4201

Regardless of which identifications you currently hold, there is value in defining "survival agenda" from the point of view of bodies surviving and reproducing themselves rather than from the point of view of a bunch of current identifications. There is no value to the concept of "survival agenda" if it just means "my current state of mind". It would better be defined as the most true desires of the body. In my direct point of view, identification with the body is no different than identification with the most stupid and painful of ideas but when judging people from a 3rd person view (as we were doing in this conversation), we can judge the identifications based off of our external point of view. You can bash your head against the wall, because you identify as being stupid or lost but that's not fullfilling your "survival agenda" or "true desire" in my opinion. At least it doesn't seem to be effective survival when it comes to surviving bodies. We can let go of the distinction of effective vs uneffective survival which is what you were trying to make me let go in this conversation. Fair enough we can let go of it but in this context the concept of "survival agenda" loses all it's meaning and the claim that survival agenda always conflict will not mean anything anymore. But even if you want to let go of this distinction, there exists a definition of "survival agenda" by which 2 parties can have them their survival agendas not conflict, since they can define the concept to anything they want. In which case my point stands. I don't think the suspension of ego is necessarily a temporary thing, that is an idea you have about ego suspension. Highly layered as opposed to what? Reality is all there is, if you define it as something you are creating a distinction as it being different from something else.

A distinction can indeed be made between healthy and unhealthy survival. You could analyze that what lead you to jump off the building was identifications with ideas that you absolutely wanted to keep believing and thus you jumped off the building out of survival. But it's not an effective way to preserve the body. My only point is that there exist a way for a group of individual to align their survival agenda together such that the preservation of their body (and their offspring is maximized). The constant state of conflict Leo brought is not a must, just a possibility.

@RendHeaven You open a very interesting can of worms, but my initial point is simply that there exist a way to align your survival agenda with someone else, not that ego games are not survival. We can create categories of survival and whatnot but ego games are not required for true or biological survival. Even if it requires both party to be enlightened, there exists a way. I just disagree with the idea that survival agendas always conflict. You "survive" whatever you think you are. If you identify with an idea you protect this idea, hence the birth of an ego. This is Ralston's explanation which I like a bit but it's easy to use this to judge ego as a mistake. Basically you are asking if there's a point to not being awake? "Ah yes it's been designed it so that I stay stuck in ego games so that I keep wanting to survive". I think that's bullshit, you are already awake, the premise is false. Anyone who isn't stuck in survival might see it as beautiful. Not sure what your point about complexity is. You are the one assigning the concept of complexity to survival. What is complex about it?

Yes but not in the benefit of their survival. If I were to analyze why they fight, I'd say one of them is seeking love and validation from the other and is under the impression that they depend on this love. You could say this love dependance is survival but it's broken survival. Their survival would be more effective without the "need to be loved". It doesn't really help them survive nor their children survive better. I'm not saying survival agendas never clashes but I'm not seeing why they'd always do. When 2 people have children their true survival agenda coincidence and any remaining issues are really just unsolved problems about themselves.

Why would the survival agenda of a couple looking to raise children conflict though? Their survival agenda of both push them toward raising successful children so their genes can spread.

@Nahm @RendHeaven This one was too good ???

@Blackhawk Can you notice not believing in yourself plays a role in not getting a girlfriend? If I wanted to do a complicated task like driving a car, but deeply believed I am unable to drive, would it work out? Would I wake up one day being able to drive a car? The only way out for me to learn to drive a car is question this idea that I am not able to drive a car. Otherwise I'll never get out of my "hole". It still will require me to learn though but I both need to stop believing I can't and then start learning. Can you see that thinking you can't makes you not able to, because what you need is confidence which equals thinking you can?

I can admire the level of hate that's coming out of your thoughts though, that's some next level self-hate there But you have to consider why it is that my comment generated such an emotional reaction from you? If I'm wrong then why did what I said bothered you? Do you get that much bothered anytime someone says something wrong? There is a huge contradiction between considering me "worthless" yet giving me enough importance to even produce such a long answer about how much you hate me. It sounds like I have free rent in your mind, which honestly wasn't the point of my answer. If my answer didn't help too bad, you don't need to come out and try to attack me for it. All of that being said, none of this probably feels good to you. I can only imagine how you feel and it must be terrible. If I made you feel like that why focus on me? Why focus on the life you hate? You could just focus on things you like and improve your life instead... Those beliefs are not going to get you anywhere and doubling down on them just gets you deeper into insanity, as seen in this message.

