Emerald

I went to a little sushi place, that we go to from time to time. I don't eat raw fish anymore... though I miss it. Salmon and eel were the hardest to give up when I stopped eating meat. But I really enjoy avocado sushi and sweet potato sushi. My daughter made me a little card. She likes to do things like that.

It was good. We went out of town for the evening and went to dinner. Other than that, it was business as usual.

I recommend moving away for a while. This will make your decision clear because you'll have a standard of comparison. The situation will still be there to come back to eventually... if you want to. But are you afraid that you won't want to go back? I ask because I've been in situations that I've been afraid to take time off whenI loved a person, but they were toxic to me. I was afraid to leave them behind even for a little while, because I knew deep down that I wouldn't be going back. And it became immediately clear the moment I left, that I didn't ever want to go back. I think that taking time off is the risk you need to take to truly know. Otherwise, you're just going through scenarios in your mind without real perspective. Deep down, you probably know that you don't want the dysfunction... but you're afraid of what will come. This is my impression. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I think it might be the one on dealing with negative emotions by allowing them to pass through you. The one where he was talking about becoming like a superconductor.

I think this is the one. I've never known Leo to take down any videos... and if he did, it wouldn't be because a commenter disagreed.

The reason why I say that it's low is because he has that amount of views spanned over 350 videos relative to my 60 videos. So, his channel is about 6x larger than mine with the same number of views. This means that he doesn't have a large amount of subscribers tuning in whenever he post a video. You usually get about 20% of views per video relative to subscriber count: some from subs and some from newcomers. So, if his average view count for each video is between 100 and 200 views, this means that he probably has around 1000 subs. Also, usually when YouTubers hide their view count, it is for the reason of trying to hide a low subscriber count.

Thanks. It does become really obvious when you've been through the dry spell at the beginning to see when others are trying to grow their channel in ways that don't really work. Plus, I checked out the guy's channel after I posted yesterday, and my suspicions were confirmed about the low sub count. This Leo critique video was one of his most popular videos and it only had like 350 views. So, he has a very low subscriber base despite the fact that he's been consistently uploading for two years. And looking at the things he has posted, it's a lot of racist kind of stuff... or just obnoxious "basic" kind of stuff. So, I definitely think that he's just trying to piggy-back by criticizing Leo. That way, all the Leo fans will be upset and click on his video.

I really just think he's trying to get views off of doing a response video to Leo and being generally abrasive. Having a YouTube channel myself, I know it can be a difficult thing to get your first subs. So, I see it as him taking the easy route. I noticed he doesn't have his subscriber count shown. It probably means that his sub count is low and he wants to seem more influential than he actually is. He also stated a few falsehoods just in the first minute that I watched. Leo didn't take down a video because he disagreed with him in the comments. The logo has nothing to do with the "man boy love association" or whatever the hell. And there were a couple other things too. The best thing you can do if you see a video like this where the person is just trashing on another channel just to get subs is to not give them the watch time. Watch time and audience retention rates are the biggest factors for getting more views and subs on YT. So, if they see a lot of people dropping out before the two minute mark of the video, it will inform the YT algorithm that the video is either irrelevant or not interesting.

Thank you. No plans that I know of. I have work tomorrow, so the first half of the day is just that. But we might go do something when I get off since my hubby is off tomorrow.

There is no necessity to believe in God/Devil as real entities in order to be a good person. I don't believe in them as entities myself, though I admit that I don't know anything for sure. To me, God is everything that's ever been/is/will be and the Devil is a solely human-based psychological occurrence. They aren't opposites... but moreso the "Devil" is just another manifestation of God. But this is just what my experiences have lead me to believe. There is no necessity to believe anything... but there is a necessity to be able to recognize the native darkness that we all have. This is one of the reason why some of the best people that I know are Atheist, Agnostic, or generally non-religious. What I noticed is that many religious folk tend to identify themselves with the good and righteous. And that they have an extreme resistance to noticing the darkness in themselves... which ironically makes them vulnerable to the "whisperings of the Devil." This is why my quote from my earlier post is very relevant. You may not believe that the Devil exists as an entity, but it certainly exists as part of the human psyche. It can be experienced very clearly if a person is willing to face their own ugliness. So, in the case of the Devil... a rose by any other name...

