LastThursday

Aha! How can there be an observer without consciousness? How can there be an observer without the observed? Are you the observer ever able to separate yourself from the observed?

I take that as a compliment. One person you can dismiss, two people you have take more seriously... I'm not talking about your character, I'm talking about the observer that is "you" thinking you're a body-mind complex. That thing will change and disolve. That is really what you're calling "experience". Consiousness itself is absolute, but the observer is relative and flimsy. Consciousness carries on, but the observer dies.

It's not yours, never was. The construct that is "you" will eventually change and disolve, it already has many times in "your" life. Just ask your five-year-old self.

Look at this thread for some thoughts:

Dealing With Ambiguity If there is one nearly universal law about life, it's the fact that so much is unknown. If there is a second law, it's that there is so much contradiction. How do we learn to navigate these two laws succesfully? By unknown I mean a lack of information or knowledge about a thing. We often have to make all sorts of decisions based on what we do know. But there are a lot of times when we can't know beforehand what the best course of action to take is - we don't have enough information. Nearly all situations we find ourselves in are novel in some way, and we are forced to make a decision there and then. The first system that kicks in is a kind of matching. We dip into our memories and unconsiously go "hey I was in a similar situation before", we then snap-to-grid and simply treat this situation as being the same as before. This is good enough for most mundane situations such as getting on a bus or buying something in a shop. This templating process helps because it ignores all the unnecessary details and simplifies things. In reality though, we don't know how the shop assistant will react to us, or if the bus driver accepts cash. Indeed if the situation unfolds and it doesn't match our template, it can be cognitively difficult to adjust or react appropriately. What to do if the situation is completely novel and we have no past experience to draw upon? We can ask. I remember being in Japan and wanting to buy a train ticket from the automated machine, but not reading Japanese I was clueless. I asked a passer by, pointed to a map and pointed to the machine, and they promptly helped me buy the ticket. Either you gather more knowledge, or you use someone else's knowledge. If your car breaks down, you get a mechanic to fix it or you can learn how to fix it yourself. Getting help from others, is our default mode in the West, we simply can't catch our food or build our own shelter. In the absence of both help or being able to get further knowledge, you can plump for what seems right for the situation. When I was going for university interviews, I was due up in Sheffield. My dad was based in Rochdale, which is a good two hour journey by train. It turns out, that when I left the interview, it had snowed very heavily, and no trains were running, nor was there any further information on what I could do to get back. In the end I waited several hours in the station in the hope that something would be running. My intuition served me well and they had managed to clear the line enough for a train to run back to Manchester at least - which took five hours. The point being that sometimes relying on instinct or intuition is the only thing left to use. And, we use this system of intuition a lot more than we let on, to make decisions. Even when planning for the future, we can only provide a rough skelleton of what we want to happen. The detail of the actual execution is unknown, in fact most of it is unknown, we simply defer to our future selves to take care of it. What about contradiction or ambiguity? With the explosion of information on the internet, we can be overwhelmed by the amount of contradictory advice on nearly any topic. Is eating butter good or bad for our bodies? Is alcohol in moderation ok or not? But outside of internet advice, there are still many contradictory situations we can find ourselves in. When is the right time to look for a new job? Should we start our own business? Should I text that special person back or not? Should I concentrate on learning and university now, or just learn on my own? A lot of contradiction appears because we want several different things at once. We are tempted by both contradictory possibilities and we can see the plus points of all of them. There are a few ways to deal with contradication. The first thing we can do, is to sit and make a kind of balance sheet of good versus bad against each possibility. This can force us to consider things we would not otherwise have and to make it easier to reject one possibility, resolving the ambiguity. We can also from the outset ask whether two possibilities are actually contradictory. Maybe we want to meditate all day to reach enlightenment, but we also want to socialise every day. Taking both as absolutes, yes, there's a contradiction. However, being more flexible allows us to do both. We can realise that nothing we desire is absolute, there is always some wiggle room. We can meditate for a part of the day and socialise for the other part. It's not purist (absolute), but it's practical (pragmatic). And, this is the main strength of pragmatism, it allows us to take multiple choices and to compromise between seemingly contradictory paths. Another thing we can do, is to ask ourselves "where does this desire come from?". It may be that we automatically think we need to get a mortgage on a house, without questioning it. Or that we think we should have children, but that clashes with our desire to travel round the world. Sometimes, the desire can expressed differently and that resolves our contradiction. Maybe we can travel when our kids are old enough, or just give up on the idea of having kids at all. Maybe we become teachers, so we can pass on our knowledge to kids, because that's what our desire really was, and go teach around the world. This process is simply re-framing our desires. Just the act of re-framing can resolve a seeming contradiction, but it requires imagination and some lateral thinking. Lastly, we can just accept the contradiction and not actually take action. Instead we let life decide for us: "if I have kids I'll be happy", "if I end up travelling, I'll be happy". This is the opportunist approach, an opportunity arises which matches one of our desires, and we take it, without concerning ourselves too much about not tending to other desires. We just give up on the contradiction and let external circumstances decide for us. But neither do we have to be passive, we can be active when the opportunity arises to grab it and fulfill one of our desires. This method requires us to be patient but attentive, and to live with the possibility that our desires won't be fulfilled at all. Indeed we secretly know that our desires will change over time in any case, and all our worrying about contradictions will evaporate.

