Emerald

I'm going to be debating Athene tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. I don't think he'll concede that I won, no matter what I do. But I think it will be an interesting discussion none-the-less.

Very interesting. When I had my experiences, there was this deep feeling that I already knew everything and always had. It was as though I was directly connected to an infinite river of wisdom, and as I needed it it would always come. But I had no urge to know everything in the moment or to explore that river. I simply wanted to just be and to let whatever was necessary to come, come up as it applied to my life. Is this like the infinity that you experienced? Also, sometimes when I'm about to go to sleep, I'll see images reflecting before my eyes, partially mind and partially reflected onto the darkness of the room. One of the most common forms it takes is fractal-like designs. Also, sometimes when I close my eyes for long enough, I will see from the darkness (not imagine but truly see- seemingly) a very realistic random setting for split-moments at a time. Like, I'll see a street with people walking or an area of the woods, for a flash of a second projected directly onto the darkness of my eyelids. Is this simply mild bedtime hallucinations or is this perhaps a very mild glimpse of infinity as you experienced on 5-MEO?

So, basically infinity wanted to know what being finite is all about. And thus made itself into the infinite amount of finite experiences all at once. Correct? As God must be omnipresent and omnipotent, how else could this be achieved if God wasn't also experiencing the experience of being finite. To be otherwise, would be against its own nature. So, this sort of works like a fractal works. As you zoom further in you start to see the same intelligence translated through "smaller" (so to speak) mediums of consciousness. So, each universe has its own individualized consciousness with an apparent free will, then each creature within that universe with an apparent free will, on down. Is that correct? So, basically, the thing that makes our Natural Laws seem the way that they are and the universe have the qualities that it appears to have, is the particular frequency/vibration it has. And these vibrational patterns create the diversity on down from the cosmos to a grain of sand... perhaps through more subtle vibrations? Just a thought. It makes me think about when I was a kid and the car door would be ajar and I could split the one beeping sound into multiple beeping sounds just by paying attention in a different way and moving subtle muscles in my ears. Also, a thought that I've been pondering... If the nature of God is infinite, that must mean that the finite (and all the possibilities of the finite) must exist within the infinite as well, otherwise it would not be infinite. I've been thinking of all the possibilities of this that would just be ridiculous realities. Like there could be a reality where I have to tear off all my limbs every day. Or a reality that only consists of Bugs Bunny sitting in a room with orange walls. Or a reality where everyone is a serial killer. Or a reality that only consists of a computer screen. So, these thoughts (of course) make no sense to me because I'm stuck in thoughts of what infinity means. Could you give some clarity from your experiences with the infinite relative to this conundrum? Thank you.

Great observations!

There is no such thing as an unselfish action. But there is nothing wrong with this fact of nature. It's just the way it is. Separation is an illusion anyway, so even the welfare of others is the welfare of Self in disguise. All is one and that one thing is all loving and thus self-loving. This also works the other way around... to do harm to others is to do harm to the Self. So, fill up your own cup and fill up the cups of others. It's all the same thing, and it's all for you in the end, as everything is what you are.

It sounds to me like you may have had sleep paralysis (which is the gateway to OBE) that turned into a lucid dream. This happens when you reach the state of sleep paralysis and instead of getting up and going out of body, you go the "opposite direction" and fall asleep into a lucid dream as opposed to getting up and walking around. This is also called a WILD or Wake Induced Lucid Dream. Many people report seeing a white light during sleep paralysis, though I never have personally over the 14 years I've been getting them. But an OBE has the characteristic of seemlessness with reality while lucid dreaming generally does not, so perhaps it was an OBE instead. It is possible to travel to different and fantastical places in an OBE. So, I wouldn't rule out the possibility. I have several videos on Sleep Paralysis, OBE, and Lucid Dreaming on my channel, if you want to check them out.

Here are two videos from my channel. I have a couple others too if you search through the rest of my videos. Watch the top one first.

