Adrian colby

Oops. I’ve actually gone olive green since 😅. The rainbows are packed away in the attic till next June.

That’s probably my favourite 😁

Cosplay begins with an image outside yourself. There is a character, an aesthetic, a subculture or an archetype, and you select the clothes, hair, symbols and mannerisms that allow you to resemble it. For me, it works almost exactly the other way around despite people seeing a similarity with another character, that’s not how it came about and actually has nothing to do with that character. Ironically that characters look formed in the same way mine did. There was never a finished image of a person I was trying to become. What you see is an accumulation of individual preferences: things I am naturally drawn towards, things that feel comfortable on my body, colours and textures I enjoy, ways of wearing my hair, jewellery, clothes, objects and forms of expression that were tried, experienced and integrated into what feels like me. Each choice can stand on its own. Put enough of those choices together and, inevitably, they create a recognisable and distinct individual. That includes my name ( my name is not Adrian Colby). My name was self identified and very distinctive. ( it’s probably easy to find out but I’m not sharing it here) my appearance is probably better understood as emergent as is my identity and overall biology. together, accumulated over time through thousands of small acts of preference, they produce a coherent expression of a particular person as an ongoing becoming. I’ve understood that intimately in the last two years coming to terms with what authenticity actually feels like. What you see, then, isn’t me dressing up as something. It’s what happens when I stop dressing according to what I am supposed to look like when I stop conforming to culture or even counter culture and allow my preferences to come through, not by anyone else’s standards or pressures so I’m not even cosplaying a character, I am wearing the accumulated evidence of being myself ( the distinct human experience encompassed by the infinite awareness were all a part of) When you come across spiritual people, you do tend to find people with unique appearances. Existence expressing and experiencing itself in different ways.

🤣🤣🤣 I get that a lot.

Its AI. I just modelled the character off myself when I was wearing the costume, I sang in a club here during the festival. It’s pretty close

Meh…

Literally just had an argument with some (idiotic shaman) about this. the reductionist issue I liken to Leo’s “frog in a blender” analogy. Even if we get beyond the refraction limit we’re still isolating components that don’t have an independent existance and at that level we loose the very ‘emergent property’ we’re trying to understand. ( I think he actually said something similar in the video) but I use an example of a machine to get this to hit home. Say you have a machine. You take the machine apart because you want to understand the whole machine better, not because you think the individual components exist independently of the machine. You’re not deciding which pieces you like and throwing the others away. The machine is and works the way it does because of the relationship between everything that it is made up of. So you take it apart, examine the components and understand how they relate/work with one another. But then you put it back together. And now you understand the whole machine more comprehensively than you did when you were simply looking at from the level of appearance. What it looks like from the outside. Because the machine itself is an emergent property deriving from all those interacting aspects. The same goes for everything in spirituality. A lot of people deconstruct but they don’t reconstruct or reintegrate to understand the whole. I get sick of biological arguments using a single component to prove determination or definition. The component itself isn’t the emergent property or outcome. Sometimes the component isn’t even involved and it has to be a part of a relational and interactive system. the core understanding behind all of this is ‘relationship’

That’s fragmented love. That is the acceptance of one aspect of reality which is not unconditional. They have focused love down to such a limited point that it becomes self destructive. It’s part of the illusion of separation and why it falls out of harmony with everything else. It’s not an acceptance of culture but an identification with it for personal benefit or validation it’s perfectly understandable how people can become so deluded that they could get stuck in this trap and blow themselves up for it.

Using linguistics to go around in circles instead of realising what it’s pointing at. Well done trying to transcend conceptual thought by performing increasingly elaborate operations with conceptual thought: “Who knows the known that knows nothing about the knowing that is known…” At some point the finger pointing at the moon has become fascinated with the finger.

I found him amusing during the covid lockdowns ( 🫣😳 I used to leave ancient aliens on the tv to keep the dogs company when I was outside) but for someone who was advocating for the Ra materials ( law of one), when he said he didn’t believe in paradox I realised he hadn’t got a clue what the ‘one’ was, aka not awake and possibly delusional. His egotism grew worse until last year I think it was, he complained that he had a parasitic entity in his eye and the government or cabal were after him and his health began to deteriorate before he shot himself after claiming publicly he would never commit suicide he pushed the q anon conspiracy even after the creators of it admitted it was a hoax.

there’s another artist Dylan Louis Monroe who also creates similar mapped narratives.

