mandyjw

Brilliant. That's another term that's oh so loaded, "high quality". ?

Look into art and creative writing, or any creative pursuits that call to you. Once you realize how to draw shadows, or write them into a story, you start to realize how you're creating it when you don't want to be. When your mind goes into creative mode by default, direct it to the story you're writing, the project you're doing. It's a power. Harness it.

My thoughts are yes to the beans if you rinse them well before eating, NO to the tomatoes, because of the plastic lining and the fact that tomatoes are so acidic that they really shouldn't be in anything other than glass. Of course my mom always used to say "everything in moderation" all the time when it came to food but oh no, I had to do hours and hours of reading and podcast listening over the course of years. Turns out, she was right. Everything in moderation. Your best value is frozen vegetables for maintaining nutrients and being cost effective. Personally I would mix fresh, frozen and then canned only for when I'm really busy. Truly fresh food has a vibrational, reviving energetic kick to it, if you're sensitive to it.

I have this too. My guess is that I have thought patterns of being afraid of disappointing people, I care what they think and how they feel over how I feel. I'm so awfully hard on myself if I'm late or forget an appointment, or doubting myself for making a commitment that I've given myself some sort of post traumatic stress that creates the overwhelm and resistance. I'm in the habit of focusing more on what I do not want and rather than what I want. I would like to practice being more intentional about focusing on and being clear about what I want and more forgiving to myself. Forgiving whether I have to cancel or forgiving whether I have committed and then later found that I've had to rush or can't do something else I wanted. As I focus on what I DO want, I will be much more clear about what I want to say yes to and what I want to say no to.

Have you noticed that when someone coins a term like that, suddenly people believe it and try very hard not to be it? Karen, cringe, wage slave, etc. Watch out for language, especially new language, and language rich with connotations. If you don't know your creating it it becomes itself the ball and chain. It can both illuminate and obscure. It's a tool. It's a helpful term, it points to and illuminates a very real problem, but freedom is ultimately an inner state that the outer reflects in time.

No one is a wage slave, it's a state of mind. Some people are such slaves to their business, they'd find much more freedom being employed. But if you love what you do working for yourself, it doesn't matter what hours you work. Get in touch with passion, inspiration, intuition, it's all about getting the inner state right, it's not about being judged as being "free" from someone else, on the outside. THAT is the real slavery.

Feeling is guidance, emotion responds to your thought and indicates what Source/Unconditional Love feels about what you're thinking or how your interpreting something. So when I take a deep breath and marvel at the stars in the sky, it feels good. When I start to think, "wow, I'm really insignificant" it feels bad. Negative emotions are Love, overlaid with thought that is riddled with misunderstanding. Only when the thought is dropped and the feeling is felt head on, this is seen. Feeling as in sensation is guidance too, if something is hot or sharp, you learn not to touch it. Emotions work exactly the same way, except when we believe though we hijack the entire system and think that things are actually inherently bad. We do not believe that a knife is bad for being sharp, we realize that it's a useful tool when used correctly with care. Many of us do believe that we are bad for feeling certain feelings, or other people are bad for causing us to feel, those feelings. This is never the case.

What, I thought I was making myself into the perfect specimen of a man? If I have the flu and I get a cough that doesn't go away, doing nothing in this case is continuing to take action, to work and go on like normal. If I decide to take action and take two days to rest and drink hot lemon water, am I taking action or not taking action? If I'm paddling my kayak down the river with the current and I stay off in the shallows where there is no current and paddle and paddle, am I taking action? or is the decision to move to the center of the stream and ride the current, taking action or releasing action?

Yes, just find something else to think about or do that feels good. I recently went on a weekend retreat to start a project that's been in my head for several years. I would work on the project and then when I felt I had hit a wall I'd stop. I didn't force anything. When a question came up I'd write it down. Sometimes the answer would be there before the question was even written, but most questions I just left alone. Then I'd go walk on the beach or meditate. Watching the inspiration and ideas flow in when I wasn't resisting or forcing the project was such an astounding thing, it was just as rewarding as being in the active flow state of work. That's the key, stay in the flow, learn to love the downtimes as period of rest and the times you have to do something else as something that enhances, not takes away from what you're passionate about. Having an LP only makes your job more rewarding because it's not all there is for you. Let one enhance the other. Make getting inspiration for your LP at work a game.

