mandyjw

There are many, many ways we can improve our entire food system to be more friendly to people, animals and the entire earth.

Soul seems to be a concept that describes the vague sense or knowledge of God or something timeless. This sense the word soul points to is uncovered to be One in this work. The spirit is another thing, something in between Source/God/Oneness and dualistic scattered creation. There has to be an inbetween, or you couldn't be physical and also part of the whole.

My first mystical experiences started when I uncovered the history/story of a clairvoyant doctor who lived in my town. He built a mansion here later in life and it burned down long ago and now it's forested over and what's left are stone foundations and a whole bunch of surviving strange apple trees. I got really into the symbol of the apple and the story of the garden of Eden and lots of synchronicity happened around his story and the connection. It wasn't until recently that I thought to google the meaning of his name and it means "Apple King" or "Apple Forest". The biggest apple tree had a bone from an animal beneath it when I found it. After I found the meaning of the name I picked an apple from it and left it on his grave, the next day it was gone. And that's how Mandy accidentally became a witch.

If they're delicious and nutritious it's not a waste of time, it's the apple.

Ya awful. Awful.

@SoonHei

We really need to reframe how we (society) look at mental illness and disability. We're living in a dark age. We all praise God in different ways, we all came here to experience reality in a uniquely limited way. The better a person is at thinking usually means the more they suffer, because unconscious negative thinking is the cause of suffering. Negative thinking also commonly resonates as the "truth" to intelligent people. When the mind's grasp on truth is surrendered, that person experiences a full circle glimpse/becoming of infinite intelligence. Enlightenment as we speak of it here is a journey, but the illusion/intention of the journey may not apply to everyone.

When I was a kid the thing that started to "break" Christianity for me was becoming conscious of how powerful love was and how core it was to Jesus' teachings, yet there was supposedly a "hell" and a way of sorting people out into heaven or hell. This could not align with love. No one could answer my questions of what happened to people who lived in other parts of the world and died without knowing about Jesus, or before Jesus even lived. Did they go to hell? Any explanation I could get that was satisfactory sort of the broke the whole religion apart into pieces. I eventually satisfied myself by dropping my belief in hell, and almost exclusively focused on the teachings of Jesus, ignoring the rest of the Bible. I found scripture and studies to back up my revised beliefs but I was still left with the problem of the reward of heaven, which I did not drop. People were still sorted into eternal life or... not. Well now, here I am today somehow still left with this problem. As long as there are other people, they either are given the opportunity in life to self actualize and pursue higher truth, or they aren't. The only way I can solve this problem is by believing that consciousness is itself beyond needing to be "seen" or recognized by the illusory "owner" of the consciousness. The only way it can be solved is by saying that there is no such thing as enlightenment, that there is no such thing as people who are enlightened. I tried to turn this belief into dogma several months ago. I was furious when Leo or others would talk about levels of awakening. And yet all of that blew up in my face, and I'm very aware that there are at least in this illusory story of awakening, something that can be described as levels, of the role that intellectual understanding plays in awakening, and that past and future are an inherent part of timelessness. I still really really want enlightenment to be available to anyone and everyone. Am I playing the role of the observer? When I watch a movie, even though only observing a story I still feel pain and joy of the characters to such a high degree that I don't like to watch movies at all. When I have a dream in which I don't have a character to play, I'm still emotionally affected by what happens. Is this as it should be?

@SoothedByRain @Consilience I love the synchronicity, it always seems to get really crazy when I'm excited about life. You're never alone! It's delightfully creepy and also comforting.

There is no problem of morality. We all want to survive, so morality helps us to survive as a group. However we often are unconscious of why we have moral standards for ourselves and others. All arguing with each other on this forum, all the correction and criticism aimed at Leo takes place because of survival reasons, because we notice that our morals are not aligned. If we are a passionate vegetarian and Leo becomes a vegetarian we don't have to worry about the planet being destroyed, or about animals being abused and we will have validation of our own choice. At least until we find some other meat eater to focus our attention on. There's a difference between being a vegetarian and feeling great about our choices and inspiring others to feel great about theirs. If Leo changes his teaching style to suit what we think is most true we no longer have to feel shaky about whether we actually know the truth. We can even trick ourselves into turning love itself into a moral ideal, in which case it immediately stops being love All need for validation is survival, but we convince ourselves there are very good reasons behind it and often fail to see how it arises within. It's reaching for feeling better because we feel threatened, but we can't control others, yet we can choose how we feel. That doesn't mean that sometimes there honestly aren't threats within a community or to yourself. But if there's a real threat, you do what you need to do without resistance, disagreement or second guessing. When the shit really hits the fan, everyone automatically becomes aligned in their goal to turn off the fan and clean everything up. A lot of our threats are self-created. Even the ones that aren't grow bigger the more we push against them. There's no right or wrong actions, but we know where our thoughts come from based on how they feel.

