trenton

April 26, 2020 Today I maintained the typical attitude that I am constantly happy. Leo's video revealed that I was too attached to right and wrong, and thus overestimated how open minded I am. This is a skill that needs further development. The rest of the day was nothing special, and I notice myself losing interest in some of this work. I feel like I get sucked into my mind so much that I am run by many impulses. I have been getting a little bit better at listening to people, but I still slide. I am curious about what am I doing when I get thrown into my thoughts and chase and cling. This is often what it leads too. At the core of my thoughts, spirituality, God, Love and similar things are what my thoughts are about through most of any day. I am not clear if this is going astray, creating false growth, limiting me, or a sign of what I think is important. The meta problem may be monkey mind prior to any of the content. The challenging thing about my mind is that I am so happy that it leaves me unfocused. Is this true happiness? Is it a problem? My peers think it is weird that I am always happy, and I am not upset with them for thinking this. I often make them happy too because they do not understand how I am always happy. This is a recurring issue that I have not clarified or resolved. Nobody in my life has been as helpful as my own self reflection and this is how I intend to tackle this. I love you as far as I am capable.

April 25, 2020 My father has cancer and is expected to die in 2 or 3 days. He is so sick that he could not get out of bed. This was a chance for me to express the highest capacity for love that I could possibly imagine. I wrote him a letter, and made sure he knew that nothing mattered to me because I will always love him. I observed everything that happened to me and I was okay. I accepted all of my emotions and did not judge anyone for anything. It is like creating a peaceful circle within yourself where criticism is seen to pull you away from truth. Talking with other people does not really change how I react to the situation. We did not really do much except hang out with the family. Everything is fine.

April 24, 2020 Today felt pretty boring for several parts because I had nothing major to do, and I could not go far because of corona. I cut the grass and went on some walks. Hardly any people were out and about. As I walked I observed and reflected on what my thoughts and emotions were doing as usual. I noticed this self acceptance I experienced for the past few days started to become more anxiety ridden and toxic. It has been healing, but it is time to let it go. I may come back later if I wish, but this way of being was becoming more invasive, and it is time for it to die. The new status quo which conflicted with the previous status quo and it left me uncertain of which direction to go. I am starting to doubt that there is a direction to move in and it makes me uncomfortable. I played some chess and encountered a titled player ranked around 8800th in the world. I struggled to find good squares for my pieces, revealing the weaknesses in my positional understanding. His main advice was to make sure I study everything about chess. Anything that is useful at all. I was unable to equalize, and he beat me. I then was paired with a weaker opponent and won easily. As for the new course, I am enjoying the practical part where I am finding multiple solutions to the same position. Fischer made some interesting moves that felt unnatural to me, but they make sense. It helps me to improve my positional understanding. Later I read the book of not knowing and read about finding the real self. An interesting idea which might not be true that I have is the relation between self and reality. If reality cannot be gripped without lying, I am left with empty awareness. This makes my sense of reality similar to my sense of self. This makes me think maybe I am not a thing that can be gripped or I am reality. It does not feel true, probably because it is not the sort of thing I would naturally assume. You are okay.

I'm just curious if you guys ever feel this way. Over the past few days self reflection has been becoming deeper and more intense. I confronted my fear of losing my grip on reality because this fear is the cause of lying. I notice myself becoming less interested in other habits like chess because I am absorbed in self reflection changing my entire relation to reality. I become less interested in criticizing others, and many habits are happening to me automatically. I meditate and do yoga automatically while accepting everything more and more deeply. This brings me in closer alignment with what is. Do you guys ever feel like you are in some kind of hypnosis? Control is also being surrendered and I accept without fear my confusion and uncertainty.

