LastThursday

You have a week to live. What would you do? I've never been a fan of this type of approach to motivation. I think it's meant to get you thinking differently than you normally would, and make you realise that you can be different. It's an admirable sentiment, but the setting is too morbid. I think I would choose one of three responses, but I'm not sure which one: Just carry on in the same way and do nothing special, Have a mad rush to get my affairs in order and say goodbyes to those I care about, Wallow in self pity and anxiety. It's not a good motivator. Mostly if you only have a week to live, then you are gravely ill and probably bed ridden. It seems like the only thing I wouldn't do is have time to do all the things I've always wanted to do. As a general principle for living life, it's also not that great. Firstly, there's that constant underlying fear of your imminent death and not knowing exactly when it's going to occur. You could say, that indeed none of us know when death will occur, it could happen today crossing the road. But using that as a guiding principle is not necessarily motivating, but actually neurotic. I think it would install an uneasiness and impatience in a person. Secondly, it's short termist. We're all very prone to short term thinking in any case without emphasising it. Some of us want to live "in the moment" which is short termism in the extreme. Constantly thinking that you have a sell-by-date doesn't allow you to plan for the long term. Whilst it's true that we don't really know what's going to happen in the future, we should at least guide ourselves towards some sort of destination and plan it. Put another way we have better lives by having a long term purpose - the week-to-live principle goes against this. It's all stick and no carrot. The last jab at the concept is that it falls into the quick fix category of self help. People have busy lives and short attention spans, quick fixes sell better. Can you really solve motivation problems in an individual by scaring them with death? I suspect not. No. Leave death to those that are actually dying next week. In fact, go and visit them and get a taste of what death could be like - and it would make you appreciate more what a joy being alive is. That is the right way to use death as a motivator, to highlight how good being alive is. Most demotivation in life comes from being down on life and just seeing and being in negativity. A well-adjusted human is naturally motivated, an actualised human is naturally motivated. Self actualisation is a long term process, because society is not built around it, and there's a lot of societal programming to undo, to make it even harder, largely you have to deprogram yourself. Luckily it's a virtuous loop; the more you actualise the easier it gets, and the more motivated you become. That is exactly the sort of thing that should be taught. How do you sell such a long term process to the masses? I don't know. I suspect you either have the right temperament and circumstances, or you don't. Only very few of us will actualise.

I think it largely depends on which point of view you take. If you're an idealist then consciousness is supposed to be the bedrock and so consciousness must be constant. There's a link with truth also, because truth is that which is constant. Your view on time and space and all that stuff comes into it too. If there is no time and no space, then it's clear that there is still existence/consciousness so that is constant (my original answer). If there is time, then all moments are strung together by time itself, so time is constant - equally for space. In other words whatever feature of reality you choose to focus on, it must be constant in order to be able to focus on it.

