LastThursday

Do love me a bit of Chemical Brothers

@Leo Nordin I disagree that it's a waste of my time. The original intent of my journal hasn't changed: The intent is not to get enlightened through journalling. That would be futile and silly. It's also not about playing mind games with myself. But it's just about writing things down as they come up so I don't forget them, because they might come in useful in future. It's also just an expression of my creativity, I enjoy writing. That's good enough for a journal. You ask why I don't just become enlightened? I'll give you an analogy: Imagine you've fallen down a well. The well is damp and dark, all you can see is the light of the opening to the well far far above. How do you get back out? You try and climb the walls, but they're too slippery. You shout and pray for assistance, but no-one hears you. You wait hoping someone will come by and rescue you. You use your intelligence and make a mental map of the well, brick by brick, hoping it will give you a clue to escape (my method). You start taking bricks out and think about digging your way out, but it's too much work. Then, one day it rains hard and the well starts filling up, and slowly you float up to the surface and climb out to freedom. You really shouldn't get too concerned or upset about what I write: just get to know your own well.

@Sempiternity thanks!

@Leo Gura your response to @SoonHei's death has been the correct one and timely and I commend you for being open and listening too. My heart goes out @SoonHei's family. I watched your videos nearly from the start and have personally gained a huge amount from them. I came to the forum much later but I've grown to like the anything goes nature of it. As you say, it's a place to hang out. Where else can I talk about consciousness, leaving home, give advice about relationships, read about building a business, solipsism and the dreaded free will? And to be in the presence of so many enlightened masters, all in one place? Nowehere else, that's the answer. I could even investigate politics if I could bring myself to do it. And amazingly I've started a journalling habit for the first time in my life. Enough simping. Some questions: How do you square the circle then? Do you still want this place to be somewhere to hang out, or does it or should it serve a different purpose? How do you have a carefree, free-for-all forum without many rules, but maintain civility and decent behaviour, and have reasonable standards and less bullshit? Especially as the number of forum members expands. Does it need more moderators? Does it need stricter and more rules? Is the very structure of the forum at fault for low standards (if there are any)? How do you get over the churn of people on the forum, most of them newcommers who need proper guidance in what you're teaching? What about the inexperience of the early twenty somethings making up the large majority of members here? I've noticed myself naturally slowly moving away from the forum over time, mostly because I seem to have exhausted a lot of the subjects that interest me on here. I'd like to progress in "the work", but the forum is not the place to do it maybe it never was. In that sense the forum serves its purpose well: as a stepping stone to higher things and for learning the lingo. Some of the things that disturb me about the forum is some of the casual bullying, harrassment, and stories of racism between members, and some amount of implied misogyny too, and the rudeness and extreme lack of empathy shown at times. I hope this kind of thing is taken extremely seriously and dealt with quickly in future, and there's solid system in place for it. Personally, thankfully, I haven't been at the receiving end of any of it and nor should anybody be.