I am sorry to hear about your loss. I wish you the best. Here are my thoughts... I understand wanting to get back on the path to spiritual growth. But this is the path because the path is reality... it's just an unpleasant part of it. To resist, ignore, or skirt these emotions is to avoid the path. The only way past these emotions is through them. To embody them completely and to honor the wisdom of the emotions. To distract yourself with more intellectually based spiritual endeavors, is just an avoidance of reality as it is. It's an attempt to remain inside of the comfort zone of the mind where there is a sense of limitlessness and control and safety. What is more challenging is to be heart-centered and to honor the emotions that come up in your subjective reality in the present moment, instead of bypassing them with spiritual growth endeavors to try to get to some future version of you that is improved. Be with your sadness and anger and lack of motivation, and honor them. Don't try to distract or repress. Ask yourself, "What are my thoughts telling me that I want?" and "What are the sensations in my body (feelings minus thoughts) telling me that I need?" These will likely be very different answers. Honor this divergence, and don't resist it or invalidate it. Honor the fact that your feelings are telling you that you need time to re-cooperate by giving yourself that time to simply grieve and be with your emotions. But also, recognize and don't invalidate your emotions that inform the thought, "I should be on the spiritual path." This is an emotion too. Be with that emotion, but don't give it what it thinks it wants. As doing this would be a distraction. But recognize that wanting something is a valid emotion and accept it as part of your emotional experience. Be easy on yourself and don't let the intellect override the emotions with shoulds and should nots.

I think the distinction of gender relative to spirituality is one of Yin and Yang. When I had my enlightenment experiences, there was a distinctly feminine feel to the whole thing. It was just a complete saturation in feminine energy. Being raised in a society that values Yang (masculinity), and is largely unaware and mistrustful/critical of Yin (femininity), I was highly masculine identified throughout my later childhood and teen years. Also, I didn't really have any women that I considered role models. So, the people that I aspired to be like were all men. So, I had forgotten, repressed, and ignored much of my feminine side (the majority of my personality) in order to be more approved of and valuable in society's eyes. There were even times where I would get wrapped up in thought, and come to the conclusion that "maybe I could understand this better if I were female." Only to then catch myself and be like "Duh. I am female!" But during my experiences, I was capable of total honesty and I cared nothing for approval. I was content to just be however I was. So, there was just an utter recognition of a deep sense of femininity to my entire experience of reality. But I'm not sure if it was simply my personal feminine side or if the experience of being free from ego is inherently feminine, in and of itself. Given that the feminine is primary, like the mother is primary, so source/God is also primary in the same way. I know that Wayne Wirs, who is a mystic, calls that which is "she". So, just some food for thought.

Funny enough, Tool was the catalyst for what got me interested in exploring Jungian Psychology. For several years, I had a lot of issues for years trying to integrate the insights that I had during my "enlightenment experiences" and get back to that state somehow. I was really in a bad spot. I happened to be listening to Tool, and I started paying more attention to the lyrics (specifically to this song and Lateralus). So, I started to Google the topic of Jungian Psychology and came across a Jungian Blog writer and author named Jean Raffa. It was like reading something from an older version of myself. It was quite uncanny. I read all of her books, and each one had a bibliography of other books related to the topic. So, I read a whole lot of those books as well over the course of the year following, and it really helped me understand and get my bearings on how the psyche functioned and related back to my spiritual experiences, and why I was experiencing and struggling with some of the mindsets that I had back then. It was so helpful. I have a couple videos on Jungian Psychology on my channel, if you want to check them out. But this song specifically refers to the reintegration of the Shadow in order to get to a higher state of consciousness, theoretically eventually leading to the evolution of humanity as a whole into a higher state of consciousness. So, the song talks about picking scabs. This refers to searching through wounds that have already healed and been forgotten/repressed. So, extreme self-honesty is necessary for doing shadow work. You can also look to people whom you judge. This always means something about your values, beliefs, and assumptions about yourself and reality. But if you have any specific questions about Shadow Work or Jungian Psychology, feel free to ask.