@assx95 Why do you want to do that? Intentions and the "why" behind a desire is really important. For example, there are a lot of reasons why we desire reality to follow certain rules and laws. So there has a to be a power or a love, a will or a reason, strong enough to break the laws of your physical existence (which normally serve you and others very well) for magic to occur.

People are attracted to people who make them feel good when they are around them. All we want is to feel good, whether we translate that desire as a desire for sex, a partner, money or enlightenment. Enlightenment ultimately makes that desire a very general one, and we no longer seek it through specific things, or seek it in the future but learn to recognize it as our true nature always here in the moment. We don't get enlightened through denying ourselves things, or hiding from the world, but sometimes we deny ourselves for a while so we can see through the attachment, the ups and downs, we want a break from the dramatic ups and downs of getting things and losing them, so we step off the hedonistic treadmill to catch our breath. This is good. However denying ourselves those things is still materialism and for materialism to be transcended, we have to let ourselves see the world without judgement and let ourselves have desires and fun without the attachment, rather enjoying their beauty in the moment but not in a self or future pleasure seeking way.

Last night I had a dream/insight. I haven't had one recently. It was just the vision of a white board being wiped clean along with this amazing feeling of perfection.

The way I would describe it is that awakening is like falling in love with the world/authentic "self". The "work" is making the relationship a lasting good one once the honeymoon period is over. You're big on life purpose for a reason, because meaningful work is supposed to be a blast. Otherwise, it's not that effective, and it's not even that helpful to others. So overemphasizing work too much can be a disservice too. Sometimes I enjoy moving the lawn and other times I don't. Why? It's not about what I'm doing, it's all about how I look at it. How you look at spiritual "work" is extremely important. If God is Love, it makes sense that loving the work is gonna speed things up quite a bit.

I feel the same way about the exchange of money part of the equation, but I'm not sure if that isn't my own problem. If it wasn't for the exchange of money, I wouldn't have any reservations, would you?

@Leo Gura You know how Jesus went around healing people and saying things like "your faith has healed you"? If our beliefs create our reality then wouldn't giving big promises with 100% confidence be necessary to have any success rate of awakening people at all?

@abrakamowseBeautifully described, thank you. It's amazing to hear about other people's awakening experiences, I've found that they are incredibly unique to the person. The saving grace to the Hobbes quote is that there is no time.

Not to be a smart ass, but I gotta ask, how is it more misleading or irresponsible than recommending psychedelics without knowing someone's history?

No, you'd see more diversity in creative expression because the ego wants to conform to a collective ego (society's) standard, for survival reasons. We spend much of our energy "playing it safe" so we will be seen as normal and accepted.

Only the assertive (forgive me, but I've noticed that it's usually male) ego takes enlightenment and turns it into a goal or a process. Yet this is also love, service and perfection. My son just asked me if college teachers are smarter than high school teachers? Is it not a beautiful thing to not cash in on your potential, to do work that's beneath you? Is it not a beautiful thing to push the limits of your abilities are far as they can pushed and to receive recognition and inspire others?

You could get enlightened, but no one would ever know. In an alternate universe, Buddha stayed at the palace and became enlightened anyway.

@Nahm Awesome. I wonder about that too sometimes even though it doesn't matter. Creativity comes from one source, it's quite a trip! Both the songs I shared I first heard from the Fieval movies. I want a circular white board now.

Shadow work is the greatest pleasure you'll ever have, your life flashing before your eyes, treasured moments and beloved things from childhood collapse together into the present moment with new understanding, making a beloved and unique newly born "you" with fresh eyes and a new vision. Eyes full of the light of love. This used to be my favorite song. In my highschool year book I was a little embarrassed about it but I put it down anyway. Heard the song as a child in this movie. I never forgot this scene, and the pool of light.

This used to be my favorite song. Always felt a little bit silly about that. Something clicked about what "dream" really means. Thank you Nahm.

I had OCD as a kid, and discovered that I didn't have to pay attention to or listen to the thoughts. If I had stopped there that would have been a success story. After years of observing my ego, I realized that there was a lot of repression going on, I became unhappy and the OCD bubbled up again. As I began to listen to it, and do shadow work, it turned into intuition, and led me to some amazing discoveries. My theory is that OCD is intuition seen through a lens of fear and negativity, which is why we experience it as torturous or painful. Work through the fear and negativity, allowing it to bubble up and knowing that it will in this process. It's a gift in disguise, it's just an annoying gift, like if someone dropped all the lumber and supplies in your yard needed to build a house, and then you realized you had to do all the work to build it yourself to make any use out of it. Good luck!