Is real freedom possible? Depends. Freedom is whatever it means to you. The goalposts of freedom constantly shift so that you never have enough of it. Naturally, in the Construct Aware stage (Ego Development) you start to deconstruct freedom itself. Because freedom gets constantly redefined it itself becomes a prison of sorts. How so? Because freedom is constantly being chased, it appears it's never here today, but always tomorrow. Freedom comes in many flavours: freedom of thought, freedom of action, freedom to be authentic, freedom from tyranny, freedom from prejudice, freedom from yourself, freedom from ignorance, and others. How about freedom of action? One definition of freedom, is the removal of boundaries or restrictions. Action is always context dependent. The context supplies the restriction. The fundamental context for all action is physicality and more specifically acting through your body. If your body can't perform the action (not strong enough, agile enough, intelligent enough), then you are restricted. To increase freedom, we can augment our bodies with machinery - think cars, cranes, bicycles, and a zillion other machines. One critical faculty is the ability to use our bodies to speak and listen. This really is the human superpower, and why we have dominion over the whole world (half the world's lan surface is given over to human activity). Honing and improving your ability to speak, and to listen will give you exponential freedom: actualization. This is what this entire website is about. What about ignoring the restriction of context as a way to gain freedom? Aside from physicality itself, there are social conventions. Each situation and place and time has its own set of conventions. These artificial restrictions can be broken, but doing so can come at a cost and so increased risk of being punished for transgressing the rules. Freedom always has to be balanced with risk. You can be free and jump off a cliff if you're a base jumper with a wingsuit, but the risk of serious injury is large. Sometimes the notion of appararent risk is built into our bodily intelligence and manifests itself as fear. Fear is a strong enough emotion that it can stop you from taking a risk that might endanger you life. Fear is the antidote to complete freedom. Unfortunately, fear can be unbalanced or over-represent risk. If you're fearful of leaving your flat because you're afraid of people, then it has become corrupted. Fear then needs to be recalibrated in many instances to correctly take account of the perceived risk. The only way to do this is to go ahead and take action and then recalibrate the risk. This can be impossible to do if the fear is great, fear sets up a negative feedback loop that can keep you paralysed. And many self-help techniques are really about how to go about recalibrating without succumbing to fear - and hence gaining freedom in the process. There is a genetic component to fear, and there are natural risk takers and natural risk averse types. Psychopaths can feel no fear at all. Are they the most free of all? To a degree yes, but not being context aware is also a restriction in itself: freedom is nuanced. Taking part in continued risky behaviour exposes you to getting caught and being punished in some way - this is not freedom. Being constantly aware of context takes intelligence, and indeed this is one of the signs of intelligence: you are aware of things that others are not. In this sense sharper awareness and intelligence or knowledge gives you more freedom. Again this is what this website is about, giving you greater awareness of the context for many different things. Being more aware of context allows you to manipulate, bypass or get around it (large corporations dodging paying tax), or simply to understand why the context exists at all (which can give you freedom from ignorance). Is there some other more fundamental form of freedom? Yes. Look at someone else, it's clear you are not them. You don't have their worries and concerns and physical ailments and their attachment to being them. You are free because you are not them. This should give you a big hint. You are ultimately not free because you are "you". You are stuck in your self-constructed context, your history, your appearance, your ways of thinking, your fears and so on. If you could snap your fingers and become some other person - you detach - then you would be free of your context. This is possible, this is enlightenment.

That's exactly what you need to communicate with your man. He may not be able to explain himself very well, but it will give both of you a chance to be open with each other. You will be in a better position to know what to do afterwards. I have been in both positions myself in relationships. In one, I had fallen out of love with my girlfriend, and I really should have been honest and up front about that with her, and avoided a lot of pain. In the other, my girlfriend seemed to lose interest in sex after a few years, and then after some time, decided that she didn't want to continue the relationship. I'm not saying your relationship will fall apart by talking about how you feel. But being open will improve your mental wellbeing.

Most purpose is about surviving the world. Eating, sleeping, sex, being with people and so on. It's good to recognise that nearly all purposes you can come up with are about survival. Survival is not optional, but you can make it simple or complicated. If you want fast cars and women as a purpose, then go for it, but recognise it's still survival. If you want to sit and think in a cave, then go for it, survival. Survival is a good reason to have a purpose, forget ego. Having a life purpose is just a way to survive that aligns strongly with your values, i.e. it's authentic. The inherent purpose in most things, is to stay alive and to thrive, there's no shame in it.

