alyra

@Leo Gura why exactly, tho, is the whole enlightenment process not just another trick of the ego? experiences of nothingness, infinity, another being, not just a trick of ego? just as we can never prove the existence of physical matter because it all falls back to sensation. we cannot prove the existence of non duality because it all returns to the fact of our awareness being aware of everything but its direct self. awareness proves duality in the exact same way it denies duality. where am I even going with this question. I'm too asleep. peace, friend.

happiness is not my goal. I am happy every day, regularly. I suppose if I wanted to I could pursue increasing how strongly it is felt how often or how long it lasts - but that just doesn't seem like a "goal" that I'm interested in. it seems kind of neurotic to me, how everyone's always like "I wanna be happy" "I need to find happiness" I don't even know what I want in life lol. I just know that I want to exist lol. if I didn't want that I'd be dead

yeah gimp's what I use for this typa stuff. tho I'm not good at it yet - advanced applications are complex lol. TBH you could make a vision board with the default "paint" application on your computer - or by printing out the photos and arranging them in-person you can even copyand paste them into Word or Excel. or powerpoint. or Open Office. huh - vision board seems like a neat and nifty thing. didn't know about it - gonna make one soon

regarding the whole sacred symbols stuff. It's fascinating for sure, I haven't researched it too greatly - but immediately I recognize that it is nothing but patterns that arise from a patterned foundation. It's quite unsurprising that there's something which seems eerily meaningful, regardless of what that something is - patterns beget more patterns. just play a note in three-beat and another note in four-beat and notice how fascinating of a pattern that creates. This sort of thing is pretty much par for the course. Of course, pattern recognition is basically an abstraction at its finest - so working on your skills in pattern recognition could be a powerful skill to develop. there will be meaning in the so-called sacred geometry - meaning that our complex minds create in order to better process the worlds we experience.

@Leo Gura in a recent video you mentioned your interest in becoming a yogi. it sounded somewhat like you were saying, go off and disappear from society, and that you were delaying on this because you didn't want actualized.org to die. Have you yet considered the following ideas - that in a certain way, the cultures of the world, they are an extension of "I" and that one person is like a node in a complex neural network? That one's pursuit of Yogi could serve a purpose for the species as a whole - to find a higher level of enlightenment and return to culture with more intense understanding, able to influence then the culture with the result of the Yogi mediation and work? If , we suppose, you or someone in your position would do such a thing, the interest would be in guiding actualized.org to be in a self-sustaining setting, without the need for the central guide, so that the central guide could leave for 10, 15, 20, 30 years and return later to impact it at a more advanced level? it may be clear that I've not pondered this idea super deep, and I'm not on a super deep understanding of the "self" or etc. but I'm just curious if you've pondered a similar line of thinking at some point.

to the reader of this post: I love you!

The past is just the foundation we spring from. If we rest on muddy land, it is unfortunate. But we do not just roll around in it and say "I am lost" no, we find ways to harden the mud, or find harder ground, or build some kind of structure that can exist in mud. This is what we do. The ticket to the future is wide open.

Intuition is taking a bath and having some nice idea randomly that you totally are surprised to have. Intuition is dreams during the night time. intuition is turn off your screens at a busy day in the work , and taking a walk at the park, and letting your thoughts drift free. well, it can be found in those moments at least.

within 100 years scientists will prove that the world is flat, and we'll all be undead zombies. unable to comprehend their breakthrough. so we'll eat their brains to gain their knowledge.

wait. we aren't really self-aware at all. we can only be aware of what is not-ourself, but never of ourself itself.

nothing can really be defined with any accuracy. words are all an illusion. of course, everything is as one, so all is me. in this we we are self-aware, because everything that we are aware of is our self. however, this loses grip of what I am referring to - when we search to strip away the external things we are aware of in pursuit of understanding this phenomena of "self" that we believe we name when we say "I" - what is that? we cannot look directly at it. we cannot look directly at our self. if we can be directly aware of something, it is necessarily not ourself. in this way, there is no way to be self-aware.

