mandyjw

Looks awesome, thank you!

Jesus, this took me to a whole nother place just reading it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Thomas_Knight Not that I recommend this level of crazy, or stealing, but it's an awesome story. "Knight was largely reluctant to express any inkling of motives or insights gained through his experience, but he did offer that "solitude bestows an increase in something valuable ... my perception. But ... when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for ... To put it romantically, I was completely free."

There's a kind of greed, or stealing from myself, of trying to "own" and think "my progress." I also realized that the absolute will be a thought, even when it seems it's not and I'm not thinking it, even in the deepest "state" I can experience until it is not. And that's completely ok, divine even. M: Life is seeking, one cannot help seeking. When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State. Q: All my life I was striving and achieved so little. I was reading, I was listening — all in vain. M: Listening and reading became a habit with you. Q: I gave it up too. I do not read nowadays. M: What you gave up is of no importance now. What have you not given up? Find that out and give up that. Sadhana is a search for what to give up. Empty yourself completely. Q: When I was younger, I had strange experiences, short but memorable, of being nothing, just nothing, yet fully conscious. But the danger is that one has the desire to recreate from memory the moments that have passed. M: This is all imagination. In the light of consciousness all sorts of things happen and one need not give special importance to any. The sight of a flower is as marvellous as the vision of God. Let them be. Why remember them and then make memory into a problem? Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient. Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens. Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being. You will find that in that light there is love and infinite energy.

@Spiral Check out youtube for at home workouts, there are tons of amazing ones out there. Just 10 or 15 minutes a day makes such a difference. Cardio clears my head a bit better than weight training, but either will be a huge boost.

Macadamia nut oil is amazing in soups and for sauteing, not as good as butter but way better than olive oil if you want a non-dairy or vegan option.

Bird shit can't ruin a driveway, even if it is eagle shit. In fact it might even give someone an insight, who knows?

Mind- "pay attention to your breathing. Paying attention to my breathing. Mind- You're paying attention to your breathing! Thanks mind! You're learning how to use positive reinforcement! I'll give the same to you! You get an A++ smiley face sticker today. I was explaining the silly made up word "nom" to my son and how it was a stupid way of saying food or eat, and explained it was from I can haz cheezburger. It struck me that nom sounds just like Nahm and then remembering the cheezburger connection made it even more wild. Questioner: I have noticed a new self emerging in me, independent of the old self. They somehow co-exist. The old self goes on its habitual ways; the new lets the old be, but does not identify itself with it. Maharaj: What is the main difference between the old self and the new? Q: The old self wants everything defined and explained. It wants things to fit each other verbally. The new does not care for verbal explanations — it accepts things as they are and does not seek to relate them to things remembered. M: Are you fully and constantly aware of the difference between the habitual and the spiritual? What is the attitude of the new self to the old? Q: The new just looks at the old. It is neither friendly nor inimical. It just accepts the old self along with everything else. It does not deny its being, but does not accept its value and validity. M: The new is the total denial of the old. The permissive new is not really new. It is but a new attitude of the old. The really new obliterates the old completely. The two cannot be together. Is there a process of self-denudation, a constant refusal to accept the old ideas and values, or is there just a mutual tolerance? What is their relation? Q: There is no particular relation. They co-exist. M: When you talk of the old self and new, whom do you have in mind? As there is continuity in memory between the two, each remembering the other, how can you speak of two selves? Q: One is a slave to habits, the other is not. One conceptualizes, the other is free from all ideas. M: Why two selves? Between the bound and the free there can be no relationship. The very fact of co-existence proves their basic unity. There is but one self — it is always now. What you call the other self — old or new — is but a modality, another aspect of the one self. The self is single. You are that self and you have ideas of what you have been or will be. But an idea is not the self. Just now, as you are sitting in front of me, which self are you? The old or the new? Q: The two are in conflict. M: How can there be conflict between what is and what is not? Conflict is the characteristic of the old. When the new emerges, the old is no longer. You cannot speak of the new and the conflict in the same breath. Even the effort of striving for the new self is of the old. Wherever there is conflict, effort, struggle, striving, longing for a change, the new is not. To what extent are you free from the habitual tendency to create and perpetuate conflicts? Q: I cannot say that I am now a different man. But I did discover new things about myself, states so unlike what I knew before, that I feel justified in calling them new. M: The old self is your own self. The state which sprouts suddenly and without cause, carries no stain of self; you may call it ‘god’. What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvellously, you may call that ‘god’. It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain. Because it is without cause, it is without hindrance. It obeys one law only; the law of freedom. Anything that implies a continuity, a sequence, a passing from stage to stage cannot be the real. There is no progress in reality, it is final, perfect, unrelated. Q: How can I bring it about? M: You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. It is not in the sky nor in the all-pervading ether. God is all that is great and wonderful; I am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing. Yet all comes out of me — the source is me; the root, the origin is me. When reality explodes in you, you may call it experience of God. Or, rather, it is God experiencing you. God knows you when you know yourself. Reality is not the result of a process; it is an explosion. It is definitely beyond the mind, but all you can do is to know your mind well. Not that the mind will help you, but by knowing your mind you may avoid your mind disabling you. You have to be very alert, or else your mind will play false with you. It is like watching a thief — not that you expect anything from a thief, but you do not want to be robbed. In the same way you give a lot of attention to the mind without expecting anything from it. Or, take another example. We wake and we sleep. After a day’s work sleep comes. Now, do I go to sleep or does inadvertence — characteristic of the sleeping state — come to me? In other words — we are awake because we are asleep. We do not wake up into a really waking state. In the waking state the world emerges due to ignorance and takes one into a waking-dream state. Both sleep and waking are misnomers. We are only dreaming. True waking and true sleeping only the gnani knows. We dream that we are awake, we dream that we are asleep. The three states are only varieties of the dream state. Treating every thing as a dream liberates. As long as you give reality to dreams, you are their slave. By imagining that you are born as so-and-so, you become a slave to the so-and-so. The essence of slavery is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have past and future, to have history. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, we do not develop, nor decay; also see all as a dream and stay out of it.

