r0ckyreed

Yeah. This can happen. You don’t want to complicate things to much. Your trying to conceptualize “work” too much when you need to have a direct experience of it. You are getting lost in your mind with different concepts. You have to see “work” around you and contemplate that. For instance, you may see people “working” and bees and butterflies “working.” Just observe the actual process of what “work” really is then ask more questions about “work.” Work ethic is a code and set of principles for how you use your energy. It is that simple. You don’t need to go into what code and principles are just yet. As long as you can grasp the essence of what work ethic is, you can then ask questions to contemplate deeper. Do animals have a work ethic? What is the importance of work ethic? How can I increase my work ethic? How does it relate to my life purpose? What is the opposite of work ethic? Why am I lazy and procrastinate? What are the obstacles to my work ethic? How is a bee able to have such a strong work ethic? What is the relationship between work ethic and survival? What are the most optimal principles that I could live by to increase the quality of my work/energy? These are a few examples to go around the iceberg, as well as penetrating deep down the iceberg. No. This is you getting lost in your mind. You have to focus on one topic of inquiry at a time. Use the example method I described above. You want to have a direct experience of it. You can always contemplate other topics that come up, such as what is direct experience? But don’t expect all your answers to be conceptual. You want the experience. To know what happiness is you have to experience it. Just defining happiness is not fully contemplating. Hope that helps.

Your own philosophy. Don’t limit yourself to one school of thought. Study all the schools of thought that you can and pick the gems you find resonate with you. Don’t be strictly Buddhist or strictly stoic or hedonist or nihilist or skeptic or solipsist or whatever. Study everything and just be you. Watch Cobra Kai on Netflix. Mr. Miyagi, a karate master, ultimately tells his student, Daniel to live by his own philosophy and make it his own. You have to see the creativity and ingenuity in just being yourself. It is so amazing that we would want to be somebody else other than ourself. Wonder about that. It boils down to finding out what you love most about life and doing that as much as you can.

Yes. You got it. Yes. You got it. Yes! Way to go. Get out of your head for a little bit and into your heart. Go out and have a little bit of fun by yourself. Go to a zoo. Go to a national park. Go to a nearby nature trail or lake or whatever. Feel what it is like to be a kid and have sex with life itself and see what you reproduce. Following your passion for career takes time. In the meantime, give yourself some self-care and feel alive. If you can let yourself go towards your highest excitement, you will have the energy, inspiration, and insights to do what you need to do.

You don’t. You only have today that is guaranteed. What do you want to do today? Focus your heart fully on what you can do today. You are living it. You gotta be clear about what you want. Be a leader of yourself and be a disciple to your heart’s desires. Act on your highest inspiration. Only you can know what that is. Explore why you backslide. You seem to have the answer in that you need a sense of direction. Get out a journal and write down your goals and dreams. If you don’t know them the write down your past dreams or read biographies of others can help. That’s the challenge in life. Ambiguity is part of this journey. You gotta be clear about what is right for you. Life is meaningless, which means that the only right path is the path you wish to lead. It takes time to sort out confusion. Take it baby step at a time. It sounds like you are focusing on the marathon instead of on the step before you. None. You want to be a leader and not a follower. Deconstruct religion. Live by your own principles or you will never be able to follow your own dreams. Live by your own philosophy and not someone else’s. Sounds like myself. It seems like you have fallen into the same trap I did, which is you have “put the cart before the horse.” You have focused on answering existential questions so much that you probably haven’t given your personal survival the same focus. Go on a vision quest and search for these answers. Nobody can tell you want your personal/career holy grail is. Treat your personal life with the same attitude you treat philosophical questions. Edit: I know your future may be filled with a lot of insecurities, but you are not alone. You can be secure in knowing that everyone is insecure. That’s my thoughts on all this. You can take it or leave it. Best wishes.

For me, it is acting from inspiration rather than force/fear/obligation. When you act from your highest desire and inspiration, you are positively motivated to achieve your goal. It’s about going after what you love rather than avoided what you hate. You will find resistance lower significantly if you choose the former. True. But is it done out of love or fear? Be clear on that distinction. Success to me is simply being able to do what you love most.

