LastThursday

We're all playing word games. But it can't be helped, we're on a forum.

@Rishabh R what you need is to think without getting emotional. You can't stop thinking, but you can stop thoughts affecting you. It's pretty difficult to do, but one hint is to stop putting so much importance on them. Thoughts are not real, they're like clouds, they only look solid. Clouds can look like all sorts of things, but you wouldn't get upset at clouds would you?

To realise that there's nothing outside of what you're experiencing. In which case your experience is everything. The only other thing that is everything is God - if you like to think that way. Or if you prefer God is in everything.

Reality is God right? But that's just word games, equating one word with another. That's all that "explanation" ever is. You're right, to get anywhere in this game you need to work without words. Who needs TV?

@Zigzag Idiot I do like Sheldrake's ideas, he's kind of a model for what more scientists should be like, open to radical ideas. His accent is a bit old school Received Pronunciation (RP), it's a non-accent if you like. RP has changed over time, newsreaders on the BBC speak in the modern version of RP.

@OneHandClap there's nothing more the ego loves than to become a God incarnate.

@Bodhitree I absolutely agree. As I say it's a very loaded word, without a universal meaning - but everyone knows a God. When Leo uses it he risks the danger of folks overlaying their own interpretations and obscuring his own very specific meaning. Leo's God has a very monotheistic flavour, probably born of a blend of the God of the Abrahamic religions and non-duality/solipsism - his own culture has biased this (that's just my interpretation, it's interpretations all the way down!). Interestingly, Abrahamic monotheism probably originates with the Egyptian pharoah Akhenaten and the worship of the Sun God Ra. There's no reason for one God or many Gods: non-duality is not about counting Gods. It was probably Michelangelo that is responsible for the depiction of (the Christian) God as an old bearded man in the sky. Art has a lot to answer for. The idea of God or Gods being in the sky is also probably very ancient and indeed is encoded in Indo-European languages in words such as: deus, dios, divine, day, zeus, theism. These words all originate with a word meaning sky.

It's a double-edged sword. All words have their uses, but they're all map and no territory. The word "God" has a lot of map! But substituting a less loaded word like "awareness", "consciousness" or "everything" which are less frequently used is more likely to be misunderstood. "God" is what it says on the tin, everyone has an understanding of it. I agree 100%. Making God synonymous with everything is stupid, because it explains exactly nothing (if all you're doing is looking for an explanation of God that is). I journalled about it here: In short God is not "everything" it's more or different than that.

Every time I've sook Around and up and down And you're nowhere And so you're nowhere Maybe I'd been mistook A sound and here and there And you're somewhere And yet you're somewhere Now now I'm shook I've found it and you were me And you were here And yes you were here

Performing Magick Is it possible to hack reality? It's certainly possible to go all philosophical about it and spend all that time theorizing about hacking reality. Or you can take the engineering view, try stuff, keep what works. Although, even engineering needs an idea of what needs to be tried, otherwise you're just wasting time. So here's stuff I've read or contemplated, with a view to trying some of these out: 1. Doing things out of the ordinary This comes out of the idea that reality relies heavily on consistency: everything fits together and is continuous. The exception to the rule is you, that free-willed awareness. You are outside of material reality and not bound by its laws. So you can genuinely be inconsistent with reality. The more things you do out of normal routine, the greater the chance of odd things happening (breaking reality). 2. Simultaneously holding contradictory thoughts In the normal course of thinking we do it serially, one thought after another. There's two categories of thoughts (amongst others), closed thoughts and open thoughts. Closed thoughts are facts about the world: it's raining, I'm cold, I'm going to the shops. Open thoughts are wishes: I'd like cereal for breakfast, I want a sports car, I wish it was sunny. The idea is to hold both an open and closed thought simultaneously causing a sort of cognitive dissonance. The two thoughts would be closely related in some way. The trick is practising holding two thoughts at the same time, it is possible to do. The easiest way to do that, is to "anchor" each thought to something physical (especially locations on your body, see NLP anchoring). You then present both anchors at the same time, triggering a sort of Pavlovian response of thought. The idea here is that thought directly instructs reality how it should behave. Most thought is routine and fixed by your environment and context, making a reinforcing feedback loop. Holding simultaneous thoughts breaks the feedback loop (breaking reality). 3. Intend to do one thing but do another This is similar to point 2, except you strongly intend to do one thing (especially go to a particular place), and right at the last minute do something completely unrelated instead. Again the expectation of going somewhere or doing something specific (closed thought), feeds into reality. It's like asking a computer to load up the scenario of "going to the shops", there is a lag where the processing happens. But then you throw away that intention and do something different. This doesn't allow reality enough time to "set things up", therefore breaking it. One way to go about this is pure habit: constantly change your mind. In practice this could be difficult. Although you could have a source of pure randomness (i.e. some mobile app that connects to a site that produces genuinely random numbers), and dictate your life that way. Essentially, routine thought and behaviour leads to routine reality. 4. Affirmations This is the repetition of closed thoughts. In other words you act as if you had the things or qualities you desire. The repetition "guides" reality to match the thoughts. The idea here is that thought is reality and that reality is a lot more malleable that it appears. Scientifically, it could be that thought directly biases the underlying randomness of reality towards a particular outcome. Or in other words, thought is attached to the engine of reality: imagination. To make the affirmations more powerful, all the senses and connections needs to be engaged. So instead of just thinking: I want a million pounds, you feel the money in your hands, smell it, imagine bragging about it, imagine buying all those amazing things. In other words you fully immerse yourself into a story, you become it in your mind's eye. This is no different than trying to remember. When trying to remember something, you increase your chances by engaging all the things connected to it, until one of those things trigger it. For example, say you have forgotten the name of a childhood friend, you can improve your recall by taking yourself back to when you were with them, and imagine all the other things you used to do with them etc. Affirmations are just like trying to remember something, you are literally constructing reality through thought.

