LastThursday

@perlita emotions are like breathing. Most of the time breathing just happens without effort or thought, but sometimes you consciously control your breathing (say for meditation). Emotional mastery is being able to control your emotions when it's necessary, and letting them just happen when it's not. It's a fine line. It's working with your emotions and not against them. So I would say that suppressing all your emotions is not mastery, because we are emotional beings. But I would also say that unconsciously letting every emotion wash over you with abandon (as your kids might) is also not mastery. The mastery is somewhere in-between. But I would also say that beating yourself up about emotions which have passed (i.e. attaching a story to them), is also not mastery. Emotions come and emotions go. Letting the emotions go once they've played their part is also part of the mastery.

Hence my comment about mirrors. Perhaps the physical signature in the brain is just a reflection of consciousness rather than the cause of it. Correlation is not causation.

@Nivsch is the reflection in a mirror conscious? Is the electrical and chemical activity of the brain just a mirror of what is happening outside of it?

@Bill W naturally you'll have to be arbiter of what is and isn't nonsense for yourself. The Swedish straw-man guy is easy set up and to blow over. But only because he lacked the wit to produce original ideas of his own (parody or not). And without doing the work yourself, that is indeed all Leo's and Swedish guy's ramblings are: ideas.

Have you cut open a brain? It's grey gooey mess. Is your conscious life a grey gooey mess? How do you go from one to the other? Hmm? (I'd like to add, I'm not a serial killer).

I have the same response when I talk about programming computers to my loved ones. My advice is to talk to people who care about it, not to those that don't. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my passion about computers is not strong enough to get through to people?

It is liberating to be free from the prison of your past and your future. If you can really embody it you are completely free to be what you want to be. I'm still trying.

@Harikrishnan your life is not a solid block extending in both directions into the (imaginary) past and the future. It is YOU, NOW.

Is a parody any less valid? Even with a pencil thin moustache?

Of course the Swedish guy is confused on what Leo means by imagination. Imagination IS reality. It is not your ego producing reality, but the Godhead's imagination producing reality. The ego has no control over the Godhead's imagination. Also, there is a conflation between grammatical tense in English (denoting time), which Leo has no choice but to use and the existential absence of Time itself, to which Leo is pointing to. The two are linked. If Time does not exist and yet we have experiences of past events, then there is only one conclusion: we (the Godhead) are imagining a past (in the present moment). From there it is a simple step to say that the past did not happen in any sense whatsoever: we (the entirety of existence) have just been created de novo with all our imaginary memories - and we continue being so.

@perlita why do you think your loss of control is a negative thing? Do your kids ever lose control?

Is mastering emotions really about dropping the stories attached to them? Is mastering emotions about fully embodying their dynamic without prejudice? Is mastering emotions about knowing that they are an illusion to be seen through?

A lot of ego driven behaviour (often detrimental to self development) seems to come from needing the love of others. It's interesting to contemplate where this perceived 'lack of love' comes from. My pet theory is that most kids when they become independent of their parents, are so used to getting love and support from their parents, that they go into a sort of 'love shock' when they don't automatically receive it as adults. This sets up neurotic behaviour as an adult. One way out is to become a parent to yourself. Speak to your inner child (as an adult) and give them love and support, it sounds ridiculous but it can work.

Ask a farmer about philosophy and s/he will talk about sheep.

@Ibn Sina what's more complex than a human? Two humans. It's a matter of scale. A rock has less defined structure than a human, but is a planet full of rock, say Mars, less complex than a human? You could also shift your analogy with machines to more of an analogy with flow. A human being could be seen as more like a waterfall, with matter flowing in and matter flowing back out. A waterfall has a kind of ephemeral existence, it's constantly in motion, but somehow keeps its identity. But where does a waterfall begin and a waterfall end? The boundary is kind of fuzzy. If you can't tell where something begins or ends, then does that something really exist separate from everything else around it? Isn't the complexity of a waterfall part of the same complexity of the landscape it is in?

I wouldn't know if I am enlightened or not and nor do I care, personally. What I do care about is that my consciousness keeps rising up and up.

@RichardY each to their own.

How do you make a plant grow? You don't, it does it by itself. How do you encourage a plant to grow? Give it more sunlight, more water, more fertilizer. But not too much, or it will get scorched, or drowned or poisoned. A friendship is reciprocal. You have to like them, but they also have to like you - and that can't be forced. The best you can do to encourage the friendship, is show your interest in them, see and talk to them regularly, and let it grow from there. But if they are not interested in you, then be grateful and move on.

Three things to be aware of: 1. Societal programming. There is immense pressure from society not to be single, and you have been brainwashed into always seeking to be with someone. 2. Sexual attraction. Basically biology. You have been programmed by evolution for billions of years to reproduce, so that your genes survive in perpetuity. 3. Being god incarnate, you can choose to ignore 1 and 2 and focus on more productive things - like realising your true nature.

And belief and existence are the same too. There is no existence, you just believe you do.

@Shadowraix understood. I'll shut up. I was just being a devil in any case.

@Shadowraix it's funny you should mention circles. Aren't they the embodiment of an infinity inside a finite form? Aren't they also only a construct of the mind?

To understand something, you must well... understand it. When you talk about 'infinity' you have an understanding of it. Then all talk of 'infinity' is based on that understanding. The natural question to ask as a consequence is: 'Does my understanding of infinity have infinite depth to it?' In other words, is your understanding of 'infinity' inexhaustable? Can you keep on discovering new aspects to your understanding without end? The only possible awareness that could possibly even get close to having an inexhaustable understanding of 'infinity' is Absolute Infinity itself. If the understanding is limited on the other hand, it can only be a 'finity', and hence you have not grasped the true meaning of 'infinity'.

There's nothing wrong with repetition. The need for constant novelty is a sickness we all suffer from - how else do you master a thing? Constant repetition is the key for mastery. And, without the repetition you would soon fall back asleep.

Scrum is just a methodology for optimisation and as such is an Orange activity - the aim being to save money, by reducing time spent on non-productive development - since there is a tendency for customers to constantly change the goalposts, and also to get round the problem of lack of immediate feedback (from customers) from changes made in software. Scrum fails, because it doesn't take into account the individual characteristics of the workers in the team. It's a one size fits all methodology. In other words it fails to see each worker as an individual system in her/his own right; it also fails to model the interactions between those workers. Scrum also fails, because of a tendency to 'game' the system by the individuals involved for various reasons; such as reducing stress, moving deadlines, staff churn, supporting junior developers, pleasing the boss and so on.