You didn’t use the word “loneliness”, but the original post explicitly invoked the psychological consequences associated with perceived aloneness: loss of belonging, loss of sanity and the possibility of going insane. If the Absolute cannot know itself until knower and known arise, then the Absolute cannot “recognise that it is alone” prior to that distinction either. Recognition is already an act of knowing. The one recognising itself as alone is therefore already a differentiated self, not the undifferentiated Absolute. All of what you’re saying would be from the perspective of a ‘self’. once identity reforms following an experience of dissolution, the self can interpret the absence of self/other as “I was alone”. But that’s the returned identity ‘I’ talking. It’s applying a relational concept retrospectively to an experience in which the conditions necessary for that concept were absent. To be “alone” requires the distinction of an “other” whose absence can then be recognised. people who get worse after dissolution or collapsing into the absolute, do so because they project a relative interpretation onto the absolute ( like anthropomorphising it) reacting as if relative identity and mentality applies to it. That’s effectively what a god delusion is ( spiritual ego/ Christ complex). ” I am God and I am utterly alone”, when god itself is prior to the distinction of ‘I’. its better to express it as “existence is god and existence is an undifferenciated/undivided, whole”. when Leo states “I am God” or “you are God” what is being pointed at is not the individual self. the use of language is irresponsible because it can induce a misunderstanding leading to nondual nihilism, not nondual understanding or integration. destabilising interpretation occurs when the returning identity projects relative properties back onto the Absolute. “ I was the Absolute, therefore I was the only one there, therefore I am fundamentally alone”. But “I am the only one” has already reconstructed the very self/other distinction that had dissolved. You see? That’s the point where the mistake is made. That interpretation can then be carried back into relative life stating other people are merely illusions, relationships are ultimately meaningless, ordinary life can be dismissed, and the person can become increasingly detached from the relational reality in which the self actually exists. The Absolute becomes something the identity appropriates rather than something whose recognition transforms its relationship with life. The person ultimately succumbs to psychosis. people who get 10 times better understand they/self are not the absolute. They hold a more integrated interpretation that recognises that the self is not the Absolute as an isolated identity. “I” is a differentiated appearance within it. The return of distinction does not mean a return to fundamental separation or rigid identity attachment. Self and other can be distinguished while simultaneously being recognised as relational expressions of the same underlying reality. A unified appearance of distinctions within the absolutes imaginings. Understanding that there is no true separation in the relative means you can never be alone because the self is intrinsically connected to everything else and cannot exist in isolation. The absolute itself cannot be alone because it is prior to the conditions needed for ‘alone’. So “there is only the Absolute” and “I alone am the Absolute” are not saying the same thing. The first removes the privileged position of the individual self. The second places the individual self at the centre of the Absolute before its even manifest. Not mixing those up is crucial. The Absolute is not a self experiencing aloneness. Aloneness is what a self can project onto the recognition of the Absolute when it tries to understand a non-relative state through relative concepts ( distinctions in the mind). one is not alone. One is one because it ‘is’. And again, be careful with the word “illusion”. The Absolute’s imaginings are what reality is: appearances of differentiated form within the undifferentiated Absolute. That does not mean they are not real. They are. that’s precisely what “reality” and “real” refer to: the imaginings of the Absolute appearing as form. They are appearances, not illusions. The illusion is taking those differentiated forms to be separate, isolated things. Treating ‘real’ as ‘illusion’ leads to the very nihilistic dismissal within the misunderstanding I described above.

It’s ’the Great awakening’ by champ parinya in 2018. when I question people who have it and point to it as ‘awakening’ or ‘spiritual truth’, they can’t even tell me who made it, their background or mindset.