are there any old favorites of yours that - whether it was intended or not - after you became more aware/conscious and self-actualized, grew a new meaning for you? I am listening to a song I've always loved the sound of, Schism by Tool, and while I wouldn't necessarily say the song is about a low-consciousness enlightenment experience regarding how communication does not actually transfer understanding, it's still makes me smile a little as I project that meaning onto the lyrics anyway lol. so - curious if anyone else has found this, with songs, film, novels, poetry, and any other form of media - that after you became more aware, instead of most of these forms of media seeming kind of low-level and a little less exciting, that they reveal a new, possibly unintended, or even if we're lucky a hidden intended meaning, which is of a higher level of awareness than initially noticed?

this was bumped after 6 months. quitting internet addictive sites cold turkey is the easiest way. but it isn't growth. growth is to quit it the hard way. it takes a long time and a lot of effort. quit it cold turkey and you just get addicted to the next site. and usually it isn't just the internet sites you get addicted to. binge watching? drinking? gaming? food? relationships? family? drama? workaholic? of course leo is manipulating us. whenever one human talks to another it is manipulation. whenever you breath out, I breathe in. or maybe it isn't manipulation at all, it is just monkeys being monkeys. but let's be honest, it's humans being humans. this is our nature, and this is the nature we work to become aware of. blaming others is one of those things. addiction is another. intent to manipulate is one too. they aren't bad. letting go of them doesn't mean ceasing to do them. letting go of them, being mindful, means doing what is more authentic in that moment. if we know that we are manipulating someone, we are more likely to realize it isn't really what we want to do. sometimes it will be. it's whatever.

lazy eye has been my favorite song by Silversun for a long time. but I haven't given it a listen in a few months. wow! it's like, it's convincingly so aligned too! makes me wonder!

there's this one feeling or sensation or emotion or something, which is negative, it's kind of an irritation that if I have it I'm in monkey thinking prettymuch. but as soon as I attempt to be mindful about it, it disappears. but eventually when I stop being mindful it comes back! not right away but still. any tips? it's almost amusing 'cept it makes me throw a day away.

it was said there are twp types of thinking - language thinking, and sensory thinking. It was said that Language Thinking is common for neurotypical folk - and sensory thinking is common for folks with autism,etc. A "quick" explanation - sensory thinking is thinking with a lack of words. the thought is experienced as pictures most commonly. Temple Grandin is the most well-known person who's talked about this. For me, it is actually in the form of tactile sensation. Only recently - about four or five years ago - I had developed the ability to think with complete sentences. If I thought with a single word before then, it was a phrase - or half a phrase - or even half a word - sparringly. Predominantly, I would think with tactole thought. In my best attempts to explain - thought for me has mostly been experienced either as a blob with weight, size, location, and texture - or as a vector, zooming around in my mind's space. (which is usually about a meter around my head as a center, but occasionally has extended further. also, there's a fourth dimensional nature to this sensation lol. not gonna bother trying to explain) long story short - I'm curious if anyone else has ever heard of sensory thinking, has direct experience regarding it, or would like to ask me questions about my experience with sensory thinking. To be frank, I think it's kind of silly to imagine that it's uncommon that people do have sensory thinking - but whenever the subject of thought arises. it is something I am curious about. how do you think? do you think with words only? or do you think with pictures? and for those of you who have internal visualization of images - do you claim that this is the nature of how you think, or just memory to you? I'm wondering if there is a difference between "recalling a memory as an image or similar sensory experience" and "thinking using images or other sensory experiences" (note that this is definitely not awareness - awareness of actual real sensation is one thing. experiencing created sensations as the way to be a "logical mind" is another). for me, there is nothing in the world comparable to what my tactile sensations of thought actually are - the closest thing is if I hold a mass of playdough, and close my eyes, I can tactily guess it's size shape and weight and texture. but no this is not touching the object or feeling it with my hands - it is representing the object in my head as if it is inside my mental space. my mental membrane lol. is if there's this vat of suspension liquid which is my brain, and my thoughts exist in it, and I feel it with this liquid. does this explanation make me sound crazy? normal? I wanna know what your experience is - and what your response to my rant you probably didn't read is.

