mandyjw

Read up on hedonic adaptation. In a nutshell, it's like I buy a new thing, it makes me happy, then I'm like "meh" and forget it. Most people see through this, but not always with personal development because we think it's finally seeking after something real. It's like scrapping the bottom of the barrel of all the things we've tried in life to find lasting happiness. It feels good to have direction, to know where we're going, to be excited about it. But if stayed that way forever, we'd never have an opportunity to be spontaneous, creative, or make unexpected discoveries. Enjoy the ride, go beyond, and pay attention instead to what does not change.

That sucks. Do you have an assumption that something is wrong with you because rejection hurts? Rejection does hurt, that's ok and very normal. That said, you want to feel better obviously, but it's not like you're fundamentally flawed because this is affecting you. Probably the reason she didn't respond is because she doesn't want to hurt your feelings because it feels bad to write something out that you know someone doesn't want to hear. She is avoiding that feeling, but as you know, that doesn't work out so well. It might help to understand that though. It helps to focus on taking care of yourself, taking care of your mood as best as you can. Go for a good hard run, or whatever your thing is. Listen to your favorite music. Eat healthy, talk to a friend. Learn something new. These things avoid thinking about the sore subject but also don't avoid feeling. It's also not a bad idea to just watch a favorite movie if that makes you feel better. When the feeling is intense, feel into the sensations in your body when the feeling really hits you. Notice and disregard the thoughts and feel. Any thought you have about yourself that feels bad, feels bad because it's not true. This is what meditation and self inquiry get to the heart of, the "I" suffering centers around that isn't really there. Meditation is to "be" the middle of that "I", the I that is the center of all your thoughts of suffering that is not there. If we diagnose you with some sort of root issue, we're just perpetuating that center.

"It" works like that, YOU don't though.

You cannot mean to access any mystical state directly, as if you are intending to clean your bathroom and then do it. It doesn't work like that. It's more like making an intention to meet more friends or find a girlfriend. It can't come from a need. You have to use desire, intention, let go, allow, look for the clues and be open minded and enjoy the adventure every step of the way to see those clues, as mundane or unimportant as they may seem. it's not what you think, most of the time you're absolutely blindsided by what happens. It's way better than what you imagine, and so is this. That's the whole non-point.

@How to be wise When you imagine yourself to be a body and a character you're also free to imagine all kinds of horrible things happening to them, or to imagine them doing horrible things. Realizing the very Source of this freedom is bliss. This freedom never forces itself on you though, you have to go to it willingly. And being away from it, imagining yourself as nothing but a vulnerable or bad or in whatever way lacking character, that hurts like hell. Cause that's not what you really are.

@zeroISinfinity Honey, you're mansplaining yourself. I don't really give a fuck about the answers. I just love how the questions feel.

They hand out prizes and lollipops for being brave? jk Free expression without concern of tangible results is magic. It sort of happens on its own volition. It's sometimes hard to pay someone for a service and NOT expect tangible results, which gets in the way of the real results, which is unexpected discovery. I think that therapists are valuable when they serve as a way for people to allow themselves to open up and express without fear of judgement, and often they do that successfully. But when we tell people to just "go see a therapist", or "go get real help" we sometimes shame them from using any environment or medium to express themselves, as if expression and showing who they truly are is ugly or shameful. If we as a culture really believed therapy worked, it wouldn't be so expensive and only available for a few, it would be ingrained in our everyday habits and relationships.

Just choose a project or activity that you really want to do. Hardest part is getting started. Once you get some momentum with it, all that stuff just fades away. I go back and forth between thinking I'm addicted to the internet to feeling guilty because I'm neglecting it. The mind's repeated attempts at judging itself as flawed are ridiculous.

@Leo Gura What's the difference between Love and Bliss? Not the thought of it, but the experience? Is Love not Consciousness Itself? Is Truth a thought?

You really gotta ditch that signature quote.

An author who is actively working on a book she has been planning her whole life knows the difference between the work in progress book and her Facebook comments and grocery lists. It's all her writing, but it's not all the same either. She also may draw sudden inspiration for the book from grocery lists and Facebook posts though.

There are many people who are so caught up in the world and with caught up with caring what other people think that they can't be their own authentic selves and they suffer for it all the time. In fact this is sort of an epidemic. To them, what you have is like a superpower or an immunity. I would change your view that autism is a problem or that this disconnection is a problem. Instead I would focus on the core desire, real connection and ease with yourself, which also means your open to including others in this connection. It helps to journal out exactly what you want and why you want it. We are "wired" to focus on what we don't want, which gets us more of it until we use that to determine what we do want. Rather than holding an idea of myself as disconnected, I would instead focus on particular ways that I could and really want to connect with people in the moment. You could start with the intention to just being aware around people, getting curious about them, seeing something you appreciate about them. Rather than thinking about a problem you have that you must overcome, just observe everything as a whole and you'll see opportunities and inspiration rather than triggers.

