LastThursday

Entirely my take on it too. Solipsism is entirely like the "this statement is false" paradox. The solution is to take the 'I' out of solipsism, but then it becomes something else: a self-defining field of consciousness entirely without ground.

You've got to love that tasty non-dual cheese. I slept, I breathed heavily into a brown paper bag. And, I've still got my wonky humour at least, I didn't lose that. What will happen, will happen organically and without too much forcing (keep breathing). Whether I chose to stay on this forum or not is irrelevant to the great scheme of things. It will stop when it stops. All of life is ephemeral and grabbing on to things too tightly is a recipe for suffering. Constantly having to letting go of potential and people is also a recipe for suffering. Being alive is both - suck it up Guillermo. Carry on...

Ever since Saturday I've been feeling kind of tired. I went out Saturday with friends about an hour and half away to meet at a country pub, we ate, drank, went for walk - all very pleasant. How many of those of you outside the UK get to stroll by someone's house in a little village that was built in 1637 and talk to the owner about its history? We're spoilt so many ways in this country. But come Sunday I felt sleepy the whole day. And that tiredness hasn't left me, I want to return to my sprightly self. That phrase has been niggling away at me. I have a love hate relationship with this forum. Yes, part of it is to do with the idiocy of the way the forum is, the people in it, but also that the forum is insignificant in the same way that a cafe down the road is insignificant - and yet I seem to keep returning to it. It gets under my skin that I choose to get embroiled in its stupidity, I AM above it, both in maturity and common sense. It is not the place for me and I get no substance from it any more. I suspect I'm probably one of the oldest guys here too - I really do have a different perspective from everyone here. The main thrust of why I do so is that I know that I need to keep introspecting, something within me compels me to do it. It is a way of forcing my hand. But when I do so it sucks the little life I do have out of me. It's like holding up a mirror and seeing my reality for what it is and I don't like it. I don't like it because I have no answer for how to change the bad bits. At 53 years I've run out of steam, I've done so many things in my life that the excitement and freshness got drained out me. I remember that optimistic, excitable, energetic and flirtatious youth I was. I was immature yes, but I was also more vibrant and full of life. Earlier this week, I was minding my own business, but found myself idly curious about a police-woman walking on the other side of the street. She was older, tanned and chiselled in her features, very serious. But we made eye contact and for an instant I could see her soften, nearly smile, before she realised what was happening, and carried on looking away seriously again. THAT. That is the real me. That I miss. I used to flirt with anyone who'd care to pay attention to me. I wasn't trying to pull - although sometimes I was - more like I was saying "this is me, let's play". A friend of mine calls me "The Wolf" and for good reason, he remembers who I was before. Maybe I was a wolf, I like to roam the outdoors, I like the chase! I read the signs of things that go on around me, my tiredness is just that, both a literal and figurative one. It would be nice to sleep and start dreaming a different dream from this one. Don't worry I'm not suicidal, I've been through all that and out of the other side. No, there is no easy escape, instead I must go through it. Other people depend on my presence, my dad, my sister, my nephews and nieces, my friends; and I decided a long time ago that I couldn't do it to them. In fact I couldn't bear it going wrong either, I don't need that hell. I find it useful to get out my thoughts in this journal. I could just as well make a private one for my eyes only. But I always was a bit of an exhibitionist by nature, it all fits together with those other things I mentioned above. I really don't care if no one responds to what I write, it's enough that others see it. My energy, the good, the bad, and the ugly is held up for scrutiny, and disseminated for others to make what they will of it. It's not all bad. The large tract of introspection and self-scrutiny I've gone through has sharpened my wits, made me see far more clearly, and made me a lot wiser than I once was, even in the short time I've pissed around on this forum. I'm less of a try-hard than I used to be, I do actually flow in life and my interactions with people day-to-day, something that I've always sought after, mostly overcoming the autistic hurdles I was born with. In fact I just don't care if I'm awkward, absent-minded, or that my "mask" drops at times. Social interaction for me - as much as I've always loved it - has always been hard work. Only now at 53 can I say that I've nearly cracked it FFS. I need more. Yet another phase in my life. I want it to start now. But I'm a bumbling idiot who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. I feel like I've hibernated for long enough now, and I'm desperate to stretch and wake up. I don't know what that looks like, and perhaps it isn't going to be handed to me on a platter either. But I know one thing, I need to have a word with that younger me, mug him, and steal back that flirtatious, playful energy I once had. Cheers to that!

Thanks @Yimpa I will repeat the mantra regularly.

In no particular order the highlights are: Sweet, innocent, gut wrenching, Protracted loveless friendship, Potential wife, asymmetric, shrug, Slow motion car crash, Self absorbed, brief, immature. I have to laugh. I always wondered why I stayed single...

Thanks. You're most welcome.

Nuance man. Sigh. Women are not machines that are to be dissected and inspected like a clockwork. This is the wrong framing for what you want to achieve, you just don't realise yet. It's more of an improvisation, a dance, a ritual, a live exchange, a seduction. You're presented with a living breathing human being and you have to somehow enmesh yourself with that person. How do you do that? By paying attention to everything that's being presented to you in the moment and deciding in the moment what to do with all that. Sure, it helps to have a few rules of thumb, but that barely accounts for anything. Every single person gives you something different, you can't generalise it's not that easy.

There are no generalisations to be had, each woman is different. You're better off understanding what men are, since masculinity in all it's ways is what the majority of women find attractive. Since you're a man you're already at an advantage in that department, gotta flow with that more.

Noooo dont' break my fourth wall. Oh ok. I'm saying that women may have one or all or none of those attractive attributes, and that's it's ok. Obviously, my list is gross simplification for effect.

Each to their own lol.

Women's sometime beauty, women's sometime inscrutableness, women's sometime nuturingness, women's sometime defiance, women's softness, women's hardness. Call me an old romantic. Ha!

Damn you Zan Perrion. You may wear a costume, but I can sip coffee.

For sure, but it's not universal yet.

He even has it in bold. I don't drink caffeine, because I suspect my body doesn't break it down well, it has a huge half life in my case, and my health is probably better off without it. Pedant mode on - he misunderstands "half life" slightly, which is the constant of the rate of decay of an exponential curve, i.e. the time it takes for half the substance to be catalysed, and in theory it never quite reaches zero - pedant mode off.

Capitalism will take the cheapest path. AI is not cheap to run and maintain and those costs will eventually trickle down to the users of AI, at the moment it is probably underpriced to get people hooked on it. If AI ends up costing more than a human to employ for the same level of productivity then humans will win over AI. Will the AI cost problem be solved? Only by ditching LLMs, which are the core of coding AIs at the moment. But I don't think anyone really has new ideas about what would be cheaper and as powerful as LLMs to run