mandyjw

I didn't feel that he was telling people to stop having kids, I think he was trying to give them peace around a subject that causes so much pain and confusion in people's lives. Many intelligent talented people are opting not to have children right now anyway, and many intelligent talented children and born to parents who didn't have the opportunities to develop themselves. As society evolves more opportunities are available for everyone, you don't need to win the parents lottery to self actualize. Also overly involved, overly motivated parents can be a detriment to their kid's development.

Training your mind is just like training a dog. It takes incredible focus and resolve, incredible flexibility and most importantly immense love. I want to do better by my mind and my puppy. I want better focus. Why did I go so far down the road of Mr.Money Mustache penny pinching, moralization and optimization just to flip to the law of attraction? I have no regrets, but I do want to understand what I got out of it. Most people here would say it was working through stage green. The idea of hedonic adaptation was huge for me, it caused me to question happiness. The idea that we can buck the trend of societal expectations and design a better world starting with us, and have the guts to go in the direction of what we think is right resonated. When I believed that I lived in a material world it was hugely important for me to set my sights on happiness and wisdom rather than material things. I went so far in this direction and the black and white duality of it that I realized I was on a dead end road of self destruction of my own happiness. I wanted to let go of material attachment and I was doing it aggressively the best way I knew how within the paradigm in which I lived. When I was a kid I wanted to have nice things and a nice life but I felt like as long as there were starving children living in Africa that made me evil. Several verses in the Bible made me feel like I should dedicate my life to God, and not have a relationship or kids. I felt like I had to dedicate my life to either God or my desire for a family, kids and material security. The further I went to work in this direction the further from spirituality (or Jesus at that point) I went. Stage orange, going for the kids and the house, "killed" my spirituality. Looking back, I lived and breathed desire and goals and hard work. Looking back, the old house, the fascination with old houses and the past and the miscarriages were deep spiritual "windows" during this time. I tried to temper the pain with the fascination of the past, the magic I had possess me when I bought this house and the pain fused into one thing. There was this apple tree that had broken off but it bloomed and bore apples that year and in the background someone had spray painted the word "forever" on a pole. I also vividly remember picking apples with my mother at her friend's old house immediately before the miscarriage, and picking up a Bible again during that time. I bought the antique garnet ring that became my most prized possession, I wore it to my first trip to NYC which broke my reality and made me fall in love with something terrifying. I left the ring on Pomroy's grave for the crows this spring after the miscarriage. Finding Leo's videos burnt up the stage orange, he was stage orange at the time. I remember being so helped by his videos and also feeling motivated and the flip side of being lazy and not striving enough, and also strongly feeling the societal pressure of needing to be attractive from his videos. My surroundings were so comfy. It is desirable to not look attractive, not draw attention, mind your own business and other people will mind their's. But in cities where societal expectations and motivations have their energy concentrated in a small space, this energy overtakes me. For a girl I have been given a gift of not needing to care about my looks, and to focus on other things. But if the situation is right, when I leave my rural living safety bubble I deeply feel the insecurity and pressure of appearances that I have not yet freed myself from. I am susceptible to this. Then there was a disastrous winter, The Power of Now and the first glimpse I had of the power of letting go of my complaints and seeing the beauty. The snow on the pine trees. The insights into what Jesus meant in the verses I had pondered over for years resonated. And yet, that was the catalyst of letting go of Christianity. You cannot let go of anything, but the intention to is everything. You can focus, and you can love. When you do both together, it seems as if things are let go of. Love is a funny thing, it's so all encompassing that it's as if it's the thing that allows us to focus, the "it's ok, I got this, you go on and do what needs to be done". Can love be focused? Can something that is everything also be focused? Holy shit, well that journal entry got to the heart of the problem. I wasn't even trying to focus. Hmmm...