You've shattered my reality.

It's all about where you put your focus and attention. All your attention should be on them 100%, not yourself - your body will take care of itself, learn to trust it. What stifles good social interaction is constantly being distracted by being in your head. You can practise whenever you're by yourself, by just noticing what's around you, you can even call out the names of the things you're seeing and hearing or feeling. For example: TV, mobile, table, dub techno, piano stool, relaxed etc. Start off doing this for a small amount of time, then extend over time. If you can get up to ten minutes without distraction, then this will help a great deal.

We all need something to aim for ???

My wishlist for a HQW: Can use a drill Adventurous and spontaneous Independent and knows what she wants Happy in or out of a relationship Knows what "construct aware" means

Sometimes change takes us seemingly out of nowhere. Really all that time it was lying dormant in the background. Then one day we become aware of it. We shrug it off innocently. But we find it doesn't go away. Whatever it is is a deep part of us we've not attended to. It becomes apparent the change is going to be seismic, and we ain't ready for it. We need to keep stable and stay accepted. Yet there it is, growing stronger every day. We can try and outrun the change. Keep busy, keep distracted, stay where we are and pretend it's not there. We dabble, we start to accept we could change, it's scary and uncertain. Something suddenly clicks or snaps. It's not in our control anymore and the old way no longer suffices. What seemed genuine before is now fake and we're starting to live a lie. There's no going around it. We have to become it. There's no other way to be true to ourselves.

It feels great when you can just talk about the things that interest you. In my experience no-one ever has the same mix of interests as you, you vibe about different things with different people. But I get your predicament, none of my friends would understand half the things I'm interested in - it's partially why I'm on this forum, it's my outlet for that side of me. The answer really is to see more people rather than shrinking back and isolating yourself. Are you in a situation where you can do that? How would you do that?

Go meta. Understand the paradox. There's more to life than logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox

Is it ethical to interact with people by their worth or particular attributes? It seem like our attributes define us: tall or short, blue eyed or brown eyed, masculine or feminine, rich or poor. It would seem that the attributes are instrinsic to our very being, you can't change your eye colour for example. Some attributes are variable, like our employment or maybe hair colour. People are useful because they are able to do certain things that you can't. For example, a builder can fix your roof. A builder has a certain worth, and we pay that builder what her/his skills are worth to us. We don't actually care about who the builder is as a person. In effect we simplify the person down to their worth to us in the moment. This happens constantly in out interactions with others. We notice a set of attributes a person has, and then extract their worth to us. In the case of a builder, we do it the other way around: we want a set of particular attributes and seek out people who have those. To a degree we have to simplify the complexity of dealing with people. We just don't have the time to interact deeply with every single person we could meet. Instead we look at their attributes, apply a rough and ready formula and pigeonhole them. One of those pigeonholes is "what is this person worth to me and how useful are they?". Worth is multifaceted. But it can be distilled down to a few areas. First, can a person provide for a need that I have? Secondly, how useful could the person be in future? Third, are they part of my tribe or do they share my values? Most of us would disagree that we only choose to interact with people who are worthy in some way. It seems dehumanising to collapse a person's entire existing down to a few attributes we deem to be important - and indeed it is. This is what allows all the -isms to exist. We conveniently sweep under the carpet that we are dealing with complex emotional beings with needs and wants and concerns of their own - and we choose to just focus on a few aspects that either attract or repel us. We do the same thing to ourselves. We simplify our very selves by attaching a set of seemingly immutable attributes. Then we rate how worthy or useful we are according to those attributes. We are not capable of being loved if we are "ugly" or play sports because we are "clumsy". We are attracted or repelled by our own abritrarily given attributes. We hang ourselves by our own petard. But there is a better way. It should be obvious. We are not our attributes. We are not our worth. We are whatever that thing is that is reading this now: an infinite field of awareness, with infinite possibility - and so are others, treat them like such.

