mandyjw

Why would I want love to be selective? What's the difference between selection and focus? What's the difference between choice and focus? Alignment. It felt extremely good to pick out my last pair of running shoes because I had a literal vision and found exactly what fit my vision. It felt good to select my puppy because there was just a resonance and knowing. I didn't have to exclude the other puppies, find flaws with other puppies to justify why I picked him. It didn't feel like I picked him in exclusion of the other puppies. It felt like knowing and clarity. Like shared, reflected love. That's all. I enjoyed the other puppies, how beautiful and unique and cute they all were. But there was no doubt about the choice. That's how I want all my decisions to feel like. I want it to feel like a choiceless choice, I want to fully feel the freedom of choice but without second guessing. I had believed that love was selective, that there was good and bad, love and unloved, and all kinds of variations on the good/bad theme. I think I confused my desire for focus, resonance and clarity with an idea about love based on fears and wrong assumptions about the world and how it works. Extremely fascinated by Roger's distinction of working mind and thinking mind. It's a little more than an hour in.

Tea, both black and green, are high in fluoride, so if you drink tea it's good to be a bit mindful of that.

Relax, Take It Easy Mika Took a right to the end of the line Where no one ever goes. Ended up on a broken train with nobody I know. But the pain and the (longings) the same. (Where the dying Now I'm lost and I'm screaming for help.) Relax, take it easy For there is nothing that we can do. Relax, take it easy Blame it on me or blame it on you. It's as if I'm scared. It's as if I'm terrified. It's as if I scared. It's as if I'm playing with fire. Scared. It's as if I'm terrified. Are you scared' Are we playing with fire' Relax There is an answer to the darkest times. It's clear we don't understand but the last thing on my mind Is to leave you. I believe that we're in this together. Don't scream ' there are so many roads left. Relax, take it easy For there is nothing that we can do. Relax, take it easy Blame it on me or blame it on you. Relax, take it easy For there is nothing that we can do. Relax, take it easy Blame it on me or blame it on you. Relax, take it easy For there is nothing that we can do. Relax, take it easy Blame it on me or blame it on you. Relax, take it easy For there is nothing that we can do. Relax, take it easy Blame it on me or blame it on you. It's as if I'm scared. It's as if I'm terrified. It's as if I scared. It's as if I'm playing with fire. Scared. It's as if I'm terrified. Are you scared' Are we playing with fire' Relax Relax.

@Keyhole Very cool, thank you! What do predator and prey have in common? The chase. I am hilariously reminded of this song. Innuendos are funny. I realized what Queen's Innuendo song is really about. Through the sorrow all through our splendor Don't take offence at my innuendo Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh You can be anything you want to be Just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be Be free with your tempo, be free, be free Surrender your ego be free, be free to yourself Oh oh, yeah If there's a God or any kind of justice under the sky If there's a point, if there's a reason to live or die Ha, if there's an answer to the questions we feel bound to ask Show yourself destroy our fears release your mask Oh yes, we'll keep on trying Hey, tread that fine line (Yeah) yeah We'll keep on smiling, yeah (Yeah) (yeah) (yeah) And whatever will be will be We'll just keep on trying We'll just keep on trying Till the end of time Till the end of time Till the end of time Last night I wrote down some things from a dream, I wrote "rocks" (which my handwriting at night made look like "fucks" instead but it was rocks), "expansive" and "trying".

Do you KNOW what ego death IS? Do you KNOW what ego death is? Play with the big boys and you always get kicked the shins. Stay in your place little girl. There's no one to prey to anymore. There's no one to pray to anymore. I laugh and I cry and I laugh and I cry.

Question that comes up from suffering. Do I really want to do this? Become conscious of what's actually the case? Feels like I'm dying. Nope, you know what bliss feels like already. Doesn't feel like that at all. Do I really want to do this? I do. I do. I've had a few little love affairs They didn't last very long and they've been pretty scarce I used to think I was sensible It makes the truth even more incomprehensible 'Cause everything is new And everything is you And all I've learned has overturned What can I do Don't go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me Don't go sharing your devotion Lay all your love on me

Fear is love resisted.

@Artaemis I love you too. I give good advice sometimes. I know what to do, I can write and talk my way into alignment, but... that's the problem. It's not always embodied, not felt. I'm having a lot of ego backlash right now. And not even that. I can drop it if I want, but I choose to indulge. That's part of the resistance, it's not even ego backlash. I can't even have THAT! I choose to scare myself, because I refuse to love what scares me. I refuse to look at it. Do I have to? If I do I'll see it's love. Can I pass it off as love in thought? It's love. Love. love. It's all good. And still be scared. As a spirit, I think only the boldest most courageous spirits would want to come into be a form that's meek, like a sparrow or something. Lions must the biggest pussys of the animal kingdom. Eh, wait that would be humans now wouldn't it? Of course women and girls would be the links to the animal kingdom, and the natural world, more than men. Makes sense. Stories to assuage the knot in my stomach. This forum is terrifying. The world is terrifying. Am I predator or prey? There's no one to prey to anymore.

