of our lives. Found a really good Charles Bukowski quote on this “Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?” So here are the quotes from the book. "Eventually, you will hit upon a particular field, niche, or opportunity that suits you perfectly. You will recognize it when you find it because it will spark that childlike sense of wonder (note this isn't in the quote, but this was what I was trying to get at when I started this thread) and excitement; it will feel right. Once found, everything will fall into place. You will learn more quickly and more deeply. Your skill level will reach a point where you will be able to claim your independence from within the group you work for and move out on your own. In a world in which there is so much we cannot control, this will bring you the ultimate form of power. You will determine your circumstances." "These childhood attractions are hard to put into words and are more like sensations—that of deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power, and heightened awareness. The importance of recognizing these preverbal inclinations is that they are clear indications of an attraction that is not infected by the desires of other people. They are not something embedded in you by your parents, which come with a more superficial connection, something more verbal and conscious. Coming instead from somewhere deeper, they can only be your own, reflections of your unique chemistry." "As you become more sophisticated, you often lose touch with these signals from your primal core. They can be buried beneath all of the other subjects you have studied. Your power and future can depend on reconnecting with this core and returning to your origins. You must dig for signs of such inclinations in your earliest years. Look for its traces in visceral reactions to something simple; a desire to repeat an activity that you never tired of; a subject that stimulated an unusual degree of curiosity; feelings of power attached to particular actions. It is already there within you. You have nothing to create; you merely need to dig and refind what has been buried inside of you all along. If you reconnect with this core at any age, some element of that primitive attraction will spark back to life, indicating a path that can ultimately become your Life’s Task." So I prefer the reframing of the childhood wonder to "primal core" as it comes across as less pathetic (not saying its pathetic just saying thats the way it comes across), its I feel esoteric to say I want to regain that "childhood wonder" and most people will see it as wanting to escape responsibilities of adulthood, which I obviously do not want to do, I instead just want to find something I'm genuinely interested in, the way Robert frames it in this book, as Leo puts it to have fresh new eyes on life. Though there's nothing necessarily wrong with those childlike desires and framing of the world like @Codrina mentions & and I feel you're dead right with people longing for what there missing, I was yesterday listening to this BBC 2 interview on youtube of Russel Brand interviewing Steve Morrissey and he makes the exact point you're making so I had to screenshot the time stamp for the video, if you're interested links below, starting where Morrissey makes the point.

@Mongu9719 Yeah, they probably really are the best ways to readjust, I'm gonna stay away from psychedelics for awhile though, they tend to cause more problems for me than they solve, I'm starting to do meditation more seriously and holotropic breathwork, Wim Hof....

I don't believe that you can talk without thinking, thought is by its nature a prerequisite to speech, as Seneca said "Speech is the mirror of the mind" Thoughts just arise in consciousness and you have no direct control over what you think next "Reading and learning are things that anyone can do of his own free will; but not so thinking. Thinking must be kindled, like a fire by a draught; it must be sustained by some interest in the matter in hand. This interest may be of purely objective kind, or merely subjective. The latter comes into play only in things that concern us personally. Objective interest is confined to heads that think by nature; to whom thinking is as natural as breathing; and they are very rare. " The point of the quote above is that if you want to gain more control over your thought process it must be "kindled", meaning meditate and ruminate more

Yes, penis size does matter. There’s nothing more graphic an indicator of a guys sexual prowess than his length. The insecurity does have a basis, but its pointless to worry about because your penis size cannot be changed, so accept whatever you've been endowed with. The question wouldn't be so consistently asked "does penis size matter" if it didn't matter, and penis size wouldn't be used so commonly as a school yard insult if it in no way represented that mans manhood or if women had no a physical prerequisite for a man size. If a girl likes you it won't matter, if you're unlucky learn to compensate in other areas. "It’s interesting that men will acknowledged height as a physical prerequisite for most women, but will readily reject the size of his tool as being one as well."