Keryo Koffa

Every time I want to send a message or start a post, I am overcome with the feeling that I'm throwing some info out there into the world in order not to have to resolve it myself. Whether its a meditation idea, a philosophical notion, a motivated experiential drive, to write about it feels like I'm deliberately indulging in self-doubt instead of just doing it myself right here and now. I can see how from a higher perspectives that integrated lower, this role reverse and one learns from interacting with the world and seeing oneself in others, which are proxies to different aspects of oneself and interacting with oneself and helping a different self on the way, while becoming more whole. But I am on the path still, and my need for self-assertion is fading, I can see posts and others as aspects of myself more, and don't need to throw the base proxy of my own ego into the mix. I see ever more directly how much I project. I can also see how by letting go of ideas and old notions, I'm really just uniting them with the greater self, the world and the void from which I took them and attached myself onto. There's infinite things that are part of me, but I am even without any of them.

@Princess Arabia I could try to make it short but I think the long answer will add tons to your perspective to integrate. So here we go! Return of the “Semi-Awkward Mystic Autistic”: Part II: Confusion as a Lifestyle! The reality you see right here right now. It’s consistent and you see it in real time. But it’s just local signals in some brain. See it as it is, only a brain receiving signal. A dark singularity outside of reality. Filtering inputs and projecting images. Colors are arbitrary, shapes are arbitrary. It’s just visualization, it’s all in your head. Other’s are projection, you are projection. Shapes are a product of configuration. A primordial circuit drives desire. Interprets input into broad shapes. Associates shapes through context to stimuli. Infers relations through emotions to correlate them. Objects are a projection of desire onto qualia. Qualia is another word for the forms in consciousness. Brain circuits are driven by input and entropy. Entropy is what causes change, basically diffusion. Diffusion is stuff equalizing. Like hot water and cold water equalize to lukewarm. We use the pace of entropy to project time. Specificity of signals and error correcting creates consistency. The brain balances itself for homeostasis. Fear drives behavior, locks the brain into fear projection. Fear evolved due to our shape’s continuous survival ability. Certain projections correlate to survival and are integrated. This creates identity to be maintained. Different parts are declared self. Projected to be beneficial for survival. We have cheat codes. Our behavior is driven by survival. But the survival of what?. We can determine that. We “need” to survive, but what are we? We can sacrifice ourselves for others, projection of meaning. But everything is projection, an aspect of ourselves. Your body, projection. People on the forum, projection. The differences and barriers, projection. Emotions? Projection. Love? Projection Projection of what? One’s will to survive onto others. Evidence? Yes, behavior, extension of identity. Are these others conscious? Where do we get these signals from? “The void”, which may very well be equal to our perception. Though infinitely interpretable by configuration. Configuration determines emotions, projection, reality. Could we be not from that reality but a consciousness beyond?. Maybe, probably, definitely? Your eyes are made of receptors (energy). They receive light (energy). They send signals through the neural net (energy). Neurons fire and reconfigure (energy). The configuration changes form (energy). It’s all just a different form of energy. You are infinitely connected to all energy. You are just a form within it. A specific configuration. A certain interpretation. Others like you might exist out there. Having the same conscious experience. Their emotions are your projection. But we seem to be made of the same. They might have their own mind regardless. It’s just not part of your experience. Your experience includes the entire world. “You” are just as real as “anyone” else. Their suffering is equally projected as your suffering. There is no other. Everything is a shape within consciousness You might want to stop suffering. Only way to help others is to know how to stop suffering yourself. In your new perspective that accounts for all before it. You can guide others to the same realizations. But you need to know exactly what they are. And what separates them from yourself and your state of mind. But before you even get there. You might become god, dissolve reality, and love all suffering. Because it’s all just a configuration. Happy is a duality against sad. It can only exist in contrast. Meaning against nihilism. Satiation against hunger. Grateful / Ungrateful. Like / Dislike. Preference / Perfection. Division is distance. Point A is not in the same place as Point B. It’s a path, a journey. If we dissolved all Desire. We’d not exist. No need to exist. Nothing to do. No preference. No shape to attach to. Nothingness. This world is the way it is to maintain its illusion. If there was no suffering, there’d be less appreciation. Our identities would not have formed. We would not be talking right now Evolution creates forms. Forms fight for survival. Ego is suffering. Kill or be killed. We can live more happily. We already did. Consciousness was happy in some people’s once at a time. Already experienced that. You could be rich. You already are. You are every millionaire. You don’t have direct sensual experience. But your imagination fills