Don't know if I've written about this before here - probably - tulpa creation. What is a tulpa? The concept is basically an imaginary friend on steroids. You create and maintain a separate entity - normally a person - using thought alone. See Wikipedia for more. I don't know why exactly the idea appeals to me, after all I'm in 40's not my 00's . I think it ties in with my philosophy of thinking that we should all regularly inhabit different characters, as a way to expand ourselves, and to not get too stuck in ourselves. To be honest this is what we all already do (see earlier posts), so the only difference here in creating a tulpa is doing it consciously rather than unconciously. Effectively, you are already a bunch of thought-forms vying for attention and control of your body. Further to this, everyone in your life - male and female - is also a thought-form. Unconsciously created tulpas abound rattling around inside you. I thought I would create a female tulpa, because why not? Ok, well this is kind of related to my earlier phase of needing to work through what feminity meant for myself (yes I'm male) - we're all a balance of feminine and masculine qualities - whatever they are. Earlier I was interested in tipping the scales and embodying or expressing what I thought were more feminine qualities. Creating a female tulpa would allow me a chance of feminine creative expression even if just in thought. I have plenty of material to work from, half the people in the world are feminine. I'm not sure where exactly this need to explore a more feminine identity comes from, it's certainly not from sexual orientation (men don't turn me on, but I can appreciate a good looking one and why he's good looking). However, I was often confused for a girl when I was very young (longish hair), I have enjoyed the odd bit of cross-dressing (but hadn't done a huge amount of it). I was a little bit of a mummy's boy but not that much. In my twenties or thirties I was questioned on occasion whether I was gay or bi (nope) - even my own sister wanted me to work it out by experimenting, which I did and I definitely wasn't. This questioning made me wonder what about my behaviour made people think I was. In my forties I've worked hard to be more masculine in my character to stop this confusion in people; especially not to put off potential women I was interested in. This is not something I've ever spoken about to anyone. Lucky you, you're the first or at least in the low tens! I do think that I'm lost translation though. Being much more masculine just isn't really me, it's just a show. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's inauthentic, because I am being an authentic masculine version of myself. It's just that it takes conscious maintenance and suppression of what I used to think were "natural" expressions of my character. So here we are. In a way the female tulpa perhaps would be the more extreme version of that younger more femininely balanced self. She would have to be the female me. I have a good template as I have a sister! But we are quite different characters, so I can't just steal her character for myself - it's also kind of creepy to do that - the thought-form I already have of my sister doesn't need corruption. But despite our differences we are the closest two humans in terms of upbringing and some of our thought patterns and behaviours. Name your tulpa. I originally called her Christine, but wavered and eventually settled on Charlotte (I like CH right?). She kind of needed her own mind and body shape, but to be averagely me. When I first tried I found the maintenance side of the tulpa onerous. My visual imagination is good, but imagining a whole being from nothing except some vague template I found to be very tough. I had a long hiatus where I just forgot about the whole thing. But the idea didn't really go away. In adjusting myself to be more masculine the more feminine side of me screamed louder. Life is like that, some things are impossible to ignore and like it or not eventually you have to deal with it somehow. When I came across hypnosis videos online, there were various "feminine transformation" videos, for men I presume. The sheer fact it even grabbed my attention spoke to me. I'm a curious sort so I tried it out and it had a curious effect on me. What I had missed with the tulpa creation is what I should have done all along and that is: embodiment. After all, it was embodiment of more feminine qualities that I was missing in the first place and the reason for the tulpa creation. Embodiment is far more potent because you become the character, albeit a female character in a male body. It allowed me to explore the tulpa more fully. Although, I may have unconsciously shied away from what I felt could be a slippery slope - to what, I don't know. Some of the videos were straight become a woman type affairs. Some of them were more to do with cross-dressing. Knowing NLP well enough, I anchored Charlotte (the name) to these hypnotic moments of feminine embodiment so I could "recall" her more quickly. In a strange twist (the universe provides) I temporarily became the owner of a bunch of clothing which I promised to take to charity. I took the opportunity to actually cross-dress, specifically to fill out the Charlotte character. You really are the first know this, and as you can imagine it's odd spilling my guts like this on many levels. It's giving me the outlet I need to explore more feminine characteristics and it feels like a holiday from my normally straightjacketed-everyday-masculine self. How far am I going to push it? I don't know, it's quite possibly just a phase and I'll get bored with it. Maybe when I feel I've rebalanced myself again and can put an acceptable version of myself for public consumption it will end (acceptable to me and to others). What it also allows me to do is experiment with being someone else, albeit in private, but my hope is that the good parts of that experimentation will spill over into @LastThursday and go some way to "fixing" parts of me I don't like or "improving" other parts. I haven't actively bought any female clothing; not sure I will. I have bought nail varnish. I am very very weary about being caught out cross-dressing. Already I've probably been caught with a neighbour peering through my window from across the way. Part of me doesn't GAF, part of me really does. The social stigma is just too much. Definitely my friends can't know and neither can my family not because I don't think they wouldn't be accommodating, but because I'd never hear the end of it and I don't want to be identified by it. I also have a social image to upkeep unfortunately. In a bizarre sense I feel I'm not really cross-dressing but more like dressing a shop dummy called Charlotte in order to bring her to life. It is definitely fun and strangely cathartic though. Hey ho.

It's only when the noise stops you realise how peaceful it can be. Classic tune!

@WelcometoReality putting my meta-hat on, I wouldn't use a word at all. The problem as I see it is as soon I try to explain whatever this is, I'm already into map and not territory. I think I was using the word existence in a sense with as little map as possible, which explains my nitpickiness. But even using the word this is going too far. Maybe I'm wrong and there isn't any constancy whatsoever, just a story about constancy that I believe: after all how do you compare this moment with this moment with this moment? Aren't they all different in quality? Is there really any commonality at all between moments?

