LastThursday

It looks like you know exactly what you want. Go do it! Be true to yourself. It's also the perfect time to experiment with lots of different things and people and not to tie yourself down too much. If your intuition told you the guy wasn't right for you, then it was the right decision, you will manifest other amazing people in your life in due course.

In a debate you have two sides with different points of view. Each side then tries to convince the other that their point of view is the right one. The tendency is to fight and defend your point of view, even if the other side is being reasonable or has some good information. It tends to shut you off from learning and deconstructing. The opposite of debating is to be open to new ideas and possibilities. Even if you have your own point of view, you still listen to what others have to say and you have some curiosity about their point of view. You ask them questions to gather more information, and you're prepared to admit you might be wrong, or admit you don't know everything. You go away and integrate the new information, and deconstruct yourself. The only way to improve yourself, is to change. The only way to change is to kill off bad ideas and take on new ones. You have to want change. New ideas come from other people or your own insights. You have to listen.

Aging is entropy in action. The body constantly fights destruction from entropy using energy from the environment (food). Entropy is destructive because it is easier to break things than to fix them. The environment doesn't care about your body, it is constantly under attack (viruses, bacteria, temperature, cuts, bones breaking etc). In order for the body to keep fixing itself it needs an abstract notion of a template (self-identity) to work from. If the template (self-identity) was perfect, then it could indefinitely undo the damage from increasing entropy (it always increases). But it is not perfect, so entropy and descruction wins in the end. Interestingly, some animals can win at this game of entropy: some types of jellyfish. They are effectively immortal. But even they probably couldn't survive being cut up into small pieces (another form of increasing entropy). To reverse aging would require us to have a better knowledge of the body's systems than it does. And even then we would have to find a way of making those repairs happen. That's a very tall order.

In fact self-awareness is primary. The idea of information lives inside awareness. Imagine a screen full of pixels (information) a million of them. Then you have a million screens. At which point does all this information become self-aware? How can it?

disjoint with ok enough of this madness

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@UpperMaster this is a great insight to have about yourself. The sensation you're feeling is that of "levelling up", it can feel weird and confusing for a while. Success can be scary. It requires commitment, responsibility and it may require you to keep fighting to stay successful, it takes work. Success can also be an anti-climax, the journey can be more exciting than the result: some people fear that. But not achieving success or even trying can also be suffering in itself. When the vision you have of being a successful self doesn't match the reality, it can drain your emotions and chip away at your self-esteem. You may get a short term hit of pleasure by being defiant and talking yourself out of success, but there is a longer term price to pay.

Thanks ChatGPT. The irony is that technical jargon is used exactly because the words have very specific meanings, and if you know the jargon you can communicate more clearly. I'd say unless you're using very well defined words, there's no way of escaping potential confusion. Just look at the use of the words: God, consciousness, Devil, enlightenment, nothing, free will, vibration on this forum. They cause no end of noise in threads (personally, I enjoy the semantic chaos), but they lead people to go round in circles with no resolution. It's a miracle we understand each other at all!

Good use of language requires the speaker and the listener to be at the same level. For example, if I talk about how to build an aircraft engine, I'm expecting that the listener has a certain level of understanding. Most confusion arises because the listener is not on the same level as the speaker (in terms of understanding). The listener either doesn't understand, misunderstands or doesn't bother to listen - but that is not their fault (it's no-one's fault). If you want clear communication then, you must match your speech to the listener's level. That's one aspect. That takes skill on the speaker's part though, to both gauge the listener's level of understanding, and to be able to speak at that level. It's not easy. Scientists can fail here (e.g. John Vervaeke, Joscha Bach). Another aspect to good communication is being semantically clear. Usually, this involves not contradicting yourself. But it also involves clearly and deeply understanding the connections between ideas, and being logically sound. Most people either don't have enough depth around a subject, or don't know how to be logically sound. It also often involves having a bigger picture view of a subject. Most good communicators are able to switch up and down their level of communication, and to zoom in and out of a subject. Also, to be a good listener requires some amount of curiosity. If you're not understanding something, then you should be questioning the speaker. In a more formal setting you would take notes to ask at the end or to go and investigate further yourself. Ideally, speaker and listener should question each other. Ultimately, communication is always two way. There's responsibilities on both sides to create decent communication.