It might be an uncomfortable possibility to entertain given the degree of investment many people have in self-actualization, but I wouldn't dismiss this concern out of hand. The drive to self actualize is ego-driven, so you must be very careful and always vigilant. If you catch yourself trying to add value to your identity or to prop up a sense of self-worth through self-actualization, it's important to be aware of it. This is ego. Don't resist it, but be aware. However, there is nothing wrong with success as success is necessary for survival. Just don't make it about your identity or get attached to it. There's nothing wrong with improving at a skill, as long as it is for the joy of the process and the inspiration and desire to create or do something. But this too can be hi-jacked by ego and can be used as an adornment for the self image.

It will be easy to tell. You will notice it. When you love your projection, it's a very intense infatuation. It's that initial stage where the person can do no wrong and it's very ideal. But after the first three months, those crazy in love chemicals stop and a more subtle bonding chemicals come into play. These are much less exciting, but these are the times when true intimacy and friendship start to blossom. But they can be boring. This doesn't guarantee that you're no longer projecting on them though, as projection is a deep issue that takes a high degree of awareness to spot. Most human relationships are based on projection for this reason. But after the first three months, you won't have the projection of idealism any longer. Things will start to get real. And you may even start projecting negatively onto them. So, the main thing is to watch out for assumptions about the person that aren't really grounded in reality. For example, if you're a tidy person and your partner is messy and leaves their shoes in random places around the house, and you read that situation as "my partner doesn't respect me," then you should notice that this is a projection.

I had two enlightenment experiences as a result of Ayahuasca when I was in college. Prior to these experiences, I had a Leo-level work ethic. But these experiences revealed to me all the negative motivations, crutches, and demons that motivated my work ethic. So, afterward, I decided that I was going to quit being a work-a-holic. But I fell on the other side of the horse, and suppressed all of my drives toward individuation, worldly success, and creativity/productivity. So, for years to come I was constantly fighting against myself, not sure if hard work was good or bad. I now know that I just didn't have a good understanding of what I had experienced and that I was over-simplifying and handling the insights I had in a ham-fisted way. So, I would say that if you haven't learned about paradoxes and the differences between and importance of practical truths and higher truths, then you may have trouble with work ethic afterward like I did. But if you understand that effectiveness in life doesn't stand in the way of the realization of truth but identification with being effective/successful/etc. does, then you should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and make wise decisions regarding work ethic.

I've experienced all the things that you talked about here: the panic attacks, the depersonalization when I look in the mirror (or more recently at my face and voice and mannerisms videos), and the fear looking into my eyes or others for too long. I think it's all just part of becoming more conscious and realizing that the world is not as we commonly think it is. There are a lot of unnerving things about becoming more conscious. It's just part of it. Another one that used to really bug me was that I felt like the present moment and my awareness of it could just pop like a bubble because it was so insubstantial. I was very ungrounded back then.

I would be careful with this. This post, to me, has the feeling of self deception. Now, I'm on the outside looking in and I'm not aware of your situation. I can only relate to my own self and this sounds like my self deceptions. So, I don't know if I'm correct in this feeling. But my recommendation is to look at your reason for rebelling against societal norms. Check to see if it's a rationalization. Go through and answer these questions below, to yourself in a brutally honest way. First, adopt the mindset "I don't have to be a good person" for this inquiry. Because the desire to be a good person and see yourself as a good person can distort your lens. Do you ever congratulate yourself for being against the grain of society? Do you ever imagine other people perceiving you in this way and/or imagine people that you admire approving of you for it? Is there an imagined audience for this behavior or some kind of redemption involved? Do you ever feel like it makes you more interesting or valuable? When it comes to going down different paths from your partner, is it really because they're going in a different direction? Or is it just because the emotions are not there? Or is it because you don't want to be tied down so young? Do you fancy yourself a rational person? Does this mean anything about your worth as a person? How would you feel if someone perceived you as irrational? Again, I could be totally off-base in my interpretation of your post, and I apologize if I am. But I think becoming aware of what you really want and why you want it, even if it doesn't fit nicely with your self-image, will help you become more clear and wise in your decisions for your future.