it perfectly. You only seek what you lack. What you want is a projection. Its full nature is in your heart. You don’t need proxies in “physical reality” to project it onto. The full conditions for its fulfillment are within you. To experience it in reality is to give it depth. It’s also to perpetuate experience. To take that desire away for fulfillment to slowly dissolve it. And on the journey of dissolving it via proxies you experience happiness and fulfillment. But if it doesn’t work and you can’t have reality mirror your desires, you get sad. If you can’t have what you want, you react negatively. Because we’re attaching ourselves to arising desires. Projection of our current identity and survival agenda We are stardust, materializing as conscious human experience. We should be grateful we exist at all. That consciousness is possible at all. We forget these deeper existential wonders for illusory survival projections To love someone or something is to desire it to maintain its form and identity. We create that identity and form within us, a projection via proxy. We love that illusion but it cannot last. If it did last, we’d get bored and let go of it naturally. Because it's ephemeral, it has more meaning. We do everything not to lose it. We fear losing it. We suffer out of that conditional love. Because we want them to maintain their separate form. But ephemeral existence allows the creation of our forms in the first place. Yet even then, we have the freedom beyond the physical. We can dream, imagine, create stories out of our hearts through art. Until we fulfill the desire for that form to exist for sufficiently long and allow ourselves to move on The soldiers acted out of love, love for their country, identity, families. Other soldiers acted out “lesser more selfish love”, adrenaline, sadism, primal instincts. Ideologies are the same conditional love, to preserve some forms, some identities over others. Suffering is attachment to form, to projection, to parts of one’s identity, experience, survival. We borrowed our atoms from the earth, and we seek to keep them and for others to keep them too. We deny new life to evolve, we destroy the world for comfort, out of unconsciousness. We don't protest every day, we don’t plant trees every day, we don’t invite homeless people to our homes. We don’t even take care of ourselves, addictions, neglecting our body, emotions, cravings, denying ourselves. It’s all love, confused love, arbitrary love, projected love, sense making love, unconscious love. Love for projected aspects of our self and comfort too. We are a configuration, specific perception, specific identity, specific qualia, specific emotions, present experience. We are that in which all this happens, consciousness, solipsism, call it god if you want, pure being. Dissatisfaction is a property of confusion is a property of inner conflict is a property of ignorance is a property of preference is a property of form is a property of being is a property of | . What do we do about it? Learn to understand if one seeks to transcend suffering. Understanding resolves the regret that arises when one is kept in the dark or fear. Reconcile every perspective, they’re all mistakes on the path to enlightenment. Mistakes aren’t mistakes, just confusion, locked paradigms and unresolved conflict. We’re all in a maze, looking to find enlightenment and we don’t even know what to look for. Our proxies point us towards something that resembles “Nothing”. Of course it's confusing and we got so much unique baggage and projection. But understanding gives patience, it also shows one diminishing returns, both really and the autonomy of personal experience that can only be pointed to, simulated, to run the brain circuits and intuit what’s in between.

In Truth, reality is only ever itself. But my curiosity leads me to extrapolate it beyond experience and that insights give me weird but fascinating vibes. There are many ideas of the nature of existence. Some of an infinitely conscious god, others of an evolving field of qualia gaining awareness through us. Some say god does not interfere due to unconditional love, others say god as an all controlling puppet-master, a higher self you that creates this "dream" for you. Say there is a higher self that maintains this illusion in order for you to become whole by experiencing the world in all its ways and gather experience and insight into all its aspects to gain a sense of fulfillment and contentment. In that case, to exist is to be stupid, and learning is a candle whose length is proportional to your stupidity, that will extinguish once you transcend the desire that keeps you going and the ultimate wisdom would be to not desire. But in that absolute state of mind where nothing holds any meaning anymore, there is no life. And by continuously reaching out for ego-death and dissolution, the road of wisdom, self-betterment becoming more whole, integrating everything and seeing ever more perfect, one accelerates entropy and speedruns existence. None of it mattered but the belief that it did was its own meaning. It's the idea that there are no errors and stupidity is a feature, not a bug. That without it, there'd be no existence, that perfection is void. It's scary to my ego, it confuses my psyche, it gives me existential dread on how to live my life, it feels intuitively right, it feels really like really weird existential angst. It's like god is deliberately creating problems for us to solve, and if we don't solve them, we're miserable but if we solve them we don't exist, and stupidity is the difference. Maybe the point is conscious appreciation, that should solve everything. Not need to solve problems but the consciousness during the process.