@Emerald The point you make about dogs is a point about learning anatomy rather than about learning a person (psychology, personality). Those are really different things because the way you work as a person is mainly conceptually based (your thoughts run you) while the way your body works is just hard science. What is it you think is universal to all women and all men which do not come from their body/anatomy? What is it we would be better off "knowing" about women as a group? Is it serving me? If I learn something yes (legitimately curious about the question above) but winning an argument over you wouldn't really help me. Perhaps by winning an argument I'd feel "more powerful" but this is quite clearly an attempt to compensate for other weaknesses by the ego. I think this is just more thought identification which is a waste of time. Certainly the value of this conversation is not purely 0, but this conversation is not the one you were trying to have in the first place. The analogy you make with the can opener is really a matter of the way you conceptualize yourself in how you can feel. Are you a person who needs to fight to "open up" your emotions? That is an identification, let go of that identification and emotions are accessible immediately. But that's not something that can be argued for or against. What is your proof that you are like that? You can just act like that because you think you are like that, as an attempt to prove it to yourself. The only way to really figure out what you are is to let go of all identifications and see what you really are. This is not something I can argue you into, only point out as a possibility. My most sincere empathy goes to the emotions you are going through.

@Emerald You say it's valuable but you don't say why. Why do I care what's universal about women and what's unique to someone? I fail to see what's the value in talking about the forest when looking to deeply understand a tree. There is perhaps value in "communicating insight" but for the invidivual, imo it's best to just focus on the person and let go of all stereotypes. Especially given how easy it is to misapply a stereotype and just assume a person is like A instead of actually gettting to know them. Isn't that the issue you have with "pickup men" in the first place anyway? They misapply a stereotype onto women and it leads to poor understanding. You can argue all day that your stereotypes are better, but best is none. I personally think the best way to get free of anger is to actually feel it. You aren't expressing your anger about what's really angering you, you are finding another issue to express "some anger" in which is unrelated from the true source of anger. The true anger is not really felt then. But then, if the point of this thread is to "spar", of course every answer is seen as an attack and you aren't really open to what people have to say. As long as you find things to reply to validate this fantasy of yours of "winning debates online with your sharp mind". My opinion is simply that this isn't productive. Yet I don't blame you, I too am out here debating about stuff which do not really matter as a way to distract myself from my problems. I would never try to claim it's good for me though. Did Leo make his video on the limitations of pickup from a place of argument and frustration? Probably not. I'm pretty sure he did it because he felt it would be a good contribution for those who listen to his pickup advice previously and were "stuck in pickup" ready to go to the next level. I'm not criticizing your attempt to do the same here, but only the emotional motivation behind it. I do quite value your posts, especially replies that are on a specific conversations. You often bring great points to the conversations and I find your ideas very interesting. But here you are creating conversations for the sake of sparring which have a different energy.

@Emerald Fair points. I'm not saying it's not possible to change people's mind but there are many ways to do this, some more effective than others. I tend to think getting into someone's state of mind and talking to them individually seems to be a better technique rather than opening a big "mega thread" about what you dislike in a group's opinion. But fair enough you might have changed minds with this technique. You offer an interesting perspective when it comes to understanding the world "as men" or "as women". But it's important to keep in mind we only have our own experience, which we can label "as men" or "as women". Perhaps you've had very deep friendships with a lot of different women which make you somewhat comfortable claiming things about women and men in general. But you could always find a different women who has a different definition of what it means for her to be understood. The truth is you are a unique invidivual with your unique experience. No matter how much I "understand women" as a group, through various super deep relationships perhaps, it's not like I know you until I get to know you. I think the whole premise of trying to "understand women" is broken and fails to acknowledge the individual that is in front of you. What's the value in those stereotypes of how men/women behave or want? Perhaps you give it some value because you need those concepts to identify as a teacher or as someone who has a deep understanding of sexuality. But personally, I just think it's better off trying to understand someone entirely on who they are rather than trying to use stereotypes based on their gender. To that I need no education nor concepts nor even understanding, I just need to be in the present moment and attentive to how the person I'm talking to feels. Again, I come here to spar and help. It is my way of crystalizing insights and sharpening my blade. But I am extra frustrated right now. So, I've been a bit sharper in recent months. I sincerely doubt that this identification with "being sharp" nor this debate is helping your emotional state. You may unconsciously be trying to turn your frustration against your ex for not understanding you into frustration against people of this forum for not understanding "women". I just don't believe in this particular method of teaching yet I do believe that teaching is possible, although it is best done from a peace state of mind, from a place of love not frustration.