THE SHIP SUNK IN LOVE Should Love’s heart rejoice unless I burn? For my heart is Love’s dwelling. If You will burn Your house, burn it, Love! Who will say, ‘It’s not allowed’? Burn this house thoroughly! The lover’s house improves with fire. From now on I will make burning my aim, From now on I will make burning my aim, for I am like the candle: burning only makes me brighter. Abandon sleep tonight; traverse fro one night the region of the sleepless. Look upon these lovers who have become distraught and like moths have died in union with the One Beloved. Look upon this ship of God’s creatures and see how it is sunk in Love. -Rumi THE AWAKENING In the early dawn of happiness you gave me three kisses so that I would wake up to this moment of love I tried to remember in my heart what I’d dreamt about during the night before I became aware of this moving of life I found my dreams but the moon took me away It lifted me up to the firmament and suspended me there I saw how my heart had fallen on your path singing a song Between my love and my heart things were happening which slowly slowly made me recall everything You amuse me with your touch although I can’t see your hands. You have kissed me with tenderness although I haven’t seen your lips You are hidden from me. But it is you who keeps me alive Perhaps the time will come when you will tire of kisses I shall be happy even for insults from you I only ask that you keep some attention on me. -Rumi AFTER BEING IN LOVE, THE NEXT RESPONSIBILITY Turn me like a waterwheel turning a millstone. Plenty of water, a Living River. Keep me in one place and scatter the love. Leaf-moves in wind, straw drawn toward amber, all parts of the world are in love, but they do not tell their secrets. Cows grazing on a sacramental table, ants whispering in Solomon’s ear. Mountains mumbling an echo. Sky, calm. If the sun were not in love, he would have no brightness, the side of the hill no grass on it. The ocean would come to rest somewhere. Be a lover as they are, that you come to know you Beloved. Be faithful that you may know Faith. The other parts of the universe did not accept the next responsibility of love as you can. They were afraid they might make a mistake with it, the inspired knowing that springs from being in love -Rumi WHISPERS OF LOVE Lover whispers to my ear, “Better to be a prey than a hunter. Make yourself My fool. Stop trying to be the sun and become a speck! Dwell at My door and be homeless. Don’t pretend to be a candle, be a moth, so you may taste the savor of Life and know the power hidden in serving.” - Rumi

A New Rule It is the rule with drunkards to fall upon each other, to quarrel, become violent, and make a scene. The lover is even worse than a drunkard. I will tell you what love is: to enter a mine of gold. And what is that gold? The lover is a king above all kings, unafraid of death, not at all interested in a golden crown. The dervish has a pearl concealed under his patched cloak. Why should he go begging door to door? Last night that moon came along, drunk, dropping clothes in the street. “Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine. The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden, to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.” I have fallen, with my heart shattered – where else but on your path? And I broke your bowl, drunk, my idol, so drunk, don’t let me be harmed, take my hand. A new rule, a new law has been born: break all the glasses and fall toward the glassblower. -Rumi

Oh Shin honey.

Devils awaken as angels, angels awaken as devils.

@Shin I know I have a bit of one, but I'm not giving it away.

@Shin Nope. I have an accent?

I was never your follower, I'm not asking for your help, and I cannot feed any of your tendencies. It's all you. Do you see the subtle or not so subtle blame here? Sort of like the blame of "woman" in the fucking old testament? You planted the tree, you told yourself to pick the fruit, you ate the fruit, you gave it to someone else, you split yourself and then what happened? Blame and shame. Stay there if you want, I'm done with it.

It's funny, I think you're right and desire to let go of it but I've been thinking about this quote from you a lot just recently. On 4/1/2019 at 7:58 AM, mandyjw said: @tsuki Honest to God. I thought you'd tell me to let go of that story and impulse. tsuki lol, what would you do if I told you to let go? Are letting go and holding on an action? Hahaha It wasn't arrogance in my eyes, it was confidence and it did have power. The power just wasn't yours to own. Your desire to purify the shadow of arrogance is good. Just know the confidence doesn't have to die with it, that's the light. My apologies to Marta as well. The path of least resistance of human interpretation, drives and mind filters along with dissolved boundaries created a strange situation. You can't own that either. You can't own the dark just like you can't own the light. We can take responsibility though. Thanks tsuki, it feels really good to bring this stuff to light.