Sometimes I wonder if it's an honest, loving recommendation coming from a place of experience and wisdom or a "don't sue or blame me during your next bout of ego backlash, K?" ETA: Not to criticize anyone in particular, as disclaimers are necessary when you live in an insane society that in order to cover up its own insanity, labels its scapegoats "insane."

Or another way of saying nothing matters, you're not made of matter, so you have absolutely no good reason not to feel good. Also feeling good and awareness/clarity are correlated/ the same, but it won't make much sense to explain, you kinda gotta experience it.

Law of Attraction points to the experience of your "reality" being far stranger than you think. It goes beyond ideas of legit or not. It's more "true" than most things we consider true though. It deals with the truth we create for ourselves and shows us how to create it consciously. The law of attraction is about having greater awareness and focus, and recognizing that the core of every desire is the desire to feel better. This becomes your focus, over believing your thoughts blindly and continually noticing that you are now where you want to be. It is the basis for change. It is the realization that when we feel amazing, we notice amazing things, and good things and thoughts come to us. When we drop resistance and stop noticing what is thoughts we've never had can come in. An insight is a just a thought you've never had before. Law of attraction would teach you that this approach might be off, if you focus on your blockages and limiting beliefs thinking you need to get rid of them before you are free to create your life, your focus on your limitations is actually holding them in place. Making intentions or rather, allowing your desires, is what bring the blocks into light and is the power and momentum you need to blow through them. Awareness over your thoughts of control reveals your true power. "Purer" is a thought that limits and gets into judgement and good and bad and what other people thing territory. The better feeling your ideas the faster you will attract them into your experience. This is how you and only you measure the purity of them. It's beyond choice and not choice. Allowing desires is also like surrendering them. When you really, really know what you want, there's' no choice at all. For example if I offer you the choice between your favorite desert and your least favorite food, you'd say "it's no choice". It IS but you're just VERY clear about what you want. The awareness that the law of attraction "teaches" makes you very clear about you want in the same way, it's a choice but also at the same time it's not because you're so clear about it. If you're interested in learning more check out Abraham Hicks, she is AMAZING. It's also amazing to see how this all fits in with all this other consciousness work stuff, meditation and nonduality, etc. Not to mention the bliss and happiness, forgiveness, understanding and abundance of new possibility, creativity and ideas that floods in.

psykhē "mind" (see psyche) + dēloun "make visible, reveal" (from dēlos "visible, clear," from PIE root *dyeu- "to shine"). https://www.etymonline.com/word/psychedelic

@NoSelfSelf Not sure what you mean, it was not satisfying at the time but the whole thing worked out for the best for everyone involved, strangely enough. Anyway, good and bad is very relative and just a fleeting appearance at that. Sometimes we equate bad with freedom and good with security, but they're not at odds at all really.

It means no contact, no speaking with, etc.

They are from one perspective, but that's not the one I mean. Instead of going on the basis of what we already think and believe is true and our framework, we instead are becoming aware of our thoughts. Now you've heard "be aware of your thoughts" 1000 times before probably, but a simple way to state it is that we are now paying attention to how our thoughts feel. We are more interested in how the thoughts feel than the thoughts itself. In a way we are now disregarding our thoughts, like we've been taught to do in meditation, but at the same time, we're giving them more clear attention than we have ever given them before. So since we've determined that we want to feel better, (and this is basically the core reason for every want we've ever had), now we see why we are wise to give more weight to feeling than thought. We know where we're going now, and we are using how we feel in the present moment as our guidance system. This is living in the now, flying by the seat of one's pants. In order to do this we have to throw out a whole bunch of previous beliefs that told us we were right to feel bad about certain subjects because they were true. Instead of feeling bad and powerlessness to change it, and at the mercy of the world outside, and a whole bunch of other possible reactions that we have practiced or avoided in the past, we instead get very, honestly curious about the thoughts that seem to coincide with suffering. A lot of the time these thoughts are very unclear. The funny thing about doing this is that you learn to pull yourself out of suffering by using both the tactic of dropping thought, learning to see through thought and knowing the difference in feeling between disbelieving and believing a thought that feels bad, and focusing thought. Learning to focus thought means to be conscious that your objective is to feel better, even if you have to leave or disregard for now the current subject of thinking to do it. The mind doesn't like to do this unless it's clear about what it really wants, the feeling better thing. This clarity fades during suffering, almost like as if we're really, really drunk and trying to find the bathroom. A great cheat (you can't cheat) is to journal and just write down what you're thinking and feeling. Just putting thoughts in a linear manner outside your head focuses, and you can make it work faster and better by bringing in a sense of curiosity and humor if and when you're able. Curiosity and humor is the ultimate "detachment", that is also full of feeling and awareness. You'd think that someone could have just taught us when we were 4 or something that it's so simple, if a thought feels bad that means you're holding a belief or perspective about it that isn't true. Like for real, how fucking brilliant and simple and clear cut, and Loving, would feeling as a guidance system be??? That's really how things are. It's really that Unbelievably good. But believing thought and beliefs over the guidance of feeling is the matrix we're afraid to live and die in. But wait! Fear feels bad. Actually wait, hold on, that's not always true, which is why I have to listen to feeling in the moment rather than give power to the mind to judge. Downhill skiing a challenging trail is thrilling, exciting and scary. It makes me feel present in an intense way. Maybe that's what my life is, something that I'm figuring out on the way, not sure of all the twists and turns yet, something that has never ever been done, something that is pushing all the boundaries in the universe, and the fear is just here to remind me how very Alive and present I really am. I'll keep that kind of fear, but maybe trash the kind that feels bad when it comes up.