By having an awakening to what is true. When you have a true awakening, there isn’t any doubt in your mind. If there is doubt, then you know you have to go deeper. But beyond spirituality, you have to cross-reference from many perspectives to see where your “knowledge” falls in place. A good place to start is admitting that you don’t know and could be deluded. Most deluded people assume they know, and people who are wise question if they are deluded. You don’t. Knowing is itself a dualist thing that you need to transcend to reach higher states of mind. Knowing and knower are one. Being is more fundamental. Direct experience is all you have. Concepts are what is fooling you, which is why we have reality. Your sleeping dreams are as true as this life now. Your mind draws the lines between reality and dreams. Your direct experience may suggest that the sun rises and sets, but your direct experience can also tell you that the earth is rotating rather than sun moving. You see? You cannot get beyond consciousness. To know if your senses are “deluded” implies using your mind to construct that distinction. How you gonna tell a flat earther that the earth is round? Through direct experience from a certain point of view. That is what you got here. Direct experience from a certain point of view. This requires an alternative state of consciousness. It takes a raising of consciousness to realize how your mind fools you and deludes you. There are many layers in which your mind fools you. At certain states, it is hard to see the level of deception, which is why Trump and conspiracy theorists (flat earthers, etc.) are at such a low level of consciousness. The short answer is consciousness and a raising of it.

Work on improving your falsetto for massive results. Chest voice is your natural voice. Working on falsetto not only strengthens your head register, but also your chest voice as well. Be sure to warm up your chest and mix before doing falsetto, as you could potentially lose range in your chest/mix without proper warmup.

Yup. No problem. My favorites were the first 3 Harry Potter PC games.

1. Uncharted 4 2. Life is Strange 1 3. The Last of Us Part 2 4. Skyrim 5. Black Ops Zombies 6. Star Wars Jedi Academy 7. Old School Runescape 8. Harry Potter PC 9. Pirates Online

The deepest love I received from my parents was them making me feel special and gifted. They made me feel like a hero to them, and they would engage in fantasy play with me as a kid. I think a big thing was trust. I felt like I could trust my parents and they could trust me. However, it was different with my sister. My parents making me feel special and gifted ended up making me become an asshole in my life. My high self-efficacy turned into narcissism. Narcissism definitely plagued my psyche throughout my life until my freshman year in college. The specific ways that it backfired was I was always competing with everyone, which led me to have hardly any friends. My sister wanted to spend time with me as a kid, but I was so competitive that I kind of drove her away. To this day, I have a great relationship with my sister, and this is in part because I have changed such that I was more open and humble about my flaws and mistakes, and I started to make other people feel special and gifted like the way I felt. Some ways that I did this was through magic tricks. I initially did tennis and magic for selfish reasons. Magic was to help me to make friends in school, but I eventually did magic because I liked how I could make people feel. This led me on to getting a master's degree in mental health counseling as an existential therapist. But in my childhood, my parents gave me everything that I wanted really. I was spoiled, but I had deep respect and listened to their wisdom. I think what helped me to respect them the most was the fact that I knew they respected and loved me. I always felt accepted and belonged. I felt so accepted by my parents that when I went on to Boy Scout campy, I became homesick because I missed my parents. Some of the small things that made me feel accepted and loved was the fact that my parents would do literally everything for me. My dad would always get me up in the morning and make me waffles, eggs, pancakes, etc. My dad would take me out for tennis lessons, trumpet lessons, etc. My mom would support me as well. Looking back, I realized that I spent a lot of time with my dad, and I wished I had spent more time with my mom. My mom's job was not as flexible though so that complicated things. Whenever I was sick, my dad would take off work to care for me. The deepest love I received and still receive is having all my needs provided to me. I feel so deeply loved by my parents that I still live with them today. I have never left my home because it feels so much like home. A downside to all of this is that my parents never taught me how to be independent. Like I said, I was spoiled, but I was taught that my opportunities given were a privilege, and I was taught to have gratitude and good manners. What helped me understand this was being exposed to a variety of cultures throughout my life. Ever since I was around 9 years old, my family would go to Mexico every year. We experienced great delights, but I also remember seeing the poverty that people had to live through. This helped me to gain more appreciation of what I had. My parents also showed me great love by the education that they gave me. They told me at an early age what sex and drugs were about and to avoid them. My dad shared with me many of his mistakes. He was so vulnerable with me about his stupid errors that made me respect him and listen to him. I learned a lot of what not to do from my dad's stories. With my mom, she advocated for me all throughout school because of my ADHD. I could sense how much my mom cared for me by her being assertive to make sure I was treated fairly at school. I felt like both my mom and dad had my back, and I could always go to them for help. I typically go to my mom for emotional problems, as she is a therapist herself. My mom and my dad have always empowered me and highlighted my strengths such as being passionate, ambitious, hard worker, etc. They have always encouraged me to succeed in my dreams. I had dreams of being a professional tennis player and trumpet player at around age 11-12. My parents showed me love by encouraging me to fulfill my dreams, and they never told me I could not achieve my dreams. I know some parents may discourage their kids, saying "you will never amount to that ..., etc." In addition, they helped me reframe many negative experiences I have had into positive ones. Having ADHD and being held back in school were some struggles I was faced with and embarrassed by initially, but my parents had me see my ADHD and being held back as strengths. Other ways were my dad spending many nights helping me with my homework. I realize now how much I took this for granted because after a long day of work, it can be hard to help a child with their school work. What my mom and dad did to help me with my school work showed that I was worth their time. I never felt like I wasn't worthy to them. They always made me feel worthy by verbally expressing that they are proud of me for my accomplishments. They were always quick to compliment. The big takeaway from this exercise for me is that I felt the most love from my childhood when my parents and sister treated me special with respect, provided my basic needs, recognized and highlighted my strengths, provided time for me, and encouraged me to follow and actualize my dreams. I think a theory of love based off of the common themes of my childhood is that the deepest love comes from making others feel special. Ways to do this are to highlight their strengths, express they are worthy of your time, and encourage them to be themselves and follow their dreams. Just giving positive attention to someone is enough to make them feel special. EDIT: Love to me boils down to making other people feel like they can be themselves around you, as well as helping others to bring about the best in themselves. This first starts with me being authentic first but authenticity is another matter entirely to contemplate.