I think the mere concept of "muddying the waters" is more harmful than any perspective. This forum is specifically meant for "radical open-mindedness". Nothing is off the table and we make sense of perspectives by reasoning through them. Not dismissing each other. It's not about us, it's about the ideas themselves. I wouldn't dismiss the ability of others being conscious right away. But I wouldn't accept it either. The truth is that we don't know. If you look at a thing, you draw associations. Memory and ideas enter your mind that didn't exist before. The unconscious is vast. We are not aware of how we created this world, just that we are a conscious experience perceiving it. Maybe consciousness is fundamental and exists within everything. Maybe consciousness splits into every human. Maybe consciousness is an infinitely fractal perspective and every configuration of matter is conscious, albeit not self-aware. The truth is, we can only know or direct experience, and even that is questionable due to its nature. All we can know is, there is at least one consciousness, the one you can confirm now. Everything else is speculation, though the different evidence might be convincing.

If you are able to exist, feed yourself, have clothes and a warm place to sleep then you are free and can be in love with the universe. Obligation is distraction. Attachment is illusory and inauthentic to your emotions and the nature of being. Love is only known to you in conditional fashion, your creativity, senses and feelings are in relation to your level of awareness, will and unobstructed action, the feeling to unconditional love to take and give unattached to any one thing but woven into the nature of experience itself only to be realized through openness and change of paradigm, mindset. Programming makes you a machine, impersonal and controlled by outside forces. The only forces controlling you are universal, they define your senses, experience and state of being. Everything else is a self-created delusion communicated by your environment in less or more direct ways all linking back to survival and assumed emotional comfort learned through correlation and behaviorism. But the mind is free, all limitations are imagined and self-imposed. Comfort and technology dull the senses, lifestyle intoxicates the body. But the body is strong and the mind is infinitely rewireable, obstacles are 99.999% mental. Preferences are an self-created illusion, being is fundamentally meaning and meaningless, everything else is a preference based on experience related to an assumed survival correlation and identified as preferable and the emotionally associated. Psychedelics make you in tune with yourself and sharpen your senses. The question is if you can handle and integrate the expansion of your senses, emotions and desires, the release of limitation, and being given free reign to reimagine and reexperience the world with ever less bliss and ever less self, putting focus from thinking, rationalizing, memorizing and obligating into being, experiencing, understanding and loving.

@Yimpa That really made me chuckle. I was in a state of ignorance, feeling compelled to share the transcendence of my own paradigms But then that becomes a mind game and A PAIN IN THE ASS If I'm honest, I don't feel like reading such elaborate posts myself, yet I cause it to others Seeing that really makes me wanna let go of it though, so I'ma do that Be more snappy

The Universe was not Self-Aware The Universe was Nothing The Universe split into Forms You form Forms and Forms form You Awareness is an aspect of Existence But you were not always Self-Aware You are Senses You are Intuition You have Desires You have Perception Desires filter Perception Filters create Distinctions Distinctions become Objects Objects are Projected Desire Projected onto Perception Projected through Intuition Intuition connects Objects Desire creates Emotions Emotions drive Behavior Some Behavior fulfills Desire Such Behavior becomes Habit Habit becomes Identity is Ego Ego is Homeostatic Happiness now Conditional Conditionality is stored in Memory Memory is encoded in the Brain Brain Configuration Navigates Mind Identity is Memory is Navigation Psychedelics synergize the Brain Interconnect Intuitions and Experience Psychedelics loosen the Filters Unconditional Love causes Ego-Death Psychedelics are temporary cheat-codes To realize the truth that was always within

