LastThursday

If you have already achieved everything desired of you by society, what's left to do? Society's excitement if you will, is lowest common denominator glory. Get a partner, get married, buy property, have children. With the currency of all that being work for as much money and time and prestige as you can muster in a lifetime. It's seems obvious that a Western meritocracy earns its living by comparing ourselves to each other. You do well by simply being better. It's a blantantly obvious way of being no? What about those folks that aren't better, what to do about those people? Ignore them, put them down and make sure they're not included: segregate them out of your social circle. So much for Stage Orange capitalism and betterism. The neurotitism of Western society is that you have to have or obtain certain few certain attributes to be considered worthy of being included and recognised. If you want to see the origin of this idiotic notion look no further than the ancient Greek aesthetic: Where else does the idea of muscular Alpha males stem from? It's an inescapable Western paradigm. The only thing that's changed in over 2000 years is that they preferred curly hair on their heads rather than baldness. Obvioulsy, I find myself ascribing to this ancient idotic aesthetic. If I could click my fingers and become any one of those ancient statues and flex those biceps I would in an instant. That's how inculcated I am in so called modern culture. What's left to do? Everything. Eschew those pesky Greeks, rid myself of everything that makes you want to conform. Even being "yourself" is old hat. What's left is just understanding deeply what the fuck is going on. Why am I "I"? What is an "I"? What in the hell happened between being a bewildered babe and a bewildered middle-aged man? I could probably spend another lifetime dissecting it all to no avail. This seems like real modernity 2021. No. I've already achieved everything wanted of me by society. It's time to say "fuck you" to society, it has nothing more to offer me. Instead I chose to go my own way and to own my very beingness. To be just to be and not be neurotic about it: to just be a non-muscular God.

48. Do you actually have a point?

Yeah made my list of people for openings(what kind?).Served me well. Good training I guess. That's a non-sequitur if ever I've seen one. Man, you speak in riddles.

@sethman good to hear. What was your takeaway from the Jacques Derrida video then?

@intotheblack Because they're misogynistic whining manchilds. Obviously my comment is not productive and possibly inflammatory, but it does make me feel better.

Don't be daft there are no "right" words. Right according to whom, you? Watch this video for an explanation as to why - it's only two hours long:

@fish what are you saying? This forum is more delicious than an Italian ice cream parlour.

You have nothing to prove. Let people believe what they want to believe, you can't please everyone. In fact, just stop talking to the neighbour, that will give a stronger message. Obviously be civil, say "hi" if you bump into them but keep it to a minimum.

The normie force is strong within you. Only your thoughts are going round in circles. Why not aim to escape from the prison of your thoughts? Meditate regularly. Walk in nature. Learn to play an instrument. Have sex. Do something out of the ordinary. Therapy probably won't help, it's just more thoughts. But I'm no therapist.

And that explains precisely nothing. Leo's audience needs explanation, he's not preaching to the converted. Explanation takes lots of words. Leo has to convice his audience of what he's saying. The more esoteric the video, the longer he needs to explain things, which is why his videos have got longer. What you're saying is like saying that War and Peace should just be ten pages long, because most of it is fluff. Yes, maybe, but then you lose all the nuance and guts of the story and all the juicy details. You should be able to focus for a few hours on anything without it being a problem. Here's a short video for you:

Ah yes, love. We all need love me included. It's not a bad need to have, but it is a need that never seems satisfied. There are so many ways to trigger it within yourself. Where we go wrong is to think too narrow: "I will only feel love in a relationship with this particular person". Love is everywhere in many different forms.

Is it though? Some of us seem to be drawn to creating our own thought prisons: no free will, solipsism, no self, illusion of reality etc. We get a melancholic thrill from it. And we use it to stop ourselves going any further into the scary unknown.

What do you need? A man, a relationship, the love from a relationship, not to be alone, something else?

Coincidence only happens if you are aware of it. It's the active process of awareness that is weaving together reality. That awareness is intelligence itself. Everything is just luck and coincidence.