Nobody. The only person who can awaken is You. The question already assumes duality to be true and other selves existing. There is only the One Self.

Leisure or technology/social media slavery. I know it can be difficult and draining at job slavery. Your leisure time is time to have fun and do things that level you up to escape all slavery. It is easy to turn your leisure time into another form of slavery. If your leisure time isn’t helping you, I would consider it a form of slavery. No amount of social media use can get you to escape wage slavery unless that is your side gig for making money. However, most people don’t use social media in a conscious way to make money, they use it to kill time as a form of drug.

Having the freedom to be in solitude, particularly in nature. Don’t have one. True freedom to me is not following a schedule. It is to be able to follow my intuition at any given moment. Routine can be beneficial, but not for creativity and spontaneity. There comes a point when too much meditation stops being productive. I personally only do formal meditation for 10-20 minutes every other day. I think you could try 20 minutes meditation and try some other practices like contemplation and reading books. Read my post on Long-Term Meditation is Crap to understand more on what I mean.

Idk. Why don’t you contemplate that.

Evil is like poop. You may not like it, but it is part of you. Evil is part of infinity like poop is part of you. Without it, there is no you and no reality. Everything that you see, smell, taste, feeling, hear, and think of is always a part of you. All of them together make up a you. One main purpose of life is learning to love yourself. This means to fall in love with yourself and see the beauty that you are. You aren’t just a human, you are everything.

The perception of evil and wrongness is what I think can lead to a lot of suffering. Total peace to me is feeling complete and marveling at the perfection and beauty of reality. To me, suffering is when you see evil all around you; thus, ceasing to see the magic of reality. But there are many forms and degrees of suffering. Suffering isn’t necessarily good or evil in the same way that anger isn’t necessarily good or evil. I personally prefer to not experience suffering or anger but that is one of my biases.

Evil doesn’t exist. Evil isn’t the absence of love. Evil is love such that you cannot call it evil. A rock isn’t evil. A hand isn’t evil. A knife isn’t evil. A human shooting a gun at a rock isn’t evil. A bird eating a snake isn’t evil. A human eating a bird isn’t evil. A human eating another human isn’t evil. The location of evil is in your mind. Evil is always an abstract concept for the benefit of your survival. Notice how emotional you are and get on this topic. What makes killing an animal good and a human evil? What is wrong with cannibalism? If you are honest and if you wake up, you will see there is nothing wrong with the world. Evil is the belief there is something wrong when there really isn’t. Evil doesn’t exist because evil is the perception of wrongness in the world when such a thing doesn’t even exist. If the earth blew up tomorrow, it would be insignificant to the vast infinite universe. Thanos murdered half of all life out of love. As long as you perceive evil in the world, you will never awaken to experience the infinite beauty and love of existence. The concept and perception of evil is your obstacle, your ultimate gateless gate that needs to be deconstructed as part of your journey to awaken from this dream.

