LastThursday

Whatever you think, you're wrong. I don't have a hidden agenda in any way with you. My style is to quote the parts of what people write that take my interest nothing more. If you're going to be aggressive or behave like a fool then that is going to get my interest. That is an explanation thanks. A belief. A fucking thought . A fart in the wind. OBVIOUSLY! Then you haven't thought very deeply about it. And if you have, you're being intellectually dishonest in owning up to what you've discovered.

You're hilarious. We must be kindred spirits. Anyway seriously, I'm not ramming my ideas down anyone's throats, you can take it or leave it. I suspect you just choose not to understand it further or are unwilling to let go of the story you're clinging on to. And since you're so keen on explanations and stories what is your explanation then? Why does death never come eh? What does death even mean to you?

Zzzzzzz

Exactly. If that isn't death then I don't know what is. Everything is concertinaed into this. It's this which is the source of everything including the sensation of being "me" and all my memories. Anyway, we've had this conversation before about death, and you know my views. See above.

Death = Change. It's really that simple. Becoming a corpse is just a more deliniated change than other forms of change. The subtle point is that the sensation of being "you" will die, but awareness may be eternal. I don't believe for a second that @LastThursday will continue indefinitely. For example, the child version of @LastThursday already (literally) died when he became an adult.

If that narrative helps to motivate you then use it. I would see it in a similar way, but less of a war and more of a balancing act. You want to stack all your resources both mental and physical onto the "positive" side of the scales, to counteract (and outweigh) the heaviness on the "negative" side. When you lose your motivation or values, then you need to build up simple habits that you can do daily, without too much thought or effort. This will at least keep you from sinking lower. And it helps stack things on the positive side. This can be as simple as walking every day, painting, making good food, treating yourself, making plans with others, looking after a plant or a pet etc. But things you can do regularly and enjoy and fit with your lifestyle. It's definitely possible to overcome it. There may be reasons for that sadness and having therapy can help you overcome it. I don't know your history so I couldn't recommend anything specific. Maybe's there's unresolved trauma, or negative patterns of thinking, or something physical, or there could even have been a single trigger in the past. But you should try and uncover it, even if just to know what you're dealing with.

When it comes to bad mental health having a healthy psychological attitude is actually the solution or end goal. So how do you achieve the contradictory goal of a healthy psychology using an unhealthy psychology? I'd say that's very difficult. One answer is to become aware that your own bad mental health varies throughout the day and the week. There a good days and bad days. This should be a flag that shows you that bad mental health is not a fixed entity. And that should give you hope that bad mental health can actually be changed for the better. The other thing to be aware of is that the mind and body form one system, one thing affects the other in a reciprocal relationship. Even if it's difficult to think your way out of depression, it can be a lot easier to keep the body healthy. Eat properly and exercise well, get enough daylight and get enough sleep, meet people regularly. This requires some amount of consistent discipline - but discipline itself can be good for depression. There's often an element of helplessness to depression and self-discipline directly confronts this. A lot of bad mental health is caused by negative ideation and rumination - especially depression. It can be extremely difficult, but becoming aware of the triggers of negativity can help in overcoming them. Also the obvious routes of therapy and working through past traumas can help immensely. The point is that being helped by others can be an easier road to take, than trying to solve your problems alone. It's completely possible to eliminate the worst negative thoughts. It's completely possible to love yourself and have a good self-image. It's completely possible to solve a lot of the problems in your life. Staying calm and confident requires you to learn to be calm and confident even in the middle of ruin. That requires a certain amount of detached awareness of what is going inside and outside of you. Meditation and self-enquiry can be helpful too.

Sometimes aggression shouldn't be tolerated. Bullying and corruption gets normalised because people tolerate it. Isn't it so?

It's natural to want to immitate who you admire either conciously or unconsciously. Also, the people on this forum are not random, they are the people who most closely align to Leo's ideas or values in some way. It's no surprise then, despite it being irksome. I'm shaving my head now.

What I like to call "Air Music".

Yes! But not for everything. My thoughts seems to get "stuck" at certain physical locations: one outside the gates to a park when I was young seems very persistent. And that location seems to get attached to abstract thinking. There is a theory (I forget where I read it) that says that all memories are stored spatially like this. Indeed, a "Memory Palace" explicitly uses this technique to remember a large amount of things. And a story is memorable for the same reasons. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. Certain things happen in certain places, it would seem natural that a location would trigger all the memories associated with that location - even abstract ones. Those associations are two-way.

