mandyjw

If social scorn worked then Donald Trump would never have been elected President after the Access Hollywood tapes came out.

I have a son who is autistic so I have done a lot of research on autism and its causes. We do know what causes autism and it's an incredibly complicated mix of many factors. To add to that we have become much more understanding and compassionate as a society and have become much better at spotting autism early and diagnosing it. We also got rid of separate diagnosises and include them all on the autism spectrum. All the statistics on autism rising cannot possibly figure all the factors in for changes in how we diagnosis it. In the 70's if you had Aspergers (now no longer exists as a diagnosis, it's all autism spectrum) you'd be bullied and shoved into a locker. Now if you have Asbergers, you would receive extra help with speech and social skills, go on to be really successful in a field of interest, have a family and have children on the spectrum. Autism is caused mostly by genetics, which are affected by gut bacteria changes, which though it's possible gut bacteria could be affected by vaccines, antibiotic over use, pesticides in the food system especially the persistent use of glyphosate, are much more likely to be the major culprits. Stress during pregnancy, early infancy and different changes in lifestyles due to the use of technology are also a huge culprit for changing gut bacteria, which in turn changes the way genes express themselves. The prenatal and postpartum care that mom and babies get in this country is abysmal. When I brought my son home from the hospital, the amount of education the nurses were required to give me on SIDS was ridiculous. I came home with severe anxiety and forced my baby to sleep in a cool room on his back on a firm mattress because that was their directions. He did not sleep in those conditions and I didn't either. If I had been told it was ok to co-sleep his early infancy would have been so much healthier for him. I was not given hardly any information or support on postpartum anxiety or depression and was left to figure all that out on my own. My point is vaccines save lives. If you want to save the most lives that you can with your money, you vaccinate kids in third world countries. Vaccines are miraculous. Yes, we should study their negative affects as much as we can. But there is a lot lower hanging fruit that can be changed if you care about human health. The inherent fear of needles and having something foreign injected into you or your baby fuels all kinds of irrational reasoning for that fear. If you want to live in fear, intellectually it makes a lot more sense to be afraid of your glyphosate ridden Cheerios you eat for breakfast every morning.

In the end of Leo's "How Fear Works" Part 2 he says that mastering your emotions is harder than waking up. The topic of emotional mastery keeps coming up lately. I spent years working to master my emotions and made huge progress in my life and as a person. I thought that enlightenment WAS emotional mastery. At first I repressed my emotions and had a few blow ups but I learned to go into the emotions and go into feeling them in my body and I thought that I had learned how to work through the repression problem. I got really good at this, and life demanded that I had to be. I could handle my son's autistic meltdowns like a pro, I could handle nearly anything life threw at me, or so I thought. I didn't understand that I had demonized my emotions and I had tried to control them, not master them. They were like children obeying me out of fear, not love. I started going backwards, strange things happened in my life and learning about the law of attraction was a huge missing piece that made puzzle pieces fall into place faster than ever before. During my awakening, I saw that my ego had split itself, it was the very thing pointing the finger at and rejecting itself. The awakening was stunning... and disruptive as fuck. It took weeks to get my life back together and I acted out all kinds of things I had been repressing. In other words emotional mastery and all my work went out the window. Then I was left realizing that I had a LOT of work to put the pieces back together, this time understanding that emotional mastery did NOT MEAN absence of emotions. I guess this means that you can have your cake and eat it too? You are here to feel. You are here to follow your heart, follow your bliss, and experience bliss. Yet you are also here to be wise and to see that wisdom is the greatest deepest pleasure that can be found. The tricky thing is that the bad stuff isn't what it seems. You can break through the illusion of pain or depression through acceptance, or you can appreciate them and use them to guide you to where you are meant to be. I would really love to hear your thoughts and insights on this. What is true emotional mastery, and what does it look like? Is enlightenment feeling the deepest depths of emotion fully and also being as master of them? How do we move from a relationship to our emotions of control to love?

Check out Mr. Money Mustache. I prefer the "do what you love" or find a way to love what you do approach, but the truth is most of us waste most of our money because everyone around us does the same. We don't think through our priorities in life properly and can retire much earlier than we would think. He's quite ranty and hardcore stage green but I've learned a lot from his blog.

The world is endlessly fascinating. "Not all who wander are lost." I GET it now!!!

@perlita Kids are trial under fire, that's for sure! I'm doing pretty good, not perfect by any means though. One thing that really helps is if i can just look at them. I find that if you I be conscious enough to really watch them and see them, it stops the spiral of thoughts that leads to loss of control. Another thing that helps is meditation, because I find that meditation is a practice of being space, and the better you get at being "space" the more you are able to hold the space for the child and the screams and fits go through you and don't find anything to stop and resist. It's such a common thing in life to raise kids, but it's the hardest thing we'll do. It sounds really cliche, but lots of attention to self care and self love is a MUST when you have young kids.

