LastThursday

Software engineering is hard. Running a succesful business is hard. Most self-employed software engineers I know simply hire out their services and normally get longer term contracts if they click with a particular customer - so that's one route. If you're in the app space then you either you have to carve out a niche for yourself, or you have to beat the competition, on price, on design, on functionality and so on. If you're a one-man-band then that will require a lot of hours grinding away and some amount of luck that your product will get noticed. It's possible to do, but it needs lots of love and time. You need patience, stamina and lots of in-depth knowledge. Saying that, software updates are de rigeur, so you have scope for refinement and improvement over time, and people will accept that. That means working on several products at a time, say three, is a good way to go to spread the risk (you're gambling time and money and reputation). Start off very simple and find a niche and build up over time. You really have to do a bit of market research to find out what's popular or what people want, and then find that niche to settle into. In terms of running a business you either pick it up as you go along, or take some sort of introductory course to get your feet wet.

An interesting talk with links to religious practices too:

Agreed 100%. The one that looks like your mother seems to give you a hard time

@Flowerfaeiry a different way of looking at it is this. Imagine you have two people, one you know very well, say family member, and one a stranger. What's the difference? They both look similar, i.e. two arms, two legs etc, they can both talk to you and have their own minds and personalities. For all intents and purposes they are basically the same. And yet, in your imagination, you treat them very differently.

??

It's becoming apparent that I've got a split in my personality or ways of interpreting the world more like. Playing chess regularly, I can see the parallel with the way I think a lot of the time. Programming for work, involves taking many factors into account and then finding a solution within those contraints, not too dissimilar from playing chess. I've learned to think effeciently that way over many decades, it's not natural per se, but I do have a predisposition for symbolic representative thinking. The other side of me is more "artistic" for want of a better label. I'm a bit of a dreamer or drifter, I like being spaced out, out of my mind. That all is, when I'm not in logical-mode. Younger, I would encourage that dreamy sensation by getting drunk (it's UK cultural and acceptable). I dabbled in various substances, but only by proxy, I've never actively sought it out, but neither have I rejected it if it was offered. I also directly enjoy the arts, especially music of all descriptions, I enjoy making music. Of all the arts music is the one that immediately connects me with something that isn't logic - my truer self. I'm very reliant on intuition and gut feeling to make decisions or choices. It makes for a strange mix. I like building models of how the world fits together, by plucking from my knowledge-base and then intuiting my way to an answer. I like to try and defend a position to see if holes can be poked in my mental models, but in the last instance I'm not wedded to my constructions. I like to keep things fluid, which is my more artisic side coming through. A lot of what I've learnt through Actualized is pure knowledge and fact building. But paradoxically the more I absorb, the less and less relevant it seems. Some amount of the constant inner turmoil I feel is the tussle between logical sense making, and intuitive, being, sense making. I think in the last decade I've slowly swung from the former to the latter. There will come a tipping point where I start regarding logical sense making to be the less worthy of the two ways of seing things: as much as I love thinking abstractly. After all, if I'm building mental models of the world, but also not ever holding a particular position, what is the point, where does it lead? How much better it is to take the world as I experience it, directly and head on, without the distractions of the mind.

@Gonzalo what's the connection between authenticity, ego and contemplation?

Hahahaha. Are the two instances of the word duck different in any way? Ceci n'est pas une pipe, non?

The juxtaposition does strange things to me:

For the rock to exist, it has to be differentiated from everything else (not-rock). Consciousness does this job of differentiation. This is dualism. So if there's a POV then it's within the consciousness in which the rock exists. A rock continues to exist when not being observed, because it isn't in fact separate from everything else. It's like a hologram, all "objects" exist within the hologram at all times, but consciousness "moves around" the image to reveal (i.e. differentiate) different objects. Technically, information in one part of the image is spread over the whole hologram. But extending the analogy, consciousness itself is also the hologram. Consciousness works at very many levels, some less aware than others. Consciousness can split itself into many islands of higher awareness (people). We all share the same consciousness or POV if you like.

Before the thought you just had arose, what was before? Was it nothing? Did nothing exist? Maybe what was before was everything. And now it's a different everything. That thought didn't arise, it wasn't erupted from nothing, it blossomed from everything, in one fluid motion. Everything was involved in making that thought. The very marble of that thought was sculpted from the everything. The thought had the purpose of the universe behind it and it's source unimaginably complex, even if the thought was simple and plain.

