Emerald

It's hard to zoom out enough from the personal to pick up on the love. But from what I've experienced, everything is one thing and the nature of that one thing is love. It's as though the entirety of reality is "crafted" out of love itself. This becomes self-evident when we can see things in a non-dual way that is unattached to the personal. The ideas we have about love as human beings are mostly about personal preferences, pleasure seeking, pain avoiding, and attachment. But these are short-sighted ideas of what love is and rely heavily on make-believe ideas like significance, meaning, value, and having a point. These are more akin to admiration and trying to get somewhere. So, we see things as good/evil, significant/insignificant, worthy/worthless, pleasure/pain, creation/destruction, up/down, life/death, big/small, good/bad, etc. But these are all false dichotomies based upon illusion. That said, I personally prefer a world that has a minimum of suffering and a maximum of happiness. But these are just preferences and have nothing to do with reality. Reality is always perfect, every second. There is nothing ever wrong with it. It is what is and what is, is love. But it doesn't help to actually experience this love too much to know intellectually that it's there. But it helps me to remember that the love is always there when I start to slip into existential crisis mode. I'm lucky in that I've experienced it before, so it's reassuring. Existential crises are just another part of the personal development path. You will always run across them. Just keep yourself on track and don't get discouraged. If happiness and fulfillment is what you're after, just keep digging and you'll eventually come out on the other side. But the dig itself is very emotionally uncomfortable... but totally worth it.

There is no point in life, just as there is no true center of the universe. Once you truly transcend the need for life to have a point, you will experience firsthand the infinite unconditional stone-faced love of the thing referred to as God, even in the midst of the chaos. God is not just good. God is all: good, bad, and ugly. God is the girl that got lynched, the people who lynched her, the rope that was used, every tear cried, every drop of blood shed, and every horrified bystander (such as yourself). The thing to understand about having direction, despite life being objectively pointless, is that human beings are all fundamentally seeking one thing: happiness and fulfillment. So, go in whichever direction will bring you the most long-lasting happiness and joy. Don't worry about finding a meaning or a point or anything like that. Those things are just the measuring sticks of the human mind. They don't really have any reality outside of the human intellect. Treat this life in the way that a child treats a trip to the playground. It doesn't have to mean anything... just go learn and play. Don't try to rationalize the importance and significance of the playground... just play.

Wisdom, I find is like an internal living breathing ever-changing river that already has every insight that you could ever hope to know. We can either be in touch with or out of touch with it, but it's always there to be accessed and changes moment to moment. You can't find it externally... only internally. It's the mother-load of insights, visions, and inspirations and has an intelligence on its own. Insights are particular realizations that come up from being in touch with wisdom. But as soon as they are communicated or solidified as an ideology/belief, they are no longer wisdom but knowledge. Particular insights can't be communicated or remembered as wisdom... they can only be communicated and remembered as knowledge. Wisdom is only wisdom when accessed in the present moment. I don't know how to describe awareness. Nothing comes up that feels right.

Having read your post, I suspect that your desire for aloneness comes from resistance to intimacy instead of a genuine desire to be with yourself. I would recommend committing to making a real connection to another human being. Make a real friend. You may feel like you're alone in the way you think, but you're not. You just have to find someone that's willing to accept you as you are that you can go to deeper levels with. You should try to experience one relationship that's gone right. Right now, it seems like you're using various ideas to lie yourself into cutting out other people because you just don't see it work out. I would look up "avoidant attachment style" to see if it fits you.

I was going to say that's Durga not Kali but Durga is just a different personification of Kali.

I just made a video about the discomforts of seeking enlightenment. I've been experiencing the same kind of depressing feeling and conceptions that you are. I even thought of the machine metaphor that you came up with. It's funny how people on the same path tend to see the same trees. I hope that it's helpful.

People have the natural way that they are. Most men are more masculine than feminine. Most women are more feminine than masculine. There are many exceptions to this though. And everyone has both energies. But the thing to be understood about sexual polarity is that the masculine/feminine ratio is pre-conditioned and inherent to the individual through biology. Just like gay people can't change the fact that they're gay, a person can't change their unique ratio of masculinity or femininity. So, this is why authenticity is so important to sexual chemistry as opposed to trying to gravitate toward one polarity or the other. You may believe that you want a polarly feminine woman (and on the raw reptilian brain sexual level this may be true) but what you really want from a real relationship is a woman who complements your unique ratio. But masculinity and femininity are just about impossible to fake. I can always tell when a man is pretending to be more masculine than he is... just in the same way that a masculine woman can wear a pound of make-up and dresses but it doesn't actually make her more feminine. The problem is that many of us want to be wanted sexually, and we're afraid that being ourselves and not polarizing ourselves will make us less desirable. But this polarization makes us less attractive... not more attractive because it kills the passion and internal life between the masculine and feminine energies that ebb and flow inside of us all.