There is a good quote related to this. It goes something like "The smartest thing the devil ever did was convince everyone that he doesn't exist." The Devil definitely exists as part of the human psyche that subtly influences our behavior toward destructive drives. Lucifer is (more than likely... unless there's some other dimensional blah blah) just a mythical creature, but what he represents is very real and is the very reason why there's so much bad in humanity. I think this is what SLICKHAWK meant by Lucifer.

The way to reconcile these things is to not identify yourself with being a victim. You can acknowledge that someone has wronged you and that certain things are not your fault. However, when you take 100% responsibility for you life, you acknowledge that however you decide to respond is 100% your responsibility. So, the power is in your hands to respond in any way. No one can fix your problems for you, even if you didn't cause your problems. So, even if courts call a person a "victim" because they've been victimized, there is no need to own "victimhood." It's like being assigned a juror number. You may have been juror number 5 in the most recent court case, but as soon as you're done with the case you don't care about your identity as juror number 5 or feel like you have to keep it for life. You simply realize that it was a useful label in the context of the justice system, but not useful in any other scenario.

I will probably continue to upload once every 2-3 weeks until early June when my assignment ends. I've been having difficulty finding energy to make them weekly because I work 40 hours a week and each video takes me about 10 hours of work to put together. So, fifty hours of work and the rest of the time for child rearing is difficult for me to keep up with. When I get the chance to film after the kids go to bed, all I want to do is relax and have some me time. Before, I was working about 20 hours a week, so it wasn't a big stretch in energy to make a video a week and be really consistent with my schedule. But I figured that with summer coming up, I will have a lot more time on my hands and I can even schedule multiple filmings in one sitting. Since the setup to the filming is one of the more time consuming and difficult to schedule things, this should help my frequency and consistency. I may even decide to do one long video a week like normal, and maybe a few quicker videos for throughout the week. But I'm not sure yet. I have to see how it goes. I have considered mentorship before. I work with kid and teenagers, so I have somewhat of a mentorship function. But it isn't in the same way as I'd be giving direct life advice or anything of that nature. I don't remember Annie off-hand, but I normally have a pretty good memory for people who comment. Can you describe her screen picture or the things she talked about in her comments?

I suppose that is true that it is ultimately one voice in the end. But I definitely experienced it as two loud clashing voices fighting constantly and violently against one another. I was strangely in awe of the fact that I was wanting to make everything so positive and hopeful and pleasant for everyone and everything and at the same exact time I wanted to burn everyone's houses down and kill everyone in the most painful way possible. It was like watching a volatile chemical reaction happen inside of me that I would normally hide from myself. But I was watching it like a child would watch fireworks. It was like watching the dance of good and evil. But these were just small when zoomed out from. The voice of wisdom was a deep kind of knowing. It didn't really come as a thought. It showed itself to me as something that I had always had but had not known that I had. A deep satisfaction of all drives to seek new knowledge or skillsets, as I always had. I already knew that it was all already there. There was no need to seek any more knowledge to make myself some way or to come to some point of knowing this or that thing to satisfy my seeking drive.

I came from the perspective of identifying strongly with the positive voice. So, my conscious actions were always well-intentioned. In fact, my big problem was that I identified to strongly with the positive voice, and didn't want to see the negative voice in me. I had no awareness of it. Goodness was (and still is to some degree) one of my strongest identifications. But the negative found it's way to covertly influence my behaviors. So, some people may identify or give expression to the negative voice, and end up doing terrible destructive things. But identifying with the good voice, doesn't really do much better. It was more a realization that neither voice was me, so I could watch both without judgment or discomfort. And with that level of awareness, neither voice had a sway over me. But the ability to separate from these warring voices allowed me to hear a much quieter voice: the voice of wisdom.

