mandyjw

Is it up to us though, are we free to make that choice? I believe that we are but it feels a lot like rather than a choice that there's a wall of fear/desire that needs to be loved through. Letting go of the idea of siddhis felt good, but the idea itself is the only thing that can be let go of. I saw God and God is terrifying. I need God to sit on THAT side of the wall for a little bit and I'll love God and God will love me with the wall between us for a little bit until I get my courage back. In my case I'm very conscious that there's a wall and that I put it there. That doesn't mean that God doesn't also work through subtle under the radar ordinary ways though.

Of course, if only I can love myself, who am I? If love cannot be given or received how can there be a giver or a receiver at all?

Love is the negation that can't be negated. Lately I've struggled with feeling unloved, the same feeling as hitting the wall. This morning I was trying to contemplate my way through the feelings. I was first thinking about masks, and I was ready to get up, and my little girl woke up and I brought her into our bed and settled down again until she fell back asleep so I could get up myself. She almost always takes a stuffed animal with her but this morning, she had one thing, a mask my sister just gave her Monday. A couple days ago, we went on a trip with the kids and the drive home was long. I've always been as I'm able, completely honest with my husband. I talked about the sensations in my forehead and the awakening and he made a comment that "I got through it", as if to him it was a psychotic break or some kind. I don't think this is what he meant, but that fear that it was a psychotic break, that I am crazy triggered me to face that wall. Why else can't I tell the story without feeling crazy? Then he said his quote that he's said so many times that it annoys me "Assume everything you know to be true is false" and told me to apply it to my beliefs about love, and the beliefs that Leo speaks about with love being everything. Ooooohh that hurt. THAT belief did not want to go. It's funny, I used to use the password truthlove for everything unimportant ever since we were teenagers and he would use the password idontknow. So this morning I was contemplating, not thinking about what my husband said but trying to figure out why I felt unloved. It struck me that they idea of love coming from outside myself was a complete lie, and that only I could love myself. This realization really hurts when you are facing a wall. It is the negation of love. We think of love as something we give and receive but truly it's not. You tune in and lose yourself or you tune out and see the masks and face the wall. Even that differentiation, tuned in and tuned out, can be negated. Love is the negation itself that can't be negated.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost “This is your world You’re the creator Find freedom on this canvas Believe, that you can do it, ‘Cuz you can do it. You can do it.” ― Bob Ross "And in your world you put as many or as few trees as you want. It's up to you, totally and completely up to you." Bob Ross

Apparently, God created a mind just so he could fuck with it. I used to think these analogies were so crude and unnecessary, but everything else seems like a circle jerk. "We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. " -Robert Frost

I think it means now is forever.

I always assumed it meant open or something like it, I'm not sure why I remembered it that way. I feel like my memory has turned into the ultimate trickster. Here's something else I think I remember, tsuki means thrust and nahm means take. @remember What does it mean to remember?

Because it feels good. Commitment allows you freedom in other areas in life. Committing to my marriage, job and location has given me security, which in turn means freedom, time and space to experience the things I love. I'm more interested in exploring nature, creativity, meditation and spirituality and the little things around me than experiencing other places and people. I can be married to the same man my entire life and never really know him. I can live in the same little town and never fully explore the entire space or get to know all the people living in it. I can do the same job and never fully master it. Mystery is inherent in life, if you feel stuck or bored you aren't looking deep enough. Wherever you go, whoever you sleep with, whatever you do, there you are. It's like the sand mandalas the monks make, there's something beautiful about making something incredible, knowing that it's just going to exist for a short time. If I knew everything I build or did was permanent, I'd be too concerned about my legacy to have full freedom to create.

God, the moon has been beautiful these past few nights, I'm supposed to be meditating but it's staring at me right now through the window. What is the meaning of your avatar again? Didn't nowisforever draw it? Before all of this happened and whether it was good or bad or even happened at all, I sat down and wrote out a list of things I wanted. It was after reading the surrendered/empowered wife book, and before that book desire was a dirty word to me. There was one thing that came out of the list, or rather came out of myself turning that mode back on again that floored me, "I want to move away" and the universe emphatically said "NO". Out of that practice also came watching lana del rey music videos with no understanding of why, and making youtube videos about spirituality, which drew me to the forum. There were two lists, one was small things I wanted to do during the day to raise my mood and take care of myself and take responsibility for my own happiness. The other was big wants and desires in life. If you want, make a list or two with pen and paper be completely honest, show no one.

My mom bought my kids glowsticks a long time ago and my daughters was a butterfly wand, and she liked it so much that we kept it even though it no longer glows. A few nights ago my kids fought over the wand and my son kept pointing at me and saying "dead!" and my daughter would take it and say "alive!" and I would play dead or spring back to life on command each time. Eventually they got so wound up that they started smacking me over the head with the wand and going back and forth so fast that I no longer knew if I was supposed to be playing dead or alive. Last night my daughter found my son's wolf winter hat and wore it over her head like a mask and pretended to be a wolf. I was tired and the simplistic eyes freaked me out the realization of symbolism and reality as a collapsing duality hit me and I saw the mask as real. Then she took her mask off and I realized that our faces are just masks. I remember the quote from Moby Dick that Pretom had said, when he told me in a PM to "strike through the masks." "Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond." Moby Dick And there's my wall.