Changing the World There are many times when we wish things were different in our lives. The desire to want things to be different usually comes from a place of suffering. We have a right to suffer about many unpleasant situations: physical abuse, poverty, modern slavery. If you are in any of those situations, then there is a strong justification for that suffering. There may be nothing you can do about improving your situation in those cases. Most circumstances are not that severe though. More often, suffering is caused by a mismatch about how you would like things to be and how things actually are. The mismatch can be made worse by not being able to do anything about it. Let's have an example. You find that your partner is always working long hours, and you just wish she would work less and spend more time with you. This causes you some suffering, and you often vent to your partner about them changing their ways. Ultimately, unless your partner does change, you are powerless to get what you want. There are many situations that crop up were this kind of dynamic happens. You want things to be a certain way and think you have power to get what you want, but in actuality this is not true. It is a natural tendency to be outwardly focused and have an expectation that the world should match your inner desires. We all do it. Sometimes it works, we do actually have power to manifest our desires: we have enough time, money, influence or awareness to do it. In those instances there is an argument for empowering ourselves and getting what we want, it makes us feel good and it stops our suffering. What about when we are powerless, what should we do then to alleviate our suffering? When we are powerless our only option is to change ourselves. There are many forms of this. The main one is questioning ourselves and asking if what we desire is reasonable. For example, we may wish that we lived in a mansion with a gravel drive and two or three supercars parked outside. But this is unreasonable, and if the mismatch with reality is causing suffering, then we need to drop the desire and concentrate on more reasonable desires. Sometimes our desires are unjustified. We may have a desire to be loved and admired by everyone we meet, and yet the law of averages says that there will always be people you meet who dislike you, or even worse are indifferent to you. In this case the desire itself should be toned down or changed. Sometimes it's not to do with powerlessness, but simply with a stubborn rejection of reality. Maybe you have a self image as a party animal who is great with people and likes to have fun. But you are suffering because you are lonely and find it difficult because no-one wants to hang out with you. It could be that you are in fact an introvert and being with people for long periods wears you down. There is a mismatch between your self perception and reality. In this case simply having more self awareness will allow you to change your self image. Being self aware, and being open to changing yourself, really are the two keys to reducing suffering in the long term. This works even if you do have power to change your external situation. Most suffering is caused by having unreasonable desires or with your perspective mismatching reality. If you find yourself wanting people to change to suit you, or that you expect people are there just for your benefit, then this should raise a red flag and you should immediately start working on yourself to reduce your suffering. Working on yourself can be a long and difficult process and may seem unnecessary, but the liberation from suffering is worth it in the end.

@EddieEddie1995 what a great looking cat you have.

