LastThursday

Do you equate self-control with mastery? Mastery can be a very long and many faceted process, patience is definitely needed. But mastery is also an incremental process, and you can gain its benefits bit by bit. At some point you won't recognise yourself as the same person anymore, because mastery will have changed you. What seems hopeless at the start is hopeful at the end. Mastery is just what you choose to master. If your hope is to tolerate pain and master it, then that's what you should do. What you're describing about yourself just seems like a problem of motivation. Motivation is complicated. In broad strokes there is positive motivation and negative motivation. Positive motivation are things like, exciting goals, rewards for achievement, satisfaction of completion, recognition, free leisure time. Negative motivation are things like, deadlines, not having money, bad consequences for not completing, letting others down, not keeping to some standard. Some motivation is more neutral, like having a plan, collaborating with people. You need to work with all types of motivation.

Start with recognising that you're not a machine, but a human. You will have disciplined days and undisciplined days, allow yourself that. You will also have only a certain capacity for discipline, and that may be a lot less than you want to achieve your goals. But that capacity can increase with lots of practice. Use techniques like Pomodoro to help stretch your capacity. From a philosophical view you're always doing something, even if it's just sitting there breathing and blinking. You cannot not help but be doing something, 24/7. So disclipline is not a matter of active versus lazy, but of constantly steering your activity in the direction you want. Also, everyone is different. Work out your own psychology. For example, my natural tendency is to be haphazard and go from one task to another, so I just go with it, and allow myself to work in small bursts, and lots of differerent sub-tasks of the main tasks. But, I can also work well with timed tasks, such as 1 hour on task A, 1 hour on task B ans so on. Maybe morning versus afternoon works better. Learn what works for you.

The flipside is that subjects like Solipsism, Free Will, Spiral Dynamics get discussed at all. Isn't it amazing that there's a bunch of people willing to talk about these niche abstract philosophical ideas on a public forum? Yes their definitions and usage get abused and misunderstood, I'm with you on that, but still.

I used to be sad about the lack of it here. But I've changed my mind about it. It's hard to convey humour in text and very easy to be misunderstood. One person's humour is another person's offence. Some humour can get misundertood as trolling, even if it isn't. What one person finds funny might be seen as childish by another. British humour is not American humour. And on and on. I inject a bit of humour from time to time, because I enjoy it, but I try and keep it to a minimum, and not get too upset if people don't pick up on it.

Totally. Bloody annoying though. But I admit I'm not immune either in the ego department. I like to use the full force of my vocabulary for peacocking purposes, a.k.a, showing off. Not that it does me any favours in any way. Anyway, I'm rambling now.

Only my personal pet peeves: Any topic with the word "Leo" in it. Any comment that has something like "Leo please answer". Topic starters that don't engage at all in any of the answers. Using made up language or terms nobody else understands. Threads that derail into nonsense. Lists. But to answer the actual question, I strongly don't vibe with all the pickup emphasis in the Dating section. There are other saner more agreeable ways to find someone, you know. There are saner ways to learn social skills.

To me insight is the same as understanding, with a sprinkle of surprise. Something like, it was there all the time, but now I've become aware of it, I understand, how surprising. I think it's totally possible to forget insights and to get dumber over time. Sometimes there's a certain amount of practice needed to make them stick, especially if they come from other people. Also, sometimes it's like, ah yeah I get it now, wow. And then sometime later, actually I don't get it, I thought I did, doh! Commonplace book. Why does that phrase spring to mind...? I forget.

@Something Funny I get the sentiment. I can go on to Amazon or eBay right now and get nearly anything I want, and I don't even need to get off the sofa. Any idea I have someone's got there already or it would cost a bunch of money to set up and protect. Either, you're making the same thing but better, cheaper or in a slightly novel way. And most things on Amazon or whatever, I don't actually need. But despite all that, it is actually possible to be genuinely innovative and creative, and there will be a market for it somewhere. It just takes practice and effort. There's probably never been a better time to be visible to the world and showcase what you're about if that's what you want.

And, in long? What's simultaneity? I mean, I know what the word is, but what does it mean to you in this context?

Awakening is a funny word. The unsaid assumption is that you're asleep. Asleep to what though? Plenty plenty I'm sure, but I don't know what it is yet. So to me awakening is the process of discovering what I don't know yet. By "know" I mean the whole breadth of experience. And therefore I'm constantly awakening. But, there is a philosophical awakening to be had. And this is done by mental contemplation of everything. Even a light contemplation on things can yield some awakening. It's about constantly asking questions and finding your own answers to them. Everything is in plain sight, you just have to learn to see it. That's one facet of awakening. There are other types of awakening.