I should write love poetry for a living ha! Anyway: I took your smile and put it in my pocket. Your glistening lips pinned on a loop of memory. Sniff sniff, that perfume soaked into my very being. Every idle wandering thought ends at then. All those partitions in time paper thin but impenetrable. Even if we returned we would forever be disjoint-strangers. Would you even remember me? Should you even remember me?

@integral I liked your video, slickly done. Future-gazing™ (mine!) is a fun activity. The idea of having new perceptions is good. Although I think that each thought or memory we have is essentially a different perception. Consciousness is unbounded in that respect.

I'm fortunate to have been on the wrong side of privileged when I was younger, and that makes me appreciate what I have all the more now, and make it hard to give up or change. I think we all have our problems and to belittle them or dismiss them doesn't help us. If complaining helps then do so. I've done many things which seemed like they would go on forever, but eventually they ended. It's no different with breaking out. I suspect it will happen in an unexpected way and probably in a way that I won't even notice at the time. But I'll see. I do know that even this situation will change with time. @Snader what are your experiences on your own questions? I'm curious to know.

Partially yes. Wage slavery is just not for me, it doesn't suit my temperament. Due to my history I've always had to be and like being self-sufficient. To have people "lording it over me" and for me to make them money just sticks in my craw. But, it's convenient and it's stable and it's what everyone else does. The alternative of working for myself, whilst it would probably suit me more, is more difficult and unstable. The self-worth angle is interesting. I've always known my own worth in that I've never particularly needed external confirmation of my worth or capabilities. In that sense I'm confident. But, I've had a lot of experiences, especially when I was a teenager/young adult, that constantly ground down on that self-worth. So I've learned to not expose myself too much and I've tended to just go along with the flow and stick in the background. It's only now more recently that I've felt more comfortable stepping up and exposing myself. It's opposing forces causing paralysis I think. Because of my difficult teenagehood I've constantly yearned for stability and to be free to pursue my own interests. So I have a strong sense of wanting comfort and stability in my life - which I've largely achieved. Giving that up in any way is difficult. Also, my attention has always been quite scattered. I have so many interests and avenues of exploration that doggedly fixing myself to one thing and just pursuing that as my "purpose" just doesn't gel with me. The only thing I've managed that with is my interest in computing, and indeed that is my day job now, and I'm thankful for it. But there are many times when I've wanted to just give it all up and do something completely different. Society seems to want to bludgeon me down a particular path of working and spending and buying houses and having a family and having no time to do anything else with: I reject it all, and yet I still do it to an extent. It leaves me with a strong feeling of being in limbo with no real resolution other than to upend it all. I don't see myself as unfortunate, in fact I know that compared to many people I'm in a privileged position - and I did it all myself in spite of everything. I'm grateful for it. But my upbringing, parents and the society I found myself in have "programmed" me in a certain way. I've done a huge amount of work to undo some of that bad programming, but there is a core that still needs fixing so to speak. I have a conviction that if I can just fix that remaining part then I'll get going. Society just wants me to grind and spend. I want to have joy and freedom. The two seem mutually incompatible to me.

I dunno man these are some hard things to answer and contemplate. Without it turning into too much of therapy session (I don't need answers here thanks!), I'll pick on this point: The sensation of feeling trapped, like in a spider's web and of having been foolish enough to get trapped in the first place. It's partly to do with circumstance (society) and my lack of willingness or ability to get myself out of, or commit to, any course of action to untrap myself. This goes along with a strong feeling that I should have "been someone" for most of my life. A good friend of mine recently called me a "genius". The CEO of the company I do work for said I was the second most intelligent person he'd met, and said this in front of his entire workforce (the first being his finance controller apparently). So what do I do with all that? (rhetorical question lol). I ask myself surely I must have the brainpower to get myself what I want or to where I want? But no it's not to do with that, it's just prolonged commitment and perseverence, I'm learning. The only conclusions I can draw is that in general society doesn't reward outliers, but just your average jo/e and brute subservience to its mores. The other is that there isn't anyone to blame except myself, I'm the one that suffers and the one that has to do something about it. There's no fallback and no-one to give me a leg up. However I'm not a victim. I know the answer to my situation is to uproot everything I've built up around me. I'm just not ready to do that (yet).

This is good. You want to take the middle way. Removing the objects in life that burden you (even if just to stop thinking about them), makes life simpler. This extends to non-tangible things too: commitments, bad relationships, addictions, unwanted responsibilites. But don't remove the things that actually make life simpler: washing machines, good relationships, a paying job etc.