I think "arises" is too strong a word, unexistence is always made with reference to existence. But I'm just being nitpicky, please ignore me. Your sentiment is correct.

There aren't any rules about how you should use the forum (generally), so it's not possible to misuse the forum. <<< this me procrastinating ahahaha...

That the world seems to carrying on existing. Existence.

@Carl-Richard this is good stuff. Even if you are deep into systems type thinking, it's always good to keep in the back of your mind that you can go beyond it. For example: A system is always part of a larger system (a car is part of traffic, the internet). A system nearly always interacts in some way with other adjacent systems (a car emits air pollution). The difference between a unit in a system and its relationships is often arbitrary. For example a cell sends out chemical signals, those chemical signals (relationships) are themselves units. Or, in physics a gluon (relationship) is the same as a quark (unit), both being disturbances in the underlying field. Or a person (unit) speaks (relationship) by disturbing the air-system. Anyway I'll stop there. Good post!

Liberation is a perspective. And yet the delusion doesn't come from nowhere, it isn't a separate thing. The delusion is made of the same stuff as the non-delusion.

There really is nothing to be said. If I take a warm bath, should I actually say something about that? There are an infinitude of things I could say. None of them are actually a replacement for the sensation of taking a warm bath. The sensation of the warm bath is a truth, any talk about taking a warm bath is not the truth but an account or a story. Why talk? We talk for one reason only and that's to convey information. Information is just the process of revealing something that was previously hidden. If I never told you that I took a warm bath yesterday, then you would never know: it stays hidden and no information has been conveyed. Talking is for the benefit of others. But hey don't you also talk to yourself? If you find yourself doing this, then what purpose is it serving; don't you already know about everything that you could talk about? I don't need to inform myself that I've taken a bath, I already know it. One purpose for talking to yourself is to maintain a sense of separation. Somehow you are the entity that experiences a warm bath, but also (separately) a person who needs informing that you took a bath. Talk is always about recognising separation, because talk is always about revealing what's hidden from others, and the implicit assumption is that others are not part of your private (hidden) world. By treating yourself the same way (by talking to yourself), you a bolstering a sense that you are a person separate from your raw experiences. You try and prop up your raw experience by talking it through with yourself as if you were someone else. You become two: the person who listens, and the entity that is being. The person who listens learns to distrust that raw experience as something "other" than itself, it only ever trusts what is being said to itself. Raw experience is relegated to a lesser thing and truth becomes the words you say to yourself and others. In order to even be able to communicate at all with someone else, a huge amount of context has to be factored in first. The elephant in the room is that you have to assume the other person has a mind (at all) that can understand your communication. You have a theory of mind, their mind, and you use that theory to talk to them. When you talk to yourself, you are applying the same model of "theory of mind" to yourself; in this way you give yourself a credible excuse for having a mind. It's no coincidence that having a mind, thinking and talking to yourself are often used synonyms for each other. The reality is is that you don't have a mind per se. What you have instead is a theory of mind, a construction useful for communicating with. That construction takes on a life of its own and becomes a layer separate from raw experience. Effectively the "theory of mind" is misused in applying it to yourself, because you have nothing to reveal to yourself, it's all there in plain sight. In the process you do yourself an injustice because you install within yourself a separation that is parasitic to your direct raw experience. It's like blowing up a balloon called "self" and then talking to it as if it were real. How often have you talked to yourself and given yourself reasons for your behaviour, or a story about your past, or about how worthless or incapable you are? This is just you talking to a "theory of mind" entity, it is self-sustaining. Talking to yourself keeps the balloon of the "self" inflated. Other people have no choice but to buy into your story of yourself, because they have to use "theory of mind" to communicate with you. This also keeps the balloon inflated: I believe that you believe that I have a mind. Having a mind would seem inevitable, really, a very convenient thing. Can the balloon of the self be popped? Should it be popped? Would you take the bottom Jenga brick out and watch the tower of the self collapse? Yes. What remains after is then the raw experience which was always there in any case. You no longer have a mind, but you are still alive and breathing. Are you then a zombie of sorts? No. It's nearly the opposite, you are no longer constrained by your own "theory of mind" or conception. All that negative self-talk and all those stories you couldn't escape no longer mean anything, poof, they disappeared in a puff of smoke. You are free just to be without the burden of keeping the balloon of the self constantly inflated. You can still plan and talk to yourself, but you no longer take it seriously or identify with it, it is just another thing happening in raw experience: just in the same way you can choose to take someone seriously, or just let them talk without it affecting you.

