LastThursday

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.

More femina vibes

VPN only for video content on here I can't access from the UK. I wouldn't normally log out of the forum when switching to VPN and back.

I'll continue my current fetish for female singers

I held you in my hands, just for a moment and then had to let you go. I knew it in that moment that it would be forever and I would, forever, be looking back at you; back at us as we were. I was tense and angry at what happened with a certainty I haven't felt since. If only I were so certain now, but I am not, what I had is lost. Just like my old tattoo what we were has blurred and become indistinct, rubbed out by the motions of time. What's left is just a shadow of the despair I once felt, that wrench of separation now transformed into I don't know what. No matter what beautiful substitutes have taken your place - I loved them all equally - they were somehow incomparable, you would call me crazy I know. In every love I had I saw you, and yet not you; I wanted to continue loving just you and to hold you in my hands for just a moment again.

Are you a drama queen or king? I feel as though I've always had a strong distaste for drama, I prefer a calm and considered approach even if all hell is breaking loose. And yet, drama has followed me around like a bad smell, and I have to consider the fact that I might be at the centre of it at times. I suspect I'm a closet hypocrite. Definitions. What constitutes drama? Fundamentally it's a strong emotional reaction to circumstances, usually negative. But in itself that isn't enough, that emotion has to be expressed in an overt way. That expression can often be over the top and impulsive, and is designed to get the attention of as many people as possible. This is so that the needs of the drama queen/king are met. There is an element of insecurity with drama. I'm certainly guilty of having strong emotional reactions to circumstances. Usually, this comes about because of some perceived unfairness (towards me generally), or because of being overwhelmed, or more rarely the stupidity of people's actions. My default reactions are intransigence or sarcasm as a way to signal my emotions. They can be effective in getting my own way if done right. However - and I know this - they can induce strong emotions in other people and actually cause the drama I'm trying to avoid. My behaviour is to a degree selfish, but directly challenging a person can also induce drama, and I have done this plenty also. Mostly, I just keep my emotions to myself and let them dissipate, that is the sane option, but nearly always unsatisfactory. I think my behaviours have coalesced over time in response to being in positions of helplessness when I was younger. I was helpless against bullies at school, I was helpless at work when being asked to do things I was uncomfortable with (long hours, work weekends). In order to wrest back control you have to either make the antagonist feel uncomfortable every time they deal with you, or see that you're unwilling to yield to their demands. Sarcasm or humour can be very effective for making people feel uncomfortable, without them having anything to push back against - and therefore avoiding drama. Intransigence shows that you are unwilling to yield to demands, or if you do yield, you do a bad job of carrying out their demands. Again, it's hard to fight against someone who is carrying out your demands - it avoids drama. A lot of drama is caused by outrage. I guess outrage is just a strong emotional reaction to some perceived unfairness or rule breaking or entitlement. The entitlement one is interesting, as often people in positions of authority expect others to do as they say. Directly challenging people in authority often causes outrage which can create drama. Some people use drama as a modus operandi, either consciously or unconsciously. At some point in their lives they've realised the effectiveness of getting lots of attention to bolster and validate their emotions. Often elaboration happens around those emotions and a dramatic story is weaved with lots of reasons and justifications for those emotions. Usually, there is an outward projection for the causes of those emotions and a complete rejection of responsibility for owning those emotions: that guy made me unhappy and I'm outraged, everyone needs to know my story! And my distaste of drama comes from that need to make something bigger than it really is, the impulsiveness and irrationality of it, the need to involved people unnecessarily, and the unnecessary elaboration around simple emotions. It just makes me roll my eyes in despair. Stay calm, keep your emotions in check, and challenge the person who upset you directly.

The Mobius strip is a way to understand consciousness. The Mobius strip is self-referential, it's a loop. When you cut the strip it takes on a new form, but really it's still the original strip. In a way the cut (consciousness/awareness) is imaginary, the original strip (non-duality) always exists. Consciousness is just a constant process of cutting into non-duality. You can't capture this process with numbers.