The end of the Contemplation video.

The realization that you are God is all you need. Everything is infinite beauty, infinitely perfect, infinitely divine, and a reflection of yourself. What is so astonishing is that one could take the magic of reality for granted, and thus, not see the magic. It blows my mind how unaware most people are. I find it amazing how even I, myself, having knowing this and experiencing it, can easily slip back into unawareness of the magic, where I take the miracle of existence for granted. That should be enough to interest your friends. You don’t need a crash course. It is better if it comes from you than some video. To answer your question though, The Book of Not Knowing and Leo’s video on Life is a Maze will be sufficient.

After beating the game Life is Strange (one of the best game I have ever played by the way), it got me thinking about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Every small choice leads to huge outcomes such as a butterfly flapping its wings could create a hurricane across the world (hypothetically speaking). If you have played the video game, Life is Strange you will know what I am talking about. This has led me to feel so much gratitude towards life. It made me appreciate being a human and not having any superpowers. If you were to ask me what superpowers I would have wanted, I would have said time manipulation, but after playing that game, I experienced the total beauty and perfection of reality. It is so amazing that life supports all types of organisms all in balance and harmony. What do you all think of Chaos Theory?

If you don’t have time to read thoroughly, read the bottom part and my questions in bold. I have been meditating since 2018. The main benefits I have gained from meditation are calmness, responsiveness, and a sense of control over my emotions. I have noticed that it has helped me to focus more on the positive and not be dragged by negative thoughts. However, after meditating for long periods of time, I have noticed that my memory has decreased since I have been meditating for long periods of time (more than 20 minutes a day). I have also noticed that it can be hard to visualize things and be creative because I’m so used to bringing my attention back to the present moment. But there was also times for meditation has helped me to be more creative as well but not nearly enough. I think a big part of memory is thinking and thought rehearsal. When you meditate for long periods of time your mind shuts down which I found it good for being at peace with the present moment but meditation alone does not help you to be able to think deeper. Contemplation and deep thinking is some thing that has to be developed as another skill aside from meditation. I have come to the conclusion that long periods of meditation is actually worse for you and your personal development than if you were to spend that time contemplating present moment. Don’t get me wrong meditation is a very powerful skill that has been helpful as part of my emotional mastery quest, but I think that counting your breaths alone, labels, mantras, etc. for a long period of time can actually be detrimental to your cognitive, intellectual m, and creative functions of your mind. If all you do is silence your mind, then how can you ever explore it fully and know how to use it deliberately? When I meditate now, I only do it for short periods like 10 minute sits to still my mind to the present moment. After that, I start to use my mind to contemplate existential and personal topics that fascinate me, topics that I have been avoiding, and topics that I deeply fear. Meditation is a good reminder to be aware of the present moment. It has helped me to gain more self-awareness and observation skills in general of both the external and internal worlds. However, I love to think. My thoughts are rarely negative at all. I think a lot of people meditate to silence negative thinking, but what they don’t realize is that they are also silencing positive and potentially creative thinking as well. I love using my imagination. I love thinking deeply about life. I find much more creativity, inspiration, and insight from that than from 4 hours of sitting trying to bring thoughts back to my breath or repeating a mantra. I honestly feel like long-term meditation has made me dumb in some ways and also more aware of the now as well. I have found it difficult to think and visualize because I am so used to bringing it back to my breath. I have realized that mindwandering and daydreaming are so important and crucial to creativity. If you suppress that through long-term meditation, you will see the consequences. With all this in mind, what do you think? Why would anyone really want to silence their mind or have No-Mind? Edit: The deepest insights I have ever attained came from deep contemplations and asking questions. I guess contemplation could be technically called analytical meditation if you want to be technical about that. When I refer to meditation, I am talking about non-analytical forms of it such as anapanasati, do-nothing, vipassana, etc.

