mandyjw

The mind-opening conversations that need to happen to open people's minds take time and patience and cannot happen if you can't open your mind to them in the first place. Openmindedness starts with an open mind. I know, sounds crazy, right? People don't change because they are shamed into changing. If that worked you wouldn't have sexually abusive Catholic Priests and so many married Baptist Ministers who screw their secretaries. Shame causes more of the behavior that you seek to avoid.

Why does it matter to you? Focus on what you want from a relationship, and you'll find someone to match. It doesn't matter what the norm is. First of all, it helps to appreciate that while for the purposes of conversation, we have to pretend that there is, there's actually no such thing as "women". You can't sleep with the average or typical woman. She doesn't actually exist. There are individual women, whose bodies and desires change all the time depending on her health, psychology, the relationship she is in, her attitude, etc. Your horniness mostly depends on the thoughts you've been thinking. Also, women are cyclical. So sometimes during her cycle she will be more horny than the average guy and other times less so. It all averages out.

If you already know you're attached, you're not. You might be attached to thinking you're attached.

I've always not really cared about it all that much. When I was kid some of my favorite musicians were gay and it didn't bother me. It was mostly just something that came along with the general sexual repression of the mostly religious community I grew up in. In my late teens the influences I had around me changed, I found a community of really artistic, very liberal people. A lot of my views changed then. However, many of these people, while they had a positive influence on me, were also in their own way very harsh and judgmental, especially to people who hadn't had the same access to education and mind-opening experiences that they did. They couldn't put themselves in the shoes of someone who grew up in an incredibly rural, poor, unevolved, not racially diverse, and very religious background. I felt like to fit in and be accepted, I had to adapt myself to their views, and that felt exactly the same as it did to me in the conservative religious environment of my high school for instance. So the whole experience gave me a very big picture view of judgement in action.

The awareness of a problem and the desire and intention to be healed is good. I cannot cure myself of some neurosis that causes me suffering if I continually focus on that neurosis. It's like when I was taking Driver's ed, I had to learn that when I meet a car, I need to NOT look at the car I don't want to hit, and instead focus even more on my side of the road because I will unconsciously move my steering wheel where my focus is. Instead, I need to focus on where I want to be going. Attitude is everything. Focus on what you don't want gets more of what you don't want. There is a point when you're ready to get specific about a desire to be healed, happy, or whatever, healing doesn't come from a thought of lack. When you feel terrible, just focus on the very general goal of feeling better. When you feel amazing real specific solutions come unbidden.

What are the things you love and are drawn to for no reason?

That's the weird thing about life, it sometimes seems like it's always YOU who has to do the work. Whether it's coming up with a new idea and figuring out how the hell to make it work out in reality, initiating a conversation, asking for something you're scared to ask for, boldly admitting to someone that you have feelings for them beyond friendship, or reaching out to reconcile with someone you had a major falling out with. But that's exactly how you want things to be. Life is the best when you're living on the edge of comfort and what you think is possible. Cause both those things are complete illusions. If it feels better, focus on some other area in life that's extremely challenging, mastering an art or skill. Often when you challenge yourself and follow your own desires, there's a "kill two birds with one stone" kinda thing that goes on. In other words, you might unexpectedly meet a girl doing something you love to do. She might even chase you, who knows.

Your entire story and framework here is all mixed up. You don't have demons, paradoxically the releasing of them is the very realization of how absolutely Pure you really are. A big fucked up shadow is a concept about a "you" that is not. You've got to drop the framework of you lacking in some way. Are there two of you, one that can judge the other one? Instead go in the direction of what inspires and makes you feel good. Life is like a scavenger hunt, but we are not scavengers and nothing is lost. The true clues are not the things we think we need to survive or need to win the game, but the things we find that we really love and are drawn to for no reason.

@nistake It's just like with Leo, some people think he's magnificent and other people think he's a dick. Leo even means lion.

For creation. If you want to make a collage you first have to cut out shapes and then glue them together to create something new. The true purpose of separation is for creation with an inherent, never lost sense of wholeness. Forget the intention and the lose the creative spark and you're just making a mess of things.