April 23, 2020 Today I had a breakthrough in consciousness. I realized that the source of my self deception is my failure to accept that I cannot grip reality without lying. I knew this for a while, but I was finally accepting that no amount of ideology could save me from the groundlessness of reality. This is the reason relativism terrified me so much, but eventually my fear passed. I also recognized a limitation of spiritual teachings. I asked Leo why contradictory beliefs make me angry and he said it that I was lying to believe in reality. I knew this deep down, but I forgot and I turned relativism into an ideology in an attempt to ground myself in a sense of reality. I'm terms of other gurus, no matter how wide they seem, I ultimately don't know if what they are saying is true. Finally, I struggle to get answers from asking the forum or any other human beings who are too threatened to face a can of worms like this. From this experience I have further deconstructed authority as my own self reflection is as far as I can be conscious of anything the teachings describe. I am thinking to myself that maybe I should not tell people about these things because it might terrify people who are not ready to surrender to this. It could cause people an existential crisis. As the day passed I became sick to my stomach, and could not focus. I contemplated my rationalizing and how it lead to more lying. I would like to surrender this tendency to justify my beliefs and choices. Fundamentally none of it is true. I also noted yesterday and remembered today that philosophical mental masturbation is caused by using one's own truth seeking to build elaborate theories and actively avoid confronting truth out of selfishness. I'm sure there was a few more things I am not mentioning, but I accepted that my sickness was beyond my control, and it limited me from reflecting further. I surrendered to the pain which caused it to flow faster, but it felt like it hurt. I'm not yet sure about the idea "pain does not actually hurt". If this is true then pain is a very difficult and powerful illusion to see through. For now I found a way to make pain flow through me faster. I love you.

April 22, 2020 So much happened, but I struggle to remember it all. One of the challenges is that I often have more insights as I lay in bed after typing all of this. I can remember what happened last night. First, I recognized that I labeled some masks false self because of a state which I am attached to. It was partially motivated by truth when I used the label as well. In any case, I had a preference for inner peace and the absence of the masks. This leads to self deception because I am not that state. I had fear of regression into my previous lies as this pleasantness built upon lies unraveled. The duality of true vs. false self began to blur as the label false self became shaky. I also recognized another source of fear and an interesting paradox. If I cling to a certain state, then changing the state becomes a threat which thus prevents inner peace. Similarly, beliefs can be used to increase or decrease fear. This is problematic because changing my beliefs becomes a threat which I fear. I started to contemplate and observe fear as I recognized how I was creating it. I remembered how a marine could be trained to resist torture. This seems like an interesting way to overcome our fear. I considered my fear of sharp objects and imagined a sergeant who trained people to resist torture. He swung the knife around as I observed fear in this visualization exercise. I considered my fear of murdering other humans. I visualized myself holding a gun to the sergeant for a while. I felt moral anxiety about committing murder. I hesitated to pull the trigger, but I did and it turned out it was not really loaded. He also held me at gun point when I noticed I was more afraid of pain than death. I more deeply realized that murder is not wrong and it is an acceptable feature of reality. I use visualization exercises to observe my emotions, understand relativism, reduce bigotry, and sometimes to pass time in a productive way. You may question the fourth because if my goal is to understand myself, then a drawback is that I become absorbed in my imagination to the point that In start to identify with the scenarios and the person I imagine I am. This may not accurately represent me. Therefore, the fruits of such exercises may be minuscule. I think it works best for understanding relativism, like imagining what worldview you would have if you were born in ancient Egypt. In the exercise I did, moral relativism revealed that "murder is wrong" is not really true. A less related point is on the topic of spiritual ego. I noticed that this forum promotes the idea that spiritual ego should be frowned upon. This becomes moralizing. It can lead to repression of spiritual ego which is revealed through unconscious speech. I considered posting a critic of the forum that criticism of spiritual ego is itself spiritual ego. My criticism of the criticism is also spiritual ego. Ultimately I just let it go and did not need to organize the criticism. I felt that I was constraining myself by clinging to my spiritual ego, and it lead to lying and suffering. I noticed something difficult to describe. Letting go comes from acceptance even if it is acceptance of my clinging and suffering I experience. Accepting myself the way I am and loving myself for who I am allows me to change by letting go of the thing I was attached to. "I am who I am" became an ideology. I don't need the ideology, but "I don't need it" becomes ideology. The less I cling to these ideas, the more free and open I can become. The belief that it is better to be free of ideology is a problem should I judge the presence of ideology in myself. It is not wrong to be an ideologue. One of the challenges with this work is that it can be hard to relate to others when I experience things that are either only true for me, or so subtle that most people are not conscious that they experience these things, and they think I am wierd when I try to explain what it is like. I noticed that when I have an agenda such as walking to the park, I notice that I feel stressed when facing the opposite direction in order to do the opposite of my agenda. This causes me to feel like there are imaginary barriers or invisible walls which cause me to not walk or focus on that direction. Another instance of this is when I was viewed sexuality as immoral and distance myself from women whose sexual attraction made me uncomfortable getting close or talking to them. This barrier is being dissolved, but I still feel resistance to getting close and talking to them. I think the Zen master diary is peaceful music. One of the things I do with music is cause myself to be annoyed while getting it stuck in my head. I do this out of devil's advocacy to make my life more unpleasant than I need to make it. My resistance to suffering creates suffering in that I fear suffering. Do you think I write too much? It took me an hour and a half to write this. I love you for no reason.