@altered62 Fascinating post. I'm not sure about modern methods of this, or where to point you to but I know that mesmerism was more popular in the past. If you can't find anything more current I would highly recommend researching the history of them. Through a series of strange circumstances I read a book by a clairvoyant herbal medicines doctor from the 1800's. At the time I wasn't very open minded to the mystical realm at all but this book was a catalyst that changed that. He describes his evolution in the book, first he had a deep love for nature and plants and played around making plant medicines as a boy. A mesmerist came to town and he went to him and became obsessed with mesmerism ever since. He describes how differently the children reacted, he was almost always the first to fall asleep, one boy had a very difficult time and once under the influence became violent and shortly after the incident, died. After that visit he was left in a very positive dream like state of consciousness. Circumstances in his life changed and he moved to a city for a while and got a lot more opportunities to see mesmerists. After coming home he started losing consciousness randomly. After several incidents it happened while he was at dinner and a friend grabbed his hand out of concern for him. He described her medical condition at length and prescribed medicines for her. After that he was able to enter clairvoyant sleep at will. He was never able to be conscious throughout them and always required the help of someone to record what he said. Digging through history, this is the first mesmerist that he saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Parkhurst_Quimby

@Matt8800 Ooooohhh... good thoughts and good question. Your post triggered a feeling that God wants to experience everything and know himself fully... through limitation. Yes, all the paths are limiting, but yet in that limitation because of the nature of nonduality.... they aren't. The potential in studying with an open mind ALL religions and traditions as much as one is able to, just seems exciting to me. It's a newly afforded luxury to us, the ease of which this generation can go about doing just that is unprecedented. I was lucky to have a lot of freedom to explore Christianity as a child. I enjoyed studying it, I contemplated Jesus's words and truly tried to understand what he was saying. When I started reading Eckhart Tolle the insights of Jesus's words started falling into place. It was like a seed that had been planted. The pointers aren't the same but the thing they are pointing at is.

Wow. I predicted that pointer in a completely ass backward way in my sleep last night. I needed the actual day waking pointer for the full circle impact though. Thank you. God likes surprises. Surprises are all the more fun if you know they are coming but don't know what they will be yet. Like Christmas. I hope that your houseguest doesn't leave you too many surprises.

How do I know which one to write?

@Nahm I see you.

Good call.

I think that you are getting caught up in looking at the limitations of the religions, but those limitations don't have anything to do with the religion itself, or the truth within it. There are people at all levels of all religions. I came through Christianity full circle, that required mostly rejecting it, discovering Buddhism, and later rediscovering Christianity with greater understanding and seeing that my faith had never been a waste. I believe that every religion is not only a path but a piece of the puzzle. As a thought experiment assume that you chose to be indoctrinated in Christianity, assuming we chose to incarnate and chose our lives and our parents. Why did you chose that? What did you gain from it?

They do... I have hunch that they may transform? into something deeper, beyond emotion, beyond description... rather than disappear. @ajasatya Thanks, do you have any specific teachers you recommend? Hmm... The awakening allowed me to see through fear and completely see fear as an illusion to be laughed at. Yet, I see how I would not want to live that way all the time. So I appreciate fear yet know it as an illusion. I'm back to a level a lot like I was at before the awakening. I'm experiencing a lot of highs and bliss states that are much stronger than before, a high level of excitement for life but also some lack of direction and experience some low grade frustrations. One of my biggest challenges was a loss of focus, I'm lucky to be self employed and have a business that I could do the bare minimum to maintain. I've gone back to working, am really inspired to do my work again and I have my life (fairly) organized again. I've become really good at noticing when I'm feeling off and I'm good about taking time to do what I need to do to interrupt that downward spiral. My go to is going outside in nature and getting sunlight so I'm interested to see how I do when winter comes and I have to embrace the darkness. I understand my own psyche a lot better and on a much deeper level thanks to the awakening so I also have better tools to understand my own emotional states.

"The World is instead some kind of linguistic construct, it is more in the nature of a sentence or a novel or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational redemptionism. The world only behaves as science says it should when we confine our engagement with it to information that is a great distance to us."

@jbram2002 That's why I married you. I just had a whim to google your name and "meaning", even though I already know what it means. This is what came up. Jon·a·than noun a cooking apple of a red-skinned variety first grown in the US. From the Hebrew name יְהוֹנָתָן (Yehonatan), contracted to יוֹנָתָן (Yonatan), meaning "YAHWEH has given", derived from the roots יְהוֹ (yeho) referring to the Hebrew God and נָתַן (natan) meaning "to give". Giving, apples, the title of my journal. Literally, what the fuck is this reality? Synchronicity CITY. Sycnchronicity Oh, DEAR LORD it won't stop.