It makes me kind of sad when people tell my they don't feel confident. I understand their discomfort. I see two types of troubles. The first is not being confident in something someone wants to do: a friend told me yesterday that she likes the idea of singing in a choir, but couldn't possibly do it in a small group in public. The second is not feeling confident in general and this is a less defined sense of unease. Another friend told me she is taking acting lessons so that she can feel more confident; this is a woman who regularly trains people in a hospital setting. I felt sad for her, because on the surface I wouldn't have said she wasn't confident - it made me wonder what was going on. There is another source of not feeling confident and that is lack of experience or practice. This to me is the more comprehensible side of confidence. It seems natural to want to shy away from doing things you have little experience in, especially if you are being judged by other people. We can all safely say we're not confident in lots of different things: I'm not confident in fire-breathing for example. Generally, this sort of confidence can be gained by practice and exposure. If you're keen on learning something new then that excitement can be enough to push through any feelings of unease. The lack of experience may be driving the feelings of anxiety, but it could be that exposure to something new is just too terrifying to consider doing, or even after prolonged exposure you still don't feel confident. Saying you lack confidence can just be a code-word for a lack of self esteem. I've noticed women masking a lack of self esteem with saying they're not confident more so than men do. One of the reasons is it's unacceptible for men to say they lack confidence, it's a trait all men are expected (tacitly) to have - women have it slightly easier in this respect. However, I think women suffer from different types of self esteem problems than men and this arises mainly from being judged more harshly than men are in some areas. Neither men nor women feel openly comfortable with saying "I lack self esteem please help me". This is the sadness I felt for my friends. In my own history I've hidden my lack of confidence (self esteem) by steering well clear of situations that would need me to expose myself. Or, when I got older I took on the fake-it-till-you-make-it mentally. I realised that even if I lacked confidence people would accept it if you just faked it. I was only ever to reach this position because over time I came to the recognition that I was worthy of attention and love and, I slowly regained my self esteem. What is the outward difference between faking it and actually being confident? Nothing. But what a shame it is to fake something and feel awful every time you do, than it is to just confidently enjoy a thing. If I could engender confidence in someone, then I would; it seems to me to be at the root of lots of mental health problems, suffering and just plain not enjoying being yourself. There is no worse hell than being someone you don't want to be, with no form of escape. Are there solutions? Yes. Exposure and practice is one thing, keep putting yourself in uncomfortable and novel situations, push yourself to do it regularly - it will work wonders for self esteem and confidence as a result. Get professional help, therapy and talk through your self esteem problems. Put yourself in a supportive peer group, one that you feel comfortable with and where you can practise just "being yourself"; this will make you realise that you can be who you want to be and be accepted for it. Fake it, honestly it works, done enough times your self esteem will slowly improve and you will be accepted for your fake confidence, eventually you'll stop needing to fake it. Lastly, just know deep within yourself that it's possible to change and feel completely differently about whatever is filling you with anxiety and dread - there is escape - you can be confident.

Postmodernism, language and truth:

Spirituality is not about counting.

Breathing in is good and breathing out is good.

