mandyjw

Most of us learn the hard way by complaining and offloading problems on the wrong people. But avoiding expression is also learning the hard way. When you are honestly wanting someone to talk to the right person shows up. Life has a way of working out for us. I once ran into this sage like wise person in a random yahoo chat when I was a teenager. The same kind of thing keeps happening to me.

It's possible to unconsciously air our emotional problems, if you don't express them as they come up they can manifest in the strangest ways. There's a difference between complaining to someone who isn't in the right frame of mind to listen and finding the right person who can truly listen. There's no transfer of problems or burden to another when expression is done honestly with the right person. There's also journaling and art therapy types of expression which don't require other people directly and can actually transmute suffering into clarity or something beautiful. It's the essence of art itself. Avoiding emotional expression, crying and using people as "emotional tampons" as if that's something inherently feminine and shameful is a block to enlightenment, generally having an awesome life, and in our government it manifests as conflict and sometimes even war.

Anxiety and having a lot of thoughts about yourself that aren't true, (feelings of inadequacy, self judgement, etc) go hand in hand. Thought will move back and forth between the two, trying to find resolution. There's no resolution in thought trying to solve itself as a problem. You do not need to isolate yourself from your girlfriend or anyone else to get enlightened (at least not long term or anything like that). You want to stop believing these thoughts that feel awful, and pick thoughts to focus on that feel better. If a thought feels bad, it's not true. Don't resist the thought, see that it isn't true. The realization that you're not human and the world is an illusion is a stunningly, beautiful, freeing realization. Our mind will color over this clarity by making it subject to all kinds of judgements and imaginations of what emptiness is. The mind cannot comprehend nothing or emptiness, so its best guess is that nothing must be pretty awful. All the time thinking these thoughts feels awful because the guidance of feeling is saying, (uhmm, no, just no.) Thought just can't go there. Feeling can. Listen to feeling. Drop the thought, and choose one that feels better. No. That's self-judgment, let it go. You did something loving and intelligent for yourself. Keep going in that direction. The ego is not something you can conceptualize like that, again it's actually thought, trying to solve itself as a problem using more thought. It's only in moments of love, appreciation and beauty that there's no one thinking of anyone else. This is the true egoless state. You know by how it feels. You want to feel better, and feeling better, feeling cleared, (bringing in awareness) and feeling better (happiness) go hand in hand. I know, right? It's fucking brilliant. So all your thoughts about judging yourself for having ego are actually judgement, which is ironically what we call ego. A good way to remember this, and bring it to light is, the thought that smelt it, dealt it. Don't mistake thought (judgment) for pure awareness OF thought or anything else. Thinking AND believing you can't or that you aren't adequate is a fatal error, because that thought is actually coming from what we call "ego". Highly suggest https://www.actualityofbeing.com/ @Nahm here on the forum if you want one on one help. He has really helped pull me out of believing some stupid painful crap about enlightenment and other stuff several times in the past couple years. Still can't believe how lucky I was to have that. Hope you feel better soon.

I'm suspecting that the actual problem here is some sort of sexual repression affecting your wife. Perhaps cultural? Perhaps she has gotten some ill informed female health advice or disempowering beliefs somewhere along the line? Maybe you can help her find some resources to heal it if she's open to it?

Close your eyes and feel your body, does it have edges in feeling? Open your eyes. Can you find the hard edge to your entire visual field? Isn't it interesting that sight and feeling together give off the illusion that "my body has edges", when neither of those senses on their own tell you that? Now what happens when you look at someone and they speak to you. Do you hear their voice, where they are standing? Is the direct experience of hearing this voice inside or outside "you"? See how again, sight combined WITH other senses gives the illusion of separation?

"When that happens", future and desire are co-created. Really, you're already okay with the truth right now. Look out the window, drop the thought. There you are. The paradox is that the more you do that, (drop the thought and there you are), the more it seems and feels that you're already really okay with the truth.

So modesty can be an attempt to avoid the suffering inherent in pride, because pride is one side of a coin and the other side is guilt/shame/unworthiness (self judgement). So modesty can be an attempt to avoid suffering. However, you can be prideful in your modesty, if you judge OTHERS for being immodest, you just indulged in the thing that you tried to use thinking of yourself as modest to avoid. You fall into your own trap. True modesty is moderate and moderates so it doesn't judge self or others. The suffering is in the movement of identification and judgement, the two movements must also create the duality of self and other, right and wrong, wanted and unwanted.

