LastThursday

@Nak Khid that would definitely constitute existence. My belief in the rock would be 100%. Unless of course it kills me - but that's a different story.

@Nak Khid I Want To Believe. Belief doesn't bring something into existence, but belief is necessary to keep something existing.

How do we know anything exists? How do we know we are not being hoodwinked or gaslighted or are delusional? The simple answer is faith. A thing exists if we believe it does; and when we stop believing it stops existing. Mars definitely exists - well it does for me anyway.

When I browse the different threads here, it kind of makes me sad how there's such an underappreciation for how astounding and beautiful people are. The skills that people show and the beauty they create in the world often blow my mind. I'm a visual and auditory kind of guy. When I listen to great music or look at stunning art or craft, I feel a certain kind of excited love and gratitude (for being alive), which I wish I could feel more often and share with other people. Anyway, enough gushing. Here are two tokens of what I'm talking about. The sheer atistry, patience, tradition and dedication astounds me: The sweet tones of a human song bird, and history of two other geniuses woven together (Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder):

I will definitely check that out. Thanks! I was using beauty as just one example of a transcedent experience - so more of a proxy than focussing on beauty itself. Beauty is relative to the observer of course. Some other types of transcedent experience might be: Awe - experience the magnitude of the Grand Canyon. Sex - intense emotional arousal with a new partner Fear - the thrill of a bungee jump Gratitude - a person risks their own life for you Meditation - sitting by a river and experiencing oneness with nature Knowledge/Novelty - being shown a new way to do something So you can see that all these transcedent experiences have one thread linking them all: love. They induce love and a stronger connection (to God?). But I was also going one step further and saying that people can also induce those experiences in you. It may be sponteneous or on purpose or it may not have even happened yet. But when it does happen you will also love the person who gives you that experience. The conclusion is that you should love everyone, because anyone is capable of introducing you to a transcedent experience. Coming from a position of love in all your interactions is very different from the norm (on this forum) I would say.

I appreciate your all comments. It's not so much the artistic products I was interested in, as you say there are other threads for that. It's tricky for me to articulate what I was trying to say. There's a lot of judgement and criticism on the forum and a lot of "trying to fix" other people by providing opinions. I wanted to point out that there is a way to counterbalance the negativity when interacting with people. This also applies to people in everyday life. I was using beauty as an example of an experience that viscerally connects oneself to the world - a transcendant experience. Some of my personal preferences I posted above. I think we often lead our lives in a way that is emotionally disconected from reality - and this comes off in the way we deal with people. One way to re-connect is through beauty (it's not the only way though). When someone produces a thing of beauty such as a song or a kimono - our immediate response is one of love. We love the beautiful art, but by extension we also love the person or people that created it. By love I mean admiration or appreciation or respect or such like. But I also mean a visceral emotional reaction that connects you with the art and the person. It's hard to hate a person who produces beautiful things. But should we love a person before they've created a work of art? Yes most definitely. Because every person has the potential to produce beauty in the world. Every person has the potential to induce in us a transcendant experience and reconnect us to the world and each other. It's hard to hate that potential. It also helps us recognise that we too have that same potential and we should love ourselves for that - no matter how "broken" we feel we are.

That's not true. You have a passion for changing your life for the better. You are working on yourself - that's very worthy.

I guess you're looking for an answer from an enlightened person or at least an enlightened answer. I can only offer a list of my (stage Orange) opinions and ideas that I just made up on the spot: Take the bigger picture. Is the business successful? If yes, then what the directors are doing works. Leave them to it. Tell your employers that you think there is something wrong with their tactics. If you're valued, then offer to quit unless they do something about it - call their bluff. Suggest to them that they could make more money and be more succesful if they didn't piss off their organisers. Give them examples where they've gone wrong or in the least that they talk directly to some of their aggrieved organisers about their relationship. Show them exactly how they could save money, waste less time, be more effecient etc. Or just the stoic appropach and carry on being as mindful and open as possible, keep caring for and loving both your employers. Trust that the situation will evolve over time, they will evolve and you will also evolve over time - and trust yourself that you'll reach the point where you know exactly what to do. Feel free to tell me to go away or ignore the above if it's not useful. Respect.

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.