“If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple." - Jesus Leo is just watering down what Jesus said. You cannot hate just as much as you cannot love. There's no one doing that. There is Oneness, the love of Source. Your love for your family happens within that and feels good because it is the same resonance of Love, Source. That love can be purified and extended out to everything, but not unless we first drop our ideas about what it is and assume that we already know what love is. Ego says "if i drop my ideas about what love are, I'll drop love itself." Impossible.

You just become conscious of the love that you already are. It's not selective and never was. The mind spins all kinds of painful stories, deep down we want selective love and we refuse to recognize non-selective love as love. This is rooted in the ego and the roots go deep. That's the "scary" part of this work. Sometimes you give up the love of your family for the love of a guru, or the love of "God", or even your own idea of what selective love is. Yet all of these things can be selective, depending on how you experience them. Selective love is actually just us pinching ourselves off from the source of love. The love is within you, never was outside or coming from anywhere. Even the words "Source", "You" and "God" are so deceptive. Everything is a show of lights, some seem brighter than others, more directed at you than others, closer to you than others, but you're the whole show. You can't actually give anything up.

There's a careful balance between intimacy and mystery. Not even a balance, cause the secret is that intimacy and mystery are the same.

Oh, look it was uploaded on February 14th. Bahahaha You know, a lot of girls be Thinkin' my songs are about them This is not to get confused This one's for you Creepy. You know how you told everyone to use the affirmation "I am rascal, I am a rascal, I am a rascal," Leo? Well your karma is to now affirm, "I'm a good girl and I know it, I'm a good girl and I know it, I'm a good girl and I know it."

YES! I watched that over and over when I was a kid. The best movies were based on books, that movie was one of the few that was really well adapted.

@Nahm You know that feeling of wanting to laugh but being conflicted because you're kind of pissed off because someone isn't acknowledging how profound you are? You know the feeling of laughing at something so absolutely ridiculous that you laugh and you cry and suddenly the hilarity and ridiculousness dissolves into something beyond profound? Yeah, me neither.

You projecting. Never had to fake, I kept myself pure (cause Jesus), and a man "gave" me my first ever orgasm when I was 17 and I'm still sleeping with him. So bizarre that you'd mention Drake, this is my favorite drake song. "Cause you're a good girl you know it." Not really. In the end.. it's all your imagination. You know the easiest way to let your imagination take the reigns? Have as little contact as possible, leave all the rest to imagination. Like through text communication. It's not just physical orgasms you can imagine that way. Wild trips... anything, really. Gets a bit more tricky when there's faces and "past" and practical life details in the way though. Gotta level up for that shit.

UGH! Just what I needed, thank you. I have thought lately that I've never studied anything so intensely until now... but it's to forget everything I thought I knew. It's a classic excuse anyway, "I'm uniquely flawed or gifted or both in my capacity to learn". Easier to see in others than oneself. This is how I show my love I made it in my mind because I blame it on my ADD baby This is how an angel cries Blame it on my own sick pride Blame it on my ADD baby Blame it on my AD Sail! Maybe I should cry for help Maybe I should kill myself (myself) Blame it on my ADD baby Maybe I'm a different breed Maybe I'm not listening So blame it on my ADD baby Sail! Sail! Sail! Sail! Sail Sail! Sail! Sail! Sail! Sail with me into the dark (sail) Sail with me into the dark (sail) Sail with me into the Blame it on my ADD baby Blame it on my ADD Blame it La la la la la, la la la la la ooh La la la la la, la la la la la ooh Sail! Sail! Sail! Sail with me into the dark Sail with me into the dark (sail) Sail with me (sail) Sail with me into the dark (sail) Sail with me into the dark (sail)…

@Nahm I have no objections. I use my journal like a trash can for thoughts, sometimes forget to take the trash out though.