"I can't stop identifying right now because of how used my body is to identification. I'm screwed, no way out but to suffer 20 years of intense identification games before I can be free, all of that because my body needs time to stop identifying." Lack of identification is possible right now regardless of the life story of the body. I do think that is true, although this truth can be turned into an expectation "I should be awake right now" and then things turn sour.

I don't think that's how it works. You are never going to "change men". Naive men or men who believe in such ideas are going to go through life and get hurt because of them and learn thanks to them. If you get frustrated because of something you dislike about a group of men, no attempts to change them will ever work in reality (perhaps you'd change 4 or 5 but this is a constantly changing demographic which attracts people who has those problems). The only way out of this frustration is to accept them as they are, they are part of reality, even if their beliefs are inconvenient to you. It's like I'm trying to go out there and "educate billionaires" on the unequality there is in not paying taxes, doing it from a place of frustation. Yeah as if... It'd be nice if we could just educate conservatives on vaccines too. In practice it's much more difficult than that, the target demographic must be open to what you have to say in the first place. After all why would you need to be understood by a bunch of lonely men online? There are more developped people out there if that's what you want. But you are never going to "solve" this core issue that "men generally don’t understand women". Personally I don't entirely agree with this statement. A more accurate one would be "people generally don't understand other people at all". They don't even understand themselves. There are a lot of very big systemic factors at play in this issue, namely the way boys and girls are raised in our society. Your attempts to help with this issue may be noble but I strongly doubt your solution will have the effect you desire, this desire "to change men". I would sincerely ponder on this desire to change men as any desire to change other people doesn't seem to be functional in my opinion.

@Nahm Oops, should have been more attentive Makes more sense now

I can relate to this. I liked myself better prior to realizing no-self. Back then I was in a process of becoming more and more awesome as a person and it was amazing. But after getting into my mind that there is no self, all behaviors which hint that there is a self are being judged as "shouldn't be". Why can't I stop identifying? Why can't I stop creating a self? In my experience this creates a lot of hate toward the self because it is judged as something that shouldn't be, the ultimate source of problems. It seems that the problem isn't "no-self" though but simply identification with no-self. This idea of a self who has realized no-self which is then applied to reality as a comparison of "what should be" as opposed to "what is". The question itself, "should we create a separate self to heal" implies we have to make a decision about it, either doing it or not. Trying to intellectually create a self for the sake of healing sounds funny to me. But also trying to not have a self also doesn't seem to work from my experience. It seems the only way out would be to accept the separate self when it comes up instead of judging it as "inapropriate" or "sign or my lack of awakening". At least for me, accepting the self is difficult because the state of no-self is associated with happiness, with "desirable" and anytime I actually accept the self, the self disappear and it is likely followed by an idea which enforces that no self = desirable. To notice this idea when it is thought, would probably help. As for the actual question, I don't think artificially creating a self helps healing but I do think you should accept your current separate self, even if you think you don't have one because you are identified with the idea that you have no separate self.

