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Yesterday I could not sleep without repeating the Islamic mantra, La ilaha illa Allah :“There is no god but God.” I had been feeling afraid and deeply sad, carrying a heaviness within me that I could not easily explain or remove. I deal with this almost every day:a feeling of uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear before the vastness of existence. In that state, I began repeating La ilaha illa Allah. At first, I repeated the words almost mechanically, simply because I needed something to hold on to. But gradually, something inside me began to change. The repetition gave my mind a point of concentration. Instead of allowing my thoughts to scatter endlessly, I returned again and again to the same declaration: there is no ultimate reality, no ultimate power, and no ultimate object of worship except God. As I continued repeating it, I began to calm down. I felt less alone within my own thoughts. A sense of tranquility began to replace the agitation, my mind less chaotic, and eventually I felt a kind of serenity that allowed me to surrender to sleep. It was interesting to me that such a simple phrase could have such a profound effect. The words themselves are short, but their meaning is enormous. They contain a whole worldview: that behind all the changing things of existence there is one ultimate reality ..that I’m not abandoned in an indifferent universe..that everything I encounter from fear, happiness, suffering, beauty, uncertainty, and death exists within a reality ultimately governed by God. Eventually, I fell asleep. Yet the sleep itself was not particularly restful. My dreams were extremely disturbing. They were chaotic, strange, and at times almost disgusting. They seemed to contain fragments of fear, confusion, and images that did not follow any coherent logic. I woke with the impression that my mind had continued struggling even while my conscious awareness was asleep. Recently, I have also found myself thinking increasingly about my origin and my ultimate fate. These questions have begun to feel more important to me than many of the ordinary concerns that occupy human beings from day to day. every human being encounters those deeper questions. Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? What is the meaning of my existence? Where am I ultimately going? What happens to me when this life ends? These questions seem almost unavoidable because human beings possess an awareness of their own existence. We do not merely live…we know that we live. We are capable of looking at ourselves from a distance and wondering what our existence means. We can contemplate our birth, our consciousness, our mortality etc.. Every human being, in one way or another, seems to confront the mystery of existence. Even when we do not consciously ask these questions, they can remain somewhere beneath the surface of our lives. Sometimes they emerge during moments of happiness, sometimes during grief, sometimes in solitude, and sometimes when we become aware of our own mortality and especially when we feel lost and depressed. For me, these questions have gradually led toward a particular realization. I came from God, and ultimately my destiny is God. Full stop. This does not necessarily mean that the journey from beginning to end will be simple. I may encounter suffering. I may experience happiness and sadness, fear and tranquility, confusion and understanding. There may be trials whose purpose I cannot comprehend while I am experiencing them. There may be realities beyond my present understanding. Perhaps I could pass through heaven or hell. Perhaps there are possibilities that I cannot even conceptualize from the limited perspective of my present human existence. My understanding is finite, while God’s reality is infinite. Therefore, I cannot claim to know every detail of what lies beyond this life. But beneath all those possibilities, I find one idea that gives me a sense of coherence: my ultimate origin is God, and my ultimate destination is God.Everything else may be part of the journey. Islam talks a lot about heaven and hell as ultimate destination for people. If God is truly God, then His power cannot be confined by the limits of human imagination. If He wills to create heaven, He can create heaven. If He wills to create hell, He can create hell. If He wills to create realities beyond anything human beings currently understand, His power is not limited by our conceptual boundaries. This doesn’t mean that I must go through them , just that they are possible. When I was afraid and repeating those Islamic mantras during the night, . My mind was searching for stability, and the remembrance of God provided . There is no god but God. Human beings suffer because they want certainty about things that cannot be made certain. We want to know the future. We want to know exactly what will happen to us. We want guarantees about our relationships, our health, our success, our survival, and ultimately our fate. But existence does not give us complete control over these things.At some point, we have to surrender. If I truly came from God, then my existence is a return toward its source.From God.Through life.And ultimately back to God.I do not know .But perhaps it answers the most important one. I know where I came from.And I know, ultimately, where I am going.
