mandyjw

Well, yeah that's sort of the joke. There is a direct experience of the body but it doesn't have boundaries so your idea body doesn't line up with it very well. We try to make it line up though. ?

You have the power to change your focus and your perspective. The magic of life is that until we change this our outer circumstances won't change, and if we force change they follow us wherever we go. Start to see others and yourself as you want to see them. You can't expect yourself to do this all of a sudden. It starts with basic self care, which means making your mood and happiness the priority. Make a list of things you really enjoy doing (they can be small things, like reading a web comic, looking at art you love, music, etc) and make a point to do three a day. Notice how you see your sister when you're in a fantastic mood. Notice how you see her differently when you're not feeling good. Notice that your sister hasn't changed but your perspective has. Train yourself even when everything seems bleak and miserable to find one thing of beauty and focus on it. I guarantee you that there is some quality in someone in your town that is worth focusing on and truly appreciating. The better your mood and the more you look out for your own mood the easier and easier it is to find these things.

The Devil knows better than anyone that banning something only makes it more appealing, so if the Devil banned God wouldn't that make him God? ?

There's a difference between the direct experience of your body and thoughts about your body.

@charlie cho Yeah, just be aware that you love the goal for how it makes you feel now, not as a hope for future salvation dependent upon the success of it. Funny how when we are in a funk and can't see clearly we interpret seeing through the illusion and suffering of self as a desire to kill ourselves. ? I know you mean it as a joke here, but what you said is profound. Who wants to kill who? It's the duality, the split, the self judging the self as if there were TWO selves that you want to dissolve, or heal. Healing is complete dissolution of a problem. The desire to heal ourselves and the desire to get rid of ourselves are the same... BUT feel and are interpreted very differently depending on how off track we are from the actual Love and healing that we really are. There already aren't two, so how can we possible judge ourselves, or worry about ourselves? We can't and when we try it feels awful, because we've completely diverted from the truth of what we are. It's mysterious how a desire to heal beyond the kind of healing our mind recognizes as possible could come out as hypochondria. And a desire to heal the split between one's true self and one's thoughts of oneself can come out as the desire for suicide, sort of like in the example of Eckhart Tolle.

If it wasn't for Hitler I wouldn't be here as both my Grandparents lives were significantly altered by WW2. You can't take away one thing and not all other things. So if I create a me that really exists I must create a past story of Hitler to explain it all.

Re-write this post, except from a perspective that is trusting yourself, looking forward and speaking about what you want, not about what you don't want or how you're judging yourself and failing yourself and working against yourself. Heck, reread this post now and tell me how you feel. How did it feel to read that? Learn to speak, think and focus on what you want, not what you don't want. Not because you should, but because of how it feels. This is minimalism at it's finest. It's ok to write out the bad stuff but do it with the intention of getting it and out so you can focus on the good, on what you do want. Abraham Hicks is a powerful teaching for retraining yourself to do this.

I know what you're saying, for example, if I eat much sugar I often feel terrible after. But I discovered with diet and everything else that focusing on how I want to feel is what actually works and makes me happy, not focusing on the stuff I want to avoid and demonizing it. There's a lot to learn from stage blue, as the mind patterns are still very capable of functioning in us. It's the same tendency of the mind to create a group of people it's "above" by following or processing a certain knowledge or moral code, that it uses in order to avoid the suffering that it projects the people in that OTHER group of people have. Most Christians believe that they are above the world of sinners, and that they are protecting themselves from suffering by having these beliefs. Many people seeking enlightenment often do the same thing, they think that their wholistic knowledge and open mind will save them from suffering in the same way. All of this empowers the mind and beliefs rather than diffusing them. The thought of an open mind is not really the experience of an open mind. Having an open mind is realizing the difference between a thought and the reality of the situation. Your awareness itself is already completely unconditionally allowing and open. Thoughts create or limit. You can tell by how a thought feels if it's creating, or limiting. Becoming more aware in general of how thoughts feel is going in the direction of truly being open minded, rather than trying to use a thought (which is not aware) to try to control another thought. So now that we know what we want, we want enlightenment because of the way it feels, we start to pay much more attention to feeling itself. Feeling leads us right back to awareness and also is guidance that helps us to align our thoughts. Feeling or awareness is no longer a thought trying to control another thought, or a thought trying to get rid of thought, but openness. It means your questioning the nature of thought itself. I mean are you, or have you just assumed thought is bad and you want to get rid of thoughts? Or are you questioning what thought really is and questioning your own relationship to your own thoughts? Do you think the color red or feel the color red? Or both? Is perception thought or feeling? Can you separate thought and feeling? Specific feelings come and go like thoughts, but feeling itself leads right to awareness itself, which is the unchanging element of everything you experience.