Two throughts are whirling around each other, and I wanted to capture them before they disappear. A: the interchangeability of the sense of self; B: the absurd coincidence of reality. I don't think they're connected outwardly, but they probably are somehow. --- Imagine throwing a die over and over and getting the same repeating pattern 4 and 2. You would suspect something was up, and you might inspect the die for some form tampering. Probability itself says that any pattern or non-pattern is equally probable given enough throws. Now extend the notion out to infinity. The die will throw every conceivable pattern sometime in the infinite number of throws. In fact it will throw any finite sequence infinitely many times. Notice that even though we are interested in certain patterns, say 1,2,3, each throw is totally independent of the previous throw (given a completely fair die). So despite having patterns, each pattern in itself is not cohesive, the parts of a pattern are not dependent on each other. What if we extend the analogy of die throwing to reality? Reality appears to be "meaningful". Meaning in a stripped down sense is just patterns that we recognise. Reality is chock-full of patterns. Each object and emotion is a pattern, ideas of space and time are patterns, our sense of self is a juxtaposition of patterns. Patterns, patterns, patterns everywhere and at every level. Say there is an entity - for the sake of argument - which throws random assortments of qualia together infinitely many times. Somewhere along that sequence of infinity randomness dictates the qualia will come together to form meaningful patterns. We are living in one such assortment of randomness which is rich in coincidence because those patterns have occured together all at once. If you have enough monkeys mashing typewriter keys ad infinitum, they will eventually type the works of shakespeare: if God throws qualia around enough it will create your reality. See how in this model of reality, nothing is actually dependent on anything else, it's just one big coincidence. Cause and effect is just coincidence, the laws of nature coincidence and the same for the rest. What about all those realities God threw together that didn't quite work out? It doesn't matter. The process of "throwing" qualia sits outside of time and space, it's only the patterns that matter. There's circularity here: it's only the meaningful arrangements of qualia that get "selected" by consciousness to be "reality". So the base of reality is in fact not the arrangement of qualia themselves, but the process of "selection". What gets selected? It's simple, those patterns that repeat themselves. For example, gravity is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the cosmos. The patterns are self-selecting through their own repetition. Fundamentally any pattern is just difference. A repeating pattern is a repeating difference. --- We feel differently at different times. We can look back at our former selves and sense that we have become different people over time. Because we label that trajectory of our persona with the same label (e.g. Guillermo) we have an idea of continuity. But this is untrue, our sense of self can be untethered. In fact the dissolution of the self is a goal for spiritual practices. I can say killing a self (or ego), is hard to achieve and in some ways undesirable unless you go and live in a cave, or mix just in spiritual circles all the time. The next best thing is to take on different selves. The idea is that we're made up of a huge number of processes or entities or smaller selves. This is because as apes we like to mimic other apes and also other animals. We store away all that mimicry for later retrieval. Not only that, even though we may not outwardly express that mimicry, in order to understand anything at all we have to internally embody the mimicry. This is the source of empathy and altruism, we are constantly modelling (aka theory of mind) other beings albeit mostly unconsciously. We can leverage this internalised mimicry or theory of mind, to "inhabit" other selves. The goal of this is pretty much the same as killing the self: to be free and fluid and non-attached and flexible in our thinking and behaviour. To do this we turn up the volume on that mimicry. We are used to inhabiting our everyday selves, but with practice we can bring out all that learned mimicry to be someone else entirely, even if only for a limited time. The extreme example of this being multiple personality disorder, in which those other selves are amplified so much that they become mutually exclusive. We can do this at any time and for any aspect of ourselves. Some things to play around with are: voice - raising or lowering pitch and tempo, walk and gait - tempo, spacing, attitude, blink rate, facial expressiveness, hand gesturing, different clothing. What tends to happen is that whatever the body does, the mind follows. If you want to think and feel differently, then change the body first. Maybe if you want to express more masculine traits, squared off shoulders, feet apart, serious expression; you will find yourself thinking in a more masculine manner. With plenty of practice this becomes second nature, and you can put on the clothes of a different self to suit a situation and your mood. The main point is freedom of expression. Instead of being rigidly "you" you can accomodate yourself to an ever changing reality. Mimicry is the most powerful tool we posses.

I try and steer well away from gossiping. The biggest problem with gossiping is groupthink, which can lead to bullying behaviour against individuals. I would class gossiping as making negative judgements based on little information, or even worse actively putting someone in a bad light. My rule is to talk about what people have actually done and to keep down speculation, or try and keep my judgments down to a minimum. I outright don't gossip about people I don't know well. If intervention is necessary, then I talk to the person directly.

@Preety_India thank you for your insight, compassion and wisdom. Just keep on growing you're on the right path. And just ignore the idiots in life, unfortunately there are plenty of them.

And those parts are simpler than the whole, that's the reason for reductionism, to make things simpler to understand. Another way to understand a complex system is to interact with it, learn its behaviour. For example to understand @LastThursday, you don't take his limbs apart and reduce him, instead you talk to him and observe him. Or you might also go in the other direction and see how @LastThursday fits in within the larger system of the forum. Another way to see things, is to see how they are similar to other things. For example to understand person, you can make assumptions about what has been learned from studying other people: men will be men, @LastThursday is a man, for example.

Travelling back from Dublin yesterday I realised something. A lot of what makes travelling (or any such situation) uncomfortable for me is all to do with the body. For example train and aircraft seats really are uncomfortable for sitting in for any length of time. Shoulders and back begin to hurt and this makes you want to move around or get up. Fairly obvious. The body also complains when under some sort of stress. This can be caused by any number of things when travelling. No one enjoys queuing for example. What makes queuing unenjoyable is impatience, close proximity to people (I don't mind too much personally), and standing for long periods. For me it manifests as tension around my neck and shoulders and a tendency to hold my breath or breathe very shallowly. Mentally, it's a kind of "willing" the queue to move faster, which causes dissonance with reality. I have to actively work against these manifestations of stress: I look sideways away from the queue, relax my shoulders and try to breathe more deeply, find something else to fixate on, quieten my self-talk. Ideally I avoid queuing until the last minute. Whilst travelling there is a lot of waiting around too, when all you want to do is be making progress towards your destination. The obvious things like reading or listening to music help, but simply just meditating or people watching can be effective. I also don't wear a watch when travelling, because clock watching causes stress and boredom. Sleep can be effective for passing time, but it's nearly always difficult to sleep sitting up without head support. One thing I can't recommend enough is to get plenty of sleep before travelling. I tend to feel more stressed and unable to control it if I'm tired. Strangely there's also a tendency to want to eat when travelling. I don't know if this is just comfort and distraction from the stress of travelling, but I actively try and avoid eating unless I'm hungry and just drink liquid instead (I don't drink alcohol when flying to avoid dehydration and tiredness). Being in strange surroundings can also be off-putting, if you're abroad then odd customs, dress or having to deal with foreign languages can be difficult or even just trying to find your way round - the simplest things can become difficult. The best thing to combat this I find, is just to go with an open mind and not have too many expectations, enjoy being in a new situation, relax the body and the mind, let it wash over you. I'd say if you can be totally relaxed in the body and mind and be in the moment when travelling, then you can apply this to all areas of life.