Confessional I've always had a distaste for over-the-top behaviour. I feel a deep embarrassment about overt attention seeking and self aggrandisement, or blowing up the smallest things into a show. This sentiment I think comes directly from my parents, my dad is quite reserved and not ostentatious in any way, my mum was a bit more showy but still essentially reserved too. Saying that, my mum also had a tendency to blow up at the smallest of things, she was never able to hold back her emotions. I railed against this over-emotional reaction to everything and became detached from my own emotions as a result: emotions were unpredictable and untamable. When my mum died earlier this year, a number of people - neighbours, distant family - shared with me their grief and love for her. Death is strange because there's a large component of emotion involved, and that emotion can manifest unpredictably. I was choked up every time another stranger would say how they thought my mum was a nice person and how they liked her. I was also tearful at times when I thought about my mum and then realised I wouldn't be able to enjoy her cooking again, or to take her out and have fish and chips, or to see her at Christmas again. I cried freely at her funeral. I wasn't embarrassed by any of this emotion I felt, it was actually ok. I still don't know what I feel about my mum's actual death, I have neither thought about it deeply or seemingly had any strong emotion over it. There's somewhat of an undercurrent of guilt at not feeling more strongly about her passing. A big part of me feels relief however. I have mentioned before that my mum wasn't able to fully able to tend to all the things life threw at her. I know that I'm a capable person, and I would deal with her local council, and form filling and some of her money matters and so on. I had effectively been her part-time carer since my parents separated in the mid 80's. I definitely and firmly blame both my parents for putting me (and my sister) in this unfair position and treating us badly as a result. My sister was able to escape the caring role being younger, but I was never really able to. It's easy to scapegoat your parents for all your troubles, but they are actually responsible for some things. There's always a strong emotional dynamic in families, that can be both hard to explain and hard to free yourself from or to forgive. As you get older you slowly become aware of death. I mean it's in your face all the time in the media, but it's meaningless and detached. It's portrayed in a cartoon way in films or in a serious but far away sense in the news: it never affects you directly. It started with my grandparents, I was too young to be overtly sad or to understand them passing away. But I was in my late twenties when my nan passed away after having had several strokes. That was my first funeral. Before that one of my music teachers had died (heart attack), and I had had a strong emotional reaction to it, it just seemed like such a shock at the time, and I was told to stop being so silly by other teachers - I resented that. When people your own age die, it seems to be closer and more personal. My cousin died of cancer in her late thirties, and she was about a year or so older than me. I think her death hit me deeply existentially, but not emotionally, as adults we hadn't been that close. There was a lot questioning and recalibration that happened around that time, I wouldn't say her passing was the trigger per se, but was part of the maelstrom. Around the same time I'd found out that someone from my year at primary school had also died. It certainly made my own mortality so much more real. I rue the day when my friends die. Sometimes celebrities and famous people die and you have an emotional reaction to it. I was sad at both the death of Princess Diana and of David Bowie. I still feel somewhat ridiculous for having these emotions over complete strangers, and for singling them out over the millions of other deaths. But really, these characters are part of my psychological make up, I feel emotional precisely because I resonated with them in some way and they were somehow part of me, in the same way that losing a finger would make me upset and sad. Every human has great potential, even if not realised in that moment. Every human affects a great number of other people, both close and strangers. And, it's so easy to underestimate the impact a person has on the people they touch, and when someone dies, their influence becomes apparent. This is how we should regard death. It shouldn't be treated just as some formal social convention, soon to be forgotten about weeks or months later. Instead there is a realisation that the death is an irretrievable loss of part of you, and part of your history - and that should rightly be grieved for. And the same goes for other people, and their loss should also be respected and sympathised with. But neither should it be a big show nor an excuse for personal attention, but perhaps that's just my personal bias.

Even that thought is part of the illusion. The illusion is asking itself if it's real or illusion.

@mandyjw I'm going analytical. Struggling to Articulate My Experience One of the inadequacies I find in writing is that words are never enough to convey my experience. For example if I pick up a nominalisation like "thought", I start off knowing what it means. I talk to other people and find that no, it doesn't mean the same thing to other people. Worse it has a range of shades of meaning. In this particular case, for some people thought is just sub-vocalisation, in my case it's images, sounds, sensations. I can think about music and hum a tune, or a visual maths problem or how I might carry myself to run better etc. Maybe I can even think with my fingers and play a tune. None of those use sub-vocalisation. So even in the case of thought, the more it is examined the blurrier and all encompassing it becomes. Different nominalisations then start to overlap, memory for example overlaps with thought, but also feelings are incorporated into thought and so on. Logically, when using language each nominalisation has a boundary or area it is allowed to cover. Some things don't overlap, maybe "love" and "object persistence", some do, and others are completely inside another: all memory is thought. Taken together all these words form a kind of joined up landscape of experience. But that word-landscape is just a map, not the territory: the territory is unspeakable or indescribable. In my experience though, none of these nominalisations actually have a boundary. Thought ends up being everything, the more it is examined. The world "out there" ends up being thought. And the catch all words "consciousness" and "awareness" already are everything. This is why oddness like "everything is unconditional love" happens. "Unconditional love" is just another nominalisation. Everything blurs into everything else. Something blurs into nothing. Everything is God. That blurring is exactly right. My experience is non-dual, everything is everything else. The other way to see it is that there are no gaps in experience, for example it's not possible to make rip in the visual field and for there to be nothing there inside the rip. A gap is just a discontinuity or a boundary. This is probably the answer to the object persistence problem. Object persistence seems magical in light of subjective idealism, because it appears that there is a discontinuity in experience: we look one way and then another and subjective experience changes instantly, a discontinuity. But actually there's no gap in awareness at any point. There's also no gap in the unfolding of consciousness. There is no time. And without time, memory isn't needed, everything happens now and persists. Awareness is a sensation of familiarity. The only mystery left is why there is no awareness of everything at once. But that is the mystery of existence itself.