April 21, 2020 I had a massive shift in awareness today. I would like to credit Leo's recent video because I have recently become much more effective at self reflection, and I think he helped. Writing this journal also helped. To me an ego is defined as a mask I wear and act out. They can have various personalities, but I imagined them and I may cling to them as I confuse them for me. An ego death to me means when I am liberated from these masks by seeing how these masks are the false self. By these definitions I experienced multiple ego deaths today, and one yesterday I did not mention, but it is important. There are some masks within masks. When there is repetition in my thoughts, it indicates that there is some healing that has not yet been done. 1. Why am I drawn to the abortion issue so much? I came off as a bigot in my philosophy class because I attempted to spread my beliefs which is a form of ego. Ultimately I forgave myself and my mind began to quiet down. I accepted myself fully no matter what it is or how bad it weird it seems. 2. Why am I drawn to religion so much? Several years ago, I made myself neurotic and anxious by pretending to myself that I was crucial for mankind and I was the chosen one. I was never special, and this hit the ego at its core. I created a ton of suffering by lying to myself that I was special. 3. Why am I drawn to politics so much? The chain reaction began. I believed that I was special, and in order to reinforce this identity, I imagined myself as president, so I could feel important to all of mankind. Debating people over beliefs is pure ego, just like what happened with abortion. 4. Why do I act wise and philosophical? I can convince myself I am special by pretending I understand reality. This leads me to deluding myself through mental masturbation as I build elaborate theories and accept them as true. I do not care about if what I come up with is true or not, I am just addicted to my own thoughts. 5. Why do I want to create my own suffering? This is something I constantly tried to change about myself, and the fact that I did not accept the fact that I cause my own suffering was a source of suffering. I love even if you hurt yourself with self deception. I do not need to change, and this creates inner peace without suffering. Fundamentally, my suffering is caused by me pretending I am special. In the moments I start pretending, I start lying to myself, I become neurotic, and I cause myself to suffer. I am who I am, and if I deny these things to myself, I can't live myself, and I will not heal. My thoughts have finally slowed down, and this lead to me being and feeling more authentic then I have in years. I am much more peaceful and quiet, and more easily able to tell the truth, hence all of this writing. This is very liberating, and my sister picked up on one final mask because of how honest I was. 6. Why am I drawn to sex, masturbation, rape ect? This is sexual neuroticism caused by my identity as an innocent good boy. My sister discovered that I knew what a condom was. Throughout my school career people hit on me, but I often pretended not to understand because I wanted to leave a certain impression on them, and this was bullshit. This is the false self, and it creates moral anxiety in the form of all of these thoughts. My arguments for why I was fine with dying a virgin was to maintain this identity. I can accept myself regardless of how horny I am. Spirituality is changing my life and I am being more authentic. Thank you actualized.org for your help. Unconditional self acceptance reduces a lot of suffering and it leads to truth and honesty. I love you for no reason.

April 20, 2020 Today I felt thrilled and energetic all day. My mind bounced around frequently, but it seldom bothered me. Parts that do bother me sometimes is the devil's advocacy. For example, I know it's stupid to punch someone in the face or stare at a woman's chest, but my mind thinks about how terrible the consequences of doing such things would be. This is a process that makes me neurotic and it does not really accomplish anything, accept risky jokes that I never tell. Devil's advocacy does not keep my eye on the prize. This energy is great for getting through work each day, but at home it does not allow me to sit still. This leads to bring sucked into monkey mind with the inability to focus on reading and meditation. One of my biggest challenges is honing my emotions carefully and in distinct ways in order to obtain desired results. In this way, I am run by my emotions and I do not control them. This problem persists in chess games where sometimes I can't seem to focus as much as I would like. The more I let go of trying to control emotions, the more in control and in flow state I become. This paradox of control has not been fully surrendered to. I wonder what would happen if I could do it. Part of my chess journey has reached a landmark today. I achieved a peak lichess rating of 2203. The top 200 players are 2227 and up for rating. This journey has many ups and downs, but the longer time controls have helped a lot. I am questioning compulsive buying. Recently there was a 70% discount on chess courses. This made me feel an urge to find one. I am sure there is some value in it, but I have a ton of things to do already, and maybe this is not an effective way of building focus. Other players have told me about this and they prefer quality of quantity. I am soon to figure out if I made a mistake or not. I love you for no reason.