Planning. It's a word that both wants me to roll my eyes and fills me with anxiety. As a consequence I try to do it very little if I can. As alluded to in my earlier posts about directions of perspective (past, present, future, inward, outward), I'm very much inward and past/present. I have to actively work against my natural tendencies to dwell on the past and myself, i.e. looking to the future and planning (outward perspective) is unnatural for me. The mix of anxieties I have about planning, is centred around commitment and communication. Making a plan requires a certain amount of commitment, carrying it out requires a larger amount of commitment, and nearly always other people. The other people aspect is where I come unstuck. I have a natural aversion to asking for help, asking for stuff to be done or just generally asking. I know this to be a deep seated anxiety with me, and has taken a huge amount of work to even get to a reasonable place with "asking". It's still a work in progress (it's one of the things I absolutely hate about myself). I'm sure it's rooted in my past and character... hang on, here I go off on past and inward... back on track now... Also, other people can be a pain in the posterior, in terms of just plain being unhelpful when being asked questions (and my personal discomfort which goes along with that) or when trying to get them to do things in a timely manner. Managing people is definitely something I try to avoid like the plague. However. I am very good at communicating (look at the evidence...), so some of that stigma I used to feel about looking dumb in front of other people when I was younger, has largely evaporated, and I'm relieved. But there's still a residual of that in interactions. I also used to be a lot worse at thinking on my feet. I'm a kind of mull things over kind of guy, especially if it's in an area I don't have a perfect understanding of; being asked to make instant decisions I find paralysing. I have improved on this also, through sheer weight of practice. Anyway, so much for people. When it comes to simpler types of planning, the type that doesn't involve people or just one other person perhaps (and I know them well), I'm a lot more comfortable with. If can do everything online without having to interact with people at all then woo hoo! The 21st century was made for people like me. So I actually find mentally planning activities quite easy: it's so much like programming, step by step, B follows A. I find myself being extremely good at my time planning and being punctual to events. So there is a bit of me that sort of enjoys planning stuff for myself, I can commit to that sort of planning quite easily. But if I start to need to write stuff down and use a calendar then forget it! I'm allergic to calendars and schedules. I'd rather wing it and keep it all in my head (yes I'm a sadist, but it's good practice for the memory). As you can imagine I'm shit at remembering birthdays. Execution of a plan can be problematic. Any lengthy plan that isn't a one-shot process (happens in one block of time), can go off the rails. This is for several reasons, but mostly I get bored and and distracted very easily. For example at work stuff can take weeks or months to complete. I find it a real grind to constantly work against my tendencies. The only half-solution I've find is to work on several different projects at once to stop the boredom. Distraction is a lot harder to fix. The only two things that have any effect is self-hypnosis and using the Pomodoro method (30 minute chunks of work) and lots of music. Maybe the 21st century wasn't made for me (Internet I'm looking at your distracting ways). I don't have proper solutions to either my boredom or distraction (supposing they are actual real problems, after all, the nature of my work imposes certain ways of working on me so perhaps the problem lies there, in a word the problems are: systemic). I suggested on a post on the forum today for someone to effectively make a 25 year plan so they can get a handle of how much luxury of time they have to fulfill their dreams (punctuation?). Of course I'm a total hypochrite and I apologise, but it's still good advice. Anyone is allowed to give good advice right? In fact; one of the things that helps to keep me on track and give my mind something to latch on to is precisely what I don't do: write stuff down in a calendar. I absolutely detest being nagged to do something - a friend of mine does it incessantly and I ignore him mostly. But it's a lot harder to ignore your slightly younger self nagging your slightly older self, I ignore myself at my own peril. I think I don't do will with that guilt and so avoid calendars altogether. What strange beings we are! Another problem I have with more complex planning is research. All reasonably complex plans needs a bit of time to research stuff, because generally you have holes in your knowledge. Either you fill in your knowledge by asking other people (big red cross) or you go to the internet (better). I generally don't like the scanning type of research. Say I want plan a cheap journey to France for a holiday. My idea of hell would be to scour the cheap flights for hours looking for that one bargain. Just, no. However, I'm happy to read about spin in quantum particles for hours on end. One is mindless scanning, the other active reading. It seems to me that there are certain types of people who seem to love just scanning for hours on end. Why? What is wrong with them? All this comes down to one thing: I don't enjoy being coralled into something long term, especially if it requires unwanted exertion and/or is something I find uninteresting. Call me a commitmentphobe. My lack of planning desire is to my detriment though and I'm feeling it intensely. Ah well.

This was the natural order. Although, I would argue that change (in society) is happening ever more rapidly mostly because of technology. And the Elon Musks of the world are not that young.

@UDT just take the bull by the horns. Do the maths. Say you want everything done by age 50. That's (50-25)*365.25 = 9131.25 days. What can you do with that many days? You could break out a spreadsheet, with each day on each row, and then start planning your future. Look at the spreadsheet once a month and update it, mark off your achievements as you go. Then stop worrying about how much time you have left.