Actualising yourself does involve being more authentic. And, being more authentic involves expressing your natural impulses more, because being inauthentic is about suppressing the impulses. If you let loose and just openly express your impulses as they arise, then you're being purely authentic. It's never really possible to be totally authentic though. We have to live in society with all sorts of rules and things you can't do or say; some impulsive behaviour goes against those rules. Also, impulsions, whilst authentic, are often short term and in the moment or don't take account of the bigger picture; so they can end up being detrimental in the long run. Sometimes you have to work against your impulsions and authenticity to actualise more fully. Your impulses will only ever manifest whatever stage of development you're at: impulses will change over time.

More chaos: Speak, listen, hush, prison, expression, suppresion, supplication, interrogation, -tion, -tion, -tion, Spell, wish, extinguish, anguish, impish, impudence, improper, impoverished, -shed, -shed, -shed, I, you, me, he, miss, sir, madam, doctor, duke, lady, address, impress, heiress, dress, -ess, -ess, -ess.

Impulsiveness is pure authenticity. But there's always negative connotations around it. We have to live by rules; pure authenticity is without rules and restrictions. Impulsiveness is unregulated and dangerous, which is why new forms of impusiveness are always checked and frowned upon. Impulsiveness is creativity. Ever done anything impulsive and regretted it afterwards? Impulsiveness is always a problem. But we need it to be free.

Never post anything whilst drunk. I think it's informative to try and be coherent in different states of consciousness. The informativeness comes through because reality isn't actually coherent at all, it's a maelstrom of chaos in a constant rush. It's so easy to slip in your footing and become crazed and incoherent, reality is constantlty forcing you that way anyway. Spirituality and self-development doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever. Why don't you want to wake up? Because it's insanity - scary type insanity - real reality is scary insanity. It's all over the forum and the journals, the constant toying with insanity, right there on your doorstep. Yes, no, yes, no. Being authentic is to be relatively insane - sane by your own standards, insane by everyone else's. What we all really want is to be ourselves, our insane, unrestricted, un-owned selves. To do and think and behave as we truly want. To not be slaves, to be free like birds, and cats. We are prisoners of our own minds. So much for alcohol. For some chaos, I'm going to learn this:

Is our mental life completely disconnected from our bodies? It's an odd thought that your body could just be some sort of avatar, devoid of any inner contemplative life, a container if you like. Sure, the avatars come in all kinds of configurations, but it kind of would be possible to swap one soul for another. This idea isn't new, the idea of a soul that animates lifeless matter is an ancient one. If you take someone's brain and go look at it, it's just a grey mess of neurons. One neuron is pretty much the same as another (within reason). It's not as if there's a neuron for yellow, some neurons for Kylie Minogue and others for the taste of bourbon. There's no possible way the stuff of brains makes our subjective experience. Not unless some diabolical process is happening whereby the patterns of neuronal connections and their activity are leading to consciousness. I mean, brains are bodies right, it's all avatar, empty and devoid of consciousness. One brain is pretty much the same as another brain. Yet, we have the strange situation where our avatars are pinned to our consciousness. There's a high correlation there. In certain situations we may temporarily forget about our avatars, but they always seem to come back. Examining it, the whole set up is really quite peculiar. Here goes: Here is a world, for all intents and purposes infinite in extent. It is a world, it has structure and orderliness, it can be explored, it is consistent from moment to moment. So why not just stop there? Why the rigmarole with having a body and all its problems? Literally a middle-man to relay communications from one world to the other mental world. It's like the body was engineered as an interface, part physical, part mental. The only conceivable use for a body in this scheme, is to restrict freedom of exploration right down. We have invented cars and aircraft precisely to overcome the restrictions of the body. So where exactly is the point where the mental world touches the physical world? The real diabolicalness is that the physical world is couched directly inside the mental experience. It only takes some re-contextualisation to realise this (possible awakening, but I think you don't need to go that far). Even a materialist would have to concede that reality "out there" is being interpreted by a brain, it's just a map of the real thing, our conscious experience is nothing like reality. And idealist would simply say that it's all consciousness - basically the same conclusion as the materialists. So it seems like consciousness has different types of activity that are somehow connected to each other. There is the seeming activity of the physicality of a brain (neurones and all), and then the correlated ethereal activity of mental life, so much so that if you damage a brain, the mental activity changes in lockstep. In a sense you're comparing oranges and oranges, it's all consciousness that is the explanation, there is no interface. But that seems unsatisfactory. Mental activity and qualia are so different from a lump of gooey grey brain, how can the two possibly be interfaced to each other? What is the linkage between the two? One less obvious explanation lies in relativity. If consciousness is about anything it is about relative intensity and relative difference of phenomena. Red only looks red in comparison to something that is not red. If everything were red, then well, there would be no red. Sight is not sound because they are in opposition to each other, up is not down and so on. This is the origin of qualia. This is the sum total of awareness; awareness is noticing difference. Consciousness is hugely elaborate, but it is done by intricately elaborating relative differences. Seen from a different viewpoint, awareness is a symmetry breaking activity. Symmetry in this case means sameness. When you become aware of a new phenomenon in consciousness, you are breaking the previous symmetry. So consciousness is a symmetry breaking machine, it creates stuff from nothing, it creates difference from sameness. Is this enough to explain qualia? Nearly. It's very obvious the world of consciousness phenomena has orderliness and structure, which is born from differences. It's like painting by numbers: before you fill in the colours the picture still exists, there is already structure there. My intuition is that the "filling in" of structure in conscious experience is arbitrary. The startling conclusion would be that your conscious experience maybe similar in structure, but absolutely different in perception to mine. The "filling in" nature of qualia is utterly inexplicable, like asking two different children to colour in the same picture, how they choose to do it is random (but consistent). It's possible the filling in process is in fact completely random and just gets baked in through repetition. So the experience of the colour green becomes habituated, but its first instance was completely random, plucked from an array of all possible types of conscious phenomena. It would seem that the only proviso is that similar structures in consciousness get similar qualia attached. So red and green only occur in vision, not sound for example (although see synaesthesia). Red and green are similar in some ways. So in essence the brain is responsible for ferreting out structure from the world - through its dense network of neurones, and this structures conscious experience, but the attachment of qualia (filling in) to this structure is not done by the brain. After all, if the brain is doing anything at all it's very clear that it is a pattern recognition machine. To extend this idea, maybe any and all structure in the world (outside of brains) gets qualia attached to them (initially random for a new structure). The question then remains is there an entity whose consciousness is experiencing this world without using a brain? Yes, but it's more diffuse and sprawling than a brain. In a way our brains are all part of the same thing, but their dense structure concentrates pattern recognition to a high level, making it seem like we're singular entities disconnected from each other. But this is not the case, we are connected to each other diffusely through the other structure recognising entities in the world. The universe is a giant brain, and we're part of it - it's all consciousness.