Mastery Is it possible to be objective about your own abilities? For example if I’m just starting out at chess, I’ve played a few games and I think I have a solid grasp of what it’s about. What do I know about my ability at chess at this point? It may seem obvious but I should really be calling myself a novice. But, if I haven’t watched many chess matches or only ever played one person, then I don’t have much to compare my ability against. It may be very tempting for me to overstate my level of skill in chess. We are all prone to over estimating our abilities. This happens because we are constantly competing with other people and we have a need to inflate our capabilities so that we can impress people. But also because we don’t have enough experience in order to guage our ability in a particular area. What happens as you do gain confidence and ability, is that you begin to realise how much needs to be learnt in order to become an expert in something. I need to talk about feedback here. Some things, especially physical skills give immediate feedback on how well you are doing them. For example, it’s difficult to overstate your skill in riding a bicycle, because you will fall off the bicycle if you don’t have enough skill. This immediate feedback becomes harder to judge the more abstract a skill is. How do you judge how good you are at spirituality for example? What do you do if the feedback you receive is someone’s opinion of your skill? And what if you choose to ignore the feedback anyway? As you become an expert in a certain field, you become confident about your own abilities and you no longer need to rely so much on external feedback to guage your abilities. You become self-correcting. You can rightfully start saying to other people that you are skilled and not fall foul of overstating your ability. As a side effect, you can also judge how skilled someone else is in your field of expertise. You can easily spot a novice and correct their over-confidence. You also don’t feel a need to brag about your skills, because you are not competing against people so much at this stage, your skill speaks for itself. How can you stop yourself from being deluded about your abilities? The first step is to be humble. Even if you are an expert there is always more to learn. You should think of yourself as always being ignorant of the extent of the skill you still need to acquire. This is what mastery is about, you are always ignorant about the breadth of a new discipline and that should make you humble. Second, is to listen to all feedback even if you think it’s just opinion. It’s easy to be emotional and take negative feedback personally, but if you truly are a novice, then you need all the feedback you can get so you can improve. Even if you are an expert, there may still be areas in which you are weak, and feedback is invaluable for showing you your weaknesses. This should spur you on to try and improve those weak areas. You should even actively seek feedback to improve at all stages. What happens if you don’t do any of the above? What if you constantly overstate your abilities, don’t listen to feedback or overreact emotionally to any feedback? Then simply, your rate of growth will slow right down. If you don’t listen to experts you’ll find you won’t be taken seriously, or worse they may be hostile towards you. To have a mastery mindset requires a constant hunger to learn, to accept being corrected without complaint, and to do the hard work of acquiring the skills to become an expert. And above all to stay humble.

I'm thinking about how to raise the quality of my journal entries. There are several reasons for wanting to do this: Going meta (which I love) and improving my writing ability More succintly expressing what's on my mind: some of the things I write about I feel have deep value for me, but somehow I often feel I don't quite get the point over well enough Providing greater value to others. This journal is public for a reason, because as well as helping me to organise my thoughts, I'd like others to get something from it too - even it's just entertainment Improving my enjoyment of re-reading my own material, much further down the line I like competing against myself There is a slight amount of concern that in forcibly trying to improve my entries, I lose the off-the-cuff and spontaneous nature of my writings. I may edit for wording and typos generally, but I never re-arrange paragraphs, I seldom remove or add paragraphs. I don't treat it like an essay. This works, insofar as I am learning to write improvisationally rather then deliberately, which can give things a certain fluidity. I believe that my journal entries have improved over time, albeit through sheer practice. Ok, how should I go about it? Some thoughts: Simplify language and syntax - I really enjoy using all the vocabulary at my disposal, but almost always there are simpler words to use. This improves readibility for a wider audience, and makes parsing sentences easier. This doesn't mean dumbing myself down, but just using more straightforward language. If I'm talking about personal stuff I should be more relaxed and informal in my writing. Have a beginning, middle and end, i.e. narrative. So: what am I going to talk about, the talk about it, the summary and conclusion or punchline or revelation or cliffhanger. This is just easier to digest, than an unstructured or incoherent arrangement. Every sentence or word should refer to something that has already been introduced. Obviously, if I'm talking spiritual language then I don't need to explain everything, because I'm on a spiritual forum. But if I'm referring to things in my life or non-spiritual matters (e.g.) then I should set things up first, before I go waffling on about them. For the more complex stuff, have a plan. Introduce all of the relevant players in the topic, explain how they interplay with each other. And, use that interplay to work towards the point I'm trying to convey. Simply spend more time editing and chopping and changing stuff around. This should be done offline so that there is just one final reading of the journal entry. Do some research around the topic. Again, I have aprehension around this, that doing any amount of reading will "contaminate" my thought processes, or I'll lose my spontaneity. Or worse, I end up just copying Wikipedia. On the other hand it may make my entries more coherent. It goes without saying that I probably don't need to research if it's just about my own history or experiences. Ok that's it. Let's try it out now and see what happens.

