mandyjw

@Zigzag Idiot Thank you! It feels like space in my forehead, like there's nothing there. Other times it feels like something moving or pulling apart like it has life of it's own, it almost reminds me of being pregnant and feeling kicks. It happens often when I go outside, in certain places and novel situations but there's not a lot of rhyme or reason. It's very curious. There's flashes of feelings and images together, they don't seem connected with the sensations in my forehead. I'm for the first time intellectually understanding what those are. I've had them my entire life. The forehead sensations are completely new since the awakening in April.

@tsuki Oh good. I get worried sometimes. I find that no mind is better as a resting place and not an ideal, it's very easy to trick myself into an imbalance of one or the other and convince myself that thinking about not thinking is not thinking. I'm probably projecting that past expereince on you so I apologize as I admire your dedication.

@DrewNows I've been channeling your love for Teal Swan I guess. I was looking for this video and know know why I couldn't find it, she hadn't made it yet! My reaction,

@Zigzag Idiot I listened to him quite a bit this week, including that very video. This is going to sound really stupid but my third eye loves his voice. Making lots of connections. My husband had surgery this week and the combination of that and working more has been a challenge. Today I have the mow the entire lawn and do some work on the driveway and I made a skull design that came out all wrong yesterday so I have to redo it or I will be really disappointed with myself. The forum is generally my only downtime, except for running, meditation and being outside in nature. The kids would never let me watch to a movie or TV show, and if I read it's always interrupted constantly. I can listen to lectures and youtube all I want while I work. I love to make myself a victim of overwork. I'd have energy to do everything and more if I didn't overthink or get stressed out. Sometimes the only way to learn how to do that is to scale back on everything you're doing. NOT TODAY.

I think the key to understanding attraction is that everyone feels on some level that something is missing, so what that something is will determine who they are attracted to. In the examples below I use "woman" and "man" but it's a trend but certainly not a rule. If a woman feels like she is too controlled by her emotions, she will be very attracted to strength and leadership qualities, someone who always stands for his values without wavering, etc. She may not be conscious that she needs to develop these things in herself. A woman who wants a knight in shining armor to whisk her away wants that because she doesn't want to have to do the work herself or accept that she has the power to do it. The reason that looks are so important to many men is that beauty is experienced with the heart and not the mind. Sexual attraction is experienced with more than just the mind, so this is the way that men can experience the power of beauty and the heart most powerfully or be introduced to it. But the mind moves in quickly to co-opt and control the process. The more he starts using his mind to understand what he is attracted to the more the law of attraction works to separate beautiful and no beautiful. The mind has co-opted beauty and has created in its great ability to distinguish and separate, the concept of ugly. There is no opposite to beauty, just as there is no opposite to love, it's all illusion. Opening up to the heart and emotions can be a scary and ephemeral thing so often men sometimes completely pervert the deep reason behind their attraction to a woman's beauty. Basically everyone wants enlightenment and integration within themselves and we use each other in various ways to get it. Pain in relationships results showing us that we need to go deeper within ourselves. We miss this lesson if we constantly shuffle about from partner to partner blaming the partner instead of asking the right questions about why we feel the way we do. Of course there's nothing wrong with wanting what you want,and no one gets anywhere by denying how they feel or what they desire. Just make sure that you try to understand the WHY behind what you want on a deep level or you will perpetuate problems and pain for yourself and others.

Pssst Tsuki.... listen to an Abraham Hicks video.

@LoveandPurpose Are you really about love and purpose or are you about appearances and perfectionism? Men may inherently put a lot of value on looks but do you want to become a adept critic of women's looks or would you rather spend your time and energy on something else?

I believe that nature holds the key but it's also inseparable from us so the fear of being separated from it is part of the illusion. I really share your love of nature @pluto and as it's a lifelong love, I've become conscious that I have also created an attachment to it which has created fear of being separated from it. There's no real line between chemicals that are natural and artificial, DMT for example. It's incredibly tricky to decide what actions are good for the earth and which are bad. I've noticed that mushrooms grow most heavily where old roads have been and nature was cleared out and destroyed. I've also gotten a lot of insights from litter found in places that I consider sacred and belonging to nature. Those human litter bugs are loved by mother earth just as dearly as the birds, the stones and trees. Study the crow. He eats trash, he lives alongside humans, he thrives upon the destruction of the forest, and yet he is one of the most intelligent creatures on earth and he is the star of many myths and stories for good reason. Nature loves us so much and is such an integral part of us that it allows us the illusion that we were ever separate from it. For the same reason you're completely right, if you really look at tree, it will tell you all the secrets you told yourself long ago and forgot.

Infinity just means nothing, so things can be infinity large or infinitely small. Nothing is so infinite that it creates a vantage point of perception which can call things large or small.

@Aakash I love you too. Songs about love aren't about romantic love. And when I see you like that Then we see what we want to see all coming back to me The flesh and the fantasies all coming back to me I can barely recall but it's all coming back to me now If you forgive me all this If I forgive you all that We forgive and forget and it's all coming back to me Source sucks me in and eats me up, it's like walking into the den of lions. Nothing could keep me away.