This feels bad to think, because it's so not true. You are so much more than that.

@Someone here Chasing a temporary high is what people do when they don't understand themselves, they often do it out of fear of missing out or feeling bad. It's not that it works, or doesn't work. It's that it's irrelevant. It's important to see that feeling better and judging myself from some illusory outside perspective as being happy or feeling better is not actually feeling better at all. The actual direct experience of feeling ITSELF will automatically take you "there". This is the Grace of God, Wonder of Wonders, I don't know how else to describe it. So in practical terms, meditate with the intent to drop resistance rather than accomplish or find something, or just do what you're feeling like doing, or choosing a better feeling thought or perspective, or choose to love rather than judge, whatever it is in the moment, you as Infinite Intelligence will know. You will know by how you feel what really feels better to you. Feeling and Awareness merge when you stop cutting yourself off from what you really are with thoughts that feel bad to think. They feel bad because they aren't True, they aren't how you really Feel.

@Someone here We attribute a cause to happiness. Happiness is just the end of a desire or the absence of fear, tension, or holding yourself apart from something. You cannot remember happiness itself, but you can remember the objects and circumstances around during the time that you felt it, so you attribute those objects, circumstances, etc as its cause. Because it's what you really are, and because it's actually complete absence you mistake happiness for what you believe is you and so you see it as temporary, fragile, the same as you see "you" or your body. That's why dropping the belief in you, or seeing the mirage in the mirror is key. You cannot do anything to get happiness, but you can see what you are not, and you can see what happiness is not. Of course, you dropped your idea of you as meaningful, keep discarding, that sense of relief, grows and grows. Emptiness is Fullness. That Fullness is beyond all ideas of happiness. But you can have your positive ideas of happiness too, you can have your cake and eat it too. Just not the ones that hold you apart from happiness and create suffering. The ones that you tell yourself are about happiness but really are about fearing its absence. You cannot fear its absence because the essence of what you seek in seeking happiness is absence itself. You don't know what other people do. Every thought of judgment you have of stupid things other people do in order to feel better is only holding feeling better apart from yourself. Instead just be really fucking honest with yourself about what YOU want. You want to feel better.

Long story, his parents were very conservative Christian, had extremely strict and ridiculous rules and at the time we got together in highschool my big thing at the time was writing in everyone's yearbook "follow your heart" and I seduced him into following his heart a little too much and there were some major clashes.

I like to play the role of the corrupting force, so always good boys. I managed to get my husband shunned by his family for a year.

No, it is you, YOU are the "it" you think might choose to chase money and sex. When I graduated highschool I decided to take a risk and start a business. Almost all my friends went to college and I often felt like a loser living with my parents doing something that might not work. It took a lot of practice to learn the skills I needed and since it was something obscure, I had to be self taught expect for advice on online message boards like this one. I remember a turning point a couple years after a lot of perseverance and some embarrassing setbacks where I realized that it WAS going to work, that I was doing what I loved and it felt amazing. This kind of happiness just flooded me. I had done it. I also remember this horrible feeling, almost immediate reaction where my mind went to the first and worst thing it could think of to ruin it. If you believe you are physical, you must abide by the laws of physics. Every action (that you believe you made) has an equal and opposite reaction. Because if you believe that you can be happy, you believe that you are a thing that can be something, happy or unhappy, alive or dead. Duality, starts with I and the opposite side of the coin hangs over us as long as we believe ourselves to be responsible. As you ruthlessly go for your dreams and what you think will make you happy, all the blocks you have will pop up. You are the only ultimate block. What you really are, is the complete lack of resistance to what is, which is exactly the same as causeless happiness.