@ABM1294 if you mean a propensity for oneitis, then I have nothing. But if you're currently hung up on someone unobtainable, cold turkey all the way, zero contact, it's the most sane way.

@Late Boomer I'm sure there's some subtlety to meaning. It's not entirely words. It can be a felt sensation, something like familiarity or recognition. For example seeing a family member is meaningful, seeing a stranger less so - there's no need for words to have meaning. A lot of spirituality I would say is outside of words and language, but still meaningful. Maybe it all boils down to: if we're aware of something, it is meaningful.

I've kind of become fascinated with colour perception (another phase), ever since I did some self hypnosis and found my perception of certain colours was changed. Specifically blues and purple and pinks became very vibrant. I was surprised by this, how could simple suggestion change my experience of reality? Anyway, it got me to thinking if it would be possible to perceive new colours, ones never seen before. I was reading about colour opponent theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process) and something occured to me. When mixing colours it is either additive (light) or subtractive (paints) (https://blog.thepapermillstore.com/color-theory-additive-subtractive-colors/). So you might imagine mixing red and yellow to get orange and green and yellow to get lime. But what about blue and yellow? With paints you would get green, and with light you would get white. Neither are yellowish-blue, the colour doesn't exist in reality (because of opposition in the visual system). How to make this colour then? Stare at the image below and cross your eyes slightly until the blue box lines up over the yellow box. You may have to get closer or further way to make it easier. At first one colour will win out over the other, just keep blinking. After a bit you get a strange kind of shimmering effect, between the colours mixing. But after a long while things will settle down, and you'll see a yellowish-blue. Welcome to a new colour.

@ZzzleepingBear I'm arguing about the other half of the title. I have no view on the "no thing missing". If the "me" is separate, then the sense of existence or reality of anything is coming from somewhere that is not-me, the "me" doesn't get to decide what's real or not, even itself. This aligns with my reality, I don't stand there dictating what is real and what isn't, it happens automatically without my involvement. The "me" isn't a special case where the "me" gets to decide that it itself exists, no, it just is that way. In fact it is only awakening that allows "us" to see the illusory nature of the self, in which case a decision of sorts is being made on what is real or not. You see, it's all back to front. All this talk of illusory stuff and no me is coming from a position of being awakened. But until that point, everything is very real including the self, and there's no choice about it.