Some questions and thoughts that came up: If "you" is just a complex construction in consciousness, then that construction could either be redefined or disappear altogether - where does that leave "other"? "You" are different from "others". You seem to inhabit a different relationship to your body that others do. You are dragged around by your body, and you are aware of it intimately. You're aware of others' bodies but in a very different way. "You" are the same as "others". Not only do you have a body, but appear to have the same concerns, ways of behaving and so forth. You identifty others as being in some way the same as you (human). So there is a strong inference that others too must be experiencing something similar to what you're experiencing. The inference could be false however (i.e. philosophical zombie). Can "other" include animals or inanimate things? Is a jellyfish conscious in any sense? If other can only include humans what specifically is special about humans that allows them to be put into the category of "other"? Is it the case that if it looks like a human and behaves like one, it's a human? Or is there some God given quality that only a human posseses? If others are conscious, and you could flip into their consciousness and POV, what would you become? Would you just be a voyeur without control, or would you be some hybrid of you and them? Conversly if another person flipped into your consciousness, how would you perceive that? Can multiple people merge consciousnesses?

Another idea that came back to me: atom of meaning. Quick synopsis: An atom of meaning is the sensation attached to an object (or an object-like thing). Say for example you inherited a ring from your mother. The ring may have sentimental and/or nostalgic value. That value is the atom of meaning attached to the ring. It's an "atom" because it's an indivisble whole. No other ring or object has this same meaning. The meaning attached to this ring is also not deconstructable. This is exactly the same concept as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) being used mostly in the art world. All atoms of meaning are unique and bound uniquely to their objects: they are non-transferrable. Even if the object changes over its lifetime, the atom of meaning may change along with it; an object slowly accumulates greater emotional significance for example. So two rings may look alike and be made from identical materials, but only one of them has an atom of meaning attached: the ring from your mother.

Found this interesting. Mother is a social construct?!

Reminder to self: evolutionary democracy. Quick embryonic sketch: You have a population of decisions/implementations/laws (the organism). Each region of a country has its own organism. Fit organisms spread from region to region because they work. Mutation is achieved by electronic means, essentially you and me posting new ideas and solutions to problems. A random mechanism (proper randomness) chooses from the pool of ideas and replaces or modifies an existing idea in a region. To spice it up further, regions are not rigidly defined areas like Wales or Scotland. Instead a region is a set of people who choose to take up an organism and are then bound by the rules and ideas of that organism for a certain period before they're allowed to switch to another organism. In practice that means that geographical proximity is important, as you want your neighbours to share the same ideals as you. There is no restriction to the number of organisms, the more the better. Since people are free to switch (maybe once a year), they will naturally plumb for the organism that suits them. If nobody ascribes to an organism, it dies. Ok, that's it.

How about ten posts a week? Now that would be fun. The forum quality would skyrocket. Things to do in three minutes while you wait: Make a cup of tea/coffee Complete a Rubiks Cube Masturbate (physically) Listen to your favourite song Meditate Count to 180 breathing deeply Quick game of blitz chess online Watch an Actualized clips video Text a friend for a beer and then actually go out for a beer Think about what you're going to write in your next comment

Avoid toxicity (aka suffering and pain). The real answer is to manipulate yourself - hack your own operating system. Girls may or may not be trying to manipulating you, either consciously or unconsciously. You should be like "who cares?". Raise your own consciousness.

Good, developing yourself is more important than finding the "one". Keep that focus. I do feel your pain, been there done that (many times). From my experience what keeps the pain going is how much thinking time and importance you attach to the girl. You do have a choice here, but you are fighting hormones so it's difficult. The infatuation stage is very natural, it's how we attach to someone and start a relationship, i.e. infatuation follows attraction. And we can get stuck there if the relationship doesn't progress and especially if you're left hanging. Infatuation also warps reality: she really isn't that wonderful, she's just a person like any other. Give yourself a deadline, a date in the calendar by which time you consciously choose to move on. There are always more girls to get to know.