LastThursday

Is there anything you want from the situation? Is it less stress? Stability? To fix broken people? To show stoicism? Be a parent to your employers? Anything else? What do you think?

You are living in a timeless void. The future is always now. Everything is now. Why bother...? Why not?

Firstly, realise that if you are living in someone else's space you have to live by their rules. Normally I would say that talking is the best course of action, but that's not going to work. Dealing with any person that thinks they're in a position of superiority is not easy. The following are some devious low consciousness tactics you can use, your mileage may vary: Non-compliance. Don't answer his yells (or any other family member) or react in any way. Only if he talks to you face to face in a normal voice do you answer. If you feel "forced" in any way to do things you don't want to: don't do it. Stand your ground and politely say "no". Walk off or leave the house if necessary. Always stay calm and composed at all times. Don't react angrily or sheepishly. Don't raise your voice. Don't ever get physical. Come and go as you wish. Don't ever ask permission if you can do something or go somewhere. Be prepared to take the consequences of non-compliance, plan ahead if you are likely to be kicked out of home. Lastly, love you father to death and make it clear that you love him. Think good thoughts about him as much as possible. Do nice things for him to reward any good behaviour from him - but do them because you want to - never be fake in your love. Be strong. Good luck.

@Emotionalmosquito if I was in your position I would ask myself the following blunt questions: Am I debating for sport, fun, to get a kick out of it? Am I addicted to the drama of the situation? Am I being triggered by people not listening to me? Am I being triggered by someone more intelligent than me (are they playing with me for their amusement)? Am I being triggered by someone I think is more attractive than me (and you feel inferior in some way)? Am I being triggered by people not showing me love? Have I outgrown the group I thought I belonged to? And so on.

To go a bit meta: "pointless" is a value judgement ultimately to do with your personal survival. To put it a different way, to say something is "pointless" is to say you can't afford to waste resources on something that could be better spent elsewhere. But the thing is, is that spiritual growth/understanding has nothing to do with survival, the two are orthogonal.

You make a good point. This is a good way to keep yourself humble. Your future self should always be wiser, cleverer, smarter, more aware and more successful than you are now. Your present self should make that happen. If you're not embarrassed by the old you, then you're doing something wrong.

@Aquarius excellent post. It feels uncomfortable to be lost and not know what you want. It sounds like you have lots of great ideas. You have to keep trying new things until you find what you want to do and how you want to live - forget about pleasing other people or trying to fit in with their needs - put yourself first. If you want to be successful you have to have a good balance of three things: 1. Good ideas. 2. Stamina and perserverance. 3. Good people skills. All these things are just skills you can improve over time if you put focus into it. If you want to practise stamina and perseverence, then these will help you: 1. Have a daily routine (even on weekends) 2. Have one or two long term projects with achievable goals 3. Emotional control. Emotional control is important. There will be times when you feel like giving up, or you feel very distracted, or you want to waste time. You will need good coping strategies for this. I find meditation, exercise (gym, walking, running, swimming etc), being outdoors in nature and good diet help a lot. Also depending on the type of person you are a certain amount of social contact is necessary - also this is good for people skills.

@Evil Raccoon Whatever resonates with your vibrations. I know it's hard but you get the nourishment from the sweet (candy) not the wrapper. Personally after a strong diet of Leo, she's far too incoherent and New Agey for my refined taste (and she also loves herself (as we all should...)) - perhaps she triggers me because of that. Damn, I need to shadow work myself more and also eventually reach that lofty Stage Green goal. I'd say there are better teachers than her on this forum even. But each to their own.

I'd say dislike is too strong a word. I have friends who are close and friends who are less close. Those less close ones probably have less in common with me or our tolerance of each other is lower - but we have other mutual friends in common, so there is a connection. So basically nuance. The friends who dislike me, spend less time with me and the dislike is probably reciprocal. If they tolerate me without making that clear to me, that's their cross to bear.

Learn some non-attachment. Give the money to someone else no strings attached and see what happens.

Notice how the negative belief is made of two parts. One part is the story attached to the belief. For example "I'm scared to do a bungee jump". The story in this case is "the bungee jump". The other part is the negative emotion attached to the belief. In this case it's "I'm scared". Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) has many techniques for replacing the negative emotional part of beliefs. The basic idea is that we normally only feel one thing at a time, but NLP techniques disrupt this by making you experience overlapping emotional states. Usually a neutral or positive state is overlapped with the negative emotion. If done correctly then this can rapidly change the emotion associated with the belief (permanently in most cases). Look up NLP collapsing anchors for further investigation.

@The Lucid Dreamer that podcast was super interesting. It's amusing how people want scientific "proof" of psychic abilities and yet it's all there out in the open. Any experiment that repeatedly gives results with statistical significance needs to be taken seriously. It's also very interesting that consciousness (or at least "intent") is having an effect on essentially random quantum fluctuations. So consciousness is affecting the material world at a fundamental level. The comment about the brain in the podcast gave me an odd thought. Maybe the brain acts as both a large source of quantum randomness (tens of billions of neurons) and a large amplifier of quantum effects (huge interconnectedness of neurons) . In other words, consciousness (i.e. the conscious field) has a large effect on the brain precisely because of it's structure. The brain therefore acts as an effecient conduit for consciousness - but the brain is not the source for consciousness. It would be interesting to build a neural network AI so that it contains a certain amount of quantum noise throughout its network and then see if it can be controlled with an experimenter's intent. Can you make an AI truly conscious? Anyway, just some thoughts.

