LastThursday

I say go for it. Being alpha is a double-edged sword though. To be alpha, you have to be accepted as being alpha by your peers. So in a way you can only be alpha by getting the approval of your betas. If they don't accept your alpha qualities then you've lost and you're just a beta or less, time to move on. Saying that, you do need to have an alpha mindset to even get there in the first place. That just means you actively want it, which you clearly do. I don't think you need to be alpha to fuck a lot personally, but it probably helps. For example, you could just be a beta and hang around with an alpha and get his spoils. Human inventiveness doesn't have any limits. A real alpha is someone who is comfortable and in control in any situation they find themselves in. That mostly takes intelligence and experience and a shit load of confidence.

Your dog only exists in your thoughts. The past and the future only exist in your thoughts. Your thoughts are always in the present moment. It's easy to confuse thoughts for the things they stand for. Your thoughts about your dog are not the same thing as your dog.

There's a kind of rabbit hole you are not entering here. Take an activity such as driving a vehicle. I think you'll agree that you need a certain level of proficiency behind the wheel, otherwise you are likely to die or at least be badly injured very quickly. Maybe you'll also agree there is very little "thinking in words" going on when you drive. Maybe just the odd mental note like "I'll take the next junction", but otherwise not much. But you must very definitely still differentiate the world in to concepts. You will need to have concepts such as other vehicles, pedestrians crossing the road, speed, weather conditions, time of day, traffic lights, police, vehicle handling and so on. Without these concepts you would die. The differentiation doesn't just go away because mental verbalisation stops - it just removes a layer of interpretation.

Strange isn't it? You think you are dead and yet your mind is very much alive. The question is, how strongly should you identify with your thoughts? Where are the thoughts coming from? But if it is truly causing you distress, then you should drop meditating for a while. Wait until some sort of peace returns.

If someone tells you there's a million dollars buried in your yard, is that Truth? Obviously, it is probably BS no matter how sincere or confident they seem. You may even convince yourself, in which case it's probably also self-delusional BS. But you should actually start digging anyway...

Everyone is broken or dysfunctional - and that's normal. If you can accept that, then don't give up on getting close to people. Love their faults as much as their perfections.

The you that is sad is not alone, go make friends. God cannot be alone, god is everything, including you.

@FourSeasons I think it's interesting that you think being more masculine is a problem? Personally I'd be very happy to be with a woman who could use a screwdriver or is willing to take control in a difficult situation. But then I'm all for equality. I don't think you should see your masculinity as the problem. There are masculine women and feminine men, so what? If you want to explore being more feminine, then that's great! You should be able to choose when to be more womanly or more manly, whenever you need to be. If I can make some points from what you wrote: Some people are addicted to drama. It makes their lives seem more interesting and emotional. But it's quite dysfunctional behaviour. It comes out of insecurity in yourself and the relationship. You need to work on yourself so that you can talk about your needs in a calm and relaxed way. You can be sensitive without the drama. That can be a big problem. But maybe part of the problem is that he doesn't communicate his needs to you? But you can help him by asking him: "What do you need from me? Why are you upset?" and then just listen to him. It sounds like you both need to learn how to communicate well together - not just for you to become more feminine.

So which one is valid? They both are. But only at the time you are experiencing them. That's what living in the moment means. To be able to judge something as valid or not, you need to compare two things. But in order to compare two things, you need to have a "memory" of both things. Do you trust a memory? But acceptance is kind of the opposite of judgement. It means you stop comparing two things which may be distorted, and just accept what is in front of you right now. That acceptance is truth or validity or non-judgement. Acceptance doesn't mean that it's meaningless, to the contrary acceptance has more meaning than judgement.

See, the problem is deeper than you think. How do you "really know" what happened to you, when your perception of what happened is distorted? In fact, how do you "know" your perception is distorted? It's not like you have a clean and clear and truthful version of what happened and a distorted version to compare with each other. So say you have a psychedelic trip and lose your identity and become one with god and so on. You then come back down to normality and you have a dualistic ego driven experience. Which one is distorted, which one is truthful? You can't experience both at the same time.

That's an astute observation. When you wake up from your sleep and remember your dreams, did they really happen? Did they really mean anything? The point of having mystical or psychedelic experiences, is not actually for the experience itself. It's for the after effects - the things that permanently change after the experience has gone. So you do it for the permanent change in your experience of the present moment, nothing more.

It's tricky, because there's two types of mastery. One type would be like tying your shoelaces or riding a bike. It's a very defined thing, you can either do it or you can't. You know when you've mastered it, when you can do it. The other is less defined. This would be like learning a language or a martial art. You can always learn more words or new moves or whatever - it doesn't end. But in this case mastery would be fluency. So the test is, can I do this thing without thinking about how to do it? Instead you are able to think about what you want to do. It's kind of like autopilot, that's mastery.

Added. Happy to meet up. PM me.

Then that's a good start to your answer. Everytime you get an answer, keep asking more questions. The key insight to consider from the answer you gave me, is that other people are a kind of "copy" of you, so they must be real, because you also think you are real.

Start with a simpler question. Ask yourself if you are real?

