LastThursday

There's already enough entertainment (and drama) on the forum without having another section for it. Greater controls on journals would be great, especially blocking everyone/specific people from commenting on your journals (although personally everyone is welcome on mine). And an automatic status in the title indicating that it's locked for commenting. I don't see much point in making journals completely or partially private either.

I'm going to moan about words and how much of philosophising seems to be hot air around definitions. What I've noticed is that there is a lot of this: take a word (e.g. love) and put forward your opinions and thoughts about it. The method is to hope that something new pops out of the woodwork and you end up having a different slant on the word than everybody else has - or at least your aim is to be deep and insightful. Whist this process can be good to garner greater understanding about seemingly everyday words, to me, it seems like a limited exercise. It's rather being like a talking dictionary, informative but somehow unsatisfying. Some of the watchwords that go through the mill (on the forum) are: love, spirituality, god, sexuality, being, infinity. I guess I'm being a little disingenuous, all these watchwords are really concepts, but my sentiment is the same. There is a reality out there that doesn't neatly fit into the confines of concepts. This is why philosophy is so convoluted, because in reality there are no boundaries to the concepts that are being expounded upon: love bleeds into spirituality. If you're a novice in the process of philosophy it's very easy to get tangled up and lose your way. What is a concept? (I'm doing philosophy now bear with me.) A concept is like a machine with interlocking parts that together perform a function. Words then get attached to the concept so that we can talk about them or at least refer to them. Words have a very definite feel to them as if they're made of solid stone, and that is their function: to make communication easier by reducing complicated concepts into short verbal utterances. Words are a shorthand for concepts. But concepts are also a shorthand, they carve out a space from the infinite permutations of reality to make it more manageable. So there's a two step process of reduction here from reality to concepts to words. For "reduction" read "distortion". Words and concepts are really a distortion of reality; love and sexuality don't actually exist at all. This is why I feel philosophy can unsatisfying. But if you tell someone "love doesn't exist" they will probably argue strongly with you that it does, or think you're suffering from insanity, or that you're having a hard time and need more "love" yourself. All this explains why it is impossible to definitively answer questions like "what is god?" or "what is gender?" or "what is the meaning of life?", because all those words and concepts are imaginary and ill defined. If you want a pretence at definiteness try mathematics. Never trust anyone who says they have the definitive answer.

How do you go about not letting the past define who you are as a person? And, why would you even want to jettison the past like that? It seems that the younger you are the more disproportionately you are affected by your environment - that is especially true for the people you grew up around. This strong imprinting in your younger years carries through to you right now. We are defined by a collage of different experiences both good and bad. A lot of this imprinting is subconsciously (despite me not liking the word) expressed in the body: our mannerisms, the way we use our bodies, our fears, our emotions, joy, sadness and so on; the rest is expressed as episodic memory and thinking. When you're told to "let things go" we attempt to simply stop thinking about some past event, or to try and think about it differently. Often this fails because we in fact don't know how to "let go" fully, or even we're too attached to our past and we don't really want to let go of it. This gets to the heart of the problem of changing ourselves and stopping suffering. Most of the change we experience as adults is just window dressing. I asked a friend of mine recently out of curiosity: "Do you think I've changed?" - he's known me for about 25 years - "No you're exactly the same". I found that kind of depressing because I know for a certain fact that I've done a lot of work on myself; I think he meant it as a compliment. But it confirms to me that most of the change I thought I had experienced is not noticeable to others - I feel like a different person to the one 25 years ago, but on some level I'm not. As a thought experiment if you were sat in a lab and a mad scientist with his fancy gadget offered you the chance to selectively wipe your memories (and associated behaviours), would you do it? I suspect that most people would be terrified and say no. We are our memories, we are our behaviours. We cherish those as our identities, even the ugly bits. It is completely possible to wipe your memories however. More precisely it's possible to change the way our bodies expresses trauma. Memories in themselves have no emotional content, it's our bodies that supply the emotion and feeling of constantly "reliving" our past. The past is gone of course, which makes this process perplexing: what is the point of all this reliving and suffering? Wouldn't evolution have been such that we just live our lives from moment to moment without a care for what already happened? Yes, we need to learn from our past mistakes and our past achievements, but once learned why do we often continue to have all that attached emotional baggage? Personally I'm sick of my own behaviours, not because they're bad or evil per se, but because they just don't gel with who I want to be, they're counterproductive. And most of those less-than-ideal behaviours are rooted in my past and younger years. But because they're imprinted into my body and emotions, I can't just think my way out of them. I've mostly done the work of thinking and recontextualising most of what already happened to me as a kid - in that sense I've already let go and forgiven - what needs to change is how my body expresses itself right now. When my coach says to me: "go set up a meeting with X" and I get the tightening feeling in my chest, that is what needs to change - no amount of thinking will change that reaction. The irony about all of this, is that I already know exactly how to change these bodily reactions. This is what NLP taught me. In the story The Electric Ant by Philip K Dick, an android realises that he's an android and starts playing with his own programming tape, and experiences a change in his reality. This is the feat I'm trying to achieve. Having someone external (a coach e.g.) can help a great deal, but ultimately the sensations are in your body not theirs, and only you can really understand them and change them. Every time a traumatic or negative reaction arises in your body, it gets reimprinted with your current context. So even the simple act of continuously engaging with trauma can change your body's reaction to it (this is how exposure to phobias can help cure them e.g.). So the trick to speedy change is to reimprint your reactions in the right way and strongly. NLP does this by triggering a strong positive reaction simultaneously along with the negative one - and this is nearly guaranteed to change the original negative reaction. This is how to play with your own programming tape. The only difficulty is doing this on yourself, because you're trying to do two things at once, and having someone else (an expert) help you do this is far more effective. But even if you know how to change your own bodily programming, would you want to? I find that even identifying my body's reactions to situations is hard to pin down, let alone change. And my body is very attached to all that trauma... damn it.