I've found a lot of strange insights about some of the times I felt shame and considered past embarrassing or even traumatic moments through journaling. You can't be too direct with your intention to heal shame, you have to be open and explore it. Here's an example. Junior year in highschool we read The Crucible. I was, at the time, very Christian, somewhat open minded for a Christian, but still judged homosexuals, etc. The school itself was quite conservative, but a handful of the teachers were not at all. Our teacher decided to have us read out loud the most sexual scene in the whole play. She picked one of the most popular girls in the whole class to be the female character and no one would volunteer to read the male character part. Well, on this day, I was not paying attention in class, nor was I interested in the play. I have a hard time learning when there's someone in person presenting, and I used to completely zone out quite often. All of sudden I just notice that the teacher is asking someone to volunteer to read and since I'm bored AF, I volunteer. The whole class is like.... "uhhh..." Teacher kindly declines my offer. I absolutely wanted to die for hours after. So last year, remembering this, I decide to look up The Crucible. What's the stupid play about anyway? So I look up the major themes of the play and laugh and laugh and laugh. Obviously I COMPLETELY missed the message at the time. I swear to god, those embarrassing moments are the strongest pointers, because we chose to feel a way about them that our Source and greater consciousness DOES NOT feel. The reason those feelings of shame feel bad is because we're thinking thoughts about ourselves and holding perspectives that aren't true. They aren't aligned with Love or Truth. If you really investigate back you can often find some crazy discoveries like I did with this example. You can literally rewrite the story of them.

Take a look, it's in a book. Don't judge a book by its cover. Discovery, It might be healing, You might make a full recovery.

@Nahm ?

I dunno. Are you indifferent to indifference?

your Self

Not recognizing your Self.

One year off, his mansion burned down in 1946.

There's nothing new under the sun. The sun is not outside you.

@abrakamowse Yep. I think I got the discovery stories mixed up the the Gospel of Judas, I'm not sure.

Recognition of your Self.

Roger's teaching style never would have appealed to me earlier on but he was recommended in this older thread, which I found very helpful in itself. Roger states that his teachings give you new conditioning, (which we often rebel against, but has it's place if you've got the big picture) and are very practical and target beliefs that sort of haunt us and cause suffering in our daily lives. He also has a way of dissolving our grand fantasies (not the real ones, just the ones holding us from it ) about what enlightenment is. Highly recommended if you're drawn to him. Roger's youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3nxl1CdbbysJB_KUBaLEfw webpage- https://www.rogercastillo.org/home

It was only discovered in 1945? ? Missed that somehow.

When you specify and allow a desire you instantly feel better. Pure desire is like an inspiration that comes to an artist. However, we often associate desire with the suffering of noticing that we don't have what we want yet. So we have split ourselves and created a tension. If you try not to feel this tension by pretending it's not there, you won't do the work to specify your desires. After you specify a desire the work is in dropping the tension, the belief that it's not there yet. Everything we want is because we think we'll feel better in the having of it. That's the essence of desire. So when you align with feeling better and understand the root of all desire, you can get more specific about desires, if you want. It becomes creation, like inspiration to the artist rather than survival. Creative mode, not survival mode.

I suspect that a lot of activism comes from people thinking that they can bring about change in return for their suffering for a cause. They believe something like, "the more upset I get about how dolphins are treated, the better it is for dolphins. The more people I guilt others into also feeling horrible about this, the better for the dolphins." God/Source is way better than that. Real change comes from inspired action and inspiration, not despair, worry, fear, guilt, shame and demonization. Being conscious of an issue means realizing that it's a problem and change is called for but also means being open to inspiration. Epiphanies and new solutions come from a relaxed mind. So it's not the activism itself but the attitude behind it, I think.

Separate colors don't exist without the white light illuminating them. Red reflects/ rejects red wavelength light and looks red, it absorbs all other colors. Separation, like in the example of color, within creation and appreciation is wholeness. It works the same with personality. Misunderstood, felt separation and personality for the maintenance of suffering is a false feeling of separation. True personality exists within the act of expression and conscious interaction. Depression and repression are the act of holding on to the personality as an idea of oneself, when personality is something we give off, like light. It's for giving. There aren't two of you. There's no one that can know the other. That's why when you're in the creative flow, "dancing like no one is watching", you feel awesome. You're not even there, you're one with everything. But when you're self aware you split yourself in two, wonder why you fall on your ass and then to add insult to injury blame yourself for it.