April 19, 2020 Today I nearly fell for a trap. I thought that spirituality was often filled with vacuous truth of I was incapable of embodying what is being pointed to. This allowed me to set theory aside and start moving past the intellectualism. I saw Leo's new video titled "outrageous experiments in consciousness". Sometimes I am in no position to verify the things that are said, for example " what is death" may require psychedelics which are illegal in the U.S. and I am not realistically able to fly to Peru any time soon. This gave me the thought that it could turn into more beliefs and ideology. I decided to do an experiment to see what happened after the video. Some of his models lost me, and maybe the universe's death was an illusion like his other deaths, but I speculate. As Leo would put it, the love was so great that it radiated from him such that I could feel it. I learned to love my fear and inability to love more which hit me and it was healing. This has immediate real world affects where I now love my family more, and it can heal them too. From the point of view of a white supremacist, he is not an ideologue. From this premise I can question if I turned this love into an ideology. The consequences of the video are that I am more loving which can become a lens through which to see reality. It would be a useful lens from the standpoint that I easily and effectively reduce suffering of myself and others. It does not always feel like a lens from the perspective that love to me in the form that I currently describe it is such that I accept fully the hatred others within what feels like a white light and consciousness. Being mean is a form of love, but this gets complicated. I am an ideologue of what love is like to me because it is a lens that feels true, but my understanding may change, and thus my behavior and thoughts. I am also an ideologue of what ideologue means to me, but this is a temporary lens. I love you for no reason.

Today, I recognized many obstacles. One obstacle is the fact that I lay in my bed all the time. This makes me feel lazy, uninspired, and demotivated. I am now sitting on the floor and it is more comfortable anyway, and I feel more alert and focused. Secondly, I admitted to myself that I created my neurotic approach to personal development in order to slow my growth. It is like the critical voice in my head that judges and criticizes to be counterproductive while claiming to be helpful. This critical voice is false, and will not slow me down. This critical inner voice caused me to identify as a terrible person so that my thoughts were designed to make me self reflect less deeply. It is the source of a lot of anxiety and lies. It denies what my full capacities are and how powerful I truly am. It may make me feel superior or inferior to other people, and this is not a healthy way to judge others as it limits my own growth and often backfires. Finally, I would like to describe how chess ego is an obstacle to growth. Many players say I am underrated at 1774 USCF. I often play much stronger than this, but not always. This leads me to overestimating my true playing strength, which although at my best I surprise myself, it causes me to feel like I already know things that I don't know. This prevents me from learning as much as I could because I undervalued intermediate chess lessons which are necessary for me to improve. I love you for no reason.

I reflected as far back as my memories go. I did not know anything, but for some reason I spoke English fluently and could understand others. I was 3 at the time of this memory. I reflected as far back as I could until something popped. Prior to this memory, I was able to exist without any notion of survival. It was just one day for some reason everything existed when I was 3 and I began seeking to understand by accumulating knowledge. It became a great inner peace when I opened myself to existence without any need to survive. Death is never something thought of, and thus never feared. This is prior to the first memory. In seeking to understand the true self, I often run into things difficult to explain. 1. Our not knowing creates the experience which we know. 2. Separation between you and any object is conceptual and imaginary. 3. Deconstructing your current sense of self makes you closer to nothing due to separation being seen as imagination which thus includes everything. What is it like to experience life without any notion of survival?

That happened to me too and I felt the same way you did. Sometimes I feel incredibly peaceful compared to all of the ways in which I hurt myself and the difference is great enough for me to cry.

@Applegarden i noticed that too. When we talk online you are only reading my words. It does not actually help you to raise your consciousness, it just adjusts your beliefs no matter what we write to you. I use these forums to post interesting ideas and events which might teach other people various lessons, so they may find it helpful. The main benefit of this forum is that I can be more honest about myself. People may judge me, but I am less afraid of internet people than I am the people around me in terms of how they judge me. I would be blasted directly, emotions, words, insults and everything. Here it is just the words.

This is a tricky topic for me. I noticed that my mood is often worsened when I lie to myself. By observing this I lie to myself less and I become happier. Sometimes people judge me because I'm happy, but I would have to lie to myself to pretend I'm upset because of it. Some positive emotions, especially comedy are linked to lying. It can lead to me acting like some beliefs are true because it is funny to say that. This can lead people to becoming stuck in a perspective from which you are funny, but to others you are offensive, and it could bite you. There may be other excessive positive emotions. My questions are: How can excessive positive emotions limit growth? What happens to you when you let go of positive emotions? What are some examples of excessive positive emotions?

