mandyjw

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.

@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.