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Super interesting — can you pls share references?
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Quality approaches over quantity when it comes to getting sex.
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Sounds like sexual ego.
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Careful with your expectations. Sometimes holding onto them can be where your energy goes instead of into the things that actually makes women decide they wanna fuck you. 200 approaches is an unfathomable number. Slow down, tune in. If you’re actually smooth and can read girls you needn’t even talk to much more than 5 to 10 girls the whole night in order to find someone you have a shot with. Quality over quantity. If you’re doing some sorta flash in the pan approach like I’ve seen some guys resort to in insanely busy street party environment then yeah you may need to talk to a few more girls but 200 at that point is the video of that guy say “can I get your number” to every girl he passes. There ain’t even 200 girls pretty enough for sex that you’ll pass in most places in a week unless if you’re maybe in Eastern Europe which if you can’t pull there… lord help you.
- Today
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Natasha Tori Maru replied to Joshe's topic in Society, Politics, Government, Environment, Current Events
Excuse me, boys. Naughty. Naughty boys. Motherfucking TROUBLE TROUBLE TROUBLE ON THE INTERWEBS. See below markup in green. hErE cOmES tHe FuN POlIcE -
@Olaf If you want anything then go for it but remember that chasing the positive will generate the negative . Backwards law - Alan Watts. By the way I am not one to judge you. I was myself like that a few years ago and still am to some extent till this date. Secondly you are doing better than you think. Accept your singlehood and then take action by socialising . That's it.
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Truth is the ultimate understanding. When you understand something deeply it’s making perfect sense so I guess you’re not getting triggered as before.
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@Jordan of the Shire I appreciate these insights. Making me think a lot! I find the concept of properly processing and feeling our emotions, and emotional dysregulation, a big topic that ties in with authenticity. I often hear people "acting on emotion" and claiming it is them "authentically expressing" themselves in the moment. Reacting and expressing without any form of block. But I see their "expressing" the emotion as an form of emotional violence (ie they are having their emotions AT a person, instead of expressing as is). For example: I become angry my colleague didn't do something, and I follow my impulse to be angry. But is this a true manifestation of the emotion or feeling? Is there some addition on top of the emotion, resulting in me having the emotion AT a person (ie blame, judgement, self righteousness)? Properly processed and regulated emotions means we FEEL them acutely - but we aren't so overtaken by them as to feel the need to act them out and express. There is space. I do not speak about repression or bypassing/avoidance. I speak about truly feeling the depth of all spectrums of emotion/feeling, and being able to hold space to respond and not immediately react. It is an interesting thought - Authenticity isn't necessarily acting out whatever state is currently dominant. It may be the capacity to remain in honest contact with your internal experience while allowing how that experience becomes expressed in the world. And that expression is no longer a violent one (directed at someone) when felt in full and authentically.
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Mellowmarsh replied to Hyperion's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Be that as it may for your personal logical left brained reasoning. But that’s not the point of this thread topic. What I’m trying to say is: All perspectives as to the true nature of reality are relative - therefore cannot be absolutised. On a level of meta logical reasoning: The absolute = undefinable and cannot be different from all of reality itself.The aggregate of all of reality itself is not isolated from all individual fragmented things, events, and experiences, but are interconnected parts of a single, all-encompassing reality.Therefore, all assertions are relative, and relative assertions about the absolute are absurd. Human knowledge/ based on conceptual models of reality, in this artificial conception, is relatively ( un ) true. -
@Rafael Thundercat Shame is a HUGE topic from my research and personal work. Unlike other emotions, I perceive it operating on multiple psychological levels simultaneously. Which is why it can be so tricky because the source can be different for all of us - and it has a habit of morphing from emotion, to a feeling, to being part of our identity. And it can transition back through all of these forms. To convolute it further - guilt can also be confused for shame and also feed it. The guilt / shame spiral. Shame = "I am wrong". Guilt = "I did wrong". Because shame is about identity "I am" I find it is much harder to work with as a conditioned response. Shame as a feeling: an unpleasant affective state, often involving exposure, contraction, wanting to hide, or wanting to escape someone's attention. Shame as an emotion: a level above feeling, which is the raw emotion and often is about how wrong we feel in relation to some standard. Shame as a part of identity: repeated shame can become an identity. The shame isn't merely an emotion that happens to a person - it is imbedded in their sense of self "I did something shameful > people see me as defective or wrong > I am defective > I am this kind of person who is defective" Emotions can be real without the interpretation being true - which is a core philosophical distinction that can help us assessing our feelings, emotions and beliefs. Shame is often not based on truth.