I recommend keeping it. But here are the things I do to keep myself from getting hemmed into the scrolling game or getting caught up in reading the Facebook Post's equivalent to junk food: 1. Unfollow everyone who posts stupid, unpleasant, or hate-filled posts. This doesn't mean unfriending or blocking people that do this. But it is choosing what kind of posts that I want to see in my feed and which I don't. Facebook, to me, is for fun interactions and over-the-beer conversations with friends that don't live close to me. I want only interesting and positive posts in my FB feed. 2. Unfollow everyone who posts political stances that don't agree with my own. Nothing personal, I just don't like certain political stances and I don't want to have to wade through tons of posts that disagree with my sensibilities, when I'd rather be socializing or looking at cool stuff. If I wanted a bunch of political propaganda, I'd listen to Rush Limbaugh... but I don't. 3. Block all posts about overtly disturbing events. If someone posts about children that have been kept in cages and starved to death or other such morbid posts, I unfollow them and block all other posts from the site. There are a lot of terrible things that go on in the world, but my Facebook time isn't the time that I want to become aware of them. I do use FB to keep up on current events including the negative ones, but I don't have to know every morbid detail or see pictures. 4. Go on Facebook no more than twice a day, and don't spend a ton of time scrolling. I might scroll through FB for 15 minutes at a time and comment here and there or read an article or two. But I luckily get easily disenchanted with this. I noticed that I sort of get my hopes up by going on FB hoping to have some kind of interesting interaction. This never really happens. It just doesn't have the charm of face to face interactions that I'm searching for. So, I notice that I'm looking for this, and that I'll never get it by scrolling and searching more. So, I might make a few comments or read a few articles. But it isn't long before that becomes dull for me. So, I recommend setting time limits... especially for scrolling. You could even cut out scrolling all-together too, as this isn't really necessary for keeping in touch with friends. 5. Find another activity that's more interesting. Internet-wise, I have my channel and this forum, where people are far more interested in the things I'm interested in. So, I have more of an opportunity for stimulating conversations. But this shouldn't also become too much of a habit. I only go on here about once every day or two. My channel, I check several times a day because it's mine. But time limits are necessary in these cases too.

You're bringing facts into a feelings fight. Be careful, as a seeker, not to fall into the trap of using an objective understanding of truth to lie to yourself. Don't consult your mind, consult your heart. If you can, with full emotional awareness still contribute to the suffering caused by the meat and dairy industry, there is nothing wrong with that on the existential level. It means nothing about your value as a person and never can. But if you're skirting the awareness of the destructiveness of these social patterns by emotionally hiding behind an abstract understanding of existential truth, then you're engaging in spiritual bypassing. I mean no judgment in what I'm saying. I just want you to be aware, that it's possible to use the understanding of higher truths to resist and insulate yourself from reality. So, I recommend watching some slaughterhouse documentaries and really becoming aware of what's going on. If you can still eat meat and dairy, then that's what it is. But don't avoid the awareness. Edit: Sorry, I thought your last message was about Veganism. I read your comment through that lens. Either way, I'm going to leave the comment here.

You're welcome! When I write my videos, I create a fairly detailed sloppy outline to make sure that I don't miss anything. I organize it in a logical way in sections. Normally I start with all my definitions and explanation. Then I add my interpretations and experiences or other types of information that's helpful. Then I usually end with a process or way to apply the insights. But I have these large sections. Then I cut them down into smaller sub-points. The sub-points, I don't memorize but I have them on an outline so I don't forget to talk about them. But when I do talk about them, I talk about them off the cuff and nonchalantly. I don't read it directly off the script. If I miss something, that's okay. My videos are longer, so I don't memorize them before-hand. I just make sure that I talk about things that I know well. Or if there's an aspect that I don't know as well, like another person's quote or theory, I just research it and memorize it before-hand and record and re-record until I'm able to convey it properly. I have cuts in my videos, so this works out okay. I think the blue color is good for your logo. Darker may work even better though because it will translate better to black and white. I think blue would be a good color to use in general though... as long as it isn't electric/neon blue or paired with too many other colors.