I really don't exist, I really cannot tell my own story honestly, I can't remember it, it's like sand slipping through my fingers. I don't know my own story, there's no ground to be found in the story at all. I never woke up, I never fell asleep. In searching for truth, I found that I am always an actor, always a fiction playing out some sort of script. My desires aren't mine, my failings aren't mine. The last sort of ground to seek is the feeling or notion that there's some sort of depression or depressing element to this. There's not even that.

Why automatically draw that conclusion? There is no "me" and there is no "him", we are illusions, characters in a story. We're all projections so in our interactions we are always projecting. The key it not to demonize projection but be conscious of when you do it. Self realization is realizing that you are both the author and the story and character whose vantage point is necessary for telling/experiencing the story. In order to have a story, and to interact with others you have to have both love and conflict between the other characters. There has to be something that you have to give and something they have to give and learn. Just like in the Harry Potter stories, each of Harry's teachers has strengths and weaknesses. If you are wise you can intuit the strengths and weaknesses of teachers and still learn incredibly valuable knowledge from someone. If you are not wise you parrot the teacher and will always share his/her weaknesses. If you are not wise you don't see the strengths and disregard the teacher as having nothing to teach you. We all appear as imbalanced characters in this illusionary story life to add to the richness of the story. Even the teachers. Even the enlightened are so perfect they are imperfect. That's what makes life beautiful.

Ralston brings up various strong and conflicting emotions for me. I'll leave it at that.

@Truth Addict Labor is a very unique experience, it warps your consciousness immensely because there's no choice but to surrender to it. With my second child I gave into the pain and surrendered for a moment and the pain transformed into an intense warmth and energy. I'm only conscious enough to break through pain sometimes, but I know it's entirely possible. I also believe in responsible high quality pain management for childbirth and medical procedures, I'm not like Peter Ralston who would go to the dentist and refuse novocain unless I really felt I needed the experience for some reason. Everything is you, and should follow the path of least resistance unless there's a desire to do otherwise.

@Zigzag Idiot Fascinating, thank you! I brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "open your mind". The insight of the importance of an open mind is one of the first that really changed my life after I found Leo's videos years ago.

@Truth Addict It's important to remember that pain and suffering are two different things. A certain level of understanding and maturation is necessary to transcend suffering, and to perceive pain as energetic. If we had a good childhood most of our emotional suffering begins right before we become teenagers and our coping mechanisms start developing around then too. We either use those for the rest of our life or the pain becomes so great that we seek another solution. If we hide or bury pain and trauma, and continue creating it the shadow builds. As our consciousness builds or for bigger unknown reasons, we may start having nightmares, what seems to be psychotic episodes or mystical experiences that appear negative. This indicates a deep unconscious need or desire to purify ourselves and integrate the shadow. The pain a newborn experiences is a very raw physical sensation. For example during meditation my ear started itching. It's been bothering me since last night and so I quickly react to it. During meditation it was as if time had slowed down and I felt the "itching" as this slow pulsing energy, neither painful or pleasurable. Would I prefer to perceive this way 24/7? No. I'd rather react quickly because that's better for my health and survival. We know that newborns feel pain but no one knows how much they suffer. Crying can certainly be an enjoyable release but appears as pain to an untrained eye.

I have a theory that hell realms and the appearances of "evil" spirits show you that you have shadow work that needs addressing. They are an aspect of you, your psyche creates them to wake you up. I believe that suffering is the fight against the loss of self, not the actual loss of self. With surrender suffering ends.

@JonasVE12 You've heard it said that God has a sense of humor? This entire illusion we live really is very funny. It's true that some jokes come from the ego, but humor itself does not. Is the universe just black blank space or is it interspersed with stars and planets, black holes and God knows what else? If the universe isn't consistent in it's perfection why assume the mind of God or emotional experience of God is any different? Enlightenment means there's no you, but your thoughts and emotions were created because they are part of the mind of God. They only align with God, purify, intensify but they don't disappear. The ego gets blamed for a lot of stuff it never really does. It's so sneaky and intelligent that it blames itself, it separates itself and is both the accuser and the accused. If you fall for it, at least part of it is sure to survive.

@JonasVE12 You are in luck because humor, amusement and positive emotions are exactly what enlightenment is about experiencing more of. Our ego gets in the way of those and many other beautiful things about being. The thing that needs to be surrendered is not the bliss of positive emotions but the thing that tries to claim them. There are a lot of paradoxical truths that have to be integrated. I highly recommend listening to Abraham Hicks in addition to Leo and other teachers.