Very cool. I have a book on foraging and the author mentions how many various and probably unknown nutrients are in mostly unstudied foods that come from wild, unfarmed, undepleted soils. It's an intuitive thing too, it's so satisfying. There are so many species and varieties of food that we literally don't even think about eating. I think that the more we learn about nutrients the more we will care about how we farm food. The way we raise animals for meat is a huge concern but even the way we are misunderstanding soil and the earth, a living microcosm, in growing vegetables and grains is also very unconscious. Build one road and you disrupt a massive network of mycelium communication. Kill the mycelium in the soil and your vegetables can no longer properly absorb nutrients. Not to mention the effect of fertilizers, pesticides, Monsanto. Then what happens to nutrients when we ship those fruits and veggies for miles? Alright, I'll stop being depressing now. I'm really glad I don't have to forage for food in January.

People are terrified of feeling and vulnerability, and use thought to block themselves off from feeling their own feelings and vulnerability. Therefore anything out in the world that has to do with feeling and vulnerability would also be demonized and controlled.

Oh my God, you're right. Thank you! Wow. Perception and suggestion is a funny thing.

Wow, look at Mike Pence's twitter banner picture. https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence Edit by Admin: That banner is a picture of Mike Pence and his wife. Nothing to see here.

Imagine you're having an interaction with someone else. Say it's a coworker you don't like much. You use memories of events and beliefs of past judgements about this person to color your feelings about this interaction. You completely cloud the interaction, you completely fail to see the person as they are in that moment and flow with the interaction because you have all these blocks up, annoyance, insecurity, defensiveness, skepticism. Say this person was actually trying to do you a favor but all these thoughts clouded the actuality of the situation and you formed the opinion that they were trying to get you fired. This type of situation is happening to us in our interactions every single day. Think about the forum. Think about how you sort of expect what kind of quality response you'll get when you see the user name or avatar. There is a sheer Intelligence, Love and Awareness that occurs in our interactions when we drop thoughts of other people. That's what you want to experience. Just go directly there and you won't have to figure out solipsism intellectually. You can't do that anyway.

I just recently was shocked by something Rupert said about happiness in a his "The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience" book. We cannot actually remember the experience of happiness, only the objects and circumstances around it. All my life I've been told it's not about things and felt the truth of this deeply, but I never really understood how my mind deceives me into thinking that people, places, experiences and things can make me happy. Then I tried minimalism, thinking that lack of things would make me happy. There's nothing wrong with finding happiness in things unless you feel the absence of happiness because you notice the absence of the object you mistakenly credited it with. But yes, happiness/Love/Joy/Being/Awareness is just who you truly are.

@Intraplanetary The realization leaves you completely free to create the life of your dreams, love people unconditionally, and be and love yourself to the fullest in the moment, whatever that looks like right now.

@John Iverson An attractive man or woman is one that's following their passions, happy, inspired, full of life energy and fulfilled in themselves. The reason that bands get groupies is because that's exactly what people in the audience see. All charisma, confidence and all that other stuff comes as an effect of being in the flow of what inspires you. Watch musicians and bands perform. Find what it is in life that makes you feel as inspired and in flow as they are. By identify I just meant to find out for yourself what your interests are, find what really makes you happy. Don't try to make yourself into the person you think will attract women. When I was 14 I decided that the guy I liked was losing interest in me because my eyebrows were too bushy. So I carefully shaped my eyebrows. Shortly after that he started dating the girl with the most unruly eyebrows I've ever seen. Seriously, it's such a waste of time, and people can sense when you're trying too hard. Just do what makes you truly happy. If you want to improve you wardrobe, do it. Buy stuff you really love. If you want to start lifting weights, do it. But don't do that stuff thinking it's some recipe to attract someone. Do it only be cause you want to do it for you.

Make yourself happy, identify and follow what makes YOU happy.

@zeroISinfinity I think you're projecting some stuff on me. I wrote that in a "funny, cause it's true" tone. Since you're being serious though, I grew up in the patriarchy of a Baptist Christian church and it's somewhat funny to see the same exact thought patterns and the use of the archetype "God" carry over into enlightenment and nonduality here on the forum and elsewhere. It would be dishonest and avoidant of me to pretend that it's not a potential problem. I can identify an imbalance or problem and want a resolution without having to suffer for it. That's just like me telling you to suddenly stop getting turned on by hot women because you won't awaken that way or something.

I don't know, maybe because there's been a miniscule percentage of female leaders and whole lot of SMITING from male leaders for the past few millennia that men have exclusively been in power and trying to play God? They don't even try to play New Testament God, but OLD Testament God, cause more smiting enemies that way I guess. Testament to testicles I'd say. So over it.

Courage and love look like the stupidest most FOOLISH qualities to someone who identifies with being intelligent. Also God a "he"? Where'd ya get this "he" shit?