An overview of how gender and womanhood is intertwined:

More here:

@Realms of Wonder it's natural when you change your lifestyle that you start feeling like a different person. You're not going insane, you're just realising that who you are is more flexible than you thought before. Once you taste freedom from your old self, there can be a tendency to over indulge in that new freedom. You're just experiencing a period of readjustment and it takes time. Let things take their course, but just keep steering yourself in the right direction. It looks like you'll be ok:

I'm guessing what's lacking yet is the realisation of unity. You are everything. Everything you do and say affects everything and everyone else.

When you're doing self development, it's important to have some sort of sign or signal that you're actually developing; otherwise you're just spinning your wheels. This happens a lot. There's a fair amount of experimentation whether that's self imposed or from external sources. It's often dressed up as something other than experimentation though: formal therapy, heroic life goals, serious serious stuff. That's not to denigrate it, experimentation is just fine with me - and mostly you need those external sources to inspire different ways to experiment. Experimentation requires being truthful to yourself, playfulness and a fair dose of courage. Signals. For me one of the primary signals of change is lightness. All the times I've had major shifts or breakthroughs I've felt like a weight has suddenly been lifted off me. This is telling, because it's my body that is feeling the release. Most change happens in the body and with how you feel moment to moment. How does the body know how to feel release? I find that super interesting, because it implies the ability feel "released" was there all along, it's not something the body dreamt up in the moment. I mean it could be, but the release is positive and feels good, the body already knows how to do those things. I would argue that feeling "released" is the baseline or tabula rasa for the body. The body also learns to feel tense and knotted up, as life throws bad experiences at you. It does this as a form of self-preservation, it's fight or flight. With enough stimulus the body encodes the fight or flight directly into its neurology, and you're permanently in tension. Despite that, the body still knows what it is like to not be in tension, it just choses not to express this. The acquired tension, then manifests in any number of ways, with aches and pains, recurring illness, and bad mental health. Once you have a breakthrough, that lightness feeds into everything else. You find yourself behaving and thinking differently from before, and sometimes you even think "why the hell was I like that before?" - even better you don't care about how you were before, you just enjoy being your new self. Thing is, you can keep releasing indefinitely, and each time it feels better, and that's because you're slowly returning back to your authentic baseline. That is what "authentic" actually means: nothing is impeding your natural expression. For me, I have a lot of hang ups about how I should be expressing myself. It's all very controlled, and all very much in the name of self-preservation. I'm embarrassed at myself when I do express myself openly, and I find myself always having to pretend I'm not embarrassed. I feel that expressing myself is always way OTT. And I have to constantly soothe myself by saying: "look you really didn't have to worry about it, you were just fine". This kind of toing and froing is exhausting. The answer is to release it all, and embrace a new and joyful normal.

Try this with subtitles on: And for something different:

I often wake up with tunes going around in my head. This morning it was this: I didn't question it. But I did put it on the laptop and had a little dance. This is unusual since I'm no dancer and I'm not a morning person. Oh, and my brain's stuck in the 80's...

