LastThursday

Thanks @Mu_ I have an intuition about what I was trying to get across, but something is lost in translation to text. But let's see if I can get to the gist of it for fun. Some disconnected points: 1. Assume the that contents of existence is the same as existence itself. It's like a car is made up of wheels, engine, chassis (all content); but isn't the wheels, engine, chassis just the car itself? So is the car one thing or many? There doesn't seem to be much commonality between a wheel and an engine. Maybe there's many types of existence: wheel existence and engine existence and chassis existence and they're all different? 2. Do we define existence to be prime, or is existence self-evident, or is existence just a word pointing to something indescribable? If existence is self-evident, then the "self" in "self evident" must also be in existence. Does existence define itself? Weird. 3. When you say "existence" I think I know what it means. How is that possible? I don't think someone has ever sat me down and given me an explanation for the word. Is my "existence" really what you're talking about? I don't know I'm more talking to myself here. Maybe one for the journal. Thanks!

@Mu_ what hit me is, is existence plural or singular? If singular then what is it that is existing, it must be one unindividuated whole? If plural then how can one part of existence be compared to another part of existence, what is the commonality? In other words, we look around and see existence everywhere, despite seeing lots of different things. What is common between a chair and a bear? What is "knowing" existence?

Quitting can be liberating, but it's your survival on the line. Depending on the sort of person you are, either you will be motivated by it, or demotivated by it - there's only one way to find out. Personally, the times I've done it, I eventually got demotivated and burned through my money. Quit. Have a little break and/or holiday for a few weeks, then treat your time after that like going to work, have a routine and stick to it, concentrate on that portfolio. Then make a deadline after which you will start looking for work again, maybe after six months.

This is a duality in language only, which you are pointing out. You could say "non" or "not" anything you like, like non-nothingness, it is fiction. Most dualities come out of language use. Illusion is only recognised retrospectively. So before illusion is recognised for what it is, it is real. But consciousness is self-referential, so it has the ability to recognise stuff - an observer isn't necessary. To itself, i.e. it wasn't an illusion before it was recognised to be one. Maybe I see the shadow of a man in a dark alley at night (real), and then I realise it was just a cat walking along a wall throwing a shadow (illusion). Yeah moment is the wrong word, because it has a connotation of "snapshot" or "slice" in time. It's no such thing, moments are a fiction of language. But I was talking within a paradigm of "moments". For something to stop existing, a comparison has to be made between two things: existence and non-existence. For a comparison to be made, we need to remember the state of something before it changed. So we are reliant on memory (possibly a fiction) to say that "moments" go into oblivion. That presupposes that "moments" exist, which they don't, but we can discuss things as if they do exist. The appearance of movement, space and time are all real, they are the content of experience, the illusory nature of them is only recognised after you have experienced them. They are real and unreal. Agreed, both are the case simultaneously. There is a static (persistent) quality to experience as well as a fluid one. There is a subtle interplay of the two: energy (movement) is conserved (static).

Agreed. To re-iterate, existence and non-existence are the same. Unfortunately I have to use language to get my points over. I would say that content is experience, there is nothing outside of content. That sensation of pure being or pure existence, is still content.

Existence and non-existence are a duality. Every moment you've ever experienced no longer exists. We're sat on a knife edge between existence and non-existence. You could even say the two are synonymous. The sensation of existence is an illusion.

I think, sometimes, blaming or hating our exes gives our egos an escape from having to look at themselves and say "I messed up". But it's also important to recognise there can be a grieving process with relationship breakup, and that process can make you angry or resentful. I don't necessarily think that grieving process can or should be bypassed by being "spiritual". Hate your ex for a while and then get over it and love them for what they gave you.

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.