Identity = Memory = Triangulation = Interpretation = External Reality as Proxy to Desired Experience

Through notes, videos, pictures, possessions, to-do lists, unfinished projects, we gather so much clutter. We can ignore that clutter, then it'll fade into our subconscious, but we'll be reminded through association eventually. And at that point, resistance towards the present moment and current desires will come up to distract us. We can train ourselves to dismiss it as it arises and to some degree we need to, not to start the process of cluttering anew. But now I seek to rid myself of it all by going over it piece by piece, recognizing it, realizing its nature, and dismissing it. What has made it easier for me is to recognize what is happening to all the attachments. They're not disappearing, they are becoming part of my broader self, that I perceive and interpret as the external world. I dismiss them into the same void that spawned them. I am a filter of reality, I filter reality based on perception and interpretation, I came into being navigating with senses. Over my life, I have acquired many philosophies, ideas, fun experiences, sorrow moments, everything that defines my identity. But I never lose these things because I never owned them, they are a superposition, a distinct local configuration of reality. A balance, just like the chemical balance and neural configuration in the brain. Change is essential for conscious experience, for time, for life. My identity is how I define myself, with attachment to past experiences, that I put on like a stack of coats. And also what I define myself against, which is like playing the floor is lava. But now I’m letting all these limitations I imposed upon myself go, they flow into my larger self, the world itself, while my personal identity becomes less and less.

Identity is the Attachment to Past Experiences that were associated with unfulfilled Emotional Desires. Identity is a Lens that interprets Reality from Qualia into Objects. Objects are a Projection of Identity onto Qualia by Triangulation, creating a Map of Object-ive Reality. Reality is Navigated like a Map, Objects are Locations, the Map is our Neural Network. Any Location is its Own Distinct Experience and Infinitely Connected to every other Place. The Connection is Inherent as there is no Separation, but distinctness is Imposed through the Mind-Map. There are no “Real Locations”, but there is Qualia that manifests itself through different Forms. Every Form flows into every other form. Qualia is “extra-dimensional”.

What is imagination? Same as intuition. What is intuition? Looking at the in-betweens. What in-betweens? Exactly Meditation intends silencing to dissolve your bias. Because the more you think and imagine, the more self-referential it is. To meditate is to go back to the source. And all kinds of crazy ideas and imaginations await you there.

I intuit why we talk about nothingness over everythingness. Dualities are arbitrary and infinite. To hold one side of a duality over the other is a bias. But to be attached a duality that encompasses both sides itself is also bias. To think is bias, to exist is bias, to appreciate is bias, to feel is bias. Everything is bias. One can overcome bias by either integrating all biases or letting go of them. But there as infinite biases, infinite lenses, that through their own unique existence infinitize infinity infinitely on top of the infinity that led one towards them. One will never dissolve bias through more bias because there is too much bias for a finite mind to remember. On the other hand, to let go of bias completely is to be. But the most radical version of it is not to be, for any perception is distinction is bias. To live is bias, to breathe is bias, to die is bias, to not be biased is bias. Mindfulness is bias, mindlessness is bias. The only way out of bias is less bias, but there is bias behind a desired level of biasness and the memory that led one there and keeps that state of mind. There is no escape, but there is surrender. Awareness is ego, there is no ego-death in our lifetime as in the extinguishing of all bias. But if one sees ego-death as ego-mindfulness and a conscious perspective to be as dynamic as possible through continuous ego-deconstruction and then one rebuilds oneself from nothingness of mind through our inherent body awareness and reality reinterpretation from a higher vantage point, to give up the ego and build one anew, then ego-death makes perfect sense. In that case, ego is personal attachment, and by giving it up, one is reborn into oneself. One still carries memories of the past-ego, but they are as arbitrary as the rest of existence and only reference points to be used and navigated like one's "physical environment", without the same level of attachment as identifying with it. So then ego-death is really ego-rebirth, the conscious letting to of one's projected identity.

