mandyjw

@AleksM Have you studied the law of attraction at all? What we believe ourselves to be will show itself to us, so if we believe that we are nothing and nothing is an ideal, (we actually have an idea or positive/assertive notion of "nothing") THAT will be how we experience ourselves. Finding out what you are authentically called toward, and what you truly desire can be a huge shift. If you check out Abraham Hicks, she might help you make some connections. On the surface it seems to be a materialistic teaching but the materialistic part is just an analogy, and of course, the material is not the material. It's actually shocking how deep it is, and how beautifully they go with some of the deepest more traditionally nondual teachings and understandings.

@Zeroguy Just so you realize, every time you tag that you tag his sister. So maybe out of consideration delete or edit those posts.

@Forestluv Absolutely. I remember realizing that I had OCD as a kid, and knowing something was very wrong and feeling very ashamed and wanting to keep the shame to myself, because I knew that my parents would be ashamed too. Ironically the OCD drove me to confess things, but the thing I would not confess or would not consider confessing was the fact that I was suffering INTENSELY because of my thoughts. That's because I couldn't see it myself. When I accidently found out about the label OCD I felt a huge relief, and somehow that gave me the tools to start disregarding my thoughts on my own. The problem is, I completely and dogmatically disregarded them. judging them as bad and unwanted and actually cut myself of from an intuition that was underneath. For years I blamed my parents for my suffering but knowing what I know now, that doesn't make sense anymore. Unfortunately our society reflects to us both the belief that we should be responsible for ourselves, we should fix our own problems ourselves, on our own, AND that the ONLY appropriate resource to go to for finally admitting these problems is a professional where someone else we give the power to can give us a label. It's strikes me like the scene that played out an hour ago watching my neighbors trying to parent, "don't do that, we'll spank you!" then immediately, "Don't hit!" We often end up internalizing shame in both cases. The shame itself is the source of the issue, but we think it is as an effect of, so that's why we think that bottling it up works. Actually as it turns out DIY, professional and everything else in between is all appropriate. Why would you cut yourself off from any resource, when you are the source of all? Essentially ALL of life is timeless healing, a coming together or what was never originally apart.

If you go straight from thinking a lot about something in a certain way, to some other task that barely uses the mind, your head will keep spinning for a while. This is what happens after awakening. You stopped the activity, you've seen the light, but momentum is still at play. Sometimes stuff really comes out and starts flying around. Meditation as a practice is having the self love to give yourself the relief of letting momentum stop. Differentiating momentum from a calling, from a pull from Source requires, (well nothing) Awareness. Momentum is not an effort, it seems effortless within the momentum, and yet it's a movement. Stopping momentum gently without letting it simply play itself out is an art, if you try to halt it too fast, you end up with damage. This shouldn't matter, if the thing moving isn't real, but if the thing moving isn't real, there is no movement to be dealt with. We still have to honor the thing and the movement. Otherwise we wouldn't tell people to meditate. Otherwise we'd be like the parent who swears to the child there's no monster and expects the child to take his word for it and not to explore. We welcome the dark and we welcome rest because the light has shown us that it is ok. This is why we're all wired for awakening. WE'RE ALL WIRED FOR AWAKENING. Oh Amazing Grace of amazing graces. Meditation is not the only way of letting momentum play out. Journaling is also, expression is. Nissargadatta compares it to having to take a piss. If you ignore this calling, it can be embarrassing, and yet it is often out of not wanting to me embarrassed and raise our hand and ask to be excused in class to use the restroom, that we knowingly choose to ignore this calling that we feel. Either we're so wrapped up that we don't feel it to begin with, or we feel it but deem it an inappropriate feeling. Spirituality, I am out of diapers, but I still have an accident every once in a while. (Mom says it's ok, but she doesn't ACT like it's ok when she's tired sometimes.) She even took down the sticker chart. THAT BITCH. I'm not sure what's up with the analogies today. I guess we ALL must entertain our models of spiritual growth in our own way. Yep, it's like taking a piss. I think it's time to meditate.