Yes, that and and just being aware of how other people are logically inconsistent. I would argue that's more useful, because it's stops you being duped by others' BS.

That's the beauty of logical reasoning any X can be connected to any Y. X and Y can be anything you like. All logical thinking requires a bunch of definitions (propositions) from which to build from. For example I could try and connect "water" and "memory". My proposition is that "water has memory". From there I can logically argue all sorts of conclusions: "water remembers if its been badly treated". The proposition itself doesn't have to be true in any sense. What is a fallacy is arguing something which doesn't logically arise from the definitions: "water remembers your birthday". What's needed is clarity at all times. Each chain of reasoning needs to be consistent with the original propositions. That's why any logical argument should start by outlining definitions. Otherwise there's no base for your conclusions. For every new thing that's pulled into the essay, there needs to be a clear definition for it. It may seem obvious what a thing means to you, but it probably isn't to the reader. It's very easy to think for example that everyone knows what God means, and then start saying strange things like "you are God because X, Y and Z", nope, you have to define God first and then go from there. Unfortunately, language allows you to refer to things that haven't been described already. Especially avoid the use of referring words in propositions. For example: "it is good to be happy". What does "it" refer to here? Better would be "People like to be happy". Or deleted words: "love is everything", whose love? And what does "everything" refer to here? You get the picture. The ultimate fallacy is circular reasoning, whereby the definition refers to itself: you are God, God is you. You can argue from circular reasoning, but the conclusions are not based on anything solid. Even worse you could have a proposition that is a logical inconsistency: this statement is false.

@mandyjw I drew a diagram I hope you don't mind (I'm a visual guy): I'm starting to suspect the only way around it - with respect to what is prime - is to start collapsing things, or removing boundaries. The lines in the diagram are equivalences of some sort. One thought that did occur on my walk this morning was how consistent dreams appear to be when you're having them. There is a sensation that everything hangs together (just like waking life). When you wake up, all the consistency falls away and you realise the dreams were a mess. The point is, maybe the waking world is also a mess but just appears to hang together, sewn together by memory or a sensation of consistency? Ok to the collapsing. If there is no observer/observed dichotomy then awareness is not observing thought. Awareness becomes thought, the sensation of thinking just being the sensation of awareness itself. As so with memory, memory becomes subsumed as some type of thought (another collapse), which is just more awareness. I can lasoo memory, thought and awareness all together. This idea about alignment of thought with awareness (via emotion) confuses me in light of my collapsing. I feel as though you're putting over some idea of truth and the emotion is an indicator of how much truth a thought has? If there is a wellspring of unconditional love and you can be more or less aligned with it through thought, then thought itself cannot be unconditional love (because thought is conditional on emotion). It would seem that unconditional love somehow cannot be collapsed into awareness. Is memory also emotion? It would seem like memory can be just pure emotion: you must remember how it feels to be angry in order show anger. But memory is much more than just emotion. It's images and sounds and so on. Maybe all memory is tagged with emotion? This tagging then flags how aligned the memory is with unconditional love? I suspect all emotion is memory in any case, so those two sort of collapse together. Thinking and noticing. Noticing is definitely just a synonym for awareness. I need a dotted line between the two in my diagram! It would seem that awareness is not just a passive thing, but an active process that can be directed by thought. Since thought is awareness, awareness then just nudges itself around, things become amplied (more assholes) or things become muted (less Toyotas). Awareness then is like the weather, changeable, but no-one's in control of it. Belief is also thought, but as you say a kind of repetitive thought. I also think belief should be linked to emotion, because belief has a component of emotion about truth. Belief is about things which are true in some way. Is truth then just unconditional love? Belief colours (think emotion) your experience because it is emotional. So far so collapsed. Time. What is time all about? It is precisely to do with persistence. Without any form of persistence, time is a shambles. So you're right to point out that the belief of "I am" or there being an "I" is all to do with persisting in time. If this didn't happen I guess, we could all just disappear without warning in the next second. In that sense "I" is just a thought attached to emotion, which is awareness. Not sure I've found an answer. But I've managed to smoosh everything in my diagram together into one thing.