@Spiral Do you exercise?

"Also when you start trying to teach someone and you're not quite aligned with what you're teaching, that feeling is SCREAMING at you the whole time. Teaching can be like the mother bird throwing baby bird off the cliff, except self imposed. That's how he has to learn to fly. " For some reason this response I wrote above in a thread here stuck out to me, especially when I should have used "she" because I was talking about memory of myself making youtube videos or the female subject of the thread. I noticed just an hour ago that an eagle shat in my driveway, and I've never seen anything quite like it. I mean, I've seen bird poop before. But THIS. I mean, it's obvious when I think about it. The bigger, more powerful and magnificent the bird, the bigger his shits.

I think the "vibes" we're talking about is actually feeling, it's all about how a person or situation makes us feel. If red "makes me" happy, and it "makes you" angry would you try to convince me that red should make me angry too, that anger is inherent in the color red? Wouldn't it be a better approach to just agree that we don't agree or maybe even attempt to see that red is red regardless of how we feel and acknowledge that we want to feel happy? You CAN certainly feel strange vibes from someone, you can feel that when they speak something they aren't quite aligned with feeling in the words they say. It "makes you" feel uncomfortable, but if you go into that feeling, there's a desire there, a desire for alignment. You cannot control "another's" alignment, you cannot make them aligned, but you can align with your own feelings, and sometimes shit gets REALLY strange and you find that the person you forgave for being unaligned when you became aligned with your own feelings, suddenly also becomes aligned. Then there's this sort of prodigal son returns kind of joy, because guess what? You were never a separate two or unaligned anyway. So if you feel off vibes from someone it is only ever... your own feeling. Also when you start trying to teach someone and you're not quite aligned with what you're teaching, that feeling is SCREAMING at you the whole time. Teaching can be like the mother bird throwing baby bird off the cliff, except self imposed. That's how he has to learn to fly.