What is meaning? What is fulfillment? It's a good exercise to examine those things deeply. I think both things are rooted in emotion. Meaning is an emotional response to events, normally positive. And more specifically something is meaningful if it helps your survival directly or indirectly. Essentially you have "good feelings" towards "staying alive" and that is meaningful. Fulfill etymologically means to "fill until full", i.e. to complete something or to satiate your desire. It's not an accident that you use the phrase "feelings of emptiness". Fulfillment is the knowledge or feeling of being satisfied and complete, and full. The pursuit of meaning and fulfillment is then the pursuit of certain emotions. But emotions are ephemeral and irrational. Emotions are signals to pay attention to, not objects to acquire and hold on to. Emotions are what guide you through the world, you should use them that way. You should pursue what you want to achieve. There's no game plan for living, so you're free to make up your own plan and carry it through to see what happens. If you don't like what happens you come up with another plan and keep playing your own invented game. If you complete one of your plans you will feel fulfilled. If it helps you survive, or improves your life in some way, it will feel meaningful.

For the love of God don't submit. Stand firm!

No. It's completely normal for your thoughts to wander. By narrating your actions you're doing a form of meditation. You're constantly bringing back your attention to the present moment and to what your body is doing. This builds up awareness and allows you to have more conscious control over your body and actions. A lot of mental health problems can be caused by negative and intrusive thoughts. That's why meditation is often given as a way to help with this. But. Narration is just words. Words can never fully describe what is going on and they may end up being a distraction. It's a distraction because you're programming yourself to place importance on the narration and the words. This is the wrong emphasis. You should be placing importance on what is actually happening. Your body is a very intelligent machine and most of the time it doesn't need a lot of conscious guidance - let it spontaneously do its thing. You should also practise not narrating and totally switching off that inner voice. You'll be surprised that it's possible to live like that, and be totally conscious.

Not at all, it seems pretty relevant to the thread. I suppose I was thinking about the result (quantity) rather than the cause (motivation) behind "reading the signs". But your point is excellent. Is there an underlying motivation for why the OP is seeing these numbers? Maybe the meaning behind seeing the Angel numbers, is precisely to uncover that motivation if it's not immediately obvious.

Reflection. Anything I think about others I try and reflect back to myself. E.g. why is that guy such an asshole? Am I an asshole sometimes? Do other people exist? Do I exist? That guy is so stupid. Am I stupid? Is it ok to obsess over someone? Would I like to be obsessed about? And on and on. If done properly, it's very effective for self learning and practising non-judgement. Inverse. E.g. was the universe created? Maybe it wasn't created. Am I the only one in existence? Maybe I'm not the only one in existence. Is God a separate entity? Maybe God is not separate. Does God exist? What if God didn't exist. What is existence? What isn't existence? What is everything? What isn't everything? Do explanations get at truth, or not? Boundary removal. E.g. am I a distinct entity? Or am I part of everything else: the food I eat, the air I breathe, the skin cells I shed? Are humans special? Or are they just another animal? Am I separate from God, or the same as God? Is a colour a different thing from a sound? Or are they the same is some way? Are two people interacting, two entities or one system? Does what I do affect everything else? Are my thoughts mine or just part of this? Is my sense of self separate from my perceptions?

@Judy2 do you think instead of a fine line, there's just a sliding scale? Some folks don't pay any attention at all, some find meaning in everything, most are in the middle somewhere. I find myself constantly looking at car number plates. My brain just loves symbols and my attention gets sucked in. Sometimes absentmindedly, connections and things are triggered, and a whole train of thought comes out of it. I have to try and pull my attention away mostly and pay attention to other things. Everything in moderation. I know well enough that car number plates are randomly assigned. The symbols themselves are meaningless: except for the things they trigger within me, that's what I should be paying attention to.

For that 80's vibe

Same thing as people's opinions and advices. So it evens out. Ignore or don't ignore, same effect. Sane result. Indeed. To be clear, the OP is free to take my advice/opinion or not. I wasn't trying to be dismissive. I agree that the universe is constantly trying to speak to us, but it's not the happenings or appearances themselves which are important. It's how we interpret those things which is important. Numbers/numerology is far more abstract and ambiguous than other "signs" we could pay attention to. There are other things to focus on that give much clearer signs. @Agrande is seemingly stuck in limbo, where they see some meaning in the numbers, but don't know what the meaning is. We can't help, because our meaning in not @Agrande's meaning. The only sensible solution is to ignore the numbers, to get out of the bind.