Sort of reminder to self: One thing that continually bothers me about idealism, which I like to call Consciousness First (CF), is how does the stuff in consciousness affect consciousness itself? Materialists will say that consciousness is only a product of matter, so it's obvious that matter affects consciousness: taking drugs (matter) will modulate the conscious experience for example. But how does this work in CF? For example, you have a vial of clear liquid which when taken affects the conscious experience. CF says that you can't tell the difference (experientially) between a vial containing water and one containing a drug, because they both look the same. Any inkling of there being some substance disolved in the water is pure fiction, and conversely just believing a certain substance is disolved in the water isn't enough to predict the outcome of taking it. CF seems to have lost some sort of predictive power that materialism has. I find this state of affairs with CF irksome (even though I want to believe in it). Where is the room in CF for the unknowable? If directly experiencing (a.k.a. not creating a narrative) is the baseline of CF, then where does all the unexperienced stuff live? Where is the room for the non-directly experienced molecules of 5-Meo-DMT? Likewise for object persistence. Materialists explain this as the laws of conversation of mass (for example). This simply says that mass doesn't disappear. Whereas in CF objects constantly pop in and out of existence - you only have to cast your gaze somewhere else for the whole world to change. But object persistence is hard to deny. When you do in fact look back, lo and behold the same objects reappear. You can make philosophic arguments about them not being quite the same objects (they've aged and so on), or that persistence is just a trick played by memory (you remember the objects in memory). But those arguments just push the problem somewhere else. What role exactly is then memory playing within CF? If memory itself is causing the sensation of object persistence, then isn't memory making the whole world hang together? Isn't memory then in fact consciousness itself: it is the thing creating the persistent world? Something doesn't smell right about it. Is memory prime or is the direct experience prime? Isn't memory just an experience? Or is all of experience just a memory - especially since the present moment is contantly being swallowed by memory. Questions, questions.