I deal with social anxiety too, so I know exactly what you mean. It's our focus on acting in way that we DON'T want that actually causes us to act exactly that way. Its self awareness. You need to focus on what you DO want from the interaction. Often we never define this for ourselves. "I DON'T want to say or do something awkward" is not a strong enough compelling vision. What we DO want is to have a loving interaction. A loving interaction is when we are totally present with a person, listening and enjoying what they say and fully engaging with them. We can't do this when we are extremely self aware, which is what the anxiety and trying so hard not be awkward is. We want to have conversations with people who enjoy talking to us. We cannot be enjoyable people to talk to if we're so afraid of the interaction because we are afraid of saying something awkward. So basically you want to make the intention to enjoy conversation. If you have a carefree, hilarious friend, one that when you're with them awkward moments just make for more hilarity, and therefore can never actually become awkward at all, that's perfect. Picture how you feel with that friend. Connect with that feeling of complete ease in interaction then try to find the same feeling with conversations with strangers. With strangers and other people we have to get more creative to find ways to connect and find things to appreciate about them. But that's the key basically, just appreciate the other person and you won't be thinking of yourself. Then what you say just sort of flows and they will naturally enjoy the interaction. It's easier with some people than others, but it doesn't have to be that way forever. It's not releasing the behaviors in that you have to act them out in conversation and feel awkward, that's practicing them, not releasing them. You just have to become aware of your own self awareness when it crops up and change your focus.

Zoom waaaaaay out and look at what you're asking here. "Is it this way OR is it this opposite way?" You create conflict by asking a question that separates into opposites. It's True and it can also be a realization because it's True. No conflict. It is enough to live life however it's being lived. You are Free. You are also free to apparently give up your freedom in order to experience development and change over the restriction of "time." Guidance is wanted and guidance comes naturally. Someone is inspired to ask and someone is inspired to answer. The reality is the inspiration itself, not the someones themselves or the apparent separation of student or teacher.

You cannot separate between life and spiritual development. There are no requirements. There's no "aim and then", because to aim in thought, you cut off what you're not aiming at and by and then you created future. And now we've got a whole lot of trouble because we have all these separate people evolving over time and some are spiritually developed and some aren't, and now spiritual development is our new code for... morality and right way to live and that means some are lacking and some are "good" and some are "bad". And we just took all this Unconditional Love and chucked it right out the window. If you insist on knowing just how things are, you cannot allow actually change or develop anything. What is change or development? Thought is always stagnant. True flow that thought translates as time, is Love, Being and Awareness. Thought actually translates time into a very dead static thing.

In feeling, yes. In thought, no. The right way to live implies that I can select a standard that I can live by now, in order to feel and be ok in the future. It comes out of a need to feel ok now. This need or lack is actually felt, but is created by the thought of future and it looks to another thought to solve itself, rather than going back to the feeling itself. It's the self created problem trying to create another problem to solve itself. It's a house build upon the sand, trying to level up the unlevel top floor of the house by adding more lumber to it. Thought says that if everyone follows their own feeling, that then they will inflict harm on others, so we must have moral codes to live by, but this motivation comes out of our own fear of others, which is more thought coming out of the need to feel ok now. If we just feel, the whole vicious circle doesn't occur and clear intelligent action, which is always changing per the unique situation, can be accessed. Because in feeling itself, we are never separate from anything or anyone else, the pure feeling of being is never separate from anything or anyone else it always is felt as and acts as Love.

Having kids is like a 19 year plus grueling retreat that you can't leave. It takes a little bit to adjust to your life not being about you anymore, and then learning to still put happiness first anyway. Except it can't be just about your happiness anymore. There's a huge learning curve for most people because we believe that happiness is something we can posses, and therefore something we can be blocked from, and now there's this little screaming, crying, demanding thing that we thought would finally make us happy, seemingly in the way. All ideas and needs of happiness must be completely thrown away and reexamined in order to love this little being. My four year old experienced intense swings between intense happiness, anger and sadness. She just feels everything with very little filter or understanding. Happiness is what you are. It cannot be remembered. You can only remember objects that occurred around the time you experienced a clear understanding of Yourself/Happiness. Happiness is utterly ageless.

In our direct experience mind is a single occurrence of the thought "mind". As an abstract concept, it's something like a prism that light refracts itself through to create apparent separation, like a prism that seems to create and project separate colors. Living beings ARE mind, they don't posses a mind. There are no real actual separate minds. There is no separation outside of mind to create the separation of living and not living. It cannot be a product OF a process that occurs over time, because mind is required to create the concept of time. Again mind is what is projecting the idea of future as a thought occurring right now. The question is based on an assumption that if examined in direct experience, is incorrect. Yes because the thought "human" is a separation. Alive, dead, human, animal, to be a human you must be something an not another thing. You require the separation of mind to identify with any one thing over any other thing. When you say "only" what you are excluding other than mind? There's no actual prism like in the above metaphor that we can point to that really has existence. It seems that there is something we call mind that causes things to exist, but that's forgetting the light itself that is apparently separated by this none "thing" we can't actually locate. That light itself is consciousness, awareness, pure Knowing. Mind is a thought. A thought cannot know a thought. Only Knowing can Know and is Knowing itself.