LastThursday

Let me take you by the hand and lead you to a new self. Let me take you by the hand and lead you to a different way. Let me take you. Let me take you quickly; slowly. Let me take you by the hand and lead you to Nirvana. Let me take you by the hand and lead you to a unity. Let me take you by the hand and lead me to you.

I'd say concentrate getting into a flow state around women. A flow state is a kind of calm focused attention with no mental resistance or chit chat. Up until you talk to a woman it's all positive body language and eye contact. This can all be learnt. Any negative intrusive thoughts you have at this stage will signal in your body language and women will spot this immediately. Learn to trust your body, let it flow and be itself, get out of its way. Once you open your mouth, you can stay in that flow state. You've already mastered speaking, so there's nothing to do but talk. Your bodies will know if attraction is there or not. If so, what you say doesn't matter too much. If not, then smile, say thank you and move on.

Interesting insight. So write the book for with your agent in mind...

Truth is knowing that there is no truth.

Perspective does not exist. Only this exists imagining perspective.

You can suffer physically, to go hungry or to have bad health. You can suffer mentally, to think the worst, or to lose hope. Most mental suffering comes from telling yourself bad stories, it's letting our imaginations run the show. The answer should be obvious, drop the stories. Keep bringing your attention back to the present moment, being present now and not lost in fantasy. It's not easy to learn, but it is simple. Meditate. Understand that everything that's happened to you, is no longer happening to you, it no longer exists. Let it all go.

@Raptorsin7 my shortlist: Intelligence - must be able to communicate well and think for herself Self sufficiency - must be able to operate without me Complementarity - strong in areas I'm weak in and vice versa (e.g. I'm hopeless at keeping contact, lacklustre at organising) Agreeable and level headed - not too based in emotional thinking to the exclusion of analytical thought (balanced), doesn't overreact or get easily overwhelmed, isn't moody or erratic. Spontaneous/adventurous - able to do things without having to plan weeks in advance, can leave home without make up, is comfortable with dressing up and dressing down, happy to try new experiences. Financially stable - is able to go to a restaurant or book a hotel without breaking into a sweat about cost. I'm going to have to look at her a lot, so ongoing attraction and to have that reciprocated. Not much really...

I found it! The picture of the place in NZ I was talking about two posts ago, although it doesn't really do it justice: Some I took of Salisbury Cathedral: I forgot about the rabbits:

(beauty alert) Thinking about beauty makes me emotional, it seems to stir something inside me. I want beautiful things in my life, beautiful people, beautiful surroundings, beautiful experiences. I went through a phase nearly ten years ago where all I wanted to do is be immersed into beauty, and I travelled, visited many many art galleries and museums and tried to have beautiful experiences. I was constantly emotional to the point of tears. Even now I can't work out whether my emotions triggered this seeking or whether the seeking triggered my emotions. I have had this constant nagging sensation that I'm missing something or I misplaced a part of myself somewhere along the line. A few minutes before starting to write here I worked out what it was, you guessed it: beauty. My listlessness and lack of motivation is caused by one thing only, and that is a lack of beauty to my life. I really thought that what was holding me back was my mediocre circumstances, and my mediocre self and that was causing my lacklustre approach to life. All I needed was to be more excited, more extrovert, harder working, more committed. No. I'm excited and attracted by beautiful things and people. In that race for comfort I've pared everything down to the essentials so that I could live as a distraction free life as possible. My teenage years so unbalanced me that I withdrew into austerity and self deprecation, I didn't want life to intrude and assert its unwanted distractions and tribulations. I was never allowed to sit still however, life won over me. At university I was constant motion, after that I had girlfriends and careers to think about, constant socialising and my family never let me off the hook with their incessant neediness. Inwardly, I gave up all responsibility to myself and lived for and through other people. Through no choice of my own (I think) I've been given the chance to get what I always desperately wanted: mostly to be left alone by the ugliness and neediness of life. I've managed to take a deep ten year breath and managed to regain some of that balance I lost all those years ago. I've stopped being beholden to anyone (except my employers and landlady). I'm really free to take flight. I've wiped the slate clean so to speak and now I need to fill it with something. It has to be beauty. Not some limited definition of concensus beauty, but a wider more embracing kind of beauty. I need to be grateful for the beauty around me I already have and even just to recognise it and nuture it. Also, I need to learn what beauty really is to me and pay very close attention to it and be guided by it. And lastly, I have to actively create it for myself, be inspired by it, excited by it and let it motivate me. When I fantasize about the things I want in my life and who I want to be, I realise now that there is a common thread. I'm ready to tug on that thread.

@gettoefl it's good to see the process from the other side too.

@Sine great advice, thanks for sharing your method. I have written in notebooks, especially when I was backpacking. I guess the takeaway is to get into a regular writing habit. I do journal here and that's it, but actually writing in a notebook means I can do it anywhere anytime. Have you written a book?

Happens once or twice a week. Normally around 9am UK time. I just assumed it was server load.

@EmptyVase cool. What value do you see in writing a book? To impart knowledge or to scratch an itch or just to show yourself can do it?

I was half asking out of getting ideas for myself, and half out of curiosity. I mean I was just wondering with all this writing flying about on the forum, there must be some writers or aspiring writers amongst them. I was wondering what drives people to write books. If @Leo Gura wants to comment, then that's great. @HypnoticMagician that's an unusual reason to write a book, a holy book in fact. So for you writing a book would be part of your overall life plan? Interesting.

