mandyjw

@White Monk Yes! I'd love to go to one someday. @pluto @Nahm

"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Jesus. It was never my bed, or my sleep or my alone. I don't have a head.

Love.

Watching a chipmunk out the window and pointing it out to my kids, is that objectification? Is picking a flower objectification? Did the Giving Tree care that it was objectified? Didn't we all objectify our mothers, and didn't they love us unconditionally despite our incredibly immature selfish point of view and neediness? I have objectified God. I have objectified enlightenment. I have objectified everybody and everything, including myself. I have objectified objectification itself.

I have attracted a very odd situation in my life, that has completely brought to my awareness my discomfort with being objectified. There's a man I recently became aware of in my community, and he is someone that I will run into on various occasions, as well as his family members. I had noticed him before, he is extremely short, overweight and also has a very beautiful wife. I had assumed that since he comes from a great family, he must have a great personality and it was kind of sweet that they were together. It seems like in a rural area people use different criteria to select partners sometimes. I was at an event that they were at and even though I never spoke to him there, he friended me on Facebook. He started messaging me frequently there, with small talk and I thought that he genuinely wanted to be friends but within the past week it's more than obvious that he wants me to play into some sort of fantasy. He cares very little about who I am or what I'm feeling. It's such a bizarre, extreme example of this. In the past, there have been imbalanced people who came into my life with no sense of boundaries or decency and I have struggled to understand their reality and how they could be in MY reality. Since my awakening and seeing the story of my life, I realize that this is significant. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I attracted this situation. Feeling objectified has been an issue for me lately. I've noticed that most people either don't see me at all, or they take interest and I become almost a form of entertainment for them. I've tried to embrace this at times liking the attention and feeling appreciated, becoming angry about it sometimes, but for most of my life I've tried to be invisible. I realize fully that I am not what I see or what others see, but it still has a strong emotional pull with the potential to make me feel good or bad about myself. I sometimes fool myself and others than I am a material being. What this man wants is not to physically cheat on his wife with me, but he does want to experience the fantasy of it. He wants to feel the depth of desire and acceptance. He wants to know himself. I never understood truly how materialistic I had been. I believed that I had a body, that other people had bodies, that the world operated upon a set of rules and expectations and understandings. It's funny that thoughts are not material themselves but they create the material yet can never experience it. I suppose appreciating beauty or desire is God itself, while it's being experienced in the moment for itself it is the highest form of purity. In seeking it, in trying to secure it, it creates the worst sort of devilry and madness. In seeking or in noticing its absence is the only place it will never be found.

The night before last, I became aware that I am experiencing those really strange feelings at the start of the night again, waking up in a half sleep state feeling like there are unsettling presences around me, maybe as if I'm stuck in some other realm but part of me knows I'm in bed in my home, but it isn't that really. That description is the best I can do to describe a very specific feeling, which is very odd. Yesterday I recognized that this was happening and considered it over the day. I made the intention to be courageous and investigate and try to clear my way through the fog if it happened again. If I were into witchcraft I'd look into a protection spell, but I know the only spirit who wants to screw with my own mind is me. Last night it DID happen again, this time with some translation, with insights, very ephemeral feeling based insights. A lot of the insights I get from sleep can be clearly translated, sometimes word for word but this one while it had meaning as it happened still cannot be easily translated even in my own mind. The ramifications of just being consciousness hit me. There was fear, some sense of, "here see, do you SEE what this really means?", bot no sense of any duality between seen and seer, fear and fearer. There have been a lot of subtle insights and putting together the depth and ramifications of being just consciousness within the past week, and it's so gradual and subtle it doesn't make sense when I try to pin it along any time line.

The flow state is a high state of consciousness or presence, a true flow state requires no sense of self in the moment, the work is flowing through you as if it is channeled, there is no you doing it or resisting it. No self= high state of consciousness. We sit to meditate and "do nothing" because it creates an easy clear environment in which we can observe our thoughts and see the resistance we created. If we are engaged in action a deep state of presence is then called a flow state. Consciousness does not require any specific environment or situation to occur in, you can be immersed in action or in a deep state of sleep or anything in between.

Careful saying things like that to yourself, you can! I'm curious, was there an underlying emotional quality, a specific feeling the trip had? You know how when you wake up from a dream and you remember the feeling but not the content? Something like that?