The Manifestation Manifesto I think I've talked previously about manifestation. To be honest, my journal is getting too long to try and re-read and refer directly to previous posts, I'm starting to need an index! It's a testament to some aspect of my memory, that I have a very good memory for stuff I've written about already - but there's probably a limit somewhere. I'd hate to be a bore and repeat myself. The crux of what I'm getting at in this post is: how flexible is reality? The thing we identify as being our body, is the interface with which we effect change in the world out there. It should be obvious to anybody that to get anything done at all, we have to use our bodies, whether this is using our hands, feet, or vocal cords. It is all fundamentally physicality. There's three broad types of doing. That is: rearranging things, recombining things or directing things. In more down to earth language: tidying things up, making things or bossing people. It's in the nature of doing that there's some sort of agency and intention behind it. Generally speaking there's a sense that there's a something (you) that decides and then the body carries out the action. In normal circumstances that linkage is immediate. You think to yourself that you'd like a cup of coffee, and the body then obliges and physically makes one. Even when it doesn't seem immediate, it still is; you think you'd like a coffee at 3pm and then 3pm comes and again, you remember that you'd like a coffee and then immediately make one. It is not as if you program the body in advance and like a robot it carries out the task unconsciously, and you think "woaa, why am I making coffee now? Oh yes, I thought about it three days ago", no, that isn't how it works. Can this system be hacked? Two ways of hacking spring to mind. The first is to remove the agent. In other words you stop attributing your thoughts and intent as being the motivator of your actions. This seems strange, but in fact it isn't. For every act of doing there are a hundred thoughts not enacted. So by that token, the probability that "you" are controlling action seems low; what is so special about certain thoughts and intentions that make you act, while other thoughts do not make you act? Attacking the other side of it, for those lucky thoughts that did result in action, who's to say that you're not retrospectively claiming ownership of the action? It's like getting a full house at Bingo and claiming, yes I did in fact make that happen. Forget agency. So what does agentless doing look like? Nothing special. If indeed we can entertain that other people are philosophical zombies, then there is no agency on their part in any case - but still nothing looks out of place. The fact is, is that doing is part and parcel of the normal churn of consciousness. Any act of doing is inseparable from the context it is done in, and it's ever expanding contexts until the whole universe is involved. In that sense nothing is done, it just happens, without agency behind it. What else? The other is to effect things without the use of your body. One proxy for this sort of action, is when you ask someone to do something for you: you go to a coffee shop and ask for a coffee. I mean you are still physically using your body (vocal cords), but it's closer to what I'm getting at. If you can't use your body, then what can you use? The only thing left is thought and intention. It's clear here that to make a coffee some sort of physicality is needed, otherwise we're in the realm of the supernatural. But it's not supernatural for someone to make you a coffee, and that's where things get interesting. Is it possible that agency by itself is enough to change the world? Is it a law of nature that all personal change has to be done by your body? This goes directly to the heart of the mind/body problem (the body in the context of this post). Maybe the mind interface to reality is broader than just the body? If so then, it behoves us all to crowbar open the possibility. Law of Attraction anyone? Is it also possible that the non-body parts of the interface, can behave in an immediate fashion? Is there an inbuilt delay to the Law of Attraction, and why should this be so? Ok. So we have agentless action and bodiless action. What about combining the two? It's abundantly clear that doing is happening everywhere, but we relabel that doing as happening. Stuff is happening constantly seemingly without agency and without bodies. In effect, that is exactly what materialism is about, it's matter acting without agency or bodies - instead we have a bunch of rules about how and if things can happen. So how does idealism appropriate agentless, bodiless doing? It says that the agent is just an illusion in any case, consciousness is "doing" itself. Any sense of agency is just another offshoot of consciousness deluding itself and is in fact unnecessary. What about bodiless doing? It would just say that a body is no different from everything else in consciousness, it is seamlessly integrated into it; a body in effect doesn't exist, because the boundary of the body is a fiction. In the end this type of thinking leads into non-duality, everything is one, and there are no boundaries at all. It's obvious that if everything is part of the same block of stuff (consciousness), then agentless, bodiless action is in fact the norm. Any sense that the agent has for being in control of reality through their body is complete delusion. Consciousness is the master, and we are at its whim. If consciousness wishes to cook the probability books to make it seem like we decided to make a coffee with our hands, then it's its prerogative. If consciousness cooks the books differently and turns you into a millionaire without seeming effort, then its up to it, but it will still delude "you" into thinking it was "your" hard work and good sense.

I think we're both using different words for the same thing. Personally, I wouldn't advocate more strongly identifying with any type of behaviour, but simply having a larger "wardrobe" of behaviours to "try things on from": pastels on Monday and lumberjack on Tuesday.

Should the need arise I will, thanks for your openness. My poke was just to make sure you're not deluding yourself, but I can see that there's nothing see here, so I'll retract my projection. Peace.

I must be projecting then. You've got more persona than most on here. @ivankiss you've hit the nail on the head. We all could do with more "dynamic range" in our behaviours, especially men in general. I would also say that being more flexible this way will make you identify less with being hard or soft - which will decrease suffering in the long run.