Futuresight Our mission is to build a sustainable future for our planet, by using systems approaches to tackle some of the most intractable problems we now face. We see ourselves as catalysts for change by taking many ideas and viewpoints into consideration. Open positions: Director of Sustainability and People (Sus) Responsibilites for exploring long term sustainable options in all areas of people, technology, agriculture, energy, environment and finite resource use. Director of Polymathy and Creativity (Poly) Responsible for pulling from many different resources, facts, ideas, meta views, big picture, systems thinking, and synthesising new ways to solve difficult problems. Director of Arts and Technology (Artech) Responsible for putting all aspects of technology to use in solving problems. Visioning and advertising, problem modelling, promotional material. Directory of Chronology and Storytelling (Chron) Responsible for visioning, mission statements, advertising, social media, media, lobbying, bringing groups together and finding new ways to work together. Responsible for planning and executing on those plans. How we work: We have a flat organisational structure, where each department works very closely with each other to bootstrap a future we all want to live in. This is a typical work flow: Sus will take a problem such as how to create sustainable transport. It gathers statistics and does impact modelling both now and going into the future. It will identify problem areas and end goals. Poly will then take these results and pull in information from related areas of the "system" in which the problem lies, for example the impact to people, culture, wildlife and use of resources and come up with many scenarios and solutions. It will work closely with Artech to vision the feasibility of those solutions technically and with Sus to ensure long term sustainability. Once best working solutions are in place, Chron will build a vision and narrative and get agreement at all levels, then create a plan to execute on. This process iterates throughout the lifetime of the project. The first problem is bootstrapping the organisation from nothing.

She makes me laugh so much: And sort of related. Maybe I'll try this myself some day?:

NLP aims to collapse dualities in most of its techniques for lasting change. It does this by anchoring two different "states" (aka a duality) and then triggering both anchors simultaneously. This has the effect of reframing the previous duality into a new unity - the two previously distinct states become one state which is different in character (hopefully more positive). It strikes me that a lot of spirituality is also about collapsing dualities together. Both things are agents of change.

I went for another one of my famous (in my circles) urban hikes yesterday. I do this mostly as an escape, but also to get to know a place better. Also, I like the warm satisfaction of having completed a mission. This time it was about eight miles from Uxbridge to Heathrow, those places probably won't mean much to you except maybe for you international flyers. London is big and there's lots to explore. I usually like some reason to walk from point A to point B, maybe it's just to continue from where I left off last time (Uxbridge), or maybe have points of interest (Heathrow and planes coming and going) along the way. But the main reason is exploratory, to "feel out" different areas and how they segue into each other. There's also a sense of just being with your own senses which eventually brings you into a meditative state. The route itself was mostly uninteresting unfortunately, busy main roads and mile upon mile of suburban housing - but it didn't matter so much. Each area does have its own character, and it's possible to imagine how a place was countryside not so long ago, with bits of greenery, woods, commons, golf courses and parks hinting at how things used to be. The highlight of the hike was spotting two buzzards slowly drifting low overhead, whilst I was traversing a high street. This was an impossible sight. Buzzards are rare even in deep countryside and are mostly seen flying high over farmer's fields - and never over a city. But they must have strayed from outside of London. The route I walked mostly skirted near the west side of the greater London boundary and beyond would have been fields and reservoirs. The synchrony with the huge and noisy metal birds at the end of the route wasn't lost on me - they also coming and going from outside of London. I felt I could have walked further, I normally like to do ten miles or so and the day was blazing sunshine. But I'd reached my intended destination and I could feel my body wanting to rest a while and I was hungry, so I gave it up when I reached the tube station on the perimeter of the airport. Pushing further would have spoiled the experience in some way. I do hike with other people sometimes, but I find the experience completely different. The silences have to be filled and there's a more urgent intent and tempo to the walk, as if the destination is the prize and glory is simply completing the hike. Certainly sharing the walk with someone is more like an adventure and if you've done the route before you can be a sort of tour guide pointing things out along the way. Also, the time seems to go quicker. Neither mode is good or bad. If I'm feeling meditative or contemplative, then I go alone, for energy and adventure I go with someone else.

More @LastThursday poetry (don't roll your eyes): Come as you are, I don't expect no heirs or graces, just contorted faces, not complacency, some insatiable screams and shouts. Come as you are, I expect close up faces, lips in embraces, nothing fancy, a flat table with ice cream and dinner places. Came as you were, I didn't expect nothing racy, but woman were we crazy, like ecstasies, not embarrassing, just sated dreams and mouths.