My God, MY GOD suffering is a choice. That was what was left in the text box here from a couple days ago. It's a message I needed to see now. I seem to have hit a wall of frustration. In fact, what's really fucking frustrating is that the wall is imaginary. If there was a wall, I'd know where I was. "Oh my God, I hit a wall! What shall I do now? Perhaps I can climb over it, go around it, maybe I can dig UNDER it?" Nope. There's no wall. I just feels like there's a wall. It's like Terrence McKenna said about telling people about how this magical sand helped scrub the stuck stuff off the pots and pans, so he took someone to show and it failed to work and they looked at him like they felt sorry for him. I want to settle on something. I don't want to be groundless. I want to know the right advice to give, I want to know the right course of action, I want to have values and morals to live by. I enjoyed building the sandcastle, I enjoyed the feeling of sand slipping through my fingers. I enjoyed watching the tide come in and wash it all away. Now it's just really fucking cold, standing here on the beach all alone in the cold autumn wind. Time to pack up and go home. Don't mind my drama, it's also just imaginary with no meaning whatsoever behind it.

We are all here to help each other see those blind spots but it can only occur in a space of love. That's why I thought that Abraham Hicks quote was so powerful, we aren't here to teach one another lessons, we're here to help spark insights in one another. Sometimes those seem to be intentionally orchestrated and sometimes they are completely accidental. The hierarchy of teacher and student, intentional or unintentional has to disappear for real insight or growth to occur.

Tsuki, that's just the nature of the ego. Everyone's ego is a narcissist and our lives are lies. It isn't personal. I watch mine play out daily as I purify and love it through its fight. Loving acceptance and conciousness are the only way, just observing as if you are the author of your life, is the only way to see it and change the direction of the story. We know how to see straight through your story and what we see is brilliant and worthy of love. What we see is ourselves in you. You may have a lot of work in front of you to integrate this in your marriage and day to day life and interactions. This is when the real benefits of this work will unfold and become integrated. This is when true courage is called for. Will you take the apple?

There are no other people tsuki.

That's not true. I titled the journal "Is this journal mine or yours" because I knew we both had something that needed to be integrated and I had no idea who was teaching who. I tried to get the upper hand on a few occasions and you always pinned me down. That was a gift, a selfless sacrifice on your part. But you wouldn't fully accept or honor that I had anything to give. There were windows and openings but it was never logically acknowledged. That's why I had such a hard time feeling like I couldn't accept a gift, because I never got the full exchange I foresaw. As time passed the chasm grew wider. You wouldn't let go of the hierarchy. I played the part. Consciously, of my own free will. I was never your toy, neither was anyone else. There was never a hierarchy.

This is an interesting discussion in hindsight.

I'm not saying that you don't get permanent growth, awakening and insights from psychedelics, I'm saying that they allow you the luxury of being able to plan ahead and schedule a disruption to your life in and give you time to yourself to process it. Imagine that your perception of time, self and other is altered for days, you assume that it's going to last forever, but you have to maintain a tight schedule and are responsible for two little kids the entire time. The method that someone attributes to being responsible for "their" awakening will inevitably cause them to have biases as they struggle to understand it after the fact. There are many different circumstances that can cause someone to fully surrender and experience the truth of no self. That's one way in which this forum is so incredibly valuable, who knows what potential there is to discover ways to help others awaken no matter what their position is in life. That's why it's so important not to disregard someone based on whether they did or did not take a psychedelic or practice a specific method. Everyone wants to assume that the trajectory or path of their own evolution can be used as a map for others. It can't, but bits and pieces of direction may be gleaned from it.

Eckhart Tolle mentions various realizations that occurred before his awakening. There's a story of him following a crazy woman speaking to herself from the train onto his campus, being shocked that she was a professor and then looking in the mirror as he mumbled something to himself and realizing the insanity in himself. There are other stories like this about his life pre-awakening that he tells occasionally. The very inconvenient thing about a spontaneous awakening is that you will be left barely functioning and you will have no idea for how long. You will likely believe it will be always, you may not care of you may live a life where this has major consequences. The thing about psychedelics is that one always expects that they will eventually wear off.

It's not a particular plant or even a psychedelic itself, it's pointing to something deeper. You're on the right track though. The Bible is a book that has had an incredible amount of intention, questioning, emotion and contemplative energy poured into it over many lifetimes. Symbolism is powerful, and symbols in a way maintain power of shared emotion or intention to understand and experience God over lifetimes. Just like the moon or an apple are things that we think we experience, they are widely or universally shared experiences and they have a certain power because of that. In the same way the Bible is significant, both as a symbol itself and as a book full of symbols. The entire book of Revelations is a fun riddle. If you enjoy Christian symbolism I really suggest checking out this author, Mischa V. Alyea.

I think it's much much messier than psychedelics vs meditation. If someone without a good foundation in personal development and in life in general takes psychedelics it's game of Russian roulette. If the same person meditates, there is a good chance that they are going to have positive, albeit slow positive growth. However if you take a highly developed person, the psychedelics have a high potential of being transformational. Especially since a highly developed responsible person probably has a lot of ideas about what life is about and how it should go. There are those who desperately need structure and those who need to let the fuck go of it. Not everyone is coming from the same direction or has the same pieces of the puzzle. I had an awakening without ever having a regular meditation practice or taking a psychedelic. Looking back I spent my entire life "meditating" and searching for truth and just generally searching for feeling good, without having any idea of an end point. Ignorance was very helpful and yet in the end, had to be let go of.The more I try to understand it or credit some circumstance or choice I made with it, the more confused I get.

How could apples be compared with apples when the real work is done not during the trip or the meditation but in the space between? Maybe that's exactly why psychedelics seem to be so effective, they require so little of your time and you have something external to thank for your insights so there's less temptation to trust in your own effort.

I believe so, in moderation. I like the Lindsay naturals brand, I wouldn't buy the traditional canned black olives, there's some chemical processing that goes into producing that color and flavor.

"You are running around this planet as cooperative components to one another. Not to do bad things to each other and not to teach each other lessons, but to sift through the data to put things in your vortex to which you inner being is already aligned so that you can experience the joy of alignment." Abraham Hicks

You can't know what love is. You can become it though.