Thanks. Still trying to be as clear as possible. Thanks for your feedback and support. Throughout my life, my mind has pretty much always been good master. Logic, rationality, and the intellect have been my superpowers that have set me apart from most of my peers throughout school. I was fortunate to have the wisdom to learn from others mistakes and to weigh the pros and cons of any endeavor. In terms of existential thinking, I have been naturally contemplating since I was very young. At around age 4, I remember questioning the religious God and how the religious God could create itself. You are right. I was using meditation so intensively like a whole that I stopped thinking for a while. I was actually convinced by other Buddhist and spiritual teachers that thinking is dangerous and not thinking is good. But that is an ignorant position to hold as I see now. Actuality is important, but imagination is part of actuality. It is easy to dismiss the value of thoughts as being fantasy or whatever, but if I am always in actuality and suppressing thoughts, I will be dumber by that. Intellectual understanding, knowledge, and wisdom is something I value. Meditation is good for connecting to the intuition but I feel like a big part of reality is missing if that is all I focus on. Meditation alone is not holistic enough to attain the deepest understanding of reality. Took me 4 years to realize that. I agree. You cannot survive without thought. Knowledge is limited without it as well. My bullshit detector has also been activated as well. Maybe I am missing something or not, but I feel like a whole world is lost without thought.

I agree! Appreciate your insights. Yeah. I want to learn more how I can function with a silent mind. This is a growing area for me for sure.

I totally see that. One of my big fears is to lose my intellectual, cognitive, memory aspects of my mind. I know that this is of course a fear to work on and transcend whenever I am ready. I already noticed slight memory decreases in part because I was trying to have no-mind throughout my day. This helped me realize how important thought is to survival, memory, imagination, intellect, etc. Of course, it is also good to learn to silence it as well but for me I am not striving for long-term silence. Yeah. This happens to me all the time. After sitting for 5-10 minutes of counting breaths, mantra, or whatever I am doing in meditation, I always get fascinating and creative thoughts that I think come “purposely” to stop me from meditating. It almost makes me just want to switch to analytical meditation (A.K.A contemplation). Whenever I do try to bring my awareness back to my breath over and over again, I tend to forget those thoughts. It is like trying to recall a dream. If I don’t engage with it and write it down soon, it will be forgotten. Yeah. I totally get that. I am very attached to creative intellectual work. It is kind of like my love for life. Thinking, imagination, and contemplation are what I love most about life. However, I also aspire to become a sage and be highly spiritually developed, which to me is more about having the highest possible understanding, strong intellect, wisdom, and emotional mastery. At this point in my life, I think it is important to focus more on my strengths such as contemplation and developing my thinking mind, while also spending some time each day meditating. I think a new rule for me is that if I meditate for 20 minutes, I will contemplate for 20 minutes. I meditated for one hour days for about 30 days back in 2021. My mistake was not also balancing contemplative practices with meditation. If I neglect time for deep, existential thinking, then this part of my psyche will lose its strength as I have noticed. All of those sound good lol. That is part of my issue. I have a lot of things I want to work towards that require contrasting approaches. I definitely appreciate this feedback on being more clear about what I want out of life and when it comes to spirituality. The greatest insights I have attained came from contemplation. The greatest peace for me came through meditation. I guess I am just looking at it too dualistically. The 5 main things that I really want are: 1. Spirituality A. Gain the highest wisdom and levels of understanding possible through natural means at this point (no psychedelics right now). In addition, I want a deep spiritual connection to reality such that I see infinite beauty even in a dog turd. B. This means I need to carve more time to be in solitude to contemplate and meditate. My goal is at least one solid hour during the week days to go for nature walks, bring a journal, and contemplate. 2. Education A. Gain highest knowledge I can about life. Become life-long learner, which means to read a lot of books, personal research/study, and writing, journaling and reflection. B. This means I need to let go of or spend less time on video games, movies, media, and technology in general. 3. Health A. Being able to attain the greatest fitness, health, and strength possible. B. This means to maintain a good diet and cut out the junk food I eat. This also means exercising more often. 4. Career A. Having a career that is alignment with my spirit and life calling. I want my career, life calling, etc. to be centered around my contribution to nature. I want to work and be active outdoors and not be inactive indoors in some office. 5. Financial freedom A. Being able to have “enough” money to where I can have the freedom to not worry about money and be able to have the freedom to travel. Thanks so much. I have a better idea of what I need to do now! I got a lot of work to do lol. I guess meditation will be my guide to not be so overwhelmed with what I want to accomplish.

Just watched the movie Turning Red and it helped me understand this paradox more. I gotta learn to embrace both like yin yang. I tend to go all in on one thing. It is about learning to accept all the parts of myself. There is no unity in thinking without quietude. How I incorporate this practically is another journey to walk.