I had two experiences of ego transcendence, where it was basically like a zooming out from the self concept. And I had no fear or need for myself or reality to be anything other than what it is. So, I was able to notice and be aware of a lot more things about reality that I would normally be insulated from by various coping mechanisms. One thing that I noticed that I was previously unaware of is that I had one internal voice that I would normally identify as "me" that wanted only good things for everyone. This voice wanted everything to be at peace and wonderful for me and everyone else and the Earth. Then there was another voice that I was not yet aware of. It was a very negative voice that wanted to destroy everything. It gave me flashes of murderous fantasies and imagined through all sort of different destructive scenarios where I would tear myself or others apart. But in that state of awareness, I was just the observer of these two voices. I was normally afraid and hiding from the negative voice. So, I didn't feel comfortable hearing it. But I knew it had always been there and I know it still is. It's good to realize that you are not that voice. But you must try to find room for that voice to become heard, as this is what helps integrate the negative voice into consciousness where it will cease to have a negative impact on your actions. Also, I'm sure that everyone has both of these inner voices. Perhaps people who've worked on their self structures have reintegrated their negative voice to the point where it has no negative influence on behaviors. But a strong ego that's helpful could be hiding those destructive impulses as well. They may have a lot of ugliness that stirs around in other ways that simply doesn't brandish itself in the arena of performance and personal success.

I can relate to your feeling quite a bit. It feels like life has been a series of small enchantments that give way to disenchantments... and after nearly 28 years of my life, it feels like there are few enchantments left. But one thing that helps me keep going is in my knowledge of the fact that the enchantment and kiss of innocence never actually goes away. It gets obscured by ideas and mental frameworks, but the candle flame never actually goes out. So, like @Prabhaker said, you should look for the thing that blocks this light out from your conscious awareness and try to remove the barriers. Once the barrier is not there, the now-unconscious light of wonderment that may now be a distant memory, will effortlessly float to the surface of your conscious mind. It's like liquid or gas or even light: it always fills the space where there is no resistance or blockage. So, you must realize that something has caused you to be insulated from the experience of wonderment. Then let go of that thing through some form of inner work. To make an analogy, imagine that as a curious child you go around trying to experience the textures of the world. So, you touch things with your hands: a kitten is soft and fluffy, wood is hard and rough, water is wet and cool, etc. Then you got burned a few times maybe or got a splinter or two, so you decided to wear an oven mit to keep your hands safe. And you wore the oven mit so long that you forgot it was an oven mit and mistook it for your actual hand. So, because you're not aware that you're wearing an oven mit, you're puzzled as to why kittens are n longer soft and fluffy, and wood is no longer hard and rough, and water is no longer wet and cool. It all seems like the same feeling. Everything feels like the inside of an oven mit. Trying to think positively in this metaphor is akin to putting another oven mit on top of the old one, but the new one is fashioned to look like a human hand. Getting burnt in this metaphor is the whatever stimulus caused you to create a defense mechanism in the first place.

But you see, you're still talking about justifications and I am not. It was not my intention to get meat-eaters to justify why they eat meat or to say that they're not justified in doing so. Nor was it my intention to argue anyone out of their behaviors. My point was that justifications can be used to emotionally bypass a situation. If a person can watch animals be killed on a farm and/or participate in that industry itself, and feel okay with their actions, then that is where they'e at. But most people can't honestly do this. So, a justification such as "humans have evolved to be able to consume meat." can be used to ignore the less comfortable reality of what actually happens to animals. For example, my mother is a meat eater who never so much as considered Vegetarianism. The other day she was invited to a hog roast event, and there was a picture on the invite of a fully roasted pig with an apple in its mouth. She was really uncomfortable about it and thought it was disgusting to do such a thing and that it almost looked like a dog laying there. She said this to me, knowing that I'm Vegan, and probably expecting for me to be just as outraged as she is. I was not. I'm already aware of the uncomfortable realities, so the image was not shocking to me as it was to her. But she was truly disturbed.