@tsuki When I wrote the first journal I made here, I made so many assumptions about the part you took in it. The law of attraction explained why, at first it wasn't an assumption, it was a complete and total knowing of an aspect, or a blindness to everything that didn't matter from the perspective of Source. You helped me to focus, and it grew bigger and bigger until it took over. I saw through the veil, I was seeing the glimpses into how perfectly planned my past was, how perfectly it had been designed (or creatively written) to lead me to that very moment. Remember the book theme? When it ended I was back to my human perspective and even though the feeling of bliss stuck around and my reality was shattered, coming back from that state was an awkward transition because my normal thought patterns were left to make sense of it and they made a lot of assumptions without discerning. It's just like now, I can see flaws in my upbringing, I can see flaws in people and situations but I've had this experience of complete and total altered perception, and I know that I am creating the flaws through the filter of mind, and I know through focus they will cease to exist in my experience, and that my focus and experience is the creation of my reality itself. When I was writing the journal I assumed that your state of mind the entire time was the same as mine throughout and that's why everything that has happened since has been such a mind fuck. One assumption I made is that you had already had and fully understood the exact experience I was having then. I know now that neither of the realities I experience can be assumed. I am left without ground, trying to navigate a world where I must make and be ready to throw away assumptions. By the way, I'm sorry about all the assumptions and misunderstandings. Anyway, that's why it's very interesting to me that you are reading this particular book and starting with the Old Testament God the Father. Just remember who (you) wrote it and that the book is not the book. Selfish is a good thing, at least it is when it's focused and without its assumptions about others.

Remember the insight of how we "chose", "imagined", "wrote the story of" our upbringing and past? Or did you not come along with me on that one? Whose history do you really want to know, whose history was actually merciful?

For some reason this morning right after I woke up I was thinking about the theme of the movie Coraline which I watched a couple days ago because I got really sick, and the similar theme to the end of Gone With the Wind. Coraline wants to lose herself world of fantasy and perfection over her reality threatens Coraline but is overcome. The other mother wants her eyes in exchange for buttons, she must sell her soul. Scarlet is ruined because she creates a fantasy in her own head she won't let go of, which drives as she manages her survival during the worst of circumstances. When she is allowed the thing she wants, she realized she had what she wanted yet never wanted it and never wanted what she could not have. Lately I've fallen into a depression or non depression where my days are fine, but I look forward to sleeping and it's the highlight of my existence. A frequent thing that happens in the winter. This morning I wrote this out as a response to a question in a conversation about beauty and then discovered this new Lana Del Rey song. Beauty is always an illusion that occurs, no one or nothing has it. It's a tool the light beneath it uses. I've never been able to figure out if I'm attractive or unattractive. Attraction is something that happens sometimes. I've never managed to attach or detach to it one way or the other for very long, the pain of going back and forth of trying to do that isn't worth it. It's just something that happens, a meeting or resonance in the eye of the perceiver that has little to do with objective reality. That's all. The "ground" we all pretend to have agreed on, so we can make assumptions about each other and interact with each other based on those assumptions. We all have preferences, we seem to be programmed to resonate with certain things and some of them we seem to have in common, or they are agreed on by most people in our surroundings. Like how many people love the color blue, etc. No one can say the color blue is beautiful. There are a few people who hate blue. But if you make something in blue it will almost always sell quicker than other colors. You can derive rules from observing enough people and manipulate them to sell things, or predict their behavior based on these collective assumptions. If everyone made everything blue people would gravitate to other colors. Variety and rarity are factors that make someone take notice and appreciate. If you question it long enough or poll enough people you realize that attraction is just a phenomenon that occurs only in the experiencer itself, and it can happen on different depths and levels. 'Cause you're just a man It's just what you do Your head in your hands As you color me blue Yeah, you're just a man All through and through Your head in your hands As you color me blue Blue, blue, blue' I don't want to be beautiful, I don't want to be ugly. I don't want to successful, I don't not want to be successful. I don't know how to be free of these things except by opting out. I want to opt out of this game and I just want to go to sleep. Change my eyes to buttons Mommy. The stupid idiot never realized what it was he was being enchanted by. The lilies of the field never toiled. I want to feel the way I feel about a sunny field of wildflowers. I want to go to sleep there and wake up as one of them.