When I spoke to my dad recently, he was telling me about a druid he went and saw. Druid. Well anyway, the druid told my dad that he had had a curse put on him by one of his exes, and that most probably she was some type of witch. I must say I can't help myself here forgive me: my dad's ex hexed him - kind of flows of the tongue doesn't it? Anyway, the German word for witch is Hexen. There's definitely an etymological relationship there. Germans always capitalise nouns, strange lot, I find it an infectious habit though. Where was I? So yes, regardless of whether my dad had been cursed or not, and what exactly a modern druid does, it did raise in me a kind of curiosity. Can people's malicious intent harm you? I'm thinking pure intent here, and at a distance, well away from the intentee. Fundamentally can I make someone unwell just by thinking or wishing bad things on them? Maybe some of you witchier types are shouting at me now: yes! yes! Ok, but I'm learning here, don't think badly of me, yikes. Have some of the times I've been unwell either physically or mentally been due to being cursed or had venom discretely directed my way? I don't believe I've pissed off many people in my time, but there have been a few, and probably more than I think; I have been known to be blunt and direct at times. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly interested in seeing if I can affect other people at a distance. But the question does arise that when I do in fact think of anyone, it may have either a positive, neutral or negative undercurrent behind it. Am I accidentally affecting people this way? It's enough to make me paranoid, or at least feel as though I should be more responsible in what I'm thinking. The other side of the coin is, is there a way to undo or protect myself from both stray negativity or malicious intent? Do I have to perform a ritual, does it have to be that dramatic? Or can I simply just become aware that I've been cursed and tell myself to "calm down mate, don't worry about it", and poof! it's gone? Can I turn the curse positive in some way? One practice that I did try in the past to heal myself against people that I thought had seriously wronged me, was to sit and meditate and then imagine a bright white beam of light and love entering my body, let it build up, and then direct it through my heart and into the body of the wrongdoer. It can be incredibly hard to do this, evey fibre in the body can wrench this way and that, saying no no no; but you battle through with the white light and keep going until all the negativity is gone. Finally, I switched off the white light and imagined giving my enemy a huge friendly loving hug. So countering badness directed at me, with goodness directed at them. I must say, that bespoke exercise did help a great deal to heal my anger, frustration and feeling of being shat upon. And the person didn't even need to be there. Maybe in my own way I helped that person too? As for my dad, I hope he gets the curse lifted for his own sake, however he chooses to do it. I think that ex hexer Hexen gave him a lot of pain.

What about red Lego bricks and pansychism? Although, there's an argument for pansychism being TBS of idealism and materialism, so it's not pure.

There is no zoom without the mind. When we see images of atoms, we are looking with mind stuff: mathematics, computers, theory, machinery.

Poke a screwdriver through your eyeball and into your brain and see how long consciousness lasts? Ok, my point. Consciousness begets more consciousness. It unfolds second by second. How it unfolds is up to consciousness itself. Consciousness is like a lava lamp, it just keeps on bubbling away. Consciousness is a closed system. Screwdrivers and brains are part of that consciousness system, they a bits of blob in the lava lamp. Consciousness chooses to mess with itself according to its own plan. It turns out that some things within consciousness have a greater effect on how consciousness unfolds than other things. Shoving a screwdriver or taking a hallucigenic or whatever has a bigger effect than drinking a strong coffee. Messing around with someone's brain potentially has a huge effect on consciousness. So what? Stubbing my toe affects consciousness, but I'm pretty sure consciousness doesn't come from my big toe. Drinking five pints affects consciousness, but I'm also pretty sure that consciousness doesn't come from a sexy pint of IPA. Poking a screwdriver in your brain affects consciousness, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't come from there either. Correlation is not causation. Nothing is outside consciousness.

A lot of us are perfectionists. If we can't have it all, then we don't want it at all. Especially with self development it can be really easy to fall into a purity mindset, where if you don't do X to the exclusion of everything else, it's not worth doing at all. One way of having a purity mindset is to line everything up as polar opposites, one thing to be avoided and vilified and another to be embraced and loved. A more open way is to have an emphasis mindset. So, you don't exclude anything at all. Maybe you emphasise eating plants over meat. Maybe you emphasise water over alcohol. Maybe you emphasise gym work over smoking. The idea is to place your attention on and turn up the volume on the things which are currently important to you. Everything is then on a sliding scale from 100% to 0%. Over time you learn to adjust everything in a direction which suits your aspirations more.

The Turquoise video should be (re)made into several Clips videos, might go under the radar that way. Devilish I know.

For the individual, I'd say it's a much more practical model than SD. That's great recognition @Leo Gura, you deserve it.