I agree that there's a lot of negative projection. This is due to being raised in a Yang oriented society and valuing Yang but having a nature reflective of Yin. So, there's an unconscious judgment of self that they project upon other... at least very often this is the case. I'm guilty of this myself. I value Yang a whole bunch and have built my identity around it since childhood, as a person who lives in a Yang society. But I am naturally more Yin. So there is pain there that (if I hadn't done extensive work on myself) I would likely project onto men. But I don't think most reasonable women involved in the Feminist movement are trying to lower men's wages. I think they just want equal wages. Now, as far a the Feminists who scream at men on Tumblr... that's a different story. There are stupid people in every group. But all the Feminists that I know, including myself, are very concerned with men's welfare as well and don't want to take things away from anyone. They literally just want equality. But the dumbest people are always the loudest people too. It's funny how that phenomenon happens. It's why we can't have nice things.

The issue here is that the majority of societies only see femininity in relation to the masculine lens or are just unaware of what femininity (as a non-gendered principle) actually is: Yin. Femininity has been historically see only as beauty, weakness, motherhood, irrationality, burden to society (in agrarian societies), and hyper-sensitivity. But this is due to social unawareness of Yin qualities which is so much more expansive and valuable than these social caricatures of femininity. So, if a man took on the social caricature of femininity, then that would be very negative indeed as the social caricature of femininity is very limited and unhealthy, indeed. But if men and women both took time to develop the full depth and breadth of their feminine qualities, it would help society solve its deepest issues. The problem is that we don't like femininity as much because the social caricature of femininity is so much less appealing than the masculine principle. Real feminine qualities are things like: compassion, creativity, open-mindedness, exploration of mystery and paradox, a connection to the unconscious mind, connection to our instinctual nature, care for the Earth and its creatures, awareness of natural cycles, the ability to accept and flow with life, emotional connection, emotional intelligence, peace, intuition, unconditional love, beauty, motherhood, a connection to the non-rational, acceptance of the many deaths in life, exploration of the internal experience, respect for darkness, stillness/meditation, receptivity to wisdom, etc.

Not irrationality. The non-rational. There's a big difference there. Irrationality is part of shadow femininity which is the negative archetype that wakes up in people when they repress their masculine side. The non-rational itself is nature and is part of the healthy feminine archetype. It is the complexity and mystery of being which incubates and gives birth to all things. It precedes and supersedes rationality as it is the reality from which rationality makes its observations and generalizations. It is primary, just as the womb and the mother is primary. This is why it is part of the feminine archetype. All people share a connection to the non-rational as children of Mother Nature, but feminine people (usually women) are generally more in alignment with it. Although any person can work toward building a connection to the non-rational. But most women learn to repress this connection to the non-rational because society denigrates it and people like to crack jokes about women being irrational. That's why the world sucks so bad.

This is actually a very common hang-up for girls and women. There are a lot of strange expectations that can be difficult to let go of if you value the appearance of socially acceptable femininity, which is unfortunately constrictive.

Basically, all the stuff that Leo goes over in his videos relative to the external experience. It's a lot like our anatomy. The external is masculine, the internal is feminine. So, life purpose, goal-setting, enacting your agenda on the world, rationality/logic, individuality, transformation/change, intellect, doing, strength, stoicism, results, discernment, etc. To develop your feminine side you would cultivate compassion, awareness, a connection to the unconscious mind, embracing paradox, being, exploring the mysterious and non-rational, unconditional love, emotional awareness of self and other, etc. Masculinity is like the daytime and femininity is like the nighttime. But in relation to what Leo said above, as a joke, in our society acceptance of the body's natural functioning is still quite taboo in women. This is evidenced by deep cultural attitudes about female sexuality and female body functions. It's why Leo's joke is funny and a perhaps bit unsettling for those of us in the "fairer" sex who value a proper feminine appearance. But farting has nothing to do with masculinity or femininity... even though our cultural attitudes suggest otherwise.

There's no need to deal with his anger. Just move out. If I recall, you're right about at that age anyway. You could get a room mate or something of that nature. Heck, even if you have to couch surf or be homeless for a while, go ahead and do it. Life is too short to deal with dysfunctional parents. Push yourself out of the nest, you'll be surprised at how easily you'll fly.