@tsuki Ok, I'll try to keep my prejudices about the old testament to myself. But dear Jesus, it gets boring and violent the further you go. It's a very strange combination. I have recently started taking Jesus' name in vain, in reaction to my Christian upbringing. Sometimes it's like "was that a prayer or a profanity?" I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE. Jesus take the wheel.

@Cherylann Importance is only what we ourselves, in the moment place on something. "Impact" in a grander scheme outside of that is relative, and ultimately a complete fiction. Maybe you already intuit this and that's why it felt off to you.

To me symbols are shown through intuition and resonance, and are meant for us and don't really have much importance beyond that. Reading the Bible was more of a personal journey than an intellectual one, and when things came together I saw the things I resonated with from it as prophesies and connections, and aspects of myself. But there's nothing wrong with your intention, I just think you may be reading it with an atheistic mindset. I also think there's definitely a lot of value to doing it that way, just we aware that the actual magic (and danger) of the Bible is that it is not understood objectively or historically.

I've read the gospels, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes several times, but never made it through the entire Old Testament. The Bible is a collection of books, not a book that needs to be read start to cover. I'm not sure what your intention is but there's nothing wrong with reading the more applicable ones first or just gravitating to the ones that resonate with you at the time.

Because you have the ability to focus you could say that you are always avoiding something automatically in your choice to focus on something else, that's the nature of life. Wisdom is knowing when and where to focus, being in the flow and in tune with ourselves makes us sensitive to this kind of guidance. You want to be inspired to re-write your past, knowing that you will revisit it in order to do that. Then there is no resistance about revisiting it, only excitement to rewrite it. Revisiting is just something that occurs on its own as you rewrite/reframe. Doing something you consider fun now won't fulfill you long term, but as you raise your consciousness, judge less and perceive more, the strange result of this is that more and more around you suddenly becomes inspiring and fascinating. You are the one who has preconceived judgments about what inspires you and what doesn't. As you drop those, and meditate more, as you see and perceive more around you and think less, you naturally become able to enjoy things you never would have in the past. If the shadow work isn't coming, focus on feeling good and clearing your mind. Isn't that the end goal of the shadow work anyway? When we know where we are going, we don't have to focus so much on all the steps that we need to take to get there because we have faith that things will unfold as they need to. Then we can enjoy where we are in the process.

Throw the idea of shadow work away completely for now and just do something fun and inspiring, or meditative, or better yet something that is both. I made this video about how "shadow work" spontaneously happened for me, and how shadow work in general is not what you think.

Yes, it's not even about the result, it's about feeling good and looking toward what you want in every moment rather than engaging in inner complaining/making yourself miserable. Meditation builds the skill to do that, to drop a negative, limiting thought that feels awful to think and refocus. Sometimes when you get really wrapped up in a thought about how life circumstances or other people is the reason you're suffering, then going and consciously taking the responsibility on yourself to change your thought about it in that moment feels like dying until you do let go, and then you feel better. We are so wrapped up in telling ourselves stories that are "true" we don't realize what a bunch of painful lies we're clinging to and refuse to let go of. It's almost as if life is already a gift so perfect and amazing, we won't let ourselves accept it.

Oh, I can relate to that. From what I understand it's because we think too much about what others think, we carefully go through all the negative things they might think or the misunderstandings that might occur and because of our focus we actually attract those very things. I also wonder if our stage blue rural backgrounds are a setup for this because we have to hide so much of our personality and become so careful and concerned about what we say because we know how strongly it will be judged. The more we try not to appear a certain way, the more we focus on what we don't want, the more we get just that. I'm still watching this play out in my experience. We also collectively have repressive thoughts, and when you interact you are never the only one responsible for the interaction, it was the result of unconsciousness or a misunderstanding which is no one's to own. So blaming yourself is never ok. The key is focus. When you let thoughts of awkward interactions or misunderstandings play out in your head, stop, think about something else entirely, or envision the interactions you want to have. By the way, thanks for the encouragement on my videos and I LOVE your journal. I still get some major insights here, sometimes I don't want to interrupt the flow of your journal to thank you, but thank you.