This song flashed through my memory this morning.

A couple weeks ago I took my daughter out for a walk and as we walked back a huge cloud had appeared. I was walking by a massive field, which is rare around here, so I got to see the whole thing without trees in the way. It looked like a thundercloud bank but white and was this magnificent mountain and became heaven in my eyes with faces of men, angels, lions and gargoyles. The feeling and absorption and beauty of the moment stuck with me. I remembered how the first novel I wanted to write that I had an idea for after reading Harry Potter the second time through started. It starts with a girl lying in a field imagining things in the clouds and losing track of time. After that I had a similar experience, trail running at my parents. There's this "sacred" spot that I used to go to and pray when I was a teenager. Recently though, my Dad and his friend Tom cut wood there and "ruined it" so I haven't thought it was sacred for the past few years. I went there and took a break from running. There with this mushroom there in the sunlight, with subtle beauty beyond measure and I lost myself again like in the clouds. Little birds surrounded me and I asked for something there again. Last evening I went for another run there and went back to the mushroom. It had rotten and turned black but now was in the shape of a raven with one eye in the center of its head. I went through Mom's garden, she grew scarlet runner beans this year and they are gorgeous. This year the apples did exceptionally well from all the rain, I've never seen them better. There's this small apple tree by my parents driveway and it makes tiny apples. I never bother with them but there were so many so I took one and tried one. I remembered eating them as a kid, and I remembered this memory I have of eating them and being incredibly depressed and terrorized with my OCD. And I remembered how I used to bite faces into the apples to entertain myself. Then I remembered the beads I started making this year, the poison apple from Cinderella. I haven't had a bead style be so popular in a long time. It's like every little tiny aspect of my life is flowing together. I had a thought that our life could be split into three. "Real" life, dream life and creativity/imagination. I really want to compare the the holy trinity but I'm afraid Zigzag Idiot will be pissed at me if I do that so I'll refrain. Real life seems boring at times but it's the foundation where everything happens and can make sense and come into being. Dream life is a kind of communication and integration but it feels like it's happening to you. Creativity comes through and visits and links both worlds. This "insight" is half baked and could use some work, I know.

@seeking_brilliance @Zigzag Idiot I'll check it out, thank you! @DrewNows Yes, the thoughts that come in can either enhance and preserve and learn from an experience or they can cut you off from it. At first it helps to stop all thoughts and just sense, but later on you learn to use thought in a productive way or they just come to you. When I was a kid, I thought something was wrong with me for just experiencing experiences, like a bad smell, or doing work I wasn't supposed to like doing, I really thought that I was supposed to judge things as bad or unwanted. Last night my kids disrupted my sleep a lot, but I really got to "save" my dreams and thought processes. The first one was trying to remind me of the significance of talking to the "crazy" guy who lives near the river the night before. I had looked forward to talking to him all summer but gave up on the idea and significance of where he lives. He came down just to talk to me. He said that he saw a pileated woodpecker and I remembered seeing one and being quite close it it by the largest apple tree at Pomroy's, the one with the bone underneath it. They are gorgeous birds, bright red, black and white. We laughed a lot about the people in the town and he told me memories of what it was like in the 70's including a few hilarious but sad stories about a woman who just threw her trash in the river and had a son who was enormously fat and drove around in a ridiculous old car and told everyone he liked 14 year old girls. I ask him why he came here, he said they lived in NYC and Philadelphia, and came her in the 70's as a part of a "back to the earth movement" and came here in particular due to "odd circumstances". It was funny that I was replaying that even in my dream thoughts because the conversation was pretty dream like. I kept hearing someone call "Mom" and I got right up and went to my son's room, he was sick the evening before so I was worried about him but he was asleep and didn't even wake up when I spoke to him and asked what he wanted. Then I dreamed that I was in a library, and I remembered this as being a dream place that I have been before. It's a massive library like you'd expect in a city, only the books are on quite deep subjects, and the librarians are horribly bitchy. The downstairs is creepy and mysterious, but the upstairs is an expansive creepy book collection with no lighting except for maybe a candle flame to go by and the books are very very old. No one goes upstairs. Think the restricted section of the Hogwarts library, but being an entire floor and even scarier. The feeling of the upstairs and this entire experience came back to my consciousness like a flood, like I had just experienced it, and had never forgotten the previous dream. It was nighttime and I decided that this time I wasn't going to go back upstairs, instead I was going to leave the library. As soon as I left it was daytime again and I had traveled back in time. To exit the library, I had to go down a very tall series of steps. They were dangerous and there were no rails and no one seemed afraid but me. People coming up oblivious to my fear almost pushed me off the edge. I have had thoughts recently about how in real life I seem invisible to people, and how I often sneak up on people and surprise them when I'm trying not to. Then the steps turned into chains and you had to swing from one to the next to get down and I was just tall enough to make it. Then it became an apple orchard and I was back in time, like back in the middle ages it seemed like, sort of like the upstairs library felt like. There was a girl gathering all kinds of apples in a basket. At the bottom of the "stairs" was this amazing apple tree, and it was a variety that doesn't exist. The apples were pale and variegated colors, beautifully shaped and HUGE. I picked a couple of the biggest most beautiful ones for someone else, (friends who just appeared?) and decided I had to try one. The next nicest one I found was a little off looking. A woman standing under the tree said "You're going to eat that, that apple is HIDEOUS!". And I said "No, it's beautiful," even though I partially agreed with her, I started describing why it was beautiful to her and birds appeared on the apple as I described them, complete with bright colors and feathers. As I described them, a peacock appeared and a blue jay, their feathers sort of melded into the thing like it was half bird and half apple. I heard "Mom" again over and over until I thought I was hearing ghost voices and eventually went to my son's room and he wanted me to cuddle him. I told him it was the middle of the night, and stayed with him and reviewed the dream in my head until I could remember it.