@DrewNows This morning while driving somewhere far from home I saw a Happy Meal box thrown out on the side of the road, and watched my judgement start to come up. I just got back from a run and saw a napkin on the side of the road with writing on it. I got the impulse to go back and read it. "Share your best" I read, but then I unfolded it and it continued "joke" and had a chicken on it. Apparently God has made an agreement where he will speak to me through litter I've had a lot of experiences with this before. Does this speak to the quality of my faith? I ran quite a way and really had a desire to just stop and go sit somewhere, but there were too many houses around so I knew I couldn't do that. I turned around to go back and just where I did were a couple of four piece chicken mcnugget containers thrown out. "Chicken". Got it. There's a property for sale there and I've paid a lot of attention to it over time and have had thoughts and ideas and daydreams about it that I won't write out. No one was there so I walked down and went down to the water and sat a minute. I found a piece of blue glass on the beach there. I just made my friend a necklace out of a piece of blue glass she found on the wall by the clairvoyant doctor's property. She said blue glass was significant to her and on that day, the last time she was here before she moved away it was like the universe was pulling out all the stops. After that blue glass started becoming a sign for me, and I walked into an antique store and found a antique cobalt blue witch ball that I bought. When I got home I got all mixed up about taking action on this sudden increase of meaning and ended up pulling out my tarot cards. I was very happy that they both suggested to not taking any action and strongly reassured me in my connection with everything else that is meaningful. It's just happening, you don't have to DO anything. Just bask in the wonder of it.

The same thing happened to me, I was 15 at the time and there were other strange family dynamics involved with the rejection. A couple years later my sister met him and had a conversation with him and he told her that he didn't remember me which as you can imagine really added fuel to the fire of my feeling rejected and completely threw off my sense of reality entirely. I tried not to think of him but I would dream of him. A bunch of shadow work happened to me leading up to an awakening/no-self experience this past spring and that storyline was a big piece of it. The way it happened was that I saw the truth that my life story was a fiction just as much as my favorite childhood stories were true. I saw how the traumatic situation helped me to have certain realizations and pointed my life in the direction it needed to go. It was as if my whole life "flashed" before my eyes and I understood why that is a saying or a thing people say happens before you die. I saw him as a perfect character in the story without the personal viewpoint which was what was creating the trauma. Later I ended up sending him a message on Facebook forgiving the whole situation. I don't think that making contact is necessary for everyone but you will know.

We're always and forever tripping.

Shaun sweetie, death is imaginary, your loved ones are not. It's an illusion that there's so much at stake here, you think that there are things to lose, but all there is that's blocking you is the belief that there are things to lose. There are things. There are things that will be perceived in a new way. There's no death or loss at all. That's just the way some people translate it. If it's not resonating, look from a different perspective. That's all you ever really have got, perspective.

First of all, take care of yourself and be kind to yourself. Do things to uplift your spirit. Then put some thought into how you want a real future relationship, encounter or partner to be. Write it down, dream it out. Realize that many girls tend to want to give, and give, and give, and give and give and give, and derive pleasure from making other people happy. You did not put your needs first and you did not consider your needs before the entire encounter started. Not sending the selfie, not giving men the physical encounter they want forces them to go into their emotions. It also weeds out the vast majority of men. Women don't "hold out" because they think it will make men want them more, they hold out because they want to see what the man is actually made of. Otherwise more often than not you become an outlet for pent up emotions and desire and repressions. You are worth much more than that, that's why you feel bad but hey, now you know more clearly what you want.

Yes! I've been obsessed with that story of the garden of Eden, the notion of paradise and the symbol of the apple for months. Funny timing, I just finished making this.

Relationships never stagnate, only our ideas about them do, just because the ocean isn't stormy at the moment doesn't mean that it's not deep. You can never fully know a person even if you spend your entire life with them and you can never fully know yourself because you are a fiction. Drop your ideas about your partner and the relationship and experience it in a deeper way. It's exactly the same way meditation works. You're becoming more sensitive to life by becoming conscious of more of it in a deeper way by seeking fulfillment from within, then you might find that you no longer look elsewhere for something new.

I'm going to entertain the woo woo spiritual reasoning here since it seems you've thoroughly checked this out, Ramana Maharshi and Ramaji both talk about the right side of the heart and Ramaji talks about experiences with pain located there. “This self is the eternal, immutable Self that ever throbs as ‘I’, ‘I’. It is not touched by birth and death; it is eternal. It is not confined to the physical body in which it stations itself; it is universal in its spread” writes MK Pandit, scholar sage of the highest order, in the book "Mighty Impersonality." “Where is this Self to be found, is the next natural question. In the heart, is the answer. But it is made unambiguously clear that it is not the physiological heart on the left side of the body that is meant. The Heart that Maharshi speaks of is not the usual heart muscle. It is the spiritual heart which is two digits to the right of the center of the chest. it is not physical. It is in the subtle body and lends itself to be felt and experienced to the earnest inquirer in the course of his quest. http://thinkingaboutsurvival.blogspot.com/2009/03/science-of-heart-and-sri-ramana.html

