mandyjw

Ever really looked at the pattern in a daisy center before?

@remember No, I will play the role of extrovert when I'm passionate enough about something though.

I'm INFP, I think the difference/similarity between feeling and thinking is incredibly interesting when it comes to meditation and awakening. I hypothesize that feelers are gonna breakthrough through thinking, thinkers gonna breakthrough through emotion. Not that one can be separated from the other, but it seems that way to us so we are more conscious of and favor one over the other.

Because you're one with it all, so the controller is the controlled.

Oooo... The teacher who drew me as a yabut also gave me impatiens seeds when I graduated, because I was so goddamn impatient. She also taught me how to identify trees and draw a tree. Never really appreciated her that much. "They" are everyone all, all our teachers. Apparently.

Today was just one of those deliriously wonderful summer days. I could pick all the petals off, "he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, loves me not." I'd be left with this yellow center that just spirals into infinity (no center) in some kind of crazy sacred geometry pattern that changes as soon as you change your point of focus and try to imagine where it begins and where it ends.

Leo's "you are God" pointer was a huge help to me coming from a Christian background and lots of imagining a God that was all powerful and to be revered "thing" outside of myself. That's the thing about pointers though, they are only helpful if the person you're pointing for the benefit of is standing next to you and not in some opposite direction across the room.

@dimitri Guess you'll have to try and woo him with some pretty flower pictures first.

@NorthNow The answer is that you're the only one who gets to decide. So whatever answer makes you happy is right.

So THAT'S why nerdy guys make me hot. Hmm.. Always thought there was something wrong with me. As I just illustrated above, the self is the problem itself, the self wants to see itself a certain way and views itself as the threatened or beneficiary experiencer of all experience. There's no one to benefit from enlightenment, but the seeking of it is hedonistic and will be until there's no self. And that's fine. Cause there was no self anyway, and hedonism is a concept made up by someone who thinks the opposite is better and more fulfilling. Bahahaha.

Is asking a question hedonistic? Do you seek satisfaction in the response to it, or the discussion, in knowing the answer? The more you seek pleasure and avoid pain the more you learn that it's futile. Examining what it is that seeks that and what it seeks and what it's trying to avoid is removing oneself from the problem. However if someone tries to hack hedonism and seeks to gain a state of enlightenment for the pleasure seeking, pain avoiding self, IN ORDER TO be "above it all", they are still seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

Impulse today that made me change checkout lines and stand behind a man wearing a Def Leppard Las Vegas shirt. Kinda pissed at my inner being for her fantastical bullshit and making me wait about 3 more minutes in line. She's such an impractical fucking bitch.

He's just jealous and so deeply distraught that he'll never be a woman, so he surrounds himself with them, the more you objectify them the more accessible their feminine power seems to be.

@remember The reason there's such an appeal for students is because they (mostly) unconsciously want to knock down or resolve the power discrepancy. It's really not as flattering to the guru as he thinks. If a guru, leader, public figure, teacher, etc, attracts this behavior from students then it might be because he wants to die to/transcend the problem of his belief in his own authority.

@Chumbimba Abraham Hicks is great for this subject. I've struggled with this sort of guilt a lot too. Don't look at it as a single case so much, (the laptop) but look at your thought patterns around money as a whole.

Still imagining

How much do you want him to awaken? Imagine that.

Maybe that's what I want to be, do and have? I love them just like I do the light of the sun. Actually, I probably should come back down to earth someday. It's also no different from a teenage girl with boy band pictures all over her bedroom walls, really. But I mean, y'all do other things around here, so whatever, just sayin'.

The path of devotion is a real thing and a real stage. The student will commonly project their desire for God or enlightenment on the teacher. It's a very vulnerable place to be in and requires a lot of trust. It is natural that survival instincts of the mind will coopt and confuse the desire for God into physical attraction in an attempt to resolve it, or "get" what it wants. The "I" thinks it's a body, so it says "Well, I can't manage to merge with God, so what should I do. Hmm...." The next best thing is to find a guru to sleep with. The closer you get to God, the more ridiculous the distractions get. My own judgement would say that "gurus" *should* be well aware of this, so it does make one question their deepest desires and intentions for their students to awaken. Of course lessons will be learned by all involved, no matter how they are learned.

Q: Can there be true knowledge of things? M: Relatively — yes. Absolutely — there are no things. To know that nothing is is true knowledge. One of the major "problems"with this forum and the people who tend to follow Leo is that they conflate knower and knowledge, actualizer and actuality. There isn't anything to get and there's no one to get it. Leo doesn't have anything or know anything to teach you. However the hidden grace of this conflation is that nothing can be misunderstood when there's already no one to misunderstand it. You wouldn't want knowledge if you didn't love it. Love of knowledge and love of truth will burn away the false without anyone having to do anything about it. It's the same as my love for gurus, my love for those with knowledge, Jesus, Dr.P or Leo. It's a fire. An all consuming fire. Path of devotion or path of truth is the same. My love will consume me and whatever I fain to seek as its object. It consumes as much as it creates, timelessly.