@ivankiss I could do with empowering myself and taking my own advice

It's tempting to call conflicting perspectives opposites. Notice how conflicting perspectives simply means they appear to be difficult to do simultaneously. Really, conflicting and opposite are set up by the mind to both dismiss taking action, and to create a sense of drama. Perspectives don't need to always happen simultaneously and nor are they separate silos: Spend X years pursuing money and then spend X years living in a cave. Or simply go live in a cave, but also pursue money. Why not? Pick and choose what you want from both perspectives.

Alice in Suburbia A large majority of us live in cities. I live in a purpose built flat in a large town not a huge distance from London. I can go for a walk into town and buy myself a coffee (decaf latte) at Nero's. Other services are available, I can get my hair cut for example, or I can go and by some new clothes. The clothes are good quality, hard wearing and relatively cheap compared to my income. There are many other non-survival related services available, I can go buy a holiday for example. Everyone works for an employer who pays them some sort of regular wages that they are free to choose how to use. Some portion of those wages goes into paying rent or mortgage for shelter from the elements, and to provide sanitation, an area to cook and eat, an area for sleeping and a leisure area. Some of the wages will have to go into paying for food, which can be obtained from a local shop or supermarket. Yet more of the wages goes into paying for other services such as rubbish removal, protection by the police and smooth running of the local environment, such as sewage removal, good drinking water and keeping streets clean. All the survival related services takes up a large chunk of wages. But there is usually enough money left over for more "frivolous" stuff, such as electronic equipment, games, holidays, eating in restaurants, drinking alcohol in pubs, or maintaining and running a vehicle. Cities are created as a complementary set of living quarters and a means to access those living quarters. Access is by means of effectively one dimensional conduits called roads, which allows the living quarters to all be connected up effectively with each other, but also allow some amount of spacing between them. This type of access allows for high density of occupants, but easy movement. Most movement of people happens either from walking, or using vehicles propelled by gasoline or increasingly electricity. For very large cities distances are too great for walking and a vehicle is essential. Some bigger vehicles have lots of seating and can be used by any body for a charge - another service provided by a city. Most vehicles are privately owned by the people that use them, with the unspoken rule that close friends and family can share these vehicles without charge. Nearly all urban roads are tarmaced, which provides a smooth and hard wearing surface in all weather conditions. This provides a smooth ride for the people driving vehicles using it. Roads are also marked with all sorts of lines and signs and signals, to both direct and provide safe conditions for its users. Along most urban roads there are pavements, which allow for the free movements of people on foot. Again like roads, pavements are one dimensional conduits. This idea of one dimensional conduits, is also used for sewers, electricity cables, gas pipes, water pipes, telephone cabling, and internet fibre cabling. Some cabling is carried on wooden poles. Roads are lit at night time, to increase safety. Normally they are lit from above on tall metal posts using neon gas lighting or increasingly bright L.E.D. lighting. This allows people to see when otherwise it would be pitch black. This also allows activities to carry on beyond daylight hours or in parts of the world with low light levels especially more northerly lattitudes. This idea helps some districts of cities to continue their services for 24 hours every day. The cities are complemented by being surrounded by areas of countryside. These can also mostly be manmade and haphazardly designed. There is usually a lot more plant life and the density of roads and housing are markedly lower. Instead there will be privately owned fields were food crops are grown or livestock is left to pasture. Also there will be non-food related areas such as golf courses (especially in certain countries). Depending on the country there are rules that allow people on foot to traverse the countryside, but only on designated tracks - which are not formally paved or even. Most bigger cities will have an airport on its periphery, in which large metal flying vehicles can land and take off. These vehicles can transport several hundred people at a time very long distances, of a thousand miles or more in just a few hours, they can fly up to 12 kilometres above the surface. Most of these vehicles are propelled by kerosene combusted in a jet engine, which works by sucking in air in large volumes and burning it. The airport if it is a major one, will be structured like a small town in itself. It will have its own services, roads, temporary living quarters (hotels) and a large covered area of shops and facilities for transferring people safely to and from the aircraft. Other forms of transport are available, namely trains, which again run along one-dimensional conduits, made of thin metal rails. Trains are designed to stop at designated places, which connect up with roads. They can hold several hundred people and are designed as carriages which are connected up with each other, so that they can have capacity, but flexibility to run on track and around bends. Most trains are propelled using electric motors or occasionally diesel. In the early part of the last century they were driven by coal burned to produce heat to expand water into steam. The main sources of energy to drive the infrastructure of a city are petroleum products made from crude oil extracted from the ground or from deep in the sea. Other sources are coal burned in large factories which is used to create steam from water which then drives a turbine, which is an inverted motor, producing electricty, which is further used by cities for things such as lighting, electronic equipment, factories, and transportation. Whilst shops directly provide people focused services, most of the products made for shops are mass produced. Mass production creates large numbers of nearly identical objects by using one set of machinery. This is both efficient and allows large populations to be supported. Objects are primarily made of plastic which is a petroleum product, wood, glass or clay and some amount of animal products such as leather. Some objects are extremetly intricately designed such as laptops and cars, and a premium is paid for these, but nevertheless are still mass produced. To allow people to communicate very effectively together, there are many different networks in place. Most communication networks manipulate electricity to encode information. Originally the main communication network was the telephone, which assigns a unique number to each device using it and allows for one-to-one communication. As computing power increased it was possible to use digital encoding of electricty, which greatly expanded the capabilities of communication networks, to be able to send video, text, images and sounds to large numbers of people simultaneously. The devices using these new inter-networks (internet) are themselves extermely sophisticated and can be used for a great number of different tasks. A huge number of services from around the world are available through this internet. The phones of the last century have been turned into computers which are no longer physically tethered to the network, and can be carried around. This allows for instant information retrieval and communication to anyone in the world. Any type of music or video or product is available for purchase at any time. Cities need a large number of laws and regulations in order so that people can live safely together, and can be kept in line for the greater good. And indeed a government and their legal arms oversea and keep the piece. People are generally free to volunteer to work for any of these types of organisation. Cities will be connected up with each other within a nation, via roads, rail, air, or sea. Large container ships made of metal will transfer people and good in containers in large quantities between nations.