DEFINITELY. It can feel like the most intense vulnerability but also like embracing and letting go at the same time. I think it helps to remember that the spiritual ego, or rather our thoughts about spirituality have two different forms, A. It complains that other people aren't spiritual enough, and or feel goods about itself for being above others. B. It beat itself up for not living up to its lofty expectations. There's a subtle difference between awareness and punishing ourselves. For example say you are trying to house train a puppy. If you aren't paying any attention to the puppy at all, not giving it opportunities to go out, and letting it have the run of the house unsupervised, are you going to rub its nose in it when it has accident? Or are you going to recognize that you weren't paying enough attention? Of course, you can do either, but one option builds your bond with the puppy and the other breaks it down.

There's one way to define meditation, it's the way Abraham Hicks suggests when she says "pay attention to how you feel". There are a lot of layers to how deep this pointer goes. We often get confused and think there is a pay off for suffering, but mental suffering is desire to go through a wall and the door through that wall is going into feeling, sensations and out of thought. Example: I made a mistake that cost me money, and I think of it in the middle of the night. I feel bad. If I was aware of the way my stomach contracted just then, I could just be that and feel that energy. If I'm not aware I continue to feel bad. The thought made me feel bad so I stay within the realm of thought and seek my solution for feeling better there. "It's really the contractor's fault, not mine. He wasn't paying attention." I'm using thought and stories to make myself feel slightly better. It feels better to blame someone else than to blame myself. If I'm completely unconscious I let the blame erode my relationship with this person in the future, and cause this situation to replay and replay again. If I'm somewhat conscious, if I'm trying to become a better person I notice that I just blamed another and I go back to feeling bad about myself again, perhaps this time I'm feeling bad about my level of consciousness, rather than the initial mistake. While my desire to do better in the future is powerful, I have again in this moment missed the invitation the suffering presented. Train yourself to notice at all times how you're feeling. Whenever you notice suffering go into your breath, your body, sensations, the present moment. Look around the room. All these are pointing to the same thing, the same non-action. Beating yourself up for not being conscious is the same seeking thought and continuation of suffering. You might notice that suffering seems to be key in this work. You might notice that cold showers force you to go into sensations. You might read about monks who do crazy things to induce consciousness through pain, you might read about Eckhart Tolle awakening from a severe suicidal depression. Suffering is an opportunity. The level of suffering or the time you spend suffering means absolutely nothing, it's only that high amounts of suffering cannot be ignored, that invitation can't be missed. Your sensitivity and awareness is everything. Low level suffering, annoyance, overwhelmed feelings, malaise, all of them are powerful invitations. You do not have to suffer. Sound too good to be true? Then find out what truth is outside of thought.

A lot of brilliant innovations and creations have been copied and mass produced for nothing by China, they have nearly destroyed entire art forms. Of course this isn't China's fault, it's Americans/westerners preference for cheap quantity over quality. I live near to a Native American tribe reservation and once traded my art with a basket maker. The one I got from her she had added her own decoration style to, a technique that was not traditional but something her mother had come up with and taught her. I do feel like there is some pressure to keep their work traditional and not to innovate or add personal style too much. There are also tensions between generations because the younger generation never seems to be able to keep the traditions as well as the older had, naturally as time passes and the world changes. There are certain records that out of respect for tribes are ONLY kept within the tribe, not even historical records exist outside. This puts a huge amount of pressure on a very small group of people to keep these things. Sadly being to unwilling to share traditions with interested outsiders means that some will be lost forever, but inevitably they will be evolved into something new if the world takes hold of it. I'm not sure there's a right answer.

Mental suffering is an invitation to a party when you're like, "ehhh don't really want to go to that at all." But you go and then you have the best time, meet to love of your life there (yourself OF course!) and live happily ever after. Then you might get in a fight, break up and get another invitation but it's always YOU you ever meet at the party.

@DrewNows So much of this seems mindblowingly simple and basic, it seems like the very first things I was practicing when I discovered Eckhart Tolle. Except there's a depth of realization or experience there, like I got something out of the way. Suffering, awareness, body awareness, energy, source. BOOM. I don't know, maybe I'm full of it. My mind is still distracting me by being like... GUESS WHAT EVERYONE!!! THERE'S NOTHING BUT THE PRESENT MOMENT! But you know what, distractions are perfect. What could I possibly be distracted from? It's like before letting go of the story thoughts were a chore and a supposed to do and now it's like the most exciting thing in the world. There's still suffering but it's an invitation.

Letting go feels so much like really embracing. The mind can't work out what's really happening.

@Danioover9000 I told them and they didn't argue with me.