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No probs sir. I will say, right off the bat having overly briefly surveyed Astra, I am impressed. With that, this challenge therefore is going to take a little more creativity than what I am used to in this particular area of study. It's interesting though as I said, I will just have to spend more time coming up with new ways of thought and subsequent tests of Astra in general, which will be useful for me anyway. I'll share the most important aspects once analysis complete, which won't be for another week or so; as its just one of those things hey, I'll put more effort into it this time as I'll be able to leverage the theoretical outcomes for other uses I have regardless as I say. One weakness I have observed so far, just to take my earlier point in relation to strategic reasoning in general a little further, is strategic intersectional weighting in the construction of arguments; meaning, "given everything concerning X, how should it be used in Y?". It doesn't mean that it does these things poorly however, its definitely improved a lot from Sol 5.6, that said, that single instance is worthy of mentioning to me which I haven't heard anyone mention anything remotely close to. That said, I did extend my theoretical breadth on strategic thinking to now include and or be more specific to intersectional weighting, and that's only because there was more generality in the weaknesses of the strategic thinking of Sol 5.6, and because I am looking to point out a particular fault. Moreover, as a follow-up prediction given I said earlier that I think everyone relevant should be trying to become a designer in the use of AI for particular domains of competence, I think there's going to be a pattern between weaknesses in intersectional weighting (brought up in relation to strategic reasoning) at the general level to the point where this problem overlaps weaknesses in being a great designer, given that being a great designer for a particular domain, whether it be for music, film or constructing a legal argument to serve particular purpose, involves contextual reasoning, and contextual reasoning of course, overlaps with precisely one of the difficulties of intersectional weighting. It can actually be difficult as well to untether intersectional weighting from what contextual reasoning precisely is, since by comparison contextual reasoning includes understanding how considerations change one another’s significance, and what I am calling intersectional weighting more specifically concerns how those interactions should shape the relative importance and role assigned to each consideration when constructing an argument or design to achieve a particular purpose; otherwise outside their comparison they can almost just be used interchangeably and you'd in many cases be describing the same thing, it just depends on where the function vs the structure is emphasised. Just to clarify, this doesn't mean either that AI is "bad at designing", that's not the differentiation, its whether it is as objectively as we can make it, a great designer, and off the top of my head an important domain I think that'll be important to test is in the area of game development. I recommend testing Astra's capabilities there as well, which is totally independent from Astra just trying to copy and predict the next frame of a pre-existing human-made game and or screenshots/photos. As a side note, one interesting experiment I might run as well is testing its ability to make a game from scratch based on unusual photos, or photos in general; something which qualitative measures of context generation and alignment are just so darn important to not just get right, but where true originality is spawned because, yeah, it goes back to that strong overlap with intersectional reasoning as a compass for formatting the gap between grammar and vision and or the distance between the language of an operating system, like a human body, and cultural spawns. Yeah as the models get better this challenge is obviously going to get harder and harder, but all the better aye. Heh! And this is all of course, just from my perspective. Best wishes @OBEler .
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Tuesday: September 8th, 2026. Ongoing possibility of death happening is distinct from anticipating death.
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Tuesday: September 8th, 2026. Inner resilience after a setback is distinct from inner resolve.
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Tuesday: September 8th, 2026. Representing someone with integrated congruence is distinct from mathematical congruence.