I think this is a somewhat shocking example of medicine for profit gone too far. It seems like something a lot of people would get outraged about. I'm curious about how effective protests would be when they are safe. Other than that I wonder what actions an individual could take to correct this. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/system-doomed-doctors-nurses-sound-nbc-news-coronavirus-survey-n1164841

@Aaron p interesting dilemma. I have adopted a hypothesis that God is a verifiable experience because the Aztecs and Christians and many different religions make many similarities even though they had not contacted each other. I notice that when I have a shift in awareness, I often tend to add interpretations. These interpretations might be one thing that builds belief. Do you add these ideas and did it limit you? Secondly, is it a problem if I listen to too many spiritual teachers? This might be the cause of belief. How much time do you spend reading and listening?

Our sense of reality is often threatened when opposed by contradictory beliefs. For example, Islam is the one true religion, Hitler is good, Trump should be re-elected, feminism is wrong, God is not real, and many more. A common reaction in humans is "my worldview is true, therefore the people with whom I disagree are evil and I should kill them". This can lead to mass genocide which happened frequently in religion. For example, "we should cut off the hands and genitals of Africans who don't convert to Christianity". Similar with Christian vs. Muslim. This creates corruption in religion because of the distinction between self and other being reinforced by belief systems. Many religions agree on this similar point. Murder becomes a consequence of clinging to the false self, such as an ideologue about any one religion. This denies the true self and creates hatred of anything in reality that contradicts the piece of existence you attach significance to. Human suffering is thus caused by misalignment with God. Recently there has been a trend where more deeply religious people open up to the theory of evolution. A similar trend could continue with relativism as sacred beliefs have been shown to change over the course of generations. If you seek truth, then you may recognize belief as an obstacle which when eliminated can reduce suffering and lead to unconditional love for everything. What do you think are some religious arguments for relativizing all belief systems? Could some people in stage blue be open minded enough for this? How might this perspective be rejected?

@silene You make a good point. You show how to distinguish between relative and absolute. I had a feeling after posting this that people would feel threatened. What lead me to typing this is how different society would look if this was common rather than backwards from most religions in the world. As for more advanced than anyone else, this is a great point as well. A sense of pride in many different fields can be problematic. I must observe this constantly because if I feel better than somebody, then I am tricking myself into denying the similarities which cause me to be drawn to the people I compare myself to. This becomes a shadow that limits my growth. That was painful, but honest. I learned something and thank you for that. I'm tempted to throw away non duality in order to avoid turning it into my own ideology. I noticed this tendency constantly and am not sure how to stop it, but when I am drawn to ideologues, then I know I've done it. My guess is that self observation will adjust this, but I don't know that that leads to truth. I see my frustration, but it is only temporary, and I will not give up on truth seeking.

I noticed that I often create my suffering as a means of achieving an end goal I want. The way in which I judged myself the most is that I cause myself fear, anxiety, hatred, and depression for fun because I seem to like making myself suffer while I have a preference to not be the way I am (which creates suffering). 1. Is it normal to enjoy causing our own suffering? This situation made me wonder if I was going crazy. I felt like I was the only one doing this and I struggled to tell if this is related to enlightenment or if it is serious problem. I am gradually causing myself less suffering. 2. Is it healthy and useful to hurt ourselves to get what we want? 3. (To moderators) in regard to the first question, I would like more clear guidelines. Sometimes it is hard to tell if something is enlightenment or abnormal psychology. People at lower levels of development might find it hard to connect to these radical perspectives and therefore call people at higher levels crazy. When this distinction of enlightenment vs. Insanity is unclear, is it okay to ask this forum or should I ask a doctor?