Who is saying that pickup is supposed to give you a deep understading of a person though? Leo's take on pickup? Someone else's take on pickup? You are criticizing the whole of pickup as if all people who engage in pickup are joined together in some pickup manifesto, where they write down their dysfunctional beliefs about women. In practice pickup is just a way to get to talk to women as opposed to doing nothing in your mom's basement. Could this group of people who probably don't have much people to talk to anyway, who are left with nothing but pickup to meet people, possibly in general also hold dysfunctional beliefs about relationships? Yes but that would just be a generality. This demographic of people is likely present on this forum because it overlaps the demographic of people who needs self-help with relationships. As long as this forum is about helping people, there will be people who need help in it and those people who need help may hold wrong views about reality. If they didn't, they wouldn't need help. You could consider this a systemic problem within the demographic of this forum but then how do we "solve" the issue? Sure your thread may bring people to see through your perspective, if they are open to it. But if you were to take the perspective of a desperate person who tries pickup as an alternative to staying in their basement and not talking to anyone (prob the core audience of pickup), this post would likely appear as an attack from someone who dislikes pickup and try to invalidate something that helped them. For those people who had positive experiences and progress in their development through pickup, does this confrontation actually help them grow and go to the next level? In my opinion, if you wanted to advertise true relationships to people who are into pickup, so that they can get to the next level, the best way to do it would be to talk about the good and benefits of relationships instead of trying to talk down on pickup. It's like I'm trying to get you to try formula 1 racing by shit talking how the way you drive to get your groceries is "so casual". Yes there is more than pickup but you won't convince people who are identified with pickup to go beyong by shit talking what they are identified with. But at last, are you doing this post out of true concern for the pickup artists who miss out on real relationships because they are too much into pickup? Or are you doing this to validate and defend your belief that pickup is bad and you shouldn't date with people you don't know?

The reason I always have been given to using a lid is to prevent food stuck on the top of microwave to fall into your meal, for dirty workplace or school microwaves. That being said there seems to be issues with microwaving plastics or using plastics to store anything that is hot since it may add BPAs into your food. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/can-you-microwave-plastic#safety As long as you use a glass container you should be good.

I do believe that intuition will guide you toward what is the best for you. You might judge some experiences as painful but is the experience actually painful, or is it just a perspective? If you interpret an experience with someone as "something you lost" it will feel bad or painful but it's also not true because ownership isn't true anyway. Perhaps your intuition doesn't "protect the self against loss" which make you think you need to add this protection with extra caution. But wouldn't it be more valuable to break free from this loss aversion entirely? Breaking free would sound something like: I spent good times with this person, I've learned and I've grown thanks to them. All gains, no loss. There might be a disconnect between what the intuition judge as happy and what the ego judge as happy. Ego thinks happiness is to have the best relationship with someone and realize the ultimate relationship fantasy. Intuition knows happiness is the present moment, regardless of relationships or anything else. Ego says "look, when I follow my intuition I get hurt!" but ego is the one judging itself as "hurt" when intuition would never claim such a thing. So basically your intuition is guiding you toward something you judge as necessary to fulfill your true purpose, yet you still want to hold back and use "caution" to avoid feeling the pain again? I don't think learning should ever stop honestly. There's no need switch gear between student and teacher modes. You can always be both. Nobody needs to know everything to be a teacher, nobody knows everything anyway. The teaching itself is the value, regardless of who it was transmitted by. This is where I disagree, nothing has to be kept in mind. Intuition isn't naive, it knows. Fears about intuition leading to unwanted places are just fears, and untrue. You have all the time in the world! I do wish you that your next one turn out the way you want it to be.

My point is that, if you entirely follow your intuition (or feeling), you won't. Intuition is such that it automatically adjusts based on what you have experienced. As long as you understand why it happened and what went wrong, this fear that it happens again is irrational. The fear implies that somehow you could make the same mistake again. This may lead to you judging yourself as "needing advice" or how to "do it properly this time". I would bet that this self-advice radio show was running in your head for a little while, until you decided to open a thread to let it out. My opinion is that, your true self doesn't need any advice. Your true self already knows all of this and repeating it to yourself is not going to make the pain of your previous relationship go away. If I were you, I would consider feeling those painful feelings in their entirety, so that you can be free from them for good. That being said, I am dying of irony right now, advising someone to feel rather than feeling. We truly love to explain the stuff we struggle with, as it keeps the struggle going. This is what I noticed in your thread and could relate with. Yup totally agree with this. I think your advice and experience is genuinely helpful, I only had something to say to the other part of this post.