One of the coolest things I've become conscious of is seeing how books or even posts on the forum change every time I read them. No one wrote them, no one is reading them and I am giving them meaning. It's really wild. He is the one who introduced me to Pema Chodron, which I think is so funny and unexpected. Coming from a Christian background I had a hard time accepting Buddhist teachings because all I saw was dogma, so having a female American Buddhist teacher was the path of least resistance for me at that point.

It's funny to think... actually that's a funny statement in itself, it is funny to think. It's funny to "think back" at how some of my greatest "strengths" or pure desires I thought were dysfunctional. I just didn't understand them, because I had some false assumptions about them. I always felt like I should really look out for myself more, and care less about others. Even that feeling, was pure desire to care about how I felt, I just didn't know how to do it. I woke up this morning thinking I was feeling apathetic.

Q: How can anything be without cause? M: In every event the entire universe is reflected. The ultimate cause is untraceable. The very idea of causation is only a way of thinking and speaking. We cannot imagine, uncaused emergence. This, however, does not prove the existence of causation. Q: Nature is mindless, hence irresponsible. But man has a mind. Why is it so perverse? M: The causes of perversity are also natural — heredity, environment and so on. You are too quick to condemn. Do not worry abut others. Deal with your own mind first. When you realize that your mind too is a part of nature, the duality will cease. Q: There is some mystery in it which I cannot fathom. How can the mind be a part of nature? M: Because nature is in the mind; without the mind where is nature? Q: If nature is in the mind and the mind is my own, I should be able to control nature, which is not really the case. Forces beyond my control determine my behaviour. M: Develop the witness attitude and you will find in your own experience that detachment brings control. The state of witnessing is full of power, there is nothing passive about it.

@zeroISinfinity Well he did teach me how purification works, so that makes sense I guess.

Get an instant pot if you want to make it even faster. Also don't store things made with tomatoes and lemon juice in metal pans.

@Nahm @zeroISinfinity The point is that you shouldn't believe your thoughts. <-- Not even that one.

@dimitri

Funny, I never thoughts of the synchronicity with cheeseburgers and Meat Loaf. Also the cheeseburger song was uploaded 10 years ago exactly yesterday, when I posted it. Q: Can you touch the inner life of other people? M: I am the people. Q: I do not mean identity of essence or substance, nor similarity of form. I mean the actual entering into the minds and hearts of others and participating in their personal experiences. Can you suffer and rejoice with me, or you only infer what I feel from observation and analogy? M: All beings are in me. But bringing down into the brain the content of another brain requires special training. There is nothing that cannot be achieved by training. M: I claim nothing as my own. When the ‘I’ is not, where is the ‘mine’? Two people look at a tree. One sees the fruit hidden among the leaves and the other does not. Otherwise there is no difference between the two. The one that sees knows that with a little attention the other will also see, but the question of sharing does not arise. Believe me, I am not close-fisted, holding back your share of reality. On the contrary, I am all yours, eat me and drink me. But while you repeat verbally: ‘give, give’, you do nothing to take what is offered. I am showing you a short and easy way to being able to see what I see, but you cling to your old habits of thought, feeling and action and put all the blame on me. I have nothing which you do not have. Self-knowledge is not a piece of property to be offered and accepted. It is a new dimension altogether, where there is nothing to give or take.

Seth Godin sneaks a ton of spirituality into his business insights. Love him.

Everyone who desires to awaken and wants others to awaken and moves in that direction makes it easier and easier for others to awaken. Now with youtube, and the websites and books online available just within the past few years, getting this "secret" information is common place. In fact people complain there are TOO MANY spiritual teachers. What an awesome problem to have! It's only when you're expecting something expensive and refined that getting something cheap instead disappoints you.

If you feel someone is authentic or inauthentic could be that they are... on a relative level. Could be that there's something in you coloring that judgement. You can tell by how the thought feels. If it feels like love it's a honest "judgement". They are what they are right now, so what's more authentic than that? We don't actually have to be concerned for others, just love. It's a huge relief to let it go. All else is fear and fear only comes from illusory separation. Jenna Marbles transmits to her viewers all the same, but most of them haven't heard of this and are unconscious of it. She truly does though. The "guise" of spirituality brings with it thoughts of what spirituality should be. So if we view ourselves as spiritual we defend these ideals. Cat videos on youtube are given a free pass though. Why?