Most of us want to be normal. None of us are.

@The observer ok, but you have to be careful. You quoted me directly and talked about what I'd written - so I had to assume you were talking about me directly (you didn't mention Anna at all). Obviously, I'm not going to take it if someone puts words into my mouth. Anyway, no harm done. Carry on.

@The observer you seem to have expanded my one sentence into eight of yours. Where did those extra words come from? Anyway here goes: 1. I wasn't talking about control at all. I'm not sure where that came from. 2. I wasn't talking about anything being illusory. Where did that come from? 2. I wasn't manipulating, just giving my personal opinion, whether it was right or wrong. 3. What double standard? What are you talking about? 4. I wasn't talking about "forcing" anything. Marketing is marketing, there is no "forcing". Propaganda is forcing. Holding a gun to the head is forcing. 5. My use of the words "way in" is in double quotes for a reason. This is to indicate not a literal way in, like a gateway drug, but a suggestion that people may be guided towards increasing their own spiritual awareness - if they choose to do it for themselves. 6. I don't deny there are other ways to become more spiritual. Good. I'm glad for you. 7. Stop being sly yourself.

I think I understand now. I suppose spirituality ought to be held up to a higher standard and shouldn't be commoditised and sold like cheap plastic tourist trinkets. I personally think it might be a "way in" to spirituality for a lot of people, so it has its uses. I reckon most people don't have the refined discernment to be able to tell if they're being sold crap by a saccharine salesperson, they're just not aware enough - after all the majority of us are brainwashed by capitalist advertising. Thank God for people like Leo and others on here that produce more authentic content, it goes against the tide.

@mandyjw you shouldn't be encouraged, but you're hilarious.

I suspect this isn't new. It's just underdeveloped people behaving in underdeveloped ways. Men and women have extra-marital affairs for much the same reasons. It's hard for me to judge whether your issue is with people manipulating others, or that they're giving out false or bad information. Or is it that you think that wrongful "selling" by women is somehow demeaning or damaging to themselves or others? What do you think?

@traveler, @Keyhole I'd say you'd need a well developed level of awareness to separate the message from the messenger. If someone is not at that level yet, then being attracted by the messenger in some way to listen to the message ain't a bad thing. Also, if you're at that level then the message itself is probably not that advanced. However we all have to start somewhere. I think being confronted by Leo levels of awareness from the off, is probably too weird or just plain inaccessible to most. It's less to do with fetish and more to do with just plain old lack of awareness. I partially agree that Anna Brown is using a certain amount of "feminine" manipulation to give herself an air of mastery that she doesn't possess - i.e. she's getting away with it. But hey, don't we all do this to puff up our feathers from time to time?

There is no time. So everything must be happening now. Another way to see it, is to know that everything that can ever be experienced, will be experienced eventually. Consciousness is eternal. So how come you can't see through someone else's eyes? Because "someone else" and "eyes" are mental constructs. "You" are also a construct. Lastly, if it helps, "you" are like a radio tuned into an infinite field of consciousness. Your life is just one radio station amongst an infinite number all happening at the same time. The last one gives me hope, that I can "retune" myself and lead a better life. How do I do that? By dropping all my old mental constructs.

What a joy! Society programs us like automatons to constantly be doing, producing, striving, achieving, judging, consuming, comparing. When you feel lost or that things are pointless now, those are just withdrawal symptoms from the programming - the crutches have been removed and you feel off balance. But what about life purpose? What about it eh?

Consciousness is prior or meta to everything: time, space, matter, thought. The seed of consciousness is the ability to observe itself, and the flower of reality unfurls from it. Having thoughts is the same thing as dreaming is the same thing as reality is the same thing as consciousness. So a thought is really no different from the experience of the chair I'm sitting on - both are self-aware experiences. My chair is as solid as my thoughts. My chair is a thought story. It seems that thoughts must "come from" somewhere because we treat them like objects that ought to have a history. And that somehow some mechanistic process is happening underneath our conscious radar to produce them - but this isn't how reality presents itself. When you pay attention, reality is like a firework show. Things and appearances and stuff is constantly appearing and disappearing magically from and to nowhere and dazzling us. This is the real nature of consciousness, it is constantly creative and in motion. Thoughts are part of the show.

@Danioover9000 what you're really talking about is logic and language and not reality. It's similar to this statement: This statement is false. The above statement is really one about non-existence. Yet, clearly the statement exists. In other words, there is only existence, but non-existence "exists" within it (as a logic construct). If you're mathematically minded, existence is the Universal Set - it contains absolutely everything. You're worried about non-existence which should/would be everything outside the Universal Set. So existence contains everything - oh yeah, except, non-existence! So how to get around the contradiction? Either you change the definition of existence to include non-existence (eh?). Or people cheat the contradiction by equating the two (folks love that here). In other words the Universal Set has no boundary (a non-duality if you like) - there is no "outside" of existence. It's ok. Non-existence has already eaten you.

The destination will be what it is, when it is. What's wrong with a bit of reassuring drama along the way? Something to tell the grandchildren.