UnbornTao

What's true, especially what's existentially true, isn’t confined to any domain or paradigm of human knowledge, which are conceptual in nature. It isn't even limited to our faculties and senses. Why would we presuppose that the truth is accessible to such means in the first place? What is is already the case; it is not limited to the mind, language, or experience - not even to the brain or perception. Personal preference, criteria, and cosmology aren't relevant in this pursuit either - as if you could somehow fit the truth into a conception of existence. What's true is itself - prior to the conception of the human organism! For example, a thought about something is a thought about something. The thought isn't the thing, therefore no belief is or can be true. What are the implications of this fact?

What do you want it for? If you want to become a therapist, university is needed. If you want to learn about psychological topics, then read books and contemplate yourself things like emotions, mind, awareness, cognition, etc.

Effectiveness is a dynamic relationship defined by the purpose of the interaction and demands aligning yourself with what is happening as it occurs. For example, imagine you are eating ice cream, and your purpose at that moment is simply to enjoy yourself. In this case, you are being effective (if you are enjoying yourself): your actions align with your purpose. But if your purpose at that same moment were a different one or were inconsistent with the activity of eating ice cream - say, improving your health or saving money, perhaps - then you likely wouldn't be effective in that regard (depending on your criteria for health). This is a rather lame example, but hopefully it gets the point across. In theory, this might sound obvious, but in practice, actually recognizing this principle as it is occurring in one's experience can be surprisingly subtle, elusive, challenging. Most of the time, we aren't deeply aware of why we act the way we do, even though we think we are connected to that motive. The intellectual recognition may not easily translate into your experience because these are two different worlds - the latter often being more difficult to grasp.

Have you ever seen how a cornered rat behaves? In a similar way, we generally resist - and may even despise - having our fantasies destroyed; we want them to be validated and widely adopted, and anything that suggests otherwise is seen as threatening to us.

It is not the truth that hurts you, but rather your relationship to it - your unwillingness to acknowledge it.

Dwelling on what something means to you may obscure the possibility of realizing what it is for itself.

Wordpress, it seems, and Community Software by Invision Power for the forum. I think he designed the website himself and perhaps even coded it, too.

You're way over-intellectualizing it. Get clear on what you want, stop the mental masturbation, and go kick ass in music or whatever you like.

This seems to be a common, albeit unrecognized, phenomenon in spiritual and philosophical circles: being overly intellectual to fool yourself and others into believing you actually know what you're talking about. It's based on the trap of mistaking the social game - reaching agreements, being convincing, liking each other, and so on - for genuine understanding, depending on how that's being defined.

Recognizing that you, as a person, are not actually special can be liberating, even though it might be fiercely resisted at first. Your existence as a self is no more special than that of others. If you pay attention and tell the truth, you'll notice that your self is held as the center of the universe. A snowflake is essentially just water, and there is an abundance of these formations. What makes it special in our eyes might be our estimation and agreement, but snow doesn't care, so to speak ("snow" here refers to existence.)

Then what are you pointing to? By "agreeing" do you mean adopting it as a belief? What would be the point of agreeing without being directly conscious of it oneself? I don't really know about those guys. Ken is smart and may have had enlightenment experiences. He's also pretty attached and stuck on intellect. Has Daniel expressed or mentioned if he's had enlightenment experiences himself? How does he talk about this subject?

Setting aside the roles you play expands your sense of self, deepens your presence, and increases your vitality. As a very specific example of how this principle may play out in a social context, imagine you are being hunted by a lion. In this life-or-death situation, all your social concerns and agendas are immediately dismissed as irrelevant and unreal. You realize that they are not objectively real and are, essentially, invented. This recognition frees you from them - at least temporarily, in the example above. It is not the best example but hopefully it gets the point across.

Poor wording. I meant that Windows hasn't been optimally adapted to unconventional form factors by Microsoft yet. New touch-focused features piss off desktop users and viceversa. No desktop OS has been made truly touch-friendly without having to compromise on usability in some way, as far as I know. Both Apple and Microsoft seem to be experimenting with their OSes in this regard. I didn't say that Macs were innovate but rather the PCs that you mentioned. You may have misinterpreted me. What about metrics like hardware quality (trackpad, screen, speakers, keyboard), weight, thickness, temperature, noise, performance, battery life? What's the touch experience like? Not as good as a tablet, I bet. Overall, the M1 Air is the winner, except for touch and graphics. Many people would prefer an excellent traditional device instead of a mediocre or even decent 2-in-1. I don't think this form factor has still fully developed. Yes, PCs are of course versatile, open, cheap and customizable. For gaming, they're pretty much the best platform. Besides, they can offer discreet graphics card support. Well, it's true and I frequently feel the same. A screen without touch capabilities, except TVs and other specific gadgets, makes you feel like living in the Jurassic era. Plays Jurassic Park soundtrack. Yes. Qualcomm is their main competitor when it comes to mobile processors. Apple has been at the top of mobile processors for more than a decade. Their custom silicon dev kit used an iPad chip! In a way, M1 was the culmination of a decades-old development that started with the first custom iPhone chip. They leveraged their expertise with their mobile custom processors and applied it to the desktop. That doesn't seem to be the case. The M3 has been rumored to be built on 3nm and ARMv9 technology. Apple might choose to use that new technology only in their "pro" devices, though. I'll be patiently waiting for an Intel or AMD processor with similar relationship between performance and efficiency as that of Apple Silicon. Both companies will likely have to switch to ARM sooner or later in order to achieve that.

You're confusing intellectual prowess with enlightenment. It is possible to be very smart but not enlightened. For example, Nissargatta was awake and also illiterate. There's no correlation between these two things.

What is intuition?

Getting involved in intellectualization and abstraction can easily become a trap when the subject matter pertains to the subjects of experience and consciousness. Experience belongs to a different domain than intellect. On paper, this distinction seems straightforward; in practice, it is much more tricky to notice.

Do what you want and make it work for you. What purpose could you create for your life?

Being invested in something, especially on an emotional level, tends to hinder an impartial observation.

Do you presume your thoughts are true simply because they come from you? It seems we live under this unquestioned assumption most of the time. Because they appear to be yours or coming from you - or so we believe - you may be blindly trusting in their legitimacy, without knowing where they came from or why they arise at all.

What about your book?

To change something, first you need to become aware of what it is and how it works. If you don't see it as it is, your ability to interact with it will be severely diminished.

Perceiving reality through models can easily become a trap if you treat that effort as more than simply "drawing an apple." When you're hungry, you go for the real thing. By its nature, a model can't accurately represent what is there - it is not the thing itself. Still, models can sometimes be useful. A representation, however, is often mistaken for "reality," superimposing extraneous, unnecessary concepts onto your experience and causing you to miss what is actually perceived.

How you frame an event in your mind determines how you perceive it.

As much as you can, and when the situation calls for it, communicate in a way that the expression can stand on its own. This journal is an example of not doing that.

What creates depression is imagining a negative future for your life. "Imagining" here isn't just a trivial activity, even though it might sound like one; it is, rather, the very source of that emotion - the conceptual process that is engaged and results in depression. Stop imagining a negative future scenario, and you'll eliminate depression at its root.