I only watched about a quarter of the video, and it just sounds reactionary against mainstream Feminism but not a new thing in itself, if that makes sense. Anti-feminism and Feminism are similar in that they are both very surface-level in their views of social patterns, focusing mostly on how much good stuff women get in comparison to men socially, politically, and economically. This is about the least productive way to come at these types of issues. The problem here is that you can't kill a tree by picking the fruit off the tree. It will all just grow back. So, Anti-Feminists are basically saying: "Leave the fruit on the tree, it's kind of sucks but it's manageable. Just eat it and stop complaining." Feminists are basically saying: "Pick all the fruit off the tree and destroy it. The fruit on the tree is terrible. We need better fruit on that tree and we need to constantly police when any bad fruit grows." While I think that Feminism as it stands is the more productive of these two viewpoints, neither is anywhere in the same ballpark as the problem. My view is "Let's uproot the tree and plant it in healthier, more balanced soil, so that the fruit grows better and we have healthier food to eat." What this means is to recognize the deep roots of gender inequalities (and a scad of other non-gender related issues) which is the imbalance between Yin and Yang in our social system. We as a society love Yang but are largely unaware of and mistrustful of Yin. Yang shares an implicit tie to masculinity and men, and Yin shares an implicit tie to femininity and women. So, this is why I identify in solidarity as a Feminist. It's not just about gender equality and getting women equal rights under the law or making sure that everything conforms to that ideology. That's all good but it's just fussing with the fruit on the tree past a certain point. My version of Feminism is about changing the social system in a way that integrates the feminine principle thus reducing the shadow masculine which comes as a force to compensate for repressed femininity. So, it's about cultivating an acceptance of Yin values within society, where they were previously absent or denigrated. So, gender barely comes into this... It's why no one's looking there. The shadow masculine archetype, that I mentioned above, is shown through corporate greed, constant war, raping and pillaging the Earth for profit, the disenfranchisement of women, disregard for nature and animal life, extreme hierarchical thinking, lack of compassion, lack of unconditional love, emotional numbness, children raising themselves, etc. There is a shadow feminine too, but we suffer less from masculine repression, so we don't see it as much. But it sometimes rears its ugly head too. This is more along the lines of hedonism, stagnation of progress, irrationality, self-hatred, and the like. So, that's my issue with the current state of Feminism, is that it doesn't go deep enough. It looks at a social pattern and thinks that it's a simple fix when that one simple fix is connected to million other things that don't appear to have anything to do with gender equality. Then it shames people for not being on board with the ideology. My issue with Anti-Feminism is that it denies that there's even an issue, even in the face of all the turmoil within society relative to gender. It basically ignores what's going on and take the "It wasn't me." standpoint. So, from what I've seen of this girl's video, it doesn't seem to do anything other than negate Feminism which is the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be improving and reframing Feminism instead. But this probably won't happen until the 4th or 5th wave of Feminism or something like that, if my predictions hold any weight.

When I had my enlightenment experiences, among many other revelations, I realized that I'm bi-sexual and that I had been lying to myself by telling myself things like "I just think women are pretty." or "I'm just used to relating the female image to sexuality" or other things like that. I realized that I had always been attracted to women for my entire life, and that I had been denying it because I didn't want to have to tell people and risk being rejected or judged. So, enlightenment won't effect your sexual preferences. But it will reveal to you what's real and authentic to you because there's no "self" to protect from judgment or unwanted identifications. So, if you're attracted to a woman then you'll be okay with that. Or if you're attracted to a man, you'll be okay with that. You'll just recognize your attractions as sensations in the body and nothing more. You won't make them mean anything about a particular self or fear divergence with any cherished self-images.

I disagree that Feminism is out for female supremacy. All feminists that I know personally are genuinely trying to correct the imbalances that are there and feel deeply hurt about the state of things or the perceived state of things. There really is real pain there and not just an attempt to dominate. I even self-identify as a Feminist despite diverging in many ways from the mainstream ideas that you'll find shouted across all social media platforms. The problem with the current state of Feminism is a lack of awareness of how the door sometimes swings in the opposite direction and using the same backwards ideas about gender to pepper some of the claims. For example, our society has a really backwards social pattern that says man= strong aggressor/woman=weak victim. It's called the predator/pray dichotomy. So, anything done by a man against a woman will be seen compounded exponentially by our social norms surrounding whatever the issue is. So, domestic violence against men is often looked at as less serious or even laughed off like we'd laugh at a Great Dane who's afraid of a kitten despite the disparity between male and female strength and stature being much much closer together. Women are roughly only 15% smaller than men. The metric for strength, I'm not sure. But I'm sure this metric isn't as far apart as we make it out to be either. This automatically paints women as weak and men as strong but aggressive. Even though more aware Feminists seek to dismantle these types of ideas, the emotionality in the group often unconsciously feeds off of the assumption of man=strong/woman=weak. So, unconsciously, when it's perceived that a man has something in a better way than a woman an unnecessary emotion is added to it and a reaction where it would be more beneficial to deal with these types of issues dispassionately. To look at the issue in a deeper way to dismantle impersonal social norms. But there comes to be a lot of shaming and demonization that is just unnecessary and very divisive. So, I agree that this issue too should not be peppered with the "a man should never hit a woman." ideas as it stems from the assumption that men are always the one in the position of power and women in the position of powerlessness. But I do ascribe to the ideas "A physically stronger person should never hit a physically weaker person." and "People shouldn't hit eachother." and "It's unwise to be in a relationship with someone who hits you."