Do some volunteer work for a Hospice group and you might see the flaw in that assumption.

@KennedyCarter

My initial impression of what turned out to be some of the most influential teachers was horrible. I thought Eckhart Tolle was some kind of retarded monkey who also looked oddly like my father in law. I thought Abraham Hicks was a demon. Hmm.. probably not helping dissuade your fears of ignoring psychological disorders here, am I? The point is healing is just that... it hurts to touch that spot that I burned yesterday on the stove that's now healing, then when it is healed it no longer hurts to touch that spot. Eckhart Tolle's words resonate, and change my life and he is no longer a retarded monkey in my eyes but thoroughly appreciated. That pain or discomfort is almost always an indicator that we are still healing that spot in some way. It doesn't mean make yourself listen to something that doesn't resonate, but it also doesn't mean that our conclusions are fair. In my opinion the field of psychology has fallen into the same trap as the medical field, they are so afraid of liability that they spend 95% of their energy protecting themselves out of their own fears and 5% of the time healing people's irrational fears. That doesn't mean that doctors and psychiatrists aren't still indispensable in some ways, but they have made themselves so inefficient that many other healing modalities outpace them in most cases. And this inefficiency (time and high expense of treatments) contributes in deaths, LOTS of deaths and suffering, but as long as they aren't assigned to a certain person, or a certain hospital or organization that can be held liable, no one cares. That's the real danger and unethical treatment in my opinion.

I would save for a down payment so that you can buy rather than rent when you do move out. I would also look into a Roth IRA.

wrong. Your idea of what a strong mental idea IS, is yet... another idea. Ideas only be happenin now. Do what feels best to you, do what you're inclined to do, you're already free.

I always knew, didn't quite know, that I don't know. I knew how flighty, how flakey and shaky my knowledge of how things are or should be, or what is best really was. For a time, I thought this insecurity could be solved by finding people who did KNOW. I found people who knew. That wasn't it. Then I found people who knew. They said there's no one who knows. What was old is knew again. "I swear I didn't light this tree on fire" my son playing Minecraft says. Yesterday I went to my Grandmother's grave. I also went over to the very old cemetery lot where my sister had her own clairvoyant experience. I was along with her for the craziest part and I couldn't refute it, couldn't deny it. But I never believed she saw a ghost. Relatives. Oh, that's funny. Anyway, there was a fire right by this place recently, someone must has tossed a cigarette. It burned a lot of trees. One of the stones got discolored pretty bad. It was a baby's grave, she died at 12 days old or something like that. I never noticed that this family's plot had a baby's grave before. Carved into it was a saying, something like, everything has a purpose under heaven. Oh, purpose has a double meaning, purpose, and purpose, I purpose an idea. All that is old is made knew again. Am I writing real life, or a novel? Novel means knew... I mean new.

I wrote this in a book I'm writing. “So the church is Baptist. Pentecostals believe in speaking in tongues, but people in my parent’s church think this is foolish at best and like opening the door and offering a plate of cheese and crackers to demons at worst. They even seem to judge Pentecostals worse than they do…” she glanced up at him momentarily, “atheists. It doesn’t matter what you do, the harder you try to make yourself like them, the more they only notice the differences.” Tears welled in her eyes. It continues to dawn on me time and time again that I am not free of religion. I see the same patterns play out with nonduality, and enlightenment, whatever labels you want to put it on the woke, open-minded. It's relative. Ah. Relative. This is why we hate our relatives. The people the most like us, somehow make the differences sharply contrasted. Relative. It's within me. That's the real realization. Nothing pisses me off worse than a teacher who teaches this stuff, who knows this stuff, but who does it not quite the way I would. It seems like the worst, most devilish sin. Just throw the door open and invite them demon relatives in. That is the entire theme of the book. The House with no Door. Yeah, I know. Are you laughing? I'm laughing. We're always laughing. Who knew demons were such fun? OH! This is why there are all those people who love animals and hate people. People are too close to home. When the whole place is your home, nothing can ever be too close to home. Someone should tell all those animal lovers that they aren't human, so they don't need to stop resisting being human by idolizing animals. "Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human."" Gospel of Thomas

You can't teach what someone isn't asking for, you can't teach what someone hasn't seen the value in knowing. "Ask and you shall receive." So a good teacher would naturally, instinctively, intuitively "sell" the knowledge they can provide. You are intuiting something that is indeed there, but possibly your beliefs around money and limited resources (materialist paradigm) is skewing it.