I acknowledge the question you are posing. So sitting here, I am imagining it, and I think that’s actually where my distinction between love and attachment becomes clearer. I can love my immediate culture, but I can also love ‘culture’ and the richness of cultures that aren’t the immediate culture from which I emerged . I can love traditions, creativity, rituals, stories, music, customs and ways of relating that emerge through them. I do truly ‘feel’ the ecstasy of that running through me. I can want to preserve aspects of my own culture because they are beautiful, meaningful or simply things I prefer and enjoy participating in ( authentically, not by conditioning). None of that requires me to identify with the culture as a whole or require other people to conform to it. I can deconstruct and see through it and still profoundly accept its richness without dismissing it altogether. That’s where I think the distinction between love and attachment really becomes clear to me. Culture isn’t something separate from the individuals and relationships that constitute it. Those individuals contain an enormous diversity of preferences, experiences and ways of being, so no single cultural template can represent all of them. Nor has any culture, including conservative culture, ever actually been fixed or static. Culture is a living system in continuous process. What we now call traditional culture is itself the accumulated outcome of previous cultural transformations. Christianisation transformed pagan Europe. The Reformation transformed Christianity. The Enlightenment transformed our relationship with religious and political authority. Industrialisation transformed family, work and community etc. Each generation inherits something that has already changed and changes it again. And each generation prior complains. The continuity of a culture therefore doesn’t depend upon preserving all of its contents unchanged. It depends upon maintaining enough coherence through change that the pattern remains recognisable over time. In that sense it’s much like a biological system. my body remains recognisably me despite continually replacing cells, reorganising itself, responding to its environment and changing throughout my life. If a living system literally prevented change in order to preserve its present state, it wouldn’t preserve itself. It would eventually cease functioning. Which brings me back to Preservation and adaptation are therefore not opposites to me. They are complementary processes through which a culture remains alive. So yes, I can imagine loving my culture. But if I imagine loving it in the way you seem to be suggesting, honestly I imagine myself becoming highly stressed, emotionally reactive, controlling, selfish and ultimately self-destructive. If my identity became so attached to my cultural preferences that other people not having those preferences felt like a threat to me, I would no longer maintain the boundary between myself and others. I would start pushing my preferences outward and trying to make other people conform to them. If everyone becomes more like me, I don’t have to confront the discomfort of accepting them as they actually are. I don’t have to adapt myself to reality or find harmony with difference. that’s where I would call it attachment rather than love. I would be mistaking my beliefs and preferences for reality itself and becoming possessive of something that was never mine to possess. For me, profound love is a radical form of acceptance. That doesn’t mean being passive, no preferences, or never trying to preserve something I value, It means I can love something without requiring it to become or remain what ‘i’ need it to be. I can imagine loving my culture “till death do us part.” I just can’t imagine needing everyone else to marry it too. in that sense what you are describing as conservative love isn’t love at all but a lack of acceptance of reality. i understand what you are saying about typical liberal deconstruction of cultural constructs.I’ve been through that myself but I didn’t result in nihilism or nothing to love, it progressed into the profound acceptance of the richness of diversity, culturally and individually. Loving my own preferences within my immediate culture ( returning to those that were authentic to me and not those simply conditioned after I had deconstructed them) but also recognising and accepting the preferences of others as part of that richness. It was a holistic integrative process. I can love and participate in Christian music without identifying as a Christian and I can also be dismissive of Christian music whose lyrics are harmful and destructive. If I attach my identity to the culture of ‘Christianity’ and expect conformity to it… serious problems start to occur within my own discernment ( cognitive dissonance) I live in Ireland and the country is predominantly liberal/progressive/green. I can’t say I see a demonstration of not loving their individual culture. Quite the opposite actually. A contemporary Irish person’s culture can simultaneously contain Celtic inheritance, Christianity, pre-Christian mythology, Enlightenment values, liberal democracy, British influences, American media, European identity, local traditions, global music, internet culture, family customs and individual subcultures. the traditional Irish Celtic culture including its language are still very much celebrated and preserved lovingly by most of its people because it is seen as a valued and enjoyed preference worth passing onto future generations but it doesn’t mean obliterating all the rest or forcing the rest to conform to only it to preserve it… that doesn’t logically follow. I can love Irish culture in that I can also nuture its continued development. In that sense it is not a case that preserving it means love and developing it means it is not loved or visa versa rather recognising those two mechanisms interact as a part of the whole.

I don’t disagree that the Absolute cannot know anything prior to distinction, because there is nothing “other” to be known. There is no knower and known yet. But I think you’re conflating the distinction necessary for knowing with the illusion of separation. The moment the One makes a distinction between knower and known, you don’t get two isolated things. You get relationship ( a unity or ‘oneness’) Knower only exists as knower relative to what is known, and known only exists as known relative to a knower. They arise together. That is duality as distinction, but it is not separation. This is why I prefer the word ‘appearance’ to ‘illusion’ when talking about manifestation/reality. Illusion can imply that what appears should be dismissed as unreal( which goes against the point of a reality at all). The forms appear, distinctions appear and relationships appear. The illusion of separation occurs when the mind takes one of those distinctions out of its relational context and conceptualises it as an independently existing object. It stops seeing oneness or unity and falls into the illusion that there is a separation. Again, dot on a page. The dot cannot appear as a dot in isolation. It only becomes distinct relative to the field surrounding it. Dot and background arise as distinctions together. Remove every possible contrast, boundary and relationship and “dot” ceases to mean anything. Dot collapses. the Absolute cannot ‘know’ itself without distinction. It is otherwise ‘being’ not a thing. I would describe distinction as an outward movement ( while we are limited by language to describe an intangible mechanism). it projects itself into its appearances, creating distinction, relationship and therefore something that can be known. And known at increasingly complex degrees inevitably getting lost in an illusion that the knower is exclusively separate. But there is also the inverse movement. When mind turns back inward and begins deconstructing what appeared to be independently existing “things”, it finds relationships within relationships. The more completely the apparent multiplicity is deconstructed, the harder it becomes to locate anything that exists entirely by itself. The illusion wasn’t the appearance of multiplicity; it was taking those appearances to be exclusively separate. Eventually you arrive back at that which cannot itself be made into another isolated object, not another “thing” among things, but the undifferentiated Absolute from which all the distinctions arose. So there is an outward movement from one into distinction and an inward movement from distinction back into recognition of unity. Symbolically I represent this as toroidal movement (outward projection and inward reflection.) The movement between what is projected and what is reflected gives rise to knowing-with, consciousness ( from the Latin con-scius … which means ‘with knowing’) And this is why I disagreed with your original example of the Absolute becoming lonely. Loneliness can only arise after distinction. “Alone” requires self, other, and then the perceived absence of other. A person waking up to discover everyone else has disappeared is already a subject within a differentiated reality. That isn’t the Absolute experiencing Oneness, it is a differentiated self experiencing the absence of other differentiated selves. The Absolute prior to distinction isn’t alone. “Alone” has no meaning there. So I agree that knowing requires duality in the sense of distinction. Where I disagree is treating distinction as separation. Distinction produces relationship. The illusion of separation begins when we perceive the distinctions but lose consciousness of the relationship through which those distinctions exist. We loose sight of unity