I do focus on quality content primarily, as it is THE whole entire thing. The content is my priority, and I am constantly working toward improving my channel with each new video. But I also like to set goals for my stats because I'm the type of person whose motivation and confidence intensifies by getting clear quantitative feedback: whether it be positive or negative. I've always functioned best that way if I can draw clear lines in the sand. It helps me be able to grasp better what the quality of my videos are to other people, because I find it easier to discern than my own qualitative assessments, which are necessarily biased and sort of float in the ether. Thus far, I've found no appropriate metric for this stat. From the research I've done, my audience retention rate could be atrociously horrible or could be exceptionally awesome. It's just not clear to me. With you being a successful content creator in a similar niche who does longer videos, anything that you could offer for clarity would be extremely helpful to me. Thanks!

I'm sorry. Sometimes those proper English spellings sneak up on me and I read them as a typo. When I was a teenager I started spelling the word color as colour, just because. Just thinking either was standard to use. My teacher started asking me if I was English. I didn't get it at first.

Thank you.

@GerhardI'm checking out your website now and I wanted to make sure that I pointed out a typo that I found. Skepticism is spelled with a 'k' and not a 'c.'

Your post scares me a bit. I've inexplicably (despite my best intentions and tons of effort for the contrary) lost all of these things with the exception of husband and children. It's been a lot of loss and inability to make things stick ever since my experiences. So, my mind has already gone to the possibility that life is so difficult because it's paring down all of my attachments to push me toward awakening. It terrifies me that life may take these things from me in the same way. Your post reminds me of this fear. I'm sorry to hear of your losses but glad for your insight and presence.

I'm very excited because on Saturday, I'll be going to Teal Swan's synchronization workshop in Orlando. About a year and half ago, I found her videos an it really helped me see things from a more beneficial perspective and I was able to dig myself out of some serious psychological holes that I'd been stuck in for years. I'm trying to think of the best question that I can ask to help move my life more in the direction that I want it to go. I'm thinking about a question regarding releasing fear to get clarity, or something of that nature. I'm also going to be staying at the Tribe House where there are going to be other healing-related events and the like. I'll be there from Friday through Sunday. If you've had any experiences with Teal Swan's workshops or if her videos have impacted you positively feel free to comment.

That's good. I read what you wrote. I think honesty is the way to go. It'll help you find a good match instead of just a match. Plus, if it makes you feel better, I'm sure that she's used to all manner of guys (from ages 18 to 80) approaching her with anything from "You look lovely today miss." all the way to "Sit on my face b****." So, I'm sure that your confession that she reminds you of a character that you wrote probably wasn't that crazy seeming to her nor did it make her feel disrespected. So, knowing the experience of being a woman, I wouldn't feel in any way embarrassed about this confession because being approached is just life as usual to her. But definitely be as honest as possible in every situation, unless it hurts someone's feelings. Life is better when centered in authenticity.

- "Ohh fair maiden... thou hast me feeling feverish. Didst thou bestow upon me, the plague?" (Both keel over and actually die from the plague)

This may get too personal with my own stuff, so I apologize. From my experience, adults who don't go the extra mile to develop themselves get more and more set in their ways and less wise as they get older. I can't be around my mom for very long without her completely cutting herself from my life for years at a time as she just can't have anyone in her life that deviates even slightly from her impossible standards. She's 60 now and she's become a shut in. She's also sick, so this compounds the shut in effect. She came the other day to stay with me for a few weeks to help out with the kids while my husband is out of the country. I should have known it was a bad idea because my mother and I haven't spent more than a couple days consecutively together since I was 13. Now she's cut herself out again, and she really doesn't have anyone except for my sister who is 43 but lives with her as she is mentally challenged and can't live on her own. Thankfully, I know that she'll at least have her as she can't cut her out. She will go out of her way to find things to be against and be upset about. She irrationally twists all things to be a personal attack on her and/or a symptom of all things wrong with the world thus strengthening her disassociation from people including all of her family and the vast majority of the very few friends that she's ever had. I'd love to help her but she's just not reachable and not willing to listen to anything that deviates from her narrow view of the world. It's sad to see her so contracted and miserable like this, but there's no way to change her or make her happy. It would be a miracle if she was able to get some insight to help change her life but she is closed up, like so many other adults in their twilight. So, my advice is simply to let people be as they are. You might not like it because it's painful to watch someone you love suffer. But unfortunately, it is what it is.