Forty Days And Forty Nights At Home The word quarantine derives from the Venetian language, and was used to designate the period of 40 days in which ship and crew were not allowed on shore during the Black Death. For obvious reasons it's a word being used a lot at the moment. I find it difficult to understand how being in a kind of quasi-quarantine (i.e. lockdown) has affected me in the last year. Before the outbreak I lived by myself and have done for many years. I largely became accustomed to this way of living and I've always been good at distracting myself with one thing or another. My mental health had been bad for a number years, but I don't particularly put it down to living by myself and feeling isolated. I was seeing people every day at work, and most weekends were taken with visiting someone or other. What the lockdown did was to restrict some of that physical interaction with people. I stopped going into work, and have been mostly indoors during the day. To be honest, workwise, I was initially elated that I didn't have the rigmarole of having to prepare for work every day, and that all the distractions of being in an open-plan office were immediately gone. Intermittently, I have worked for myself over the years in any case, so I was quite self motivated and productive. Naturally, it removed that immediate chit chat and talking about ourselves that happens in an office. I can't see that mentally this caused me a problem, at first. What hit me harder, was that I couldn't go anywhere at weekends. I felt that was a very definite curtailment of my freedom, and one of the things I would look forward to in the week. Although, it's not that they were planned in any case, and very often I would do solo activites, such as take a walk in the countryside. To be honest, I already felt as though during the week simply being a wage slave was a kind of lockdown and restriction on my freedom. Instead, what took over on weekends was working on my own little projects (mostly programming), or just a huge amount of surfing and sucking in information, as I'd always done. The pandemic lockdown has been an odd sort of prison. Certainly in the past few months my work productivity has suffered. My mum suddenly passed away at the beginning of the year, and having to deal even with just the practicalities of that has shifted something inside me. I have felt emotionally steady around the whole thing, and I put that down to a combination of age and just plain old work I've done on myself over the years. It's not even that I'm purposefully trying to suppress my emotions, what comes out, comes out. My mum suffered a fair amout in her life and she was just never able to do much about it, and that's always eaten into me all my life. A part of me feels a great relief on her behalf. I do have this underlying sensation of the end of a chapter in life, and this in combination with the pandemic has unsettled me. I have this strong compulsion just to drift and not try so hard with anything in particular; I think the expression for it languishing. Some of my most pleasant times have been spent in a kind of reverie: the long afternoon in a pub hobnobbing with friends, or sitting on a beach or in a pool just enjoying the scenery and sunshine, or playing a silly game of hide and seek with friends' kids. Those times just feel like time has frozen and the rest of the world's maladies just don't exist. I think the lockdown has made me desperate for that way of being. Or maybe it's just some expression of grief I'm experiencing, I simply can't work it out. My work productivity is suffering, and all I want to do is quit and do something completely different. It's one thing listening to my intuition and having a compulsion to push myself out of equilibrium, but it's another actually doing it. One thing I learnt from the bad state of my mental health all those years ago, was that if I was going to commit suicide, thinking about it was actually pointless: either I did it, or I didn't. The light bulb eventually turned on, and I realised that all that ideation was telling me that I didn't want to off myself, I was simply trying to scare myself into action, because I wanted to stop suffering. All my Restructuring series of posts, was really just my outward expression of the constant inner turmoil I go through in trying to get myself to act. I was never really taught or given a role model on how I should go about leading life. I've never had any strong compulsion in any particular direction, I'm more happy thinking than doing, and I want to think my thoughts and not what anyone else expects me to think. Everything I do, I do out of necessity. But I so wish that I could flip that around, so I would be naturally compelled to advance myself not from a place of necessity, but a place of excitement and possibility. I just know that life would be so much more worth living then. But that feeling of not being quite associated with the norms of society and not quite fitting in is so entrenched that my unwillingness to budge outside the @LastThursday protective bubble is high. Anything I do risks exposing me to the real world and it's unpleasantness, and I know deep down that things will have to become more uncomfortable before they become better. The beginning of the next chapter is about exposing myself and reconnecting with the world more and learning to be a man - sheesh that sounds ridiculous. And simply just building up to the exciting possibilities ahead. That will pull me along. I thank God the Covid chapter is also very slowly ending here too.