Usually we tend to dislike about others what we dislike about ourselves. It can be observed as cruel. Obviously "cruel" is a subjective statement. Taking it as something objective or always true, would be... bullshit Worthless to who? The concept of value is entirely subjective. Your "value" depends entirely on what people are looking for. If you are looking for someone with a red shirt, and I have a blue shirt, I am "worthless" to your search. Are everyone the "same person" looking for the "same thing"? No everyone's doing different stuff and looking for different things. I already suggested this but if you wanted to be valuable to someone, even just as a thought experiment, you can do volunteering. You will quickly discover that the entire notion of value depends entirely on the context and there's no such thing as an intrinsic value. If someone thinks they are depressed and acts depressed, then they aren't of much value to someone who is seeking a friendship. If you were to be looking for friends, would you approach the most depressed people? None of this means you "can't be valuable" because you aren't the depression, the depression IS bullshit. If you believe you are intrinsically worthless then you act in a way to not provide value to anyone, in order to reinforce your belief. Of course, because you aren't. Your entire body is telling you "NO THAT'S BULLSHIT!!!" This is literally the function of feeling. You don't have to believe me, you can just feel it, it's true. If you were to believe bullshit, it would be highly painful. Otherwise, there would be no reason to not believe bullshit. You aren't forced to do anything. If you were to sit down, breath deeply and focus entirely on your breath, it wouldn't feel bad. Why? Because lack of thought is also lack of bullshit. Even if every one of your thoughts are bullshit, you aren't forced to believe them. You can let the thoughts appear and not give them attention. As you stop giving all your attention to bullshit thoughts, better ones will come, which will feel much better. Notice that for you to feel bad you need to think incessantly. No matter who you are, you cannot be wrong (or in bullshit) if you don't claim anything. But if you do, and if you don't challenge what you are claiming, then you are quite likely stuck deep in your own bullshit. Stop claiming "there's no way out", all that is doing is stacking bullshit on top of bullshit. It will never feel good because it is simply not true. I used the word "bullshit" a lot but it wasn't mean to be in a derogatory or aggressive manner... Just using the same words. I feel like you've made a lot of progress in the last months, you seem much more open to ideas different to what you currently hold as true and overall much more interested in discovering the truth. I can tell you will wake up, it's just a matter of time. Pain is a serious motivator. Wish you the best. PS: The Book of Not Knowing by Peter Ralston is a very good book that is empty of any claim you could possibly label as "bullshit". It is truly a book about not knowing, which you may find of interests if you don't like other spiritual books that "claim too much".

@Emerald I agree it's good advice, even if my opinion doesn't really matter about this. It sure is a good contribution. I was asking because your post gives me the impression that it is directed to you before anyone else. I have no doubt that this desire to help women of the forum is there, but in this post specifically, there seems to be a desire or need to "help" yourself first. Am I off the mark?

Does it work? Are you personally in a relationship you would consider highly fulfilling with a "man that mirrors you"?

You don't have to. This "choice" you are creating between "being nothing" and "absolute self hate in the form of bullet points" is another game you are playing. You don't have to choose between the 2, you can create any type of life you want. This idea of an unable and undeserving self is your idea. There are as many other options for you as you can possibly count. "This" is something you are creating right now. There is no "this" in actuality.

My personal favorite Free from insecurity about her value or "quality"

You could easily prove it then and thus convince everyone that you are right without people having to investigate themselves. If you have such a super natural power, why not show it to the world? Reality is precisely fun because of its limitations. Imagining = creating limitations. Anything is "possible", including the experiences of limitations. It's possible to stop focusing on the limitations and notice they aren't actually there, but it's not possible to disprove the limitations within the limitations, by definition. If anything is possible, then it's possible to have a dream with limited possibility, which is what reality is. You can stop this dream to have another dream, one in which you can intercept emails, but then that's a "different dream". In this dream emails are not interceptable with your mind.