I'm trying not be sucked in the vortex. What vortex you ask? This one right here, the journal. I have my reasons - which I may journal about... So. Yes. Anyway. Cold showers. I have taken to taking cold showers every morning in the dark. I've found that taking a cold shower - despite how initially nasty it is - gives me a slight high. Straight after I wake up I often feel slightly euphoric, and having a cold shower seems to intensity that sensation. Why dark? Well because bright light seems to wake me up too much and kills that euphoria. I'm sure Wim Hof could explain why to me. The only drawback is that I don't shave. A long time ago I started shaving in the shower without a mirror, just in case I ever go blind, and it also saves time and faff. Standing in a cold shower and shaving is nearly impossible, plus a warm face is preferable for shaving. It's a phase.

I do wonder about my night dreams sometimes. I was generally under the assumption that some amount of processing was going on in dreams - the consequence being that dreams are a kind of reflection of waking life. But just sometimes dreams are so off-the-wall that I wonder if instead I'm actually a voyeur peering into a different world. To the dream: There's a big white-walled room. I intuitively know it's the meeting space of some hotel. As the voyeur I'm looking down disembodied from the ceiling like a three-quarter view, and a woman (possibly blonde) is dressed in a sparkly cocktail dress and open toed flat shoes with fluffy bits. There's a sensation of coldness and ice. In fact in place of a carpet the whole floor is strewn with crushed ice cubes. She starts to crunch tentatively across the ice. As she gains her confidence I can see that she's actually quite drunk and is swaying as she walks across the room. The ice begins to slowly melt and turn to slush and she wades through it. Somehow, I know that she needs to drive home from whatever partying she's been up to. And, it turns out she's a truck driver! I desperately want to tell her that it's a very bad idea, but I have no way of getting her attention. WTF? I can't relate this to anything in my life. Maybe I've had the privilege of peering into another reality? Nice.

Take my hand, in white, take flight, we'll go together, flowing to the four corners, breathing forever. I'll be your moonlit path, through the dark, until the morning sparks, then we'll shine bright, forever. Take my hand, in white, come fly with me.

Compression. When you have a bad time, you notice more things. The passing of time is relative to the number of things or events you notice.

By being strategic. Sit down, breathe, and start thinking about what the most important thing to fix is, right now. Maybe it's money, maybe it's looks, maybe it's sex, maybe it's connection. Choose one of those things to work on first. Being strategic includes these things: 1. Coming up with new ideas. 2. Commitment. 3. Taking action. 4. Doing some unpleasant, boring or repetitive tasks. Be prepared for those. 5. Regular review and introspection to make sure you're getting closer to your goals. It will take a different mindset from the one you're used to. But I can sense that you have a strong desire for positive change.

I'm interested in not being deluded - which is a form of truth.

It's normal to question yourself when you start being successful. Because it's a new situation, it can feel fake or even overwhelming. I would say if possible just slow down your orders, but don't totally stop. Creativity has its ups and downs, that's normal. Creativity needs to be fed from various sources, find those sources as part of the process. Give yourself space to do some of those old things you used to do, go consume, recharge your creativity and then go back to it. Don't worry about age, unless you're on death's door, it doesn't matter at all.

House prices are a real problem. I'm in the UK in the South East of England. Over the road is a three bedroom house with garden, which is selling for around £600k (~700k euro). I rent, next door the one bedroom flat/apartment is going for £200k (no outdoor area). I didn't realise things are getting expensive in Spain too. It seems to be for several reasons here in the UK. Land is incredibly expensive, because there is limited land to build on. The cost of labour and raw materials is also expensive. If you could buy some land you could probably build a three bedroom maybe for £300k. Also there is the British dream of home ownership, everyone wants their own home. I think for example in Germany it's a lot more common to rent. So there's a cultural element to it. But this creates a pressure on the housing market. There is also population pressure, the density of people in the UK is relatively high compared to other European countries. This creates demand outstripping supply. Lastly, reading between the lines, it seems like the house building industry here likes higher prices because it makes for higher profits. So it artificially creates a supply problem which keeps the prices high. It works because of the London effect, where wages are quite a lot higher than the rest of the country - and those workers are able to afford the artificially inflated prices (and commute from the South East into work), which keeps the market buoyant. Also the government doesn't really seem to want to address the root cause of the problem by making more land available. There's a lot of talk about building affordable homes, but no real action. Saying that, house building has increased a lot in the last ten years here. I see building going on everywhere, but all at highly inflated prices that us normal people can't afford.

Truth is only available via psychedelics? Really? Which, of course, is another story, told by you, what a good imagination you have.