mandyjw

@zeroISinfinity I LOVE Aqua. @Zigzag Idiot I can only handle reading a little bit of I Am That at the time but it always amazes me. I had a session with @Nahm yesterday, which is always fun and also terrifying. I don't think there's anyone who can teach intertwining "real life", self actualization and awakening like he does. He always hits me with new ways of seeing that I didn't see before. One thing he suddenly said in the conversation was that there was a sense that there were other people around me. I've thought about this from a lot of different angles since and I'm always imagining other people, fears, reactions, even when they aren't there. There's often a sense that someone might be judging me. But they also keep me company, they are like imaginary friends. This is how I hold myself as a concept as an imaginary being, I create other imaginary friends to keep imaginary me in line. I project my own fear and judgement out. I really am like Calvin. Hobbes isn't real, but he is to me. But Calvin isn't real either though. Shocker. Of course while making videos and writing this journal there is usually a sense of other people reading or listening, which is still my imagination. It makes sense in that case but maybe it comes natural cause I'm so well practiced at this. It's like I project judgment and fear outside myself as imaginary friends. The storyteller needs an audience to tell a story. I told Nahm in a previous session that sometimes falling asleep at night I would be half in half out of a waking states, and had a sense that there were other people around me and it felt very uncomfortable. In the session yesterday he asked me for an example of something in front of me and used a water glass as an example of a belief of something there. Last night when I was falling asleep this same sort of sleep/awake state of confusion came in. I had a sense that I had no idea how I had gotten "there", couldn't recall getting ready for bed or any of that routine, and I was thirsty and thought there was no way I had a water glass beside me. I reached out and grabbed for it, found the glass there and it was like "oh. right.". It wasn't until meditation this morning that the funniness of that synchronicity struck me. In the background Nahm had a large Buddha statue which appeared just as an ominous black silhouette on the screen to me and was a hilarious example of how my fear manifests. It's terrifying to be in the presence of Love which points out to you your own bullshit. I went for a hike last night. I had an intuition to go out to a beach, and ended up in bugs so thick it was maddening. I ended up cutting across off the trail to shortcut and coming to this area of pure clay. I grabbed some and it covered my hands and the bugs I swatted. Thought about how some of the natives would use clay to protect themselves from bugs. I finally got out far enough to get away from the bugs and there's this area over the cliff where lightning struck and burned the roots of some trees. There's a large pine tree that survived this and a table like rock under it. A couple weeks ago I took some charcoal and wrote "Love" and "Clarity" on the rock. When I came back someone or something had set up some sticks to make a sort of house shape in a bend between the pine trees roots. I went into the water, which was so cold I couldn't help but sort of gasping. Washed away the clay. Then wondering if people are concerned about me, because I'm doing something somewhat risky and shouldn't be where I am. (Imaginary friends say this) I can't be afraid for myself anymore, so I have to be afraid of creeping out or concerning other people. And The more alone I am the more I worry about other people. I have twisted love around into something close to but not quite unrecognizable. I came home and found a video of a man covered in the same gray "clay" I found on my hike in my facebook feed shared by a Christian family member. Same band as the song I was laughing about the synchronicity of "I Can Only Imagine" a week ago.

"Cellophane flowers of yellow and green Towering over your head Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes And she's gone Lucy in the sky with diamonds"

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.