@zeroISinfinity It's a joke. I don't believe morality is immoral, because if I did, then I would be believing in morality. Irony, hypocrisy, etc. Ha ha

So you are "bad", and you need to act good so you won't suffer. OMG, you're a Christian! Avoiding sins of the flesh I see. Just teasing. Sort of. You want to feel good. You've never wanted anything for any other reason because you thought it would make you feel good. Now you're whittled down things you wanted and now you're questioning thought itself. What is the relationship between thought and feeling?

You know the dance like no one's watching cliche? Ever experienced a "dance like no one's watching" kind of moment when you were "on" or in flow or inspired? It's a sort of surrendering to a flow that's intensely creative and aware but not aware OF itself, like we are when we are concerned about our performance.

But you didn't answer the question. Because you don't want to act like an animal? Why not what are you afraid of? What's the opposite of that, is that what you want? What do you really want to gain that you think you'll gain by controlling your mind?

I believe that morality is immoral.

@Recursoinominado Why would you want to control your mind? What do you seek to gain, what's the end game or the imagined reward for doing so?

That's like saying a coffee filter is trying to stop the liquid from flowing through. The parts of a mechanism itself don't have an intention. If you just look at the coffee filter itself in isolation, without a big picture understanding of how coffee is made, you might come away with that conclusion. You could say that you don't explore or push the boundaries far enough because you think you know how things already are. You're satisfied with being unsatisfied. As you become more sensitive to dissatisfaction and/or as you see the glow of someone who HAS explored the boundaries, you start to question what you think you know.

I don't have to. I already own a pink elephant. Technically it's the dog's chew toy, but still.

It's kinda like the, "let's watch REAL close and see if light is a wave or a particle" experiment thing. Well, what do you know, GODDAMN. It depends on the observer.

Probably not, but people can learn how to purify their ambition by allowing it, if you don't allow ambition you risk that you also don't allow your desire or purpose. I don't think anyone gets it quite right at the beginning. The way I was raised the word ambition had neutral connotations, it could be positive or negative depending on how it's used. That's another great point, I think around adolescence it really starts becoming evident that something is wrong. There needs to be some middle ground for kids between going totally rogue and sticking with a structure that isn't built to serve you. They need guidance that steers them to responsibly cultivating their passions and interests but not the rigid structure that we currently have. Also being told that after finishing highschool I needed to take another 4 years of learning what other people thought I should know and go into $80,000+ worth of debt to be credit or of value, did not sit right. It does not foster the confidence kids need to be innovative. I don't really support the Bernie Sander's ideal of "let's pay off everyone's student debt!" because to me it's like putting a Disney Princess bandaid on a festering wound.

@tsuki I don't think that the movement of pride/need to prove oneself out of feeling inadequate is inherent in ambition but the word certainly has those connotations. There's a pure kind of desire, dream or what you could call ambition that feels amazing and is universally beneficial. @LfcCharlie4 I believe that we should radically change school systems to foster kids interests and teach kids happiness and wellbeing. At first this would mean exposing kids to a wide variety of things. There should be more of a community effort with government systems possibly reimbursing people for doing apprenticeships with kids. Kids choose the subjects they study, the school accommodates. Basic math and readings skills are taught but it drops off to purely being by choice after a certain basic level is mastered.

Thought that was Jesus. Maybe we're talking about the same one. Ba dum tss

There was never a "one" in exclusion of anything else. With the creation of "one", all other numbers are created as one is the common unit or denominator of all other numbers. I can totally picture Rumi on a unicycle.

If I'm not sure about my decision or completely aligned with my desire to have or to NOT have kids, I'll demonize others who decide differently to try to feel OK about my own decision. I might even try to control what other people want because I think that I can control what I want too. Doesn't work, but people try. It helps to realize that everyone is just trying to feel better, everyone wants to be loved and accepted for who they really are. We all want the same thing ultimately.

It does not suck! What do you guys think you are doing in meditation? Connecting with your body and experiencing that it's not your own. What do you think pregnancy does for women? You take something profound and say it "sucks". Just like your very own life. Fear of pregnancy and sort of dismissing the whole thing as survival dismisses your very Self. Dismiss the self, not the Self. Tricky non-distinction, I get it. Sigh.

I recently heard that women seek security and men seek freedom (as a generalization of course). It makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the conflicts men and women have in their misunderstandings of what these things are and how to get them. True security, Freedom and Love are all, already "properties" of Awareness itself. So we seek ourselves beyond limitations, not knowing we already intimately are that. As we align with that we are able to embody unique traits and gifts inherent in gender and individuality in a creative way and not in a survival way.

That's a misunderstanding of the nature of desire and self. If she shares this misunderstanding, like you suggest, she'll suffer and the suffering will be the indication to drop the misunderstanding and line up with her desire in a less selfish way. Most people don't know the real or entire reason of why they want the things they want at the time they get them. They lead to somewhere beyond you. It's very obvious to see this in the instance of having a child, but it works that way for every big or small desire too.