A value is like a thought story compressed into one word. To see it just ask yourself for example: "Why do I value authenticity?" and out comes the story. All values are like this, there are many aspects to them. In a sense the word used for the value has no absolute meaning, something like "love" is just a placeholder for a whole story about love. You could replace "love" with "excitement" and some of the elements of both those values would overlap. Because they are just stories, your "authenticity" would be slightly different from someone else's "authenticity" - it's all relative. Meaning comes from emotion and identification with something. We say something is meaningful if it contains some truth or has some sort of emotional charge behind it. When you have a value of "being kind" for example, it's not because it's innate but because you have an emotional response to the story of "being kind". And, because you have the positive emotional response you identify with it. Maybe you imagine being kind to a person and it makes them happy, and you get a good vibe from this thought story, and then that makes it meaningful to you.

Would you say that is done through character assasination? Or is it more commonly just shunning someone?

@UDT sorry miscommunication - I meant I'm the fan boy not you. I was just proving your point about fan boys and bloody corpses. Anyway, moving on...

I think you forget that his audience is not scientific. The only reason a scientific presenter can speak so concisely is because s/he uses a lot of scientific words and is speaking to a scientific audience. Leo also uses some jargon (god, ego, enlightenment and so on), but mostly it's plain English, so it takes a lot longer to explain. Also, unlike a scientific seminar Leo uses lots and lots of examples to make his stuff easier to understand, and this takes extra time. I'm sure Leo prepares plenty. There's no way he could talk about what he does without solid preparation. [Leo fanboy, I'm looking at you @UDT]

Truth is unchanging.

Why not press pause and watch the rest another day?

What are you? It seems like if you strip away all the things that are not you, you aren't left with much. For example, if you lose a limb are you still you? It would seem so. So you are not that limb, or that limb isn't needed to define you. It quickly gets metaphysical. It appears that you could be a kind of disembodied (i.e. limbless) entity that observes or senses the world. In this view your body and the rest of the world is observed and is in some way separate from the actual you. I like to think of it like a bar magnet: You can see the lines going from North to South. You are the observer in the South pole sucking in everything from the world in the North pole. If you cut the magnet in half width-ways you get two magnets each with their own North and South; hence there are many observers in the world, each observing their own version of the world. Looking at this analogy the world (North pole) emanates activity and the observer (South pole) passively sits there taking it all in. But it's worth noting that without the South pole, the lines have nowhere to go, and without the North pole, there are no lines to observe. The whole is a system one part co-dependent on the other. Can we do better than this analogy? Notice how the field lines seem to circulate out and then back in. If you were to remove the magnet, but keep the lines it would form kind of circuit perpetually going round and round. Also notice that the field lines have no edges, it fills all of space in all directions. You could imagine how these circuits of field lines are self-sustaining, once they get going. There's also a sort of centre to the circuits where all the field lines squash tightly together into nothingness. So maybe, you're a self-perpetuating field of something? You are everywhere and are neither observer or observed, but both simultaneously. You have an ill-defined centre from which everything springs and is subsumed. This centre is the thin slice of the present moment, and all the lines are awareness or consciousness. That is what you are.

Five is too small a sample size to make any firm conclusions from. Take a deep breath and try 100 (not in a day!). If 100 flake then you have to change something. On the other hand, if you try anything 100 times you'll get much better at it. Practice, practice, practice and patience.

Yeah, biology still counts. It's like there's a little computer whirring away in the background adding up all the pros and cons for every man or woman you meet. It's just the computer runs different programs for men and women. The program doesn't really care about what you think consciously, most of it is subconscious. It doesn't care if it's a one night stand or something longer term, or fun, or FWB or pickup or anything really. Regardless if it's sex or not, you still need a relationship to bring up a child. The path is: attraction > relationship/sex > pregnancy > child > adult >more babies. That's the evolutionary program.

Long live this thread! Bump.