@Nahm It kind of is/has. The haughtiness with which I posed the question and his answer was like a wall that got broken through and ever since then it seems like peace is falling into place ever so lightly like a feather falling to the ground.

What is desire without the mental construct of time? What does that feel like? It feels like bliss or truly feeling alive. If you don't allow that state through repression of desire you can't really experience the present moment. The problem is that sometimes we experience the flash of a real desire and feel the bliss of it and let it knock us off our feet. Then we go right into agony of trying to figure out how we can manifest it too soon or why we can't, and since we do this so much we start to think that desire itself is bad. The trick is to learn to stay with the desire/vision without bringing in resistance and inner conflict.

It's partly because you have to be creative in language use to talk about spirituality and followers of a specific teacher will use a lot of the same terms, so it can seem creepy and like everyone is parroting. As for who is enlightened and who isn't, things aren't always as they seem and projections run amok. It's easy to get lost in a maze of trying to figure out who is who and what's what but always bring it back to your own projections and state of mind/emotion.

Yes, it's in duality but duality is also magical if you appreciate duality with an understanding of nonduality. It's in that place where they meet and intertwine where enlightenment as experienced by humans and magic happens. Creativity is channeling, it's just includes its more gentler forms. Harry Potter, Star Wars and the Matrix aren't powerful pointers to the nature of reality for nothing. They didn't become wildly popular for nothing. They were a creative message from God send to us in a fun package. Have you ever been in a deep flow state, when it felt like the creation was just creating itself or the story was just writing itself or like you weren't the one running the race or playing the game? There's no limit to how powerful and all consuming those flow states can get.

So say you experience an awakening, and become pure being and lose your "self" in that moment. Wouldn't it makes sense that in that state creativity could flow through you so strongly, but there would be no "you" to take credit for it anymore, so wouldn't it make sense to describe that as channeling? That you became a channel for infinite intelligence when you lost your identification with self?

I LOVE looking at advertisements or any creative work/ideas at all really. There's always a pointer there, even if the person who thought they came up with the idea wasn't conscious of the depth of the meaning.

So does creativity always come through clearly or can it get clouded? Does it come through in the same way through different people, or does it come through in unique ways?

In a way I've integrated my awakening from almost 6 months ago, by that I mean I have my focus back and am able to go about daily life normally like a responsible adult. I've even gone back to watching youtube videos of middle aged women who have impeccable homes film themselves while cleaning so that I have motivation to actually pick stuff up off the floor and throw out old food from the fridge. Don't judge me. I'm really enjoying my work again especially with the fall and Halloween season and making money is a joy most of the time and not an obligation. My mood is pretty even keel again. However, it's only been integrated on that external level. there are still lots of realizations, re-framing and "ohhhhhhh.... fuck..." moments. I never understood how creepy the nature of reality is. I never knew how much I avoided creepy things or being associated with them. Also I hated technology and video games. Yet life is just one simulation. Why on earth would it be FUN in a video game to buy things, to improve, to learn, to meet people, to uncover a story line? Well... because that's what god is doing all the time. I've realized that I'm here to want things and to collect data, and I have chosen to experience everything that comes my way. When it's logical to hate the place I live, I adore it. Because God wanted to experience itself this form for at least 30 years anyway, living in the middle of nowhere. I don't have to care about other people's experiences or have fear of missing out, because I am all experiences and this is the one that I am choosing/ has been chosen for me. The rabbit hole of personal development and taking "personal responsibility" is deep. My life is beautifully orchestrated. If no one ever hears the music, it doesn't matter, that's also beauty. I see the nothingness in the everything. I see beauty and art as communication from source. Mikael's post about being a leg man gave me a huge revelation about men and their obsession with women's looks. Of course! I looove this time of year. Summer is dying, but good Lord, the colors. The leaves start to change and the mushrooms bloom in the woods, and there are still flowers everywhere and ripe apples on the trees. Of course I'd chose to be born this month, on the full moon.

@whoareyou Where does creativity come from?

Because the perfection of nonduality includes duality, "you" come back from a no self experience, the ego comes back and you have to integrate what you now understand. You also see the perfection and joy in doing mundane survival tasks.