My rule is to write at least 1000 words per day. There are days when the words just flow on the page and you get into a flow state. That is really motivating. I had a light bulb moment that I could just dump my journal on here into a book. I'm not sure it's quite a 1000 words per day, but I've been surprisingly consistent the last year. Maybe that's why it's playing on my mind. It would certainly be rough and incoherent for a book though. I think that's why I was asking about genre, and the reasons for choosing it. Sounds doable. When I read The Alchemist (a slim book), I thought to myself that I could write something like that.

I too was completely confused by the idea of love as being the same as reality, it just made no sense to me. That was until I saw Leo's video with Curt Jaimangal. Curt asks something like: "If God can create anything, how does God choose what to create?", and Leo responds that "God chooses to create everything, there is no preference". In other words, God creates infinity because God loves everything equally and doesn't choose between one thing or another (I'm sure someone can find the exact bit in the second video). That made things somewhat clearer for me. God creates out of love, and loves all of its creations equally. All of creation is imbued with that love. So that's nearly there, but I'm still not quite there with creation = love. I'm missing something still.

I thought I would talk about sacred spaces. Then I realised that wasn't quite right. Ok, I'll try and describe what I'm thinking about. The first kind of space is a sacred space that of churches and cathedrals. I have a fascination with these buildings from an aesthetic point of view - I'm not religious though. In this country Canterbury and Salisbury and Winchester cathedrals come to mind. The sheer bulk of these buildings inspires awe and they are normally taller and more muscular than all the buildings around them. But they are also artistic in their constructions with lots of ornament and figurines looking down at you. They are designed to humble you and make you realise how insignificant you are; but compared to what? The majesty of heaven, or God himself. There's much embodied maleness in these buildings. It's not that outside that I really want to talk about though, it only sets the scene. The inside is the sacred space, and it asserts its sacredness by assaulting the senses. First is the threshold normally gated by a massive wooden door, left open to invite the curious in. You get a glimpse of the interior from the threshold but never enough to work out what is going on inside. Once in you are subdued by the gloom, a kind of dim evening light which takes a few moments to readjust to. I always feel like I'm trespassing in spite of the open invitation. I suspect that feeling is induced on purpose, but I can't quite fathom how the trick is done or for what purpose. You then realise that you're inside a cavern where all sound is muffled and diffused throughout the space. The impression is always that the inside is actually larger than the outside (as if that were possible), and more delicate and oddly more feminine in character: that you are going back into the womb from where you came. Light and sound and form are being played with inside these buildings to induce a sense of sacredness and for me it always work - they are works of genius. Some of these aspects that are captured in a cathedral occur naturally, and I have got the same sensations of awe and sacredness by accident as it were. I find being outdoors during dawn or dusk to be like this. I remember sitting outside one evening on holiday by our converted barn, and just being dumbstruck by the massive disc of the setting sun, the warm breeze, and the gentle ever quietening sounds of the countryside. The dim light inducing a kind of wariness and heightened attention. I find dawn equally magical, I remember being picked up in a minivan to travel to the airport and go to the pyramids in Egypt. I was tired, but excited, the sky was perfectly clear and was as if the whole world were slowly coming alive for the first time. Prayers sung from the mosques could be heard in the distance, and I understood why in that moment - the coming of the day is sacred - and I felt it in that moment. It's like exiting the cathedral and being changed by the experience and being born again. Some of what I feel in cathedrals, I've experienced inside caves, the tourist ones anyway. As you walk through them again the light is dim, and they can be cavernous or at least the sound is reflected and modulated by the flat and jagged edges of the walls. The wetness and sound of water rushing or dripping coupled with the strange forms and colours of the rock, can send you into a kind of hypnosis, which alters your perception; it feels like another world. Cathedrals have borrowed their tricks from caves. I remember clearly being on the South island in New Zealand and being sat on a boulder overlooking a huge lake of glacial meltwater, framed by the snow tipped mountains off in the far distance. The water was an otherworldly opaque cyan, and I felt like I was inside someone's idea of a fantasy land. Other than the bus full of backpackers, the place was serene and completly still. I sat on a boulder and just looked on awed. I can honestly say that after a while I was overwhelmed emotionally, it was too much beauty. But behind the beauty was that sense of experiencing something sacred and being rudely reminded that this is how I was meant to feel about my existence.

Because the "everything" you're referring to is a temporal "everything" and so it doesn't exist, because there's no time.

Ha! At least I'm right once a week. What I said only applies on Thursdays.

I'm in Tunbridge Wells, Bristol would be a good drive away. I might have to take a boot full of jerry cans to get back.

An alternative way to live, the video speaks for itself:

I've asked myself this (probably morbid) question, what's the difference between someone you haven't seen in a week, versus, someone who died you haven't seen a week? The only difference is inside your head. Also, people change over time. If you only ever visited a person once a year, they would become different over time, did that younger version die? Do you mourn the loss of that younger person? Maybe.

As Leo might say, you can love everything that happens to you. Love everything whether you expect it or not.

The entirety of existence came into existence now. The idea of the universe evolving and changing is a trick.