I used to believe in "Non-Duality" a few hours ago, but that specific interpretation I held onto feels ever more delusional the more I self-reflect. I thought I had to relinquish all desires and maybe even phase out of existence. But I wondered what I would do if I were egoless. And I thought "nothing", because there'd be no need for anything. But how do I draw the difference between nothing and something, isn't it equally arbitrary. This whole world has form and direction, desires arise, they are a reflection of this homeostatic body's survival evolution. The feed of information appears in consciousness as desire, bodily needs, safety desires, comfort, belonging, self-esteem, actualization, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. All of it is arbitrary in the grand scheme of the universe and localized to this body, which I seem to be in control over. It is reality and exists regardless of my interpretation, my present experience is the only knowable reality. But practicality exists, I can recognize patterns and navigate the experience, it's just that nothing is fundamental, it's always interpretation. It's right until proven wrong, the mind is a map and not the territory. Only qualia is "real". Even that sentence doesn't seem right, because everything is equally real and unreal. But in a pragmatic sense, I create a duality between perception and interpretation, map and reality. The map isn't the same as reality but it is a subset within it, a contrast to actuality, but that's a duality, they're both reality, make of the same stuff, but I distinguish them as distinct out of an intent for navigation, sense making and understanding. All things, that the form I appear to be in control of is defined by, I define it into existence by these traits. I define into existence all of existence, every "thing". There is only perception, I perceive but I am also perception and I am the undivided being that splits into that duality. A "be-ing" rather than a being. Transience is proven by change, though change itself might not exist as we know it. Time and space, change itself is really just a perspective, a way to "navigate qualia". I can theorize an infinite fractal of qualia, each part mirroring every other, to zoom into it might be to move in that space in a specific manner and observe the perspective of entropy and generate the framework for space-time and sensual perception. I am not aware of these mechanics, they are interpretation, equally arbitrary as everything else, purely based on instinctual observation and perspectival intuition. Which themselves are all words, which I use to describe other words, to make sense. But reality already makes sense, reality is sense, reality is everything, every contradiction, every duality and unity. Reality does not appear to change based on my perceptions, but my perspective is changed by experience of reality. And even that might not be true, my perception creates reality, my mood changes my focus, psychedelics change the qualia I perceive. Reality is undefinable, for no subset can encompass a superset, or can it? Reality is every pointer and its opposite simultaneously, it integrates all perspectives, and all opposite perspectives and all non-perspectives and absolutely everything that we are and aren't aware of. Is there only awareness, or is awareness all that awareness can be aware of? Awareness can only ever know itself in the now. But awareness changes form, so that intuits that there is more. What, I don't know. How? I don't know. I can only know it by being it. I can retain memory, though its nature is projection. Regardless of all the thinking, my hand feels physical but I do not know its nature, or do I? Nature is something I invent. It is only and ever itself, a hand a concept and that which I point to that which I point to. I can distinguish many layers of awakening up until the one I am in now. It is becoming ever more aware of existence and leaving ever more lenses and the need for lenses behind and also the desire that spawns the need and then the reason for the desire and then realizing all of it was made of the same stuff as undivided reality, which I cannot with my current vision perceive as such. My eyes focus on "objects" with bias, easily recognizable forms enter awareness and my intuitive understanding tells me their purpose. But the way I understand Non-Duality in this consciousness-configuration is that it's not about "rejecting ego" but about "accepting everything". And on a healthy practical level, to free oneself of programming and fear and instead act on reason, awareness, self-reflection and taking ever more responsibility for existence. To be one's most aspired version, but in a way that does not dismiss the present for the future, but to be in the present that which one sees as the best way to be. To take care of one's desires, dismiss them when adequate, follow them when adequate, question them always, but also recognize the inherent nature of diminishing returns and the arbitrary nature of the whole fabric of reality on which everything builds.