You're welcome! I think, since your videos are shorter, I would recommend recording yourself reading off a script. Then, listen to the recording several times. Then, record yourself again until you're able to deliver the information nonchalantly. Since your videos are about five minutes, this probably won't take too much extra work, and I think the results will be much better. I think, tagline-wise, you'll want to think about who your target audiences are. For example, my audience for my channel is 75% male and 25% female. Most of my viewers are between 18 and 35. I attract people from the personal development/self help community, enlightenment seekers, new agers, philosophy buffs, and a few others. So, you want to keep your audience in mind. I would guess that the target audience for your channel would be predominantly male and between the ages of 19 and 35 as well. You'll probably attract entrepreneurs, personal development/self help community, college students, bookworms, people trying to pick themselves up out of sub-optimal situations, and several others. So, given this prediction, be sure that you stand out within the limits of these markets. So, keeping your colors more neutral or toned down is a good idea. Think about the color scheme of the inside of Barnes and Noble. I get sort of a hip, intellectual feel from that experience of being there. I think this could work well for your branding... but there could be other angles too. As for taglines, I like the idea of "more wisdom in less time" but it isn't very catchy. How about "wisdom in minutes" or "fast insights for success" or "5 minutes of mastery" or "stepping stones on the path of life mastery" or some other combination of these ideas. Maybe you could call your channel something like "The Bag of Tricks" or something cheeky like that to make it stand out more. Feel free to use any of these or toss them out... I'm just brainstorming.

Pros: - I can tell you have a naturally vibrant personality, and lots of people look for this in a motivational speaker - Great positive message - You could easily brand yourself and your channel if you capitalize upon your uniqueness. You stand out. I remember you from a year ago. Suggestions: - I can tell that your delivery style is influenced a lot by Ralph Smart. You should really try to analyze your personality and capitalize upon it in your presentation. Otherwise, it's easy to fall into the trap of taking on the traits of your favorite Youtubers. For example, Leo has been a major influence of mine, but I try to undertone that as much as possible (with the exception of the use of crazy thumbnails :D). So, I even avoid mannerisms and speech patterns that I would normally use, to set myself aside. Like, I use the word "counter-intuitive" ALL the time in life. But I never use it in my videos because it's one of Leo's buzzwords. hehe. I'll choose a word like paradoxical instead. So, I would recommend analyzing your personality and strategizing a way to share yourself naturally and authentically, while still being engaging, and avoiding sounding like your influences. - You'll want to choose a more memorable background with a personality that fits your content. It's an important part of branding.

Yes. But often times, the ego obscures suffering from view. A person could believe themselves to be happy but be in an intense amount of suffering. I bet Donald Trump can't even look at himself in the mirror unless he's top dog in all situations. I would imagine that Donald Trump suffers much more than the average Joe because he has a lot more self-lies to hide from.

My comment doesn't mean the world isn't valid or beautiful or something that we shouldn't care about. My comment was about the false nature of the word "worth". Worth is just a measuring tool of the human intellect. Reality is not beholden to ideas of worth. Its validity supercedes all ideas of worth. So, asking "is the illusion 'worth' it?" could come up with some misleadingly depressing results due to the dualistic nature of words and concepts but the non dual nature of reality.

Worth is an illusion. So, the illusion can not be "worth" anything. But "worth" itself isn't worth anything. But it's all exactly as it should be. It needs no fixing. It needs no worth.

Pros: Nice framing (rule of thirds used) Well organized and thorough Appropriate Background Good and in-demand idea for channel Your content will never run out, so your channel could go on as long as you want it to Suggestions: A little mechanical on delivery. It's a bit difficult to listen to because it feels like you're reading it. I would work toward being more conversational and off-the-cuff. Could use somewhat better lighting You may work on branding a bit more to set yourself aside from the rest. There should be something that you're offering that no one else is: personality-wise, channel branding-wise, or content-wise. Overall, I think you can be very successful with this idea if you play your cards right!

That's interesting. Did you ever speak to one of them?