Problem is that there is nothing that we "are", male or female that can be seen or understood. The assumption that there is an "authentic" person creates a duality between authentic and inauthentic. That said, her hair is way prettier than mine. Bitch.

Man, I lost my whole journal entry cause my computer crashed. It fit in really well, but who cares. CHEESEBURGERS! CHEESEBURGERS! ENLIGHTENMENT CHEESEBURGERS! I just made a youtube video. I'll post it tomorrow but lots of connections were made after the fact. Cheeseburgers will make sense then. I know that when I started having "OCD" when I was 10 and suffering deeply, (suddenly the memories coming up from that age and all the music connections, Shania Twain, Brittney Spears, Titanic make sense now) if I had had an awakened "psychiatrist" ( I suspect that a regular counselor or psychiatrist would have had negative or limited effects) the suffering I went through could have been worked through (not shoved aside and dis-identified with) in an incredibly productive and enlightening manner. Instead I had to deal the best I could as a child who had a huge revelation when she even heard what OCD was (ohhh... it has a name) and have it come back last year, eventually understood as impulse and intuition when I started heavily down the path at age 30. I'm still understanding it. There's no doer. There's no one thinking. The pieces are still clicking. I blamed my parents for being too independent and ignorant and religious for not taking me to a counselor. But now I see it as a blessing. Everything happened as it had to happen. I'm sorry 10 year old Mandy. You don't exist but I've thought about you so many times since the awakening last year. I see now what I came here to improve and desire to fix and work toward more clearly. It now makes sense why I always had such a deep, deep (romantic almost) feeling about... McDonald's. Sounds batshit crazy, but my parents were hermits and we rarely went to McDonald's so it was always a huge treat to go there and only on days when we went on trips which were already special. I never outgrew the magic of it, and always sort of wrestled with my own feelings about McDonald's and all the other negative perceptions about it of others. The first time I heard the cheeseburger love song above was from the first person I ever can't eat, can't sleep fell in love with when I was 15, and ended up traumatically trying to absolve myself of later. There's another connection with hamburger I don't want to explain now. Also the price is going up substantially right now, which is... hilarious when you get the analogy. I used to listen to this song a lot at that age. Cheeseburger song seems to spoof the style. Bats and (batshit crazy) on my mind.

I want to say that I had a day where I was lost in my self again, but... I didn't. What's left to do when you can't even blame yourself? Appreciate? There were so many beautiful things about today. Went to the beach and the puppy caught a crab and played with it and barked at it. Eating watermelon outside with my kids. What's the point of picking out moments that are more special than the rest? What's the point of having people you love and really resonate with? What's the point of having favorite books, or songs? What's the point of appreciation? How many times do I have to remember that you can focus on something fully, without excluding everything else. This is the miracle of consciousness and focus or whatever terms I'm supposed to be using. Should I edit the lyrics to suit my preferences? Lyrics He's got the whole world in His hands (except those assholes, over there, you know who I'm talkin' about) He's got the whole world in His hands He's got the whole world in His hands He's got the whole world in His hands He's got the itty bitty baby in His hands He's got the itty bitty baby in His hands (opps, dropped that one, sorry) He's got the itty bitty baby in His hands He's got the whole world in His hands He's got a-you and me brother in His hands He's got a-you and me brother in His hands He's got a-you and me brother in His hands (except Uncle Larry, fuck that asshole) He's got the whole world in His hands He's got a-you and me sister in His hands He's got a-you and me sister in His hands He's got a-you and me sister in His hands (she's a bitch sometimes) He's got the whole world in His hands He's got the whole world in His hands He's got the whole world in His hands He's got the whole world in His hands (my nose is too big, so fuck you God, you suck at sculpting and didn't go to art college, obviously) He's got the whole world in His hands