I have had a lot of difficulty with moralizing myself, but in recent years my moralizing faded more and more. My main cure was self observation. I noticed how I was manufacturing my own guilt and how it made me hate myself. This is how I realized that I was lying to myself in my moralizing as I was hyper rational as well. One thought I never believed was that I should kill myself under any circumstances. First, by realizing how much moralizing hurts, you build a vision of how you would think and behave if you loved yourself. This can lead to you seeing that evil is created by your mind as you imagine values to compare yourself against. This applies to moralizing against others as well where you deny your similarities and look righteous. This further exposed the lies in moralizing. Secondly, you can realize that guilt is a dysfunctional survival strategy. Guilt is ineffective for achieving your goals and it drains your energy. This is not resourceful and I used guilt in order to get myself to act in a way that most people found pleasing and I still struggled. I constantly made people feel uncomfortable anyway. Finally, I often equated my immoral thought I had to the act itself. This false equivalency lead to me beating myself up more. Nowadays instead of pushing thoughts away, I observe what the thought is and without beating myself up, I explain how this thought can lead to moral anxiety. I notice the fear and judgement of builds up in me and if I love myself, then I would not do this to myself. The main cure is self observation, realizing the pain you cause yourself, and ultimately that your moralizing is not true, it is just self generated suffering. I don't mean to repeat spiritual teachings you heard, this was my direct experience from self reflection. I have become more and more disinterested in moralizing, and suicide caused by drowning ourselves in guilt is no longer a problem.

@InspirationToAction I think you have a very interesting perspective. This is what I have applied to chess tournaments where I am more interested in the journey rather than the end result. This is very motivational, and it helps me to learn constantly. You explain what I have done for my hobby very well. Now my family encourages me to have a different unrelated passion. If I use my hobby as a model for what want, then I will have something to reference in terms of enjoying the journey, motivation, constant learning, direction, ect. Good answer.

I noticed a source of neurotic behavior in that I was stressing too great of importance on finding a life purpose. I now see that this is counterproductive and it keeps me in place while contributing to misery. I don't want to continue hurting myself in this way which is why it dawned on me that I don't need a life purpose and it does not matter in the long run of thousands of years what I do In this life time. I often ignored this thinking I still needed to do something important to help mankind, but this leads to self generated suffering. Now I am trying a different approach to self actualization. I'm coming from a position that a life purpose is not something I need and it does not matter, but before I was afraid that this would have demotivated me. Instead I am overall happier and curious about the possibility of a life purpose and how other people may have found one without this clinging in the back of your mind. What kind of purpose did you find by accepting that it does not matter? Why did you select this purpose and how has it transformed you?

Lately, I have noticed some differences I have after consuming more media than usual in the past week. I tend to focus on the most outrageous forms corruption to the point that it makes our current system in the United States seem broken. Although I may have many ideas about what could be done about these things and why it is the way it is, I realize I have almost no control over what happens. The most I can do is donate a few dollars to causes I like, but on its own there is little impact. This makes me feel cynical like other Americans who feel that the system to hopelessly broken to the point that they don't bother participating. However, I am a little bit different from this. First I made myself feel bad from focusing on things like Trump blowing a trillion dollars on wall street brokers resulting in a slow reaction to COVID-19, corrupt police officers planting drugs on innocent people in traffic stops, the strong corporate grip over American politics, and many other systemic problems. After this I started consuming less media in favor of reading more books which offer much greater value than the daily news of outrageous things I have no control over, whereas many people may continue watching out of habit. Why is it that we focus on outrageous things? This can include focusing on your child's F instead of the A. When this approach is taken in politics, it can make us feel hopeless and powerless. What is the maximum control an ordinary citizen could realistically have? Are we better off ignoring the media and just reading books on emotions, spirituality, success, ect.? How does politics make you feel? When I forget about politics, I live in a pretty peaceful neighborhood with a relatively low amount of COVID-19 cases. There are some people who bum money off of me from time to time trying to get alchol, food, or a ride on the bus, but overall I can be very happy and peaceful when I focus on my immediate reality rather than the outrageous. Thank you for your consideration

The reason I do all of this work is because I want to love myself. I am not entirely clear what it is like to love myself, but I think if I did it would help me to avoid causing myself to needlessly suffer in various ways including intense guilt, lying to myself, clinging to masks, and maybe something else. My questions are how do you love yourself and what is it like? Do you ever insist on causing yourself needless suffering, if so how and why does this happen? How do you tell when you love yourself?

@BETGR164128 I noticed the same thing happen to me. Except for me it is dreams during the day. I see imaginary people in hypothetical scenarios who act like me, make all the same comments and questions I would, and they emphasize the emotional state I am in. For example, I was late to work on a school project and I imagined how much everyone would hate me, but this never came to fruition. They were not judging me I was judging myself. As for real people, I found a similar situation. The more I where masks and entrench myself in self deception, the more they are disinterested in what I say. I will see how people act when I don't hate myself.