you mean the alien thriller that's showing now, called Arrival? or something else - in which case could you provide a link?

it's - instead of thinking "ok. I got to focus on the task at hand. which is. cleaning! ok cleaning, theres this space here. oh, this can go in the other room." it's not thinking language at all - but instead processing similar kind of progressing thought interaction using, in my case, tactile sensations. To explain my experience, it's like I have extra appendages, except it's floating in space. about the size of a fist. I might reach out to touch the appendage, but all I touch is air. there is no actual part of my body there, and only rarely does it feel like a tendril - usually a disconnected blob. and these phantom appendage contains complex information - perhaps a number I'm remembering during a calculation, or cars I'm keeping track of while driving, or an amount of details that describe what an image would look like if I could see it. but I can only hold a few details at a time in my focus - yet the blob itself, I know that it contains all the details, comparable to if I was looking at a picture and focusing on the dog's eye, but instead of seeing anything, I feel it. or if someone speaks a paragraph to me, I feel multiple "floating blob appendages" forming together and moving around and morphing until I understand what was said. then that understanding is a blob of information that I feel. I've heard that sensory thinking is most often comparable to like, say, playing a silent film in one's head instead of having an inner language - based dialogue, but I don't experience that so I don't want to try to explain what that's like. I'll probably misinform. note that "sensory thinking" as I've said it is a new, not yet popularly used term - googling it gives me "sensory processing" and is talking about something not quite the same.

to be honest - I've never really been able to really answer the "visual, kinetic, auditory learner" question. I am none of them really. I suppose I am most like the kinetic learner - but if anything that is more so because I have always been "internally blind" and when I was a kid and teen had very impacting communication difficulty - but if those setbacks weren't there - I actually would be a visual learner. I typically have disliked "doing" something before I understood it.

yes - something I've been wondering ever since I Started talking about it is if it's actually more common, just that people tend not to spend the time being aware of it which would be awkward to ask. "what - you don't think with sensation? are you sure you're not unaware??"

@eskwire last time I had sex was over 6 years ago and I have no immediate plans to change that. idk if I count as "celibate" because I do indulge in fantasy with masturbation occasionally, so in that way I behave sexually. occasionally I've created an account on OK cupid, had a little fun perusing profiles, but ultimately trying to set up a conversation with people was... weird. unfulfilling I guess. but letsee to ponder your questions. for me I figured out I "should" be celibate mostly because sex itself was kind of uninteresting. long story short... there was enough about sex that gave me reason to just hold off from it. I would occasionally think about relationships without sex, and sometimes it seemed kind of nice and like I said I've been social enough to be thinking about attractive peeps and maybe trying to talk to people in the pursuit of something but... I've basically been denying to myself that I have interest in not bothering, at least for now. of course, I should disclose that when I was in high school I boldly told myself that even if I never found a partner in my life I'd be happy just being on my own. and that because of that, I preferred to put off dating until college or some time around then. I suppose I've been basically temporarily celibate, but with the end date unspecified, this whole time. for two years in college I was in some relationships, but after the last one I reinstated my celibacy. (well with freedom to pine for contact I wasn't really pursuing.) by your third question. I'm unfamiliar with the language you used to ask it, but from what I read it sounds kind of like you've had a lot of relationships that are short lived for quite some time now? IMO that's a dangerous habit to fall into. it's possible that you could approach the situation, assuming that is your situation, either by mindfulness with celibacy, or by mindfulness just doing the same... trying to be fully aware as consistently as you can during that time, letting go of self-judgments and just acting like an impartial observer of the situation. either way, being mindful I trust would facilitate growth in the area of romance for you. I mean I think I understand what you mean by this. but my thoughts regarding it is... if we feel as if we should avoid something, well that's moralization. it may not be the way it has been framed by others in this thread so far, but it is still being named a distraction. In Leo's video I remember he really emphasized how when we say we shouldn't do something, we actually are rejecting the true desire that we want to do it. but I also then said, that it is both - when we moralize we split ourselves - we outright deny that we actually want to do the thing by trying to say we shouldn't, as well as we unknowingly deny the fact that there are reasons we want to not do the thing. and by splitting it in this way, we are forcing various levels of unawareness on ourselves. dogma. the truth is that our choices are all equal. and they are nothing. our individuality does in fact draw us to some things and away from others, and this is all we really need to make our decisions. the moralizations and dogmas of rules and expectations are a distraction from authenticity. generally my advice - and this is the first time I'm expressing this so I apologize in advance - is: when we use our words and thoughts and ideas to state things, we can instead of using these ideas as beliefs of right or wrong or desired or undesired or good or evil. we could realize that our ideas are necessarily *false, not false as in not true but rather as in inherently not infinity, that they are dual in nature. that the authentic self is nondual but in our small-scale duality existence, we can only truly ponder dual thoughts, and so the enlightened path is to realize that the duality is inherent - and with a neutral perspective, allow the dual experiences to only be a guide for our pursuit of authentic existence, as nothing dual can be authentic. we cannot even reach authenticity or enlightenment, these are not destinations we arrive at or trophies we acquire - enlightenment and the pursuit of the authentic self are simply the nature in which we live life out. existence is infinity and as such our nothingness is automatically a part of that no matter what we do. but using morals and beliefs makes us stand rigid against the tide of infinity, in which we break - and awareness is how we become like the sapling who bends with the wind and therefore does not break, and becomes one with the flow.