These two ^^^ sum up my feelings about it. No, it's always just real, in the sense that something that's real must exist. To say that illusion is unreal is wrong, the illusory also exists (and so is real) that's why we have a word for it. I suspect this is what's rubbing me up the wrong way. If something is eventually recognised for not actually being real (i.e. existing), then it simply ceases to exist any more, to retroactively say it never existed is again wrong. Awakening does not erase the fact that an "I" was there before. To tell a "me" that "you don't exist" is simply false. If "me" then ceases to exist and then you say "you don't exist", it is meaningless or of no particular importance. Even to say "you're an illusion or construct" is closer to the truth, but the benefit is also doubtful in that case. I use the word "benefit" because it is only a "me" that needs to hear it.

Falling in love in slow motion. I don't know if this is more of a hypothetical idea. I don't feel as though it's happened to me as such before, but it seems interesting to follow its trail as a thought. The starting point for it is attraction. Something or someone in your environment grabs your attention and you are attracted - I mean grabbing your attention and attraction are basically the same thing. It would seem to be a binary response in that way, either it grabs you or it doesn't. But binary or not, there is always an associated intensity to attraction and also attraction is multifaceted, often it's a jumble of different aspects that attract us to someone or something. Ok... What's love in the context of attraction then? Well maybe love is just repeated attraction. In time we learn to associate the bare attractive qualities in a person say, with a warm fuzzy feeling of... of... I don't know, I can't think of any other word than "love", alright, cozy familiarity. What I'm suggesting is that love takes its time to manifest and grows from the seed of attraction. This is the difference between love and lust, lust is just strong attraction, it's more of a Pavlovian response: attraction, lust, attraction, lust; there's no warm coziness. I am of the mind that love can be asymmetrical. So even if love slowly grows in the mind and body of one person, it doesn't have to manifest itself in the attracted person. This seems blatantly obvious, but often "love" gets dismissed as childish or as infatuation precisely because it isn't being reciprocated and that in turn is because society is deluded into thinking love is necessarily a two-way transaction, it isn't. When you hit spirituality, one-way love seems to be the higher form, but just to take the joy out of it, it stops being romantic love then and becomes God's love or whatever. How long does love take to arise? Again, love is not binary, it's a sliding scale from nearly nothing to full on. At the lower levels of love I would say it was difficult to disambiguate it from attraction. This is at it should be: attraction is the preliminary stages of love, they are one and the same thing. All this talk of love and attraction can be taken more generally for things as well as people, but I'm primarily talking about people here. To muddy the waters further because attraction itself comes in various intensities, it can be very hard to recognise if you even are falling in love or could possibly fall in love. It seems like in the normal state of affairs, there's attraction (possibly asymmetrical), but one person persists in expressing their love and wins over the other person to their way of thinking - so much for every romantic movie ever. But I say there is a falling in love by stealth and innocently: the attraction starts of innocently and nearly subconsciously, but exposure over time cements the attraction and love begins, again mostly subconsciously. Then that love intensifies over time and gets to the point where one day you're sitting there with a cup of tea, and realise "Damn, I can't stop thinking about X. How and why did that happen?". On reflection, that has happened to me a couple of times. And then in the next breath: "Nah. It can't be love, just behave @LastThursday. Save yourself for real love". And if my life were Sleepless in Seattle (it's not), I would go all out and try and consummate my newly discovered love. I think falling in love in slow motion is much more prevalent and goes unnoticed than is let on, mostly because it's dismissed as not being worthy or real. I object! It's as real and valid as any other form of love, especially romantic love, maybe even more so. Next time you look someone in the eye, ponder if they're in love with you without knowing it.

@Gianna a few thoughts, let me know what you think: The body likes to be in homeostasis, so creative energy requires to push it away from that. So the body signals its dissatisfaction (resistance) through anxiety and panic. Maybe the body overreacts sometimes? Signals from the body need to be interpreted and elaborated on (by the mind). The body doesn't really signal concepts such as anxiety and panic, it just gives out sensations. Is it possible that the mind could be misinterpreting the signals? Could it be that the anxiety and panic is caused by the mind first and then the body follows suit? After all, we need to live in a web of social responsibilities and rules and expectations, and using our creative potential to its fullest means breaking away from a lot of socially derived belonging? Maybe we're fighting our own mental conditioning and our bodies complain in sympathy?

Then proselytising that "there is no you" has no value. Or does it? I mean why go around saying something that doesn't make a difference either way? The fact remains that there is a "me", and here I am. I can appreciate that "I" could be re-contextualised away at any moment, but surely that will happen of its own accord, when and if it wants? Why all the goading with "there is no you"?