Realizing this stuff and realizing the Now/Awareness is like always having within you. wherever you are, wherever you go, the power to look up at the stars on a really clear night in wonder and remove the weight of a perspective from it all. I just went outside and my neighbors were playing with their grandkids, (which I think they are mostly raising.) One got yelled at by the Grandfather, "stop doing that if you don't want a purple butt!" (implying that he would be spanked), then a minute later the Grandmother yelled at one of the kids "stop hitting!" This is essentially the IMPOSSIBLE, hypocritical structure we've been trying to exist within society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence The all seeing eye, the non-separate Awareness that is our true identity, the Light that is us all. Not such a secret society after all.

My OCD as a child was complete resistance and repulsiveness to the barriers of societal structure. My deepest suffering came from an intuitive KNOWING that I beginning to accept impositions on me that were intolerable to my spirit, to the KNOWING AWARENESS of who I really was. But I tried to work my way around and dodge these barriers. Confession was the only way through I knew of, the only way of healing and feeling okay about myself I could find that would allow me to feel better but still carry the belief of "wrong" which was so new and SO strongly felt as "wrong" itself. This kind of looking back feels like your life flashing before your eyes, like a conclusion to a mystery, this clarity, such powerful knowing fully shining the light back at your past and only seeing the clarity that is Now. That's what the OCD, the indecision is. It's fucking CLARITY, in the illusory form of deep, deep confusion. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT IMPOSITIONS. No one can impose them upon you. There are already no barriers. Don't take my word for it. Shine the light and see.

There's the notion here, that emotional suffering and mental health problems is dirty, dangerous, a liability, ugly and must be hidden. However this mostly stems from the fact that the shadow IS only the shadow because we hide it. We think our shadow is like, (oh shit massive insight about the book title that came to me months ago) our butt, it must always be clothed but if I'm suffering or worried about myself I will show it to someone who has gone to school for years and years, a butt expert. Sadly though, because the shadow is not actual it isn't like your butt, you end up showing it all the time. You can cover it with great efforts, and the greater the effort the more it comes out big time and makes a big show, like a flasher at a football game. And even that, when it happens, is nothing to be shamed of. Thank God! Unfortunately, psychologists are living and working from the materialistic paradigm, so while they may have wonderful therapies and insights and are generally a very helpful modality for healing, they are extremely limiting. What we need is radical. (I misspelled "radial", beam of light.) What we need is for our entire structure of relating as society to break down. This is where people go running screaming. ORGIES, drugs, people crapping on everything! In reality, it's sitting with someone who is terrified of having a conversation with you, someone who is so shy you want to cringe yourself but offering so little resistance and so much understanding and so much okayness that it is brought to light and talk about it, that it goes away. Instead we live by this societal structure that expects us to pretend it's not there, and yet we know fully, and feel fully, that the entire conversation is driven by it. We actually think it is KIND to pretend that it's not there. It's the monster under the bed. You cannot heal with someone who tells you that it's ridiculous that you believe there's a monster there. Only shame will arise. Sometimes you have to get out the flashlight and go with them to look, and SEE that there's no monster there.

Drop the idea that you have to love yourself and just love whatever is the easiest thing to love and appreciate right now is also your self. The bird chirping, the trees, the sky. Then self love arises too. You're all of it.

This is an important point. Thinking of one particular user with incredible, sharp, cutting insight who was warned all the time because most people couldn't flip their perspective around enough to get it. Sometimes what people say is symbolic and almost like a riddle, but when you get it, it really hits home. People totally miss this in favor of logical/language only communication. So basically you want to just post Matt Kahn videos there? Either way, it would be amazing to have a section for discussing in general topics like emotional intelligence, the emotional scale, symbolism, art therapy, Jung's work, etc.