I would often count my breathing at the start of a run, four paces in, four paces out. It feels quite artificial, but it does stop the mind wandering, and it put focus on my breathing and regularity of pace.

I think I've said it before, my prescriptive answer is that there is no purpose to this in any way. It just is. Saying that it doesn't stop purpose from being the main thrust of living, you just understand that purpose is there as a motivator or a prop to feed your human needs. There is no right way to carry out the process of living, and you don't have to live with purpose. But you're asking a more existential question. There is so much coherence to experience that it seems silly not to give it purpose. Experience seems "designed" and put together too well not to be purposeful. What is purpose though? It's goal oriented action. And I think that is where it falls apart. The more you examine this the more it's realised there is no end goal to it, it just carries on and on, there is no purpose to it. @saif2 would you say that the purpose is then just for God to manifest itself?

Let's do some writing. What to write about? Let's see... I'm somewhat uneasy with the "understanding" that Leo talks about fairly regularly. He likes to say that there is a certain sort of understanding that is outside of language and logic. I think the premise is that that sort of understanding can't be argued out of by using language or logic, and so there is an absoluteness to it. I can get behind it to some extent, for example if I experience a pair of red shoes, the understanding of redness and shoeness (is that a word?) is outside of language insofar as I don't need to label the experience with language, I can just experience. Furthermore it isn't just raw sensation, I also "understand" my experience, it has meaning. That tacit understanding of experience is not exactly what Leo is pointing to however. He is pointing to a deep understanding into the workings of reality, so, more than a pair of shoes. What's the difference between the two, other than degree? I think it's what Leo would say is an absolute understanding, one that can't be mistaken for anything else, that can't be un-understood again. If I see a face in a crowd and think it's someone I know, even though I understand my experience, I could well be mistaken in my impressions, maybe it isn't actually someone I know. I understand the wrong thing. And that's where my uneasiness comes from. How can there be two tiers of understanding? Isn't there always room for being mistaken? Materialism aside, this is exactly what the process of Science aims to address. The principle mechanic of Science is simply the statement: I might be mistaken in my understanding. It realises the inherent bias and unreliability of experience. It should be noted that Science does not throw out experience, it just isn't absolutist about it, instead it wholly understands the relativity of understanding and does the best it can with that. The actuality of Science and the way it's practised can be argued with however, it's not a perfect system. But its underpinning principle is what makes it so powerful and productive. Where does that leave absolutist understanding? Imagine the conscious experience as an ever shifting sandbox of stuff. Because it's a closed system nothing gets in or gets out, and due to the nature of consciousness there is no separation from it. We pretend that we can talk about and explain the conscious experience as if we're commenting on it from a detached viewpoint, but we're always in the sandbox not outside of it. You then get the very circular: consciousness is explaining consciousness. More relevant here is that consciousness is understanding consciousness. How can that be? It seems like however absolute an experiencing of understanding is, it always comes down to the circular: consciousness understanding consciousness. An absolute thing is something that is true for all time: a Truth if you like. The sandbox of consciousness makes everything within it relative to itself and without a ground, there can be no absolutes within it. You may baulk at that. The only absolutes are what consciousness deems as absolutes. Naturally, you can be absolutely sure about an understanding, but only because it's being tagged as such. Hang on... Isn't it true that I'm absolutely sure that I'm always experiencing something, and that reality exists? Well, how can that be? How can things exist and that raw existence not be absolute? If consciousness is constantly shifting, and understanding itself relative to itself, then nothing at all is absolute, nothing can be true for all time, everything is relative and finite, only truth exists not Truth. That's my objection to having a deep understanding of consciousness or reality: there can be no such thing. There aren't two tiers of "understanding". Could it be that existence itself is orthogonal to absoluteness? Absoluteness being only an experience within consciousness; maybe it's just a concept with a word attached. If existence is completely relative as a consequence of its nature as a closed sandbox, then all its constituent parts must be relative to each other. And yet there it undeniably is, all the time, it exists. Is there a way out of that impasse? Is existence absolute or relative? One deeper understanding could be is that consciousness is not a unified static field: it is constantly redefining itself from itself. It's more like a river than a rock, more like an unfolding than a shifting kaleidscope, not a screen with experience being projected on it. Consciousness constantly redefines what it itself means, constantly upgrades its own operating system. It is not a single monolithic entity, it is no entity at all, it's uncountable. If there is an absolute understanding of consciousness to be had, it is that it is not constrained by absolutes.

It should be noticed that the process of understanding consciousness happens within consciousness. To understand one aspect of consciousness requires understanding that it is self-referential by nature.