oh! I remeber those videos. I'll give them another watch. really in the long run I will figure things out. and I don't currently have a meditation habit. and I've watched a lot of videos but never directly contemplated any of them, so I just got an overall picture but not strong applicative sense. but I'm a sucker who likes asking for tips from a community :3 I've always found that I am not great at looking at things from different angles, what I can stumble upon by talking with others, could take me years to discover on my own, just because I'm my own echo chamber lol.

I wouldn't put it so cynically... it's not that people want you not to grow. it's more that they don't consider this kind of work to be what growth is. and moreover, that there's things which make no sense before you understand it yourself. people talk about god and go "shpsh what is that even makes no sense" and that's because "god is some dude who made everything" creates a false image for them that they reject, and then don't think about how god could instead just be everything and nothing at once, nondual. no supreme being or anything. well, authentic being lol, that's pretty supreme or the other example I think of is. how when someone is down people say "get over it!" and then the down person goes "wow omg RUDE I can't just get over it don't be an ass you don't understand" but the truth is, that they can get over it, but it takes a lot of patience and effort, and honestly most people eventually do get over it and once they do it seems so easy that they then turn around and say "get over it!" forgetting how rude it used to be to hear. and so that is why people disrespect personal growth. they're completely unaware that they are doing it, and even if they do notice they don't realize the power of focusing on it, that they think growth is only training "practical" skills like con art or science or sports, not realizing the potential of training their ability to train itself. personal growth is kind of, meta-growth, and so it's illusory by nature, and easy to dismiss or outright fail to notice altogether.

I was trying to spread the ideas of personal growth actively, and after getting a lot of people not even noticing or even being kind of insulted by my saying that they can do something, idek how that makes sense. I realised. we're like that one girl in high school who's found jesus and tells everyone and NO ONE CARES OMG GO AWAY lol. kind of embarrassing. it takes the right perspective for someone to be interested in personal growth, and it takes the right perspective for someone to understand the language of personal growth. so sharing the wisdom is challenging. you gotta figure out how to lead someone in the right direction, by using language and concepts that they would understand. and you gotta hope that somewhere down the line, they'll find that eureka moment where the world changes for them. but chances are they'll forget your words of wisdom by then.

this is the one I started with actually well, I think it may have been the second or third one I watched tbh. but it's the earliest memorable one I saw.