“Question: You seem to advise me to be self-centered to the point of egoism. Must I not yield even to my interest in other people? Maharaj: Your interest in others is egoistic, self-concerned, self- oriented. You are not interested in others as persons, but only as far as they enrich, or enoble your own image of yourself. And the ultimate in selfishness is to care only for the protection, preservation and multiplication of one's own body. By body I mean all that is related to your name and shape--- your family, tribe, country, race, etc. To be attached to one's name and shape is selfishness. A man who knows that he is neither body nor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for. Or, you may say, he is equally 'selfish' on behalf of everybody he meets; everybody's welfare is his own. The feeling 'I am the world, the world is myself' becomes quite natural; once it is es- tablished, there is just no way of being selfish. To be selfish means to covet, to acquire, accumulate on behalf of the part against the whole. -Nisargadatta Maharaj” There is no self, so you can make the self literally anything you want it to be. You can make yourself any sort of ideology or group, any sort of fighting against, any sort of relationship with another. "I'm a mother. I'm a lover. I love others. I care for others." The shadowy sad lion art (scratchboard drawing I made in highschool) avatar is making even more sense. Woah! Kinda creeping myself out here. Who who?

As a strange (result?) of recent discussions here lately, I feel incredibly grateful and so appreciative of several people here on the forum. I just had a strange insight into the critical voice. The purpose of the critical voice is actually to stop and get you to consider other perspectives. We may assume we're always right, that the thing we've always been doing is still the best way. This voice questions it. It wants to liberate us. It is actually born out of non-identification. It's only when we split ourselves from the critical voice and believe we're the one being critiqued and hold resistance to it that it seems as if the critical voice is the bad guy. We need to be able to receive criticism from ourselves before we can receive it from others. Receiving is emotional, vibrational, so you know by how you feel how receptive you are. Troll keeps calling me crazy on youtube. I know I'm crazy. Occasionally it would bother me. Funny when he used my name it actually felt loving. This is the mindfuck of identification. Trying hard not to be yourself is the deepest identification there is, a splitting of oneself. It's all yourself so when you consciously try to split yourself it's an epic battle, autoimmune disorder. The emotional feminine route to self realization is learning to be a separate self. We're co-dependent. We try to find ourselves in others, looking for their praise, their criticism to steer us. Autonomy feels like death. And sweet sweet freedom.

Yes, in my opinion the benefit of a section like that would be to carve out a space where people feel safe to drop their standards and ideals for themselves. It wouldn't jive well beside topics about habits and productivity, which are important topics unto themselves. A lot of what holds this place back in my opinion is the felt need to always make a quality post or to show one's knowledge as if we are all meant to be teachers here or something. When someone is exploring their understanding or emotions it does not make for a quality post, but it can be incredibly enlightening and break down blockages that prevent real understanding from arising. It would be a place where intelligent, purposeful vulnerability can be made space for. People sometimes forget that an insight is marked by an incredible feeling of knowing that comes with it. This is what we seek when we seek knowledge, not knowledge in exclusion of that. The feeling IS the knowing.

There's never a separate self in our direct experience (or in the present moment) so when we step out of it into thought and hold some belief that makes suffering a reality we must endure for some reason, we deceive ourselves. Imagination, fantasy, none of that is actually self deception, unless it's taken to be real FOR a separate someone, then you know it because there's suffering. It's right there in the term self deception. Wisdom, love, empowerment and transcendence is knowing that all deception is self deception. “It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.” ― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I know it's "your" forum, and I respect that, but democracy is good stuff. I don't think anyone should tell you how to make your videos or what courses to make or what to post on your blog but I do think listening to input from others about a community you've built is smart. We have polls. People work for you for free to moderate. Shouldn't they have a voice?

@Loving Radiance It happens naturally. The reason that you desire anything is because you think you'll feel better when you have it, so there are two ways to disallow desire. 1. Not allowing yourself to desire the desire in the first place. 2. Wanting it and not enjoying the desire, the journey and paying attention to the lack of the thing wanted rather than enjoying the nature of being an ever expanding being. Both cut ourselves off from the desire and create a separate self in thought. There's no time in desire, and there's no separation, there's no one to have or not have anything. In the pure feeling of desire, there is no lack. The beliefs, thoughts and justifications are almost always inherent in both 1. and 2. What a desire looks like on the surface can be continually evolved and may be radically changed and fulfilled in surprising ways when you settle for nothing less than the feeling of pure desire.