I don't think that you can ever really help people. The best you can do is to encourage people to investigate for themselves how to cure their own unhappiness. I can bet that any type of help you're thinking of is only about temporarily alleviating the symptoms of suffering. That's things like giving money to a homeless person or sitting and listening to a friend tell you their troubles. Most people's problems are systemic. In other words they're rarely simple; the more you dig, the more you find, until eventually you realise it involves their entire identity and history. You realise for yourself you can't fix it all for them. You are not them. Further, helping in this way is a problem for you. To be able help someone you have to embody their problems to some extent. And as soon as you do that, you start suffering. Empathy is suffering. It may be minor and manageable, but it's still suffering. So in my experience be gentle to yourself. I try and do the following: Help as much as you're prepared to give in terms of time and emotional commitment. If it gets too much, then help less, or not at all, or leave it to others (or professionals). Your own wellbeing is just as important as theirs. Realise that any help you give is only going to be a temporary fix. Be informative and suggest that there are ways to improve their wellbeing, but that they will have to do it for themselves. In fact, embody those ways yourself. The best way to show people how to change is by example not by instruction.

For me a strong question is either one that takes you out of your comfort zone, or one that questions something that you take for granted.

Shocked? No. Understanding reality is imagination doesn't change reality. It just changes your thinking about reality. If you are shocked, it's because it's a new idea to you. But reality doesn't care if you are shocked, it carries on being imagined. The situation is a bit like being told your father had an affair for years. It's very shocking at first, but your father is still your father, he didn't change. All that changed was your perspective. So now, you react to your father differently. So maybe what's next is that you treat reality differently?

Everything is Synchronicity. As a fish becoming aware of water.

@yangmilun I say there are two types of imagination because I see a lot of confusion about it. The people who doubt that imagination is "everything" say that it can't be true, because they can't just imagine a stack of cash and it just appears in front on them. They're confused because the only kind of imagination they are aware of, is the everyday daydreaming sort. Usually daydreaming has no effect on "reality", it's just thoughts (although LoA people might disagree, they may or may not be deluded). So what is the other type of imagination? As I pointed out, there is no 100% consensus between two people about reality. So either one person is lying or they're both experiencing different realities. That means that your reality and someone else's reality are relative to each other. There is no absolute reality "out there". Scientists are confused, because they don't realise that their "absolute reality" is actually constructed or inferred from many different people's accounts of their own personal realities. Their map is not the territory, there is no territory. So where does each person's reality come from? It is imagined. The real question is: Imagined by what? And an even bigger question: Do you have any control over it?

Because there are two types of imagination. There is the everyday daydreaming kind, where you wish you had 10 million of your currency and HB10s hanging off your every word. Then there is reality. Even a scientist doesn't deny reality. A scientist will say the brain "creates reality", so even they agree reality is a construct. But they then go and confuse themselves by saying that there is a "real" reality not constructed by the brain - not realising that they too have brains. So you may as well give up and say reality is constructed, full stop. You can check this by sitting in a courtroom and seeing that the witnesses don't agree at all on reality. If reality is constructed, then this is no different to saying it's all "imagination" or "a dream". Same meaning different words.

I'm not wedded to the idea personally, I just gave a shopping list for contemplation. I may have conflated God and you and omniscience and that made it unpalatable to you. The idea was that there are an infinite number of strands of consistent stories and that you could be one of them. But all the strands together make "God". Anyway, here's another one for fun (I'm full of them): d. There is no consistency whatsoever in awareness and perception (i.e. it's all chaos, random). But. There is one exception. There is a singular source of unchanging "sameness" in awareness which pervades everything. You tap into this "sameness" source when you feel things are "consistent" or the the "same" or anything you feel you "know". In other words it's the sensation of familiarity. That familiarity can be about anything or everything, but the underlying cause or source is "sameness". It similar to the idea of the number "2", there are many things that there are two of, but there is an underlying twoness which ties them all together. The "sameness" source is the glue that holds together reality, without it it's chaos.

Do you climb Mount Everest for a trophy or for the experience?

Don't forget, you are society. Just like if you're stuck in traffic, you are the traffic. If society is your problem, then start with yourself and work outwards from there.

@Paulus Amadeus here's a few ideas to think about: a. All perception is chaos. The only thing that's consistent is your memory. Your memory defines a template for your perceptions to "fit into". In other words it simplifies the chaos by categorising it. For example, the category of "cat" is simple and consistent, but the actuallity of the perception of a cat is different every time. b. More radical. Your intuition about consistency is wrong. Consistency is just an awareness like everything else, and is therefore prone to misinterpretation. In other words you think or feel that your house is always the same house in the same place, but you're deluded. For example the street changes with the seasons, the house falls apart without maintenance etc. Is it really your house? c. Even more radical. You (God) are experiencing everything at once (the entirety of existence). But to make a nice story out of it, the creator of the dream does a pick and mix of perceptions from the whole of reality and weaves them together into a consistent story about you (your life). I like C. Just think, if C wasn't true then everything would be chaos and inconsistent and you wouldn't be aware of anything at all.