Your knowledge should be like a mountain range, wide and impressive with some high peaks. The high peaks are there because you were interested in climbing them. To come back down to earth. It's useful to get a basic grounding in many different areas of knowledge. This allows you to get a more informed feel for what interests you so you can look into certain areas in more depth. Also you start noticing connections between different areas such as music and mathematics, biology and spirituality, art and chemistry and so on. Those connections themselves are interesting for their own sakes. Behind it all is just plain curiosity about how the world works.

Consciousness is all contrast, left is not right, blue is not red, high pitch is not low pitch. Consciousness is all similarity too, green is like red, low pitch is like high pitch, right is like left. The contrasts only sit within the things being contrasted, the contrasts themselves have no existence of their own. It's very tempting to say consciousness is only the infinite interplay between difference and sameness - in ever increasing complexity. In fact I will: "Consciousness is just the infinite interplay between difference and sameness." Sameness is a kind of echo of the non-dual nature of consciousness, difference is its creative spirit or prediliction to evolution. Consciousness evolves because it is groundless, contrasts are a pointer to its absolute relativity: it defines itself with reference to itself.

Not looking after your health in your earlier years. Not keeping fit and eating healthily in your later years. Not keeping an eye on your health to catch things early. Doing things that will affect your prospects of getting work or getting finance: convictions, prison time, upsetting influencial people. Getting into debt by living beyond your means.

How do you stop yourself from becoming the centre of the universe? There's always a tug-of-war between the collective and the individual. We want to both belong, and to be recognised for our uniqueness. This two-faceted reality expresses itself in many ways. At its base it's really down to aspect. If you are the collective then it would seem the individual is insignificant and perhaps powerless. If you are the individual then the collective is less important and brainwashed and restricted. Which is right? One model for existence is to invert the big bang idea and make you ground zero. It goes like this: here I am, what has to be true for me to be here? Then a wave of inference crystalises out from the fact of your existence. Out of this wave of inference the whole universe is created. You are the big bang, but it isn't matter, time and space that is created but subjective experience. This squares up with our tendency to solipsism, and perhaps narcisism, we have the intense sensation that we are at the centre of our universe. Right at the heart of that universe is the sensation that we are invisibly observing everything unfold before us, and all perhaps just for our amusement. That idea of observation is our unravelling however. That observation is happening at all presupposes that there is the universe and then an observer separate from it. That idea is individualism at its core, that we are separate from everything else and somehow special and privileged. What is the observer exactly? Since it is not part of the universe, it has none of its qualities: no mass, no time, no space. It hangs in its own platonic realm. What happens when the universe is removed, what is being observed then? This is actually a non-question. It seems like one needs the other, a universe without an observer is not a universe at all. An observer without a universe is not an observer in any sense. What is more productive is to fuse the universe and observer together into a universe/observer. In fact the two are one thing, one needing the other, like the two faces of a coin. But now since the observer doesn't exist independently of the universe, there is no longer a ground zero and there is no special place removed from the universe. Equally with the collective/individualist dichotomy. Neither are true, it is one entity with aspects of both depending on how you divide things up. Even individuals must bow to the collective (even if just to survive) and the collective is nothing without individuals (it needs variety and originality to survive).

When I said the aliens didn't land again in my last post. I did kind of slap my head. Who could forget Portishead? (me obviously) Arguably they started the whole trip hop genre. This sounded really different from everything else in the 90's. But somehow it had less of a long-term impact than synth music in general did. I'd say it still stands the test of time for originality in any case.

Maybe, but @Nahm says the same: My justification for not believing the "bottled-up" theory doesn't come from nowhere. But it's too long for me go into without derailing the post. Although I'm not trying to be dismissive of people's problems: Same.

Pretty much I'd say. Awareness is nine tenths of the law so to speak, that's the way you cope effectively with any problem (of any size) in the long run. You've got your head screwed on so any neurotic impulses you may have now will just a be blip for your future self I've never been a fan of the container-full-of-stuff-needing-to-get-out idea. We're nothing like that. This should be dropped for a more I-am-me-expressing-myself-moment-by-moment idea. It's closer to the truth. Identifying with yourself in the moment is less prone to being neurotic. You don't get stuck on being this or being that so much. Anyway that's my prognosis ?