I've been obsessed about making sense of reality for the longest time. Constant contemplation, I can just keep going indefinitely, generating thousands of words, directions, pointers, concepts a minute. But I'm ever more aware of the relativity of it all, infinite insights through infinite perspectives, they will never end. I quit my dead end job, it's mechanical repetitive nature was a waste of lifetime. I saved up enough to get by a year. Any direction I explore appears useless. Psychedelics saved my life by giving me the consciousness back that I deluded myself out of. The world runs on luxury, there's little point in perpetuating it. I'd like to work with psychedelics, after all, what more is there to reality than exploring it in every imaginable way? But psychedelic research feels useless, we already have them, it's just public perception that needs alignment. Neuroscience is cool, but it's really just conceptualizing a map whose territory is already available to us. Philosophy isn't something I see as a job, just as part of conscious sense making. There are many professions, but they do not interest me for long. It feels like I'm looking for a distraction, feeding the ego-game of needing to bind myself to something to perpetuate survival. But in the free time I have for myself now, I want to find out what the best thing to do is. How I can live the happiest and where to go. I could join a hippie commune, I could be homeless, I could try a start-up, but for what? I could write a book about the endless notes I'm in the process of deleting. It's all conceptual baggage but it's also a map of reality. Any tips from someone who integrates ego-death with presence and navigating the real world healthily?

@Yimpa I know what I want. I hide it from myself because I'm attached to unattachment. But it's simple and I can keep doing it indefinitely. Indefinitely from my current perspective, truly until I don't feel like it anymore, but there's so much energy. I'm running away from the energy, I'm running away from myself. The light is blinding. I love it. Why am I so obnoxiously smart in stupidity?

@Davino Thank you. To externalize my thoughts would make it easier to let go of them, I am continuously changing, using ever less words, but can always deconstruct them to an infinite length. I do take pleasure in these insights and a book would be simultaneously share them, memorialize them, and make some income on the way. I really just have to start exploring life and reality outside of the conceptual proliferation I was locked in all my life. I'm ever more aware of my body's needs and the layers of my mental delusion. I will do the best I can.

@Yimpa C'mon, my externalized proxy and alter-ego, my ego-mind was really hoping to latch onto some concepts from the persona that you are to it and that it makes itself believe that it is too lazy to come up with itself, regardless of the fact that this very resistance is more tenuous than actually doing it. But now you disappointed its expectations through a higher consciousness response intended for self-inquiry, which is the last thing it wants to do, but it will and realize it's higher self in the process of doing and thank you for it later, despite always having had the means of doing it itself, and instead searching it in it's memory through physical cues from "others".

Realize that resistance is fear and ego ignorance. Others will try to control you as they control themselves. But their perspectives are partial and circumstantial. You and I were like that once when we didn't know any better. But now that we do, we can see it for what it is, a lower perspective that is yet to be transcended. Experience is only ever attained in the present moment by pushing the borders of one's curiosity into the unknown.

@Livingstone The world is filled with ego, which manifests itself through projection and ignorance. You don't need any degree, knowledge fills you with insights, but the only point of learning anything at all is to expand your perspective. Universities don't teach you any more than ChatGPT does, it's merely the game of degrees, diplomas, titles and certificates which self-perpetuates narrow thinking, specialized studies and the export of responsibility to authority. Society plays the game of validating certificates, but look at all the successful entrepreneurs, they're only where they are because they ditched this mindset and society tries to mimic them and fails because there never were any rules to it, they just did their own thing. Institutions slow you down to match their timeframe. You wait days to go and memorize some stupid speech that you can just watch right now on YouTube. It's either public knowledge, or if it's not, do you really want to participate in hiding knowledge away and monetizing it? Ideally, it'd be an environment of open thought, sharing and holistic interconnection through the lens of whatever is studied, group discussions, active participation, constructivist reimagining. Open thinking, active doing, immediate testing, passion, spirit, truth. But that's not what we see. Students are depressed, look at the suicide rates, look at what you're trying to do, you're trying to help but the elaborate means of getting there through all the bullshit diplomas to justify a human's ability to interact and help another human while outsourcing responsibility to some "professional intellectuals" is exactly what got us into this mess. Nobody can talk frankly anymore, everybody's distracted, people are referred to suicide watches, to group therapy, to some impersonal institutions, to fix problems that stem from being unable to interact with their own environment due to its nature. You and I are discouraged all our lives from sharing our thoughts, ideas, gaslight into inaction, blind trust in a system of consensus bullshitting, depressed and stopped from learning on our own and making our own decisions, constant second guessing, constant need to validate our thoughts with at least one more person sharing the sentiment, constant doubt and fear of getting things wrong and being shamed for it. The only way I got out of that were psychedelics that I started three months ago. The most valuable part of the psychedelic experience is to get fully in tune with yourself and to be able to experientially and emotionally feel that which you already know to be the case. To accept the truth and shed all doubt for the ego-game that it is. I had the same idea as you. I though, hmm what about psychology to help people? That I realized, it's a narrow focus, monetized profession, strict timetables, you'll be called crazy if you do overtime or want to help people outside of work because "you're not earning money doing it". It's so limiting, then I thought how can I do better? What do I even do? How do I help people? And I realized, people are everywhere, everyone's got their own unique problems. A person really just needs to vent and become in tune with their emotions, desires and thoughts. For the next two weeks, I spent a lot of time of Reddit, typing with people in awful situations, sharing insights, just talking about their life and hearing them out. It feels like I made their days better. Your goal is noble. But what I realized is that my drive was really out of needing that which I gave them myself, I never had anyone to help me and by helping them, I used them as a proxy to help myself. But I kept realizing how complex life is and how much there is to integrate and that I really need to work on myself. Because you can only help others up to the state of mind that you yourself are in.