It's funny how when you write a story consciously, all the characters merge. Real life characters, characters in the book. The past few days have been unreal. Ok, all the days are unreal. "Reality" is just what we call unconscious storytelling. It's funny that the death of the magic, the breaking of the spell, is severed by bad storytelling, and yet also is the very source of the creativity itself. It's not the meaningless death it seems to be. Leave it alone, and let it recharge. Ask the question and let the answer come. This deep, unbroken omnipresent, omniscient okayness is a kind of a magic I cannot touch, a magic I cannot control. I love you so deeply, I want you so thoroughly that sometimes it even seems as if were two different things. It's a tragic, tantric love story. No one is ever touched in the ultimate intimacy of it. As the Author of Happily Ever After's, there is no... Love and resonance, namaste, the light within you recognizes the light within me. Everyone is enlightened, no one is enlightened, paradoxically some know themselves to be light on various levels of understanding, understanding is itself only a certain wavelength of light. That light is our awareness which is not owned as in the material paradigm, and is not separate and never actually becomes two separate things, a me and a you, a me and the world, etc. Becomes clear when you consider the double slit experiment, is light a wave or a particle? it depends on the Observer. It IS the observer. You Are... Light.

Is Voldemort a liar? Is Harry Potter a liar? Is JK Rowling a liar?

A book of Jesus' sayings and parables that are much more clearly nondual pointers than in the other gospels. There are a lot of the same ones there, and many new ones. It's delightfully mysterious and riddle-like... the perfect set up for those big "Aha!" moments.

OMG, I would so LOVE to have a conversation with that lady. If you're open to some crazy deeper self reflection, here ya go. Today I was reading an article about coronavirus and I was getting concerned and taking it very seriously and then there was an ad with celebrity gossip, something like "Britney Spear's left boob is bigger than her right boob, OMG", I was like, the... fuck am I doing, giving this entire page any credit whatsoever? I snapped out of a daze. People are so interested in other people, but half the time it's like Rembrandt painting graffiti on a bathroom stall. It's a total waste of your talent. Might be fun once in a while, (can't really speak for Rembrandt though), but is that really what you want to be focusing on?

Going by how you feel is key. For example, this summer I really spooked myself about shark attacks because I swim in the ocean. I kept reading to get more information about how afraid I should be but after an hour and half of reading, I realized I was only feeling worse, and it felt better just to go for a swim and drop the subject. I wanted to swim and enjoy it, feeling safe. That's what in my heart, I really wanted. I tried to secure myself with information, it didn't work. The only way to do it was to actually go do what I was wanting to do. If you do not feel good about taking the plunge, find another subject, go for a walk, read fiction, etc. If learning feels good, and you find it is reliving you of past worries, keep doing it. Too often it creates 10 new boogeymen in the place of one, all in the name of progress.

Kinda click baity title, but it fits.

I used to be almost exactly as you described. There was lots of listening to Eckhart Tolle and other spiritual teachers over the years, lots of watching my thoughts. Lots of healing relationships with people close to me. Lots of understanding things I hadn't seen before. Lots of learning to appreciate people rather than let judgmental and insecure thoughts run amok. Lots of realizing I was focusing on what I do not want and flipping to focus on what I DO want. It's something that both takes practice and work and also has an instant pay off. Watch out, soon you'll be so overwhelmed with love by the interaction with some random delivery person or cashier that you'll find yourself crying about it. Then you will find the most AMAZING, wonderful, unreal people just come into your life, but they still won't be any better than that random cashier that day. You intended to see through this, and you will. You already are. ❤

There's nothing more exciting than the prospect of corrupting a good Christian boy. Jesus is pretty awesome though, have you read the Gospel of Thomas?