@Zigzag Idiot I appreciate you. You are right of course, that on the whole it's quite civil in the journalling section. I can see most journals are gardens of tranquility, albeit for the vulnerability and outpourings of emotion being expressed in some of them - but that's the journaller's right. It's probably all too easy to go doom and gloom and overeact. I suppose because I'm on here quite a lot at the moment, watching the way people treat each other sometimes makes me kind of sad. I shy away from intervening because that would make me part of the problem. So I personally feel the only option left is to try and set some sort of example, as I'm part of the community here too. Practise what I preach eh? Plus, I'm allergic to drama. - Not having a Way is hard to achieve, as Arnold Keyserling is hinting, it's better to drop the whole Way business altogether; and fly by the seat of your pants instead.

@modmyth yeah lol ranting about etiquette is not my usual style, and I was slightly presumptuous that anyone was going to read it. The problem is as much systemic as it is to do with people. Knowing software, I know that it's a real PITA to make one part of your software work differently from another part, especially if one same bit of code is currently used for both: in other words time and money need to be spent. I also suspect there's that underlying American spirit of Wild West and do-what-the-hell-you-want mentality going on here - as a more reserved Brit is grates a bit - we prefer to queue and have rules imposed from on high, so that we can secretly break them now and then, and stick it to our masters

See @Meditationdude is conflating two different things here: frequency of posting and standard of posting. They are two completely separate things. It's impossible to raise the standard of posting, because people on here are at different levels and stages of development. You need to give everyone room to express themselves at their level. Sometimes advice is going to suck, sometimes not, you pick the bits that resonate and ignore the rest. That's no different from real life.

Trolls only want one thing: getting attention by provoking a reaction. So really the best thing to do is to remove their attention supply and ignore them. But if they're honestly being a pest or worse, then obviously report them. Try not to get emotionally wound up by them, but instead have pity on them that they have nothing better to do.

Some people are going to comment once a month, some every five minutes. Who decides when it becomes too much or if this is actually a problem? Disguising your concern as being about addiction or saying that you're being loving, is disingenuous. If a problem really does it exist here, it's with being fixated on other people's behaviour instead of concentrating on your own development. Wanting to control how much people use the forum would be detrimental to it in the long term.