An expression of my more hippy side

That is rough. Why are you homeless, what happened?

I see, I understand thanks. If God itself doesn't know, then there are things beyond God's knowledge and/or abilities? Or would God choose not to know?

@EugeneTheSage I try and practise dream control, or dream affirmations. Before I fall asleep, I talk to the dream part of me. I literally address it directly: "Dream part. Are you there? Yes. I want my dream characters to be interested in me and to go on adventures with them tonight. Is that a deal? Yes..." If you ask for the same things every night, eventually it starts working. My dream characters are a lot more pleasant and approachable nowadays, some of them are even too nosey. Another thing you can do, is review your dreams and every time you had an unpleasant or annoying situation, picture a bid red cross slapped over it. This gives the "dream part" feedback that you don't want that again. For example, I had a lot of dreams of unpleasant toilet scenes and these have stopped now. I guess it's the dream version of affirmations.

I must say this is a great example of how threads should be on the forum. It's like a breath of fresh air. Anyway, ignore me, carry on...

Except that most self-help material I've come across is not targeted at a particular sex. Self-help is broad and includes lots of categories. You're right that some categories may be biased towards one sex or the other, but on the whole it's not. Nutrition or improving mental health or having "rules" for life has nothing to do with sex. If you look at the top selling self-help books, like "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" or "Atomic Habits", these are gender neutral and have nothing to do with what you're saying.

Of course you want to defend your point of view. But it doesn't make sense. Women also engage in self-help, so they have to be sold to as well. It makes no sense for an industry to sell to just half the population. Unless you're thinking all self-help is just carried out by men? And if so, what's your justification for that?

Could you explain that further? I'm not understanding.

The primary motivation behind the industry is to make money. If they can do that by playing on men's status anxiety then they will. However, I think the general thrust isn't about status at all, but simply everyone wanting to "be better" in some way; that's what sells.

But who or what control's Gods mind? And is that deterministic?

No I found various sources on the internet. My ideal would be to create my own scripts and then have perhaps have an AI voice read them to me. It's just like being a marionette, where moving one part affects tension in another part. For example, talking can make the arms and hands tense, moving the hands can move your tongue, and so on. But for ultimate flow and relaxation in your body one thing shouldn't be affecting the other, except where it's natural to do so. The different parts of the body need to work in conjunction, but they also should be able to act independently.

It's a sheer joy when this is achieved. I have practised with self-hypnosis (guided by voice recordings) for about 18 months, and at first I could not completely relax, I would notice my tensions would creep back unconsciously during the sessions. But lately, there are times when I am completely relaxed with no tension whatsoever and can maintain that for longish periods (during hypnosis). Of course, you need some tensions even to hold yourself upright and move. But if you pay attention, things like moving your eyes or breathing can trigger tensions. Like moving your eyes can trigger tension in your jaw or neck or face. So work also needs to be done there, to sever that connection. Moving your eyes for example should be completely effortless and relaxed, and so should breathing. I would also advocate doing some light stretching exercise (I do some Tai Chi) before meditating. This helps with lessening tension.

So you mean you repeated the loosening of the tension over and over again and then it got less? Exactly. Over and over and over again. Eventually the body gets the message and learns how to relax all by itself. I'm with @flowboy and @Cathal in saying that tension is related with past trauma and stresses. These are often held in the body. The fight or flight response requires your body to be in tension and prepared. If you were or are always in stress, then the body learns and permanently encodes this as tensions. I would go so far as to say that reprogramming the body not to be tense, is one way to re-contextualise past traumas. It's a two-way process tension<-->trauma. Solving one helps the other. But I'm no expert in this. It's instructive that I fractured my left arm when I was young, and that is exactly were I find the tension.