It occurs to me that the focus of conscious breathing or any other way of "directly" experiencing the body works the same way (as I noticed with writing) with mind's incredibly subtle unconscious identification with the body. Q: In love there must be duality, the lover and the beloved. M: In love there is not the one even, how can there be two? Love is the refusal to separate, to make distinctions. Before you can think of unity, you must first create duality. When you truly love, you do not say: ‘I love you’; where there is mentation, there is duality. "I love you." = "Fuck off." Loving attention to the body dissolves the body.

Wow. I don't know that I know this stuff until I write it down! I mean I don't know it, really. Writing is magic. Writing is wild. So much of my suffering has come from thinking that I don't love other people enough, or that they don't love me enough. Let go of the I who is trying to measure and just love remains. How fucking simple. How does loneliness fit in? It's both thinking that you don't love enough and aren't loved enough at the same time. I think that's why it's so sticky and so confusing. The mind can't settle on one problem and one solution, really, you've got both going together and it knows deep down that any solution it comes up with will fail. Of course, that also is what makes a lonely person so close to a breakthrough. Back to writing, I cannot write a thought and not have it be conscious. It's "spoken" by the voice in the head and then in front of my eyes to be fully and literally "seen". General feelings and thoughts are dragged out into the light where they cease to be spooks and are seen for what they are. Like sorting the wheat from the chaff. Of course, the thoughts occur as they are written, they don't come from anywhere, aren't actually stored anywhere waiting to be sorted. But the act of this focus destroys what seems to not be focused.

Of course my problem with love is only in what I think myself and others to be, and what I think of love itself. It can feel at times like giving up love, renunciating love. But love was always wild, never tamed, so it's not like you can free what was already free. You can only realize that you never owned it and what you thought you had was false. You never received it and never had it to give. No one loves me. I've never loved anyone. I noticed that there's another plant growing wild on Dr.P's grave, a bunch of daisies all in bloom. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not. How appropriate. M: Neither ignorance nor illusion ever happened to you. Find the self to which you ascribe ignorance and illusion and your question will be answered. You talk as if you know the self and see it to be under the sway of ignorance and illusion. But, in fact, you do not know the self, nor are you aware of ignorance. By all means become aware — this will bring you to the self and you will realize that there is neither ignorance nor delusion in it. It is like saying: if there is sun, how can darkness be? As under a stone there will be darkness, however strong the sunlight, so in the shadow of the ‘I-am-the-body’ consciousness there must be ignorance and illusion.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, I love you. I passionately, deeply, deeply love you. I didn't expect it, and I know that's taboo and wildly inappropriate, but I won't tell anyone if you won't. It'll be our little secret, since neither of us really exist, I don't see a problem. You're name rang through my head like a bell until I started to read I Am That. You didn't even mean for it to be read like that. We weren't supposed to find each other like this, it's not even destiny, it's way more wild than even that. I wonder if I should be concerned at how easy it is for me to love dead men over the living ones. Nisargadatta is definitely not my first. There was Jesus, and C.S.Lewis, Dr.P. I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with my extra expectations of how living men should act and behave. I am the most deeply, romantic person I know in my imagination, but in real life I am a cold-hearted, purely practical bitch. I don't believe in romance at all. It's hard to go on with life when you know what you know and green beans just... don't. I'm so glad I'm beyond projecting feelings on people and things. I have a feeling that I've revealed too much here. WHO gives a damn? No one. Is that a projection? Yes. I can't watch movies. They are too well made, they make me passionately feel and want things. It's just awful. I can't play board games. I get so wrapped up them, it's just awful. I start to hate the people I'm playing with, might throw the cards across the room, who knows. Whoever thought I was compatible for life on earth made a mistake. It's not even a mistake. It's way more wild than even that.

@DrewNows Thanks, that's a good one. I'm not sure why sunlight literally shining on things and really looking at them makes it obvious that I'm imagining my own drama. It's a ridiculous story that "I'm" eating green beans out of a bowl. What's happening is much more infinitely complicated simplicity than that, that it's not happening. Whatever green beans. You win. I'll play along with your evil games. I'll keep the charade going, just for you. I know how much it matters to them, I wouldn't want to freak them out or anything. M: Desire for the false and fear of the true. You, as the person, imagine that the Guru is interested in you as a person. Not at all. To him you are a nuisance and a hindrance to be done away with. He actually aims at your elimination as a factor in consciousness. Q: If I am eliminated, what will remain? M: Nothing will remain, all will remain. The sense of identity will remain, but no longer identification with a particular body. Being — awareness — love will shine in full splendour. Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.