mandyjw

The are EXTREMELY closeminded and rednecky. But here's the unexpected part, I hated it all my life, and I was a hermit. As I started doing spirituality I realized that I couldn't stay withdrawn from people anymore. I really started to practice seeing myself in them. The more judgement I let go of, the more beautiful they got. I started really seeing the values from stage blue I was moving back into. The love for community, the love of place, the love for hard work that connects you with nature and other people. One of my biggest mentors when I was a kid was a Buddhist. She moved here from away and was the well educated and grew up very wealthy. Instead of having a job she was the most loving involved member of the community, she made an effort to know everyone and treat them with love, even if the community shunned them. She befriended and took care of the elderly and did hospice care and she was an artist and gave me lessons as a kid. I remember telling her that she was wrong about religion, I was a stage blue Christian kid in a stage blue Christian family. She didn't see us for being stage blue. She saw through us. And here she is still in my life 21 years later and we're talking about meditation and reiki together. There are other people popping up around the place too, mostly they are stage green but some beyond too. They come here for the same reason I can't leave. What if highly conscious people started becoming gravitated to a place like this? What would be the power in having a pocket of stage yellow, stage turquoise people in a rural enough place that their energy could not be watered down by the stress of a city? What if they created a community with the giving caring values of stage blue but without the prejudice and ignorance? What if they designed a place that incorporated nature instead of fighting it?

It does matter. But we can't really be green if we deny the other colors in the rainbow as valid choices. You have to choose green as your favorite color, because you love it. Not because the other colors are the wrong choices.

Yeah, it is confusing. Both are true at the same time. Being present is being present with what arises... there's no ideal way to be, circumstances are always changing.

The heart and mind are the same.

You want to be and you also want/need, are called to create. It's tough to balance, I'm in the same boat.

I have found that I can find false spiritual reasoning for everything I do. My bad habit of being messy, really that's just because I'm more focused on spiritual matters than material, not because I can't focus long enough to get my shit together.

That reminds me of something Tim Ferriss says all the time. At 4:50 he says how Cato would wear tunics in the least popular colors just to make people make fun of him so he could train himself to be ashamed only of those things that are worth being ashamed of. There's really no difference in dressing like a slob or overdressing, depending on your setting you could still be accomplishing the same thing that Cato did.

@tsuki Is there some sort of societal pressure to look professional and presentable all the time there, or is this just a preference? I do not understand. I'll pick you tarot cards at times, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to freak you out.

Your shirt didn't dry? Do you not have more than one shirt? Are you really that hardcore of a minimalist? Want me to choose you a tarot card? Sometimes you don't want to know what they tell you but in my experience when they are negative they are a nice heads up for stuff that's going to happen and/or help you get insights and guidance faster. But maybe it works better if you do it for yourself.

I hate the dreams that have even worse limitations than real life, like suddenly the car you're driving has no brakes or power steering. A lot of my dreams are about living life like normal only I can't control anything the way I normally can. I guess control is an illusion that is more powerful when we are "awake" during the day.

Progress is not fluid, but it's ok. It's ok to miss meditation. It's ok to forget spirituality for awhile. The problem is not that you aren't living up to some ideal, it's that you have an ideal and you are beating yourself for not living up to it. There's no ideal you, there's just this current you. Your present state of consciousness is all that matters. Can you be present when you are beating yourself up for not being hardnosed enough? Self love and self care is key. Make some time for yourself to do things that you enjoy. Have some chocolate, bubble bath, stupid cat videos on youtube, whatever it is. Carve out the time for it, make it intentional. The rest of your life and spirituality will flow a lot smoother.

I really believe that you can. But you also have to combine it with some hard-nosed approaches and truly feeling sorrow and depression without distracting yourself. It's about fully embracing all aspects of life and dismissing none.

Prayer that is meditation with a little law of attraction and intention mixed in is incredibly powerful.

@EvilAngel Yep trying. You seem to be convinced so you're trying to change OTHER people's minds. So either you don't believe in free will or you don't believe that you are also other people and their opinions simultaneously.

You're still trying to pin it down. You do have free will but you don't. Did you choose your parents? Did you choose to be born? You have free will thanks to your limitations.

I really liked Leo's explanation of ultimate freedom in his latest video. You can't have ultimate freedom without giving someone the freedom to create limitations. Freedom and limitations are concepts that you just can't pin down.

@Shin I know, right?

@Shin Life in plastic, it's fantastic.

Kanye quotes... “Keep your nose out the sky, keep your heart to god, and keep your face to the raising sun.” “The prettiest people do the ugliest things.” “I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever.” Sounds like he's pretty woke.

@DrewNows Yep. It's nothing and it's also ALL OF THE THINGS and daily I get wrapped up in what it is or is not. I got up this morning knowing that I'm supposed to go pick up trash on the side of the road and love everyone who threw it out while I do it. It sounds like a wonderful opportunity to build a massive spiritual ego. Then I saw on Facebook that there is a scheduled trash pick up event today. So I just have to show up at the library and join in... that was weird.

@whoareyou I'm trying not to get too settled on any practice or no practice.

So I'm a bit shy to post this, but I was just working through Leo's most recent video and I he mentioned this very topic so i thought that maybe the time was right to talk about it. I had an awakening a few weeks ago. Couldn't eat, couldn't sleep was guided through it by someone on the forum here. When I was a kid I knew that I was insane. Later I talked to my friend who had read a book about a kid with OCD and I knew then that that was what was wrong with me. The impulses were sometimes to go do things or say things that I had no logical reason for doing. The impulses latched on to my strong religious beliefs and told me to accept the devil into my soul and I was incredibly tormented by those most of all. The told me to confess things to people. I made myself very ill confessing to my mother something about getting naked with other kids a child. I realize now that I could have given into it, and awakened as a kid and saved myself a lot of pain. But I probably would have landed in the mental institution. I didn't have the support then that I needed of the background of understand that Leo's videos have provided as well as many others. The impulses I had, they weren't intrusive thoughts but rather they were intuition on how I could awaken and see the world as it was. When I started this work I really loved the idea of having a clear mind or peace of mind. I didn't realize that my resistance to turmoil and painful thoughts was my ego. I had a spiritual opening with the death of my Grandmother. I realized that she was unconditional love. Holding her hand when she died and then touching her dead hand in the funeral home later changed something in me, although at the time I felt nothing. I thought I would be stricken by how different she felt dead than alive. I wasn't. Now I find myself in a place of not being able to meditate or still my mind. This isn't what I thought it was. I got here the exact ass backwards way that I expected to. I can't do the "work" anymore. It's all play to me. Nature speaks to me in ways that it always has but now I'm free to hear it. Still, I feel a lot of guilt and "shoulds" over abandoning the practices. The nature of my job is a highly focused meditative/creative one. I don't know if I should just go straight into that, or really focus on spiritual "work". There's no difference anymore! It's all a state of mind/no mind I guess.

Hmmm... It seems to me that this is an unfigureoutable problem. Or not a problem. One of those things.

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” 4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The first awakening. Eve beat Adam to the punch.