A Frequentist Approach Ok, it's not on the original @LastThursday psuedo book list, but it is now: Is there a different way to think about action and doing? For example, for many years I used to smoke (reasons) and then I finally managed to conquer the evil weed and feel so much healthier for it. Another example: I used to run long distance regularly and enjoyed it, but for whatever reasons I've stopped, occasionally I think about starting up again. And a third: I had a friend in secondary school but didn't hang out with her really, after a hiatus of nearly thirty years, we met back up again and now we visit each or talk to each other at least every month. What have all the anecdotes got in common? They're all narrative accounts, and as such they have an implied beginning, middle and end. This feels like an incredibly natural way to describe events, so much so that it seems unnecesary to install a different way of describing events. What are the pros of narrative? The main one is simplicity, because it's narrative, it allows you to easily put across the detail of a related set of events in a neatly packaged way. That package is like a container, say a bottle with liquid in it. The liquid is the juice of the events and what happened, the outer edge of the bottle is the confines of the events (in time). It's mentally simple to handle. What are the cons of narrative? The biggest one is that it forces the story teller to demarcate the events such as there can be a feeling of loss or disconnection when the events have finished. There's a melancholy knowing that you may not ever spend time with someone again, or that youth has slipped through your hands, or whatever. Narrative is final and nostalgic and melancholy. But all is not lost. The reality is that the package of narrative can be thrown away, but the innards kept. Put another way, events in life are loosely coupled to each other and happen in a very staccato fashion. This is what I'm calling the frequentist approach. Take my smoking example. I didn't actually smoke continuously from 19 to 40-something, nope, if you were to plot a graph of exactly when I smoked, it would be a very spiky and irregularly spaced out affair. There were times when I smoking 15 a day and long periods of five years or longer when I didn't smoke at all, other times one or two a day. Seen this way, there isn't really a line in the sand from where I stopped smoking. And, I didn't smoke continuously. Everything is a lot more ill defined and sparse. Maybe it's the same with friends you used to see regularly, and then gradually you saw them less and less and then eventually not for long periods (in my case nearly 30 years). But in the frequentist version, the gaps are acknowledged, from days to decades, however there is no beginning or end. This tallies up quite nicely with how time appears as you get older (time doesn't exist anyway), everything feels like yesterday, thirty years or actually yesterday. So instead of missing friends from university and thinking they're lost forever, I'm quite prepared for the eventually that one day and out of blue they'll turn up again in my life. The same for other things, including smoking and other vices. The bottom line is that anything that is done regularly, is a thing done differently each time. Each time I met my friend Sarah, it was a different day, a different situation and a slightly different Sarah. The narrative approach would have me believe that I met the same Sarah in the same situation for X number of years continously. It's a gross simplification. The frequentist approach I advocate, acknowledges that each meeting was separate and unique and only loosely connected to each other. Hopefully, you get a feel for why this is a gentler way of appoaching events in your life. There's no need to say a final goodbye and bury things, just simply acknowledge that it happened many times before and it could still happen again. But neither do you wait around hoping it will happen again, no, you get on with your life and if it does happen, you're pleasantly surprised and not desperate for it. There are many many recurring events in life, and their frequency changes over time, sometimes abruptly, from daily to weekly, to monthly, to decadely. How many more times will I write in this journal? Don't know, don't care, the frequentist in me says it doesn't matter, the narrator in me is a lot more clingy and neurotic: my god there'll be a time when I never write here again, what a drama, how sad this will be!

The No Way Way What sort of person writes down random made up book titles and then makes journal entries explaining them? This person does. This jocular title was really meant to convey the spirit of spirituality in a lot of ways. It's that nonsensical way in which some spiritual types speak. I think the sentiment behind "The No Way Way" and other things like that - the Ineffable Dao - really comes from Zen teaching (with its roots in Dao), where it's simply used to bypass the thinking mind in order to get through to something more raw and true. Really it's in the same tradition as the logic breaking: "this statement is false", in fact that is the most Zen statement in mathematics. Other than being a mind game to play for Zen enthusiasts, The No Way Way embodies a deep truth about reality. That is no matter what we do or say, in the end all said and told it doesn't matter, or more like, there is no-one there to do or say anything, it simply happens by itself. We all start out trying to have a "way" or method for carrying about our business or seeking enlightenment, and we all end up realising that it's impossible to have a "way" because whatever was said and done was the "way" that it happened. It was a way but it wasn't a way. The circularity can drive some logical types insane. There is also an element of Stoicism in acknowledging that even though you may have a method or way of leading life, whatever happens, happens - life doesn't care about your way. The No Way Way is just an acknowledgement of this fact. Maybe the best way of leading life, is to actively choose not to have a particular method for leading it. That's my way or at least the way I would like to choose.