My mind blanks out completely sometimes, I also fail to grasp basic concepts, or I never seem to retain them. I have trouble memorizing things, having to guess again and again basic things like, how many weeks are in a year, etc. I have trouble learning in situations that stress me out, I have trouble learning verbally from a teacher, or in a class setting. I'm a slow learner. I tell myself this is why I didn't go to college. I've always been embarrassed by this. I can't learn as well when someone else is present, when someone else is teaching me because of anxiety. In driver's ed I could not remember which way was left or right. The one job I had working for a boss at a plant nursery, I couldn't remember how to run the cash register under pressure. Ditz, flake, blonde, worthless, stupid, incapable, pathetic. This is ultimately is the cause of my driving anxiety, and anxiety in cities. I shut down completely and become stupid and incapacitated. I was supposed to be driving to a major city today for the first time, and thank God for corona virus. Sessions with @Nahm, this is coming up. Anxiety in full force. Subjective and objective elude me. Do I understand, not understand, which is the right understanding? I actually feel bad for him, that he even has to talk to me. There isn't understanding or subjective or objective, it's a joke, but I feel as if it's being played on me? Why do I feel like I'm the punchline? Rather, why DON'T I feel like I'm the punchline? But what is really going on? How can my mind "blank out"... what is happening there? It feels sometimes like coming close to the place of "passing out" which I do when I combine pain with thoughts, and resist in my attempt at transcendence. Sometimes with social anxiety I am actually afraid and feel like I will pass out. I'm not afraid of my fear, I feel the need to hide my fear in these situations which magnifies it. I want to hide this horribly embarrassing, unforgivable flaw. It makes me remember the first time I passed out, in biology class, I got a bad cut when my lab partner pulled a pen with a broken metal clip out of my hand hard and I wanted to hide it, but it was so bad I couldn't and the conflict within me made me pass out. How did I end up making him feel with all this effort to not make him feel bad? 100 times worse. Care killed the cat. A fox killed a cat by my house last fall, I suspected and my puppy reminded me of this by digging out bones of cat spine and hind quarters a couple days ago. He look so ridiculous running and playing and flipping around a horrifically dead thing without a care in the world. How do I know I'm even remembering this passing out story correctly? I'm not, it's not possible, but the sensations are the story I'm interested in here. What if the sensations are thoughts themselves? ALWAYS. If a thought is a thought, what is a sensation? A thought! So foxy. When else did I pass out? When I got my ears pierced, because I was so conflicted about making a decision to hurt myself for some vain purpose. I didn't want them to get infected so I put peroxide on them so often that they got infected. When I slammed my finger in the door at my parents house, when my dad had been drinking and there was all kinds of awful stuff going on and I told myself that I had to be functional and responsible and didn't have time to hurt myself. That time I was into consciousness work, and I observed and enjoyed it that time. Why does the law of attraction work so quickly on me, it's creepy! I'm SURE it doesn't work so quickly on OTHER people. In meditation I'm trying to go from thinking to feeling, but in conversation and driving and learning under pressure, I want the opposite! What happens if you try to exclude a part of a whole? Pressure, resistance. I am afraid that I'm going to make myself so afraid that I'll pass out. That I'll forget everything I know. Is it possible to resist so much that you give in automatically? All of this is due to an illusory doer. No duer. Dew drops on a spider's web, interconnected and reflected each in another, indra's net, the stars in the universe, one light, blah blah blah beautiful poetry and imagery. There's no one doing anything. No one resisting anything. Resist enough and you surrender automatically, it's done for you. HA! That's what I'm afraid of.

Awesome, thank you! I love the ways you explained these.

It's such a relief it's too easy, it almost feels like cheating. @zeroISinfinity

“The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.” ― Eugen Herrigel “Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.” ― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery “The more one concentrates on breathing, the more the external stimuli fade into the background... In due course one even grows immune to larger stimuli, and at the same time detachment from them becomes easier and quicker. Care has only to be taken that the body is relaxed whether standing, sitting or lying, and if one then concentrates on breathing one soon feels oneself shut in by impermeable layers of silence. One only knows and feels that one breathes. And, to detach oneself from this feeling and knowing, no fresh decision is required, for the breathing slows down of its own accord, becomes more and more economical in the use of breath, and finally, slipping by degrees into a blurred monotone, escapes one's attention altogether.” ― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery “The man, the art, the work--it is all one.” ― Eugen Herrigel “You must learn to wait properly... By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension” ― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery “This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.” ― Eugen Herrigel “You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit.” ― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery “How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and Master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone.” ― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

@Artaemis Last night I read two threads here. Nahm's reply sort of cut through like a knife and was somewhat terrifying in my imagination. At some point last night, the answer came to me in "sleep", a thought is a thought.

Great question. I couldn't "think" of an answer. A thought is a thought.

A thought is a thought! OH MY GOD, a thought is a thought!

I remember Leo making a comment somewhere on the forum about how it's sort of like you have to mourn your life, and it is, it does feel like that and it's compassionate to acknowledge that but also what a lot of dramatic bullshit. There was also someone else who asked what they should do before they became enlightened and I thought that was such a ridiculous question and answered with "get all your suffering out of the way first." Who's ridiculous? Moi. I'm this level ridiculous. Today in the shower I was trying to meditate and not think. I get a lot of color and pattern seeing when I close my eyes in the shower, and for whatever non reason see royal blue a lot. I was seeing it and not trying to notice it and my inner voice shouted in a hilarious voice, "BLUE!!!" I laughed. Three Successes: Lots of shooting down thoughts and assumptions today Realizing that I also need to allow, appreciate and dream or I become like this level ridiculous above, only with a nihilistic flare. Clarity on how profoundly and completely desire works just to fuel appreciation. Three things that brought me joy: My son's enthusiasm about building electrical project experiments with my dad. The sunset Cut flowers from the garden Three things that I am thankful for: My son's teacher is amazing. wisdom humor