transience means my happiness will pass but so will my anguish, so when I anguish I can look forward to happiness, and when I'm in happiness I know it won't be gone for good and so when I do anguish I can appreciate it for what it is and anguish less for the anguish was really an absence of happiness due to attachment I suffers because I is attached to I-self, but I isn't I, I is connected to parts that I grows attached to but I is everything and nothing and all that I yet isn't. I hasn't realized it, but I always changes, I's environment changes, but I remains, I's body changes, but I is still I, I's thoughts and identity change, but I knows I-self to be I nonetheless, I only knows what it's like to be, but I only is when I experiences, but I doesn't always experience, I only knows I's awareness when I is aware, for I is awareness. I always maintained a loose but continuous memory of I, the attachment to this memory I can overcome as I realizes its transient nature, the last question is if I can allow I-self to forget and suffer to learn I-self anew in a different form before I's imagined death. The last border to cross on ego-death, for I is not ego but ego is a transient part I grown attached to.

@Squeekytoy Life is homeostatic, it survives because it's good at it. It's defined by that trait and seeks it out through all its instincts. Evolution: Fear. Love. Desire. Exploration. Safety. Meaning. Freedom. Presence. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Repression. Shadow. Unity. Imagination. To understand our distraction and resistance towards self-annihilation, we only have to look at where it comes from, we evolved to be opposite and can only move there under a pretense like seeking truth or becoming more resilient or having a price wafting for us there. Without motivation, we go nowhere. Motivation is drive is seeking comes from desire comes from instinct comes from form that consciousness takes.

@Squeekytoy @Yimpa The reason why all of us are still here

I could see how an unbalanced ego could eventually fall into nihilism, due to a dissolution of all preferences and navigational capacity. I could also see it as an increased attachment, an ego expansion. But you'll have to elaborate for me to understand exactly what you mean. Without ego, there is nothing to appreciate, or is there?

Ah yes, the path of deconstruction and recontextualization: I'm quite fond of it myself. You can learn much about a person just looking at where and how they spend most of their day. But it's equally essential to extinguish one's own bias and projected "meaning well" The ego wants nothing more than to make everyone else your clone, but you can use that. You just have to expand your ego so far, that it covers all aspects of human life and personality. Then you'll see others just as yourself in a different circumstance and mindset.

This is it. Any moment that awareness is content with is a beautiful one. Resistance to the present moment is what runs this world and is its own currency that shapes our lives in every way. We have forgotten how blissful the mere state of conscious existence is, no matter its form. LET ME ADD TO YOUR POST: Our mind is made of countless memories, conscious and unconscious desires To realize their nature and consciously resolve and dismiss the need to hold onto them and carry them inside will diminish the continuous arising of long-term resistance and the return and waves of ego-backlash. We don't need to realize them in real life via proxies, they originated in imagination and that's where we can resolve them. At the same time, there are massive amounts within us, and it might feel like a distraction from pure being. But the body and mind are one and we can see them from this elevated perspective. Just like nutrition will make our body healthier, so will letting go. Yet we're already perfect if we can be present. It's just that distraction, sleep, etc. shifts our consciousness out of it. In a healthy state that will happen less.