@soos_mite_ah and @modmyth, I've got to second that. You're both extremely articulate in your journals, and you both write about things I wouldn't even consider or even knew existed. I find it both enlightening and entertaining (even if that's not the aim). And I might be taking notes on style for my journal... Keep it up both! Don't cringe too much

No, your question was clear. Maybe. But you're question is why are people attracted to this sort of jerkish behaviour? And my answer is, is that it reminds people of their parents. Parents sometimes have to be firm, aloof, abrasive, shout at you, ignore you, tell you off and so on: for your own good; and at other times you're their princess and the most wonderful thing that ever graced this earth. As a child you learn to respond to both these types of behaviours - you learn to like it. One day you realise you've crossed the threshold into adulthood, but you still respond well to dickish parental like behaviour. You also enjoy "my special princess" behaviour too. Obviously, the only cure is to grow up and not tolerate being manipulated in this way by other adults. Or do what I do, and just ignore them if possible, and if that doesn't work, be so obstinate and difficult that they eventually learn to treat you with respect.

You mean when some people "parent" others? It's because most people are simply grown up children, and respond well to being treated like a child.

Journal Etiquette Every community needs its rules of conduct, even if these are not explicitly written down. The Journal part of this forum is no exception. There are actually few rules which are enforced here, so there can be a temptation to have a free-for-all approach to interacting with others on here. One feature that is very much missing is being able to keep Journals closed to comments by others. Some journallers wish to have an online space where they can work things through for themselves, but also just to have the ability share in their journeys; but really don't want to interact with others in any way in their journals. Until this feature is added (it should be), then simply putting "Closed" in the title of the journal, should be a good enough signal to others: respect it! I'm not sure if it's possible to delete other people's comments from your journals, but this again should be a feature that's available. Journallers should have complete control over their content. Until then Journallers should be able to request commenters to remove their comments if necessary. Other journallers are more tolerant of people commenting in their journals (me included), but still may not want to have prolonged discussions which disrupt the flow of the journal. I think the journaller should be within their right to simply ask the commenter to move to PM if necessary. Or simply just raise the question in the main forums, where it will get more eyes anyway. Anyone seeing something interesting in someone else's Journal, should first consider if it says "Closed" in the title, if so, then DO NOT COMMENT. Be respectful. You should also consider if your comment is actually helpful to the journaller, or to other people who might read the journal. "Me too" comments should be avoided, except if you have something new and interesting to add to the journal. All comments in a journal should be directed to the journaller, or at least acknowledge them in some way. Having prolonged discussions with other commenters in someone's journal without involving the journaller, is just plain rude and disrespectful, DON'T DO THIS. Any form of personal attack or harassment in a journal is completely out of order, as it would be for any face-to-face interaction. If there is a problem that needs resolving then do it through PM in a civil manner, or involve a mod. It is an extremely underdeveloped attitude to attack others, even if you think you have a right to do so. This forum is about being a developed and conscious human being. Grow up and don't attack people for any reason whatsoever! Do not gossip about or otherwise discuss other journallers in PM without their knowledge. This can lead to bullying, group think and unfair treatment of the one being talked about. Always think to yourself: would I like being talked about without my knowledge? If someone contacts you in PM wanting to discuss another member on this forum without their knowledge, then politely decline. Anyone journaling, should be completely aware that their content is completely public to the internet, even if they don't want comments in their journal. It is unreasonable to expect people not to take your content and comment on it or use it elsewhere without your permission. It is very much a public space. If you don't wish your content to be used in any way, then don't use this public space to journal in, go somewhere else. The journals should be a respectful space for freedom of expression for the journal's owner; and so that others can learn from them.

You don't think that sexual orientation could ever be fluid over a life time? And, if a fetish can be developed why not an orientation for boobs or a beard? If your orientation is programmed at birth, then how does it take into account the huge array of different sizes and shapes of people? Does genetics orient you to find behaviour or appearance or smell attractive? Sorry, braindumping.