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Tuesday: September 8th, 2026. Anticipating a reality of desire is distinct from embracing slothfulness.
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Tuesday: September 8th, 2026. Numerous days without doing something is distinct from buildup consistency.
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😭😭😭
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My view on the death penalty is that death shouldn't ever be used as a punishment... because death is a phase of life. And if the justice institution starts framing death as a punishment, it's projecting something onto death that just adds to the average person's fear of death and dying. And we already have a poor relationship with death and the changing of the seasons in life. So, we don't need extra negative projections onto those processes. Plus, the death penalty doesn't actually seem to deter crime. It's not like places with the death penalty have fewer crimes committed than places without it. Also, I see the death penalty as a litmus test for how developed or un-developed a given society's justice system is. Ultimately, the purpose of the justice system is to keep society safe and healthy. And anything added to the justice system beyond that goal is going to be quite corrupt... as it will mission drift into purposes like punishment for its own sake, revenge, and brutality. So, it's important that the justice system keeps its eye on the prize and do precisely what keeps society safe... no more and no less.
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Totally agree
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Hyggelig å møte deg, Jan Fredrik. Gratulerer med å komme ut på Actualized.org, et veldig modig steg. 🫡 If you're cute maybe we can hangout sometime
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That's not what @Joshe was saying. He was saying that the skill you need to learn is how to get women in general to like you as a friend. He wasn't saying that you need to make friends with the woman to have sex with her. And he's right. Men who have female friends and who platonically socialize with women on a regular basis are a lot more attractive than guys who don't have female friends and who don't platonically socialize with women on a regular basis. But if OP wants to get laid by the end of the week, I'd recommend a party ideally... or a club or some other fun social environment where you can interact with both men and women in a group.
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I recently learned top scientists are proposing experiments to test whether DMT entities are real. If those experiments give positive results, it has so many implications: for the state of metaphysical materialism in society, also for competing frameworks like analytical idealism (it could in fact open up for basically full-on theistic frameworks being more plausible, although I haven't thought about this much explicitly).
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Hei, jeg heter Jan Fredrik, jeg er homofil.
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First off, I think incest taboo is very normal. And we already don't imprison people who engage in consensual incest in the USA, at least. But the reality is that the social acceptance of incest would lead to some really negative genetic results that cause lifelong suffering to the children of incest. Honestly, look at how much suffering historical royals experienced because of incest, and you'll understand why incest is a taboo. And that is why close incest (like between siblings) is nearly universally considered icky across most cultures. It actually causes major harm. And in most places even more distant incest between cousins is frowned upon. But to compare incest taboos to exploiting and killing animals for pleasure is apples and oranges. One is a taboo that involves social judgement and disapproval to discourage sexual acts that harm the offspring that arise from those sexual acts. So, the taboo makes perfect sense. The other is pure exploitation, based on killing (or paying for killing) for momentary sensual pleasure... and having to build out a harmful paradigm to normalize and avoid looking at the reality that the exploiters actions don't match the exploiters identity and values. And the ripple effects of those paradigms is... mental gymnastics to rationalize away and quell cognitive dissonance, a contraction of consciousness to maintain blindspots to harm and suffering, and a necessary disconnect from the rest of nature via the projection of imaginary hierarchies. So, having a social taboo against incest isn't the same as exploitation and the collective consequences of the paradigms necessary to justify it. One is purely practical for protecting society and avoiding lifelong suffering. The other is a usually choice to betray one's own code of ethics for pleasure and creature comforts... and then to convince themselves that they have not betrayed their own code of ethics by twisting their consciousness into pretzels to continuing seeing themselves as good. Side note: Taboos are actually a very important thing, and they serve a crucial social function to discourage harmful acts that compromise the health and safety of society... even if there are some taboos that are outmoded and arbitrary to our modern era and need dismantling. But incest taboo isn't one that will ever be dismantled, as there isn't an adaptation that exists where the harm inherent in normalized incest ever goes away.
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