Not sure I get what you mean by arising conditioning?

If I'm reading a Harry Potter book and completely riveted and engrossed in the story, you could say that I really care what happens, but also because I know full well that Harry isn't real, I also don't care what happens. Somewhere in between these facts my love and enjoyment of the story lies. Fulfillment means an end to something separate, but there is no end and never was anything separate. That's why the journey is the fun, the becoming. There's no end. If you come from the knowing/feeling that you are already whole and you GET to make choices and you can't get them wrong you open to an intuition and knowing beyond the separate perspective of believing that there's a chooser who can make the right choice or the wrong choice. The fear of getting it wrong actually blocks the knowing.

❤ Creation, Creativity, the Mother, Earth, Nourishment, Emotions, Feeling, life as art is the side of spirituality that gives birth and celebrates life. When you're focused on that ego death and physical death don't get confused. Life IS already your creative license, you're freedom itself. Many people try to kill their egos from a point of feeling fundamentally flawed and unworthy of life echoed in a dissatisfaction with life. It'll never work. You'll never get there. You're loved so much, as Love itself, there's no end to you. Interesting that the male suicide rate is far higher than that of females. If there's space made for emotions, space for healing, emotional intelligence and understanding of emotions as a guidance system, I suspect that this tragic and painful mix up and misunderstanding will occur far less. ?

That would be amazing. One of the most life changing things I've learned while participating on this forum is how to go inward and express emotions BEFORE it starts turning into more than just a sad feeling or an annoyance. Not knowing how to do that is like giving someone anesthesia only after the surgery has begun. It needs to be taught, modeled, and encouraged and then you just don't end up in crisis or in a prolonged depression. That's when it's the most difficult to reach anyone, they just can't hear you or hear any reasonable advice when it gets that bad. Also maybe we can generally start to appreciate people more instead of calling them devils, fools, and doing damage control 24/7. That type of atmosphere breeds more issues in my opinion.

I sent you a PM on April 30 offering to moderate, noting the imbalance of male mods around here and received no response. Soonhei's situation had nothing to do with you and a sharp person would not have spotted an issue because of the nature of his posts. After seeing how the one mod who goes above and beyond day in day out helping with issues on this forum who was actively helping in this case was thrown under the bus I can't imagine applying to take on this level of responsibility after that. How about we start to value emotions and helping people as a whole in this community? Otherwise you're just going to end up with burnt out, unappreciated people.

There are so many different ways to talk about karma, you could say that it is your beliefs and mind patterns. It is a filter through which you see the world and which colors your experience. You may find that you can let go and stop blaming and shaming yourself for the pattern (which prevents it from stopping or being cleared), if you can see how it arose as a response in your childhood. Sometimes that is helpful but not always necessary. Whatever we cut ourselves off from and push against creates resistance because we are not separate, not two, non dual so we can't actually do this. The only mechanism through which we can identify is separation and exclusion, and it's a false effort, it's never actual. This means that karma acts like a boomerang, what we reject comes back around waiting to be loved and accepted. The boomerang goes around and doing damage until we realize what's going on. Becoming conscious of the law of attraction is an extremely effective tool to start to see these patterns. It's just a clearing up of misunderstandings. It's not like your doing penance for your sin out of fear of suffering, it's just a beautiful reunion. Personally my biggest karma releases seemed to be "caused" by religious beliefs, (I was a devout Christian as a kid). I recognized that the love I had for the religion was never false and always the deepest truth, but the fear and judgement I had taken on with it was hidden love. Felt beyond amazing to release and recognize that. Beyond that I'm constantly curious about how and why I attract what I do in my life. If I do this out of avoidance, or fear in trying to prevent something bad, it doesn't work, that IS the mind pattern itself I'm looking to release. If I'm curious and willing to laugh about how a thought pattern played out into my experience, there's a lot more release and insight.

When there's just no thought or feeling that something isn't right I guess. Maybe consider checking out Abraham Hicks, she has incredible deep teachings on emotional intelligence that seem to magically bring things up and out on their own without aiming at it or trying to at all.

@Forestluv ❤