I respect your opinion. But I still feel that this misses the point of my post. My point is that it's easy for people to bypass an emotional awareness of how you really feel about any given topic, if we use the rational mind to justify certain actions. It's kind of like cutting corners to awareness. People can justify just about any action if they can come up with a rational justification for said action. And they can use it to block out how they actually feel about a situation. For example, when engaged in war, a soldier must be able to justify killing if they want to be able to do the job properly. Yet, most soldiers are opposed to killing in the majority of situation. So, they need to simplify their awareness of the situation, and blot out deeper levels of emotional truth. So, they choose a mental framework that isn't true but is effective at helping them kill others. They separate the world into friend and enemy, and the enemy is someone you kill. So, understand that my post are not about Veganism particularly, but about how the human psyche tends toward rationalizing away uncomfortable truths.

Ultimately, nothing is good or bad, so eating meat is not "bad" in an absolute sense. But I was specifically addressing your point about killing plants and killing animals being conferable. I was saying to be aware that this can be used to overlook emotionally uncomfortable aspects of reality, which could cause a dimming in your level of self-awareness. So, if you use this justification, it could potentially cover up the emotions that you really feel about the situation since you would be less likely to explore if further as you've already come to a satisfactory conclusion. So, understand that my post isn't really about discouraging meat eating (though I would like it if people didn't consume meat). My post is about being careful about coming to satisfactory conclusions regarding a particular matter while not diving deeper into the emotions that underlie it. It's about awareness.

I think you misunderstood the point of my post. The intention of my post was to get you to consider that you might be using the objective Truth "both animals and plants are alive, and killing either is still killing" to unconsciously avoid the awareness of what your personal emotional experience is relative to the knowledge of what killing an animal entails. Also, it may keep you from facing ugly truths about reality in tangible ways too. Human beings are pros at emotional bypassing when it comes to things that go against their values or things that they feel uncomfortable about. I was not meaning for you to feel like you have to justify your behavior in any way or calling your character into question. But it is my suspicion that you may be deceiving yourself.

To be honest, he reminds me a bit of how I was right after my experiences. I really went crazy. So, this is why I don't really think he's enlightened but that he had a Satori or Samadhi experience, and it went to his head.

I want you to be really honest. Do you really feel like killing plants is the same as killing animals? Or is this just easy to say as a technicality to justify a behavior that you have a hard time reconciling with your values? I'm not judging you for eating meat or anything like that. But I think that this is an argument based more in deflection than the actual honest emotional experience of the experience of killing and/or consuming a living creature. The former is an easy abstraction based in an objective truth that enables a person to skirt awareness of a painful reality. This ability to skirt awareness of the issue is compounded by the fact that most people get their meat pre-cut in little packages. The sense of being-ness is stripped from the presentation. The latter is much more difficult to be aware of on the emotional level and as a subjective truth. Could you slice up a live pig the way you slice up a stalk of celery? If the answer is yes, no judgment. (Most people who can probably grew up on a farm or as a hunter.) But I suspect that, for most, the answer is no. Becoming aware of emotions is the biggest part of expanding the awareness, and less so becoming knowledgeable of more abstract higher truths.

I suspect that he probably did have some type of spiritual experience and an awakening. But to my perception, he seems to use it to add to his self concept. He seems to enjoy being different. So, no doubt that he's a seeker and I'll buy he had some kind of experience. But I don't see him as being enlightened. Or if he is, his mental framework has quite a ways to go before it catches up with being compatible with his enlightenment. Also, he may be experiencing some form of mental illness as this can be an unintended consequence of certain spiritual practices if done in excess or if the person is not ready for such an expansion.

Actually, this is a common misconception. I spend about the same amount in groceries as I did before and I'm the only Vegan in my family unit. Only now instead of dairy products, I get dairy substitutes (soy/almond/cashew milk) which are conferable in price. Instead of meat, I get beans/more fruits and vegetables, and occasionally meat substitutes. Otherwise, grains stay the same. My family still eats meat, but if they didn't this would take away quite a bit from the grocery bill. So, there are fancy/trendy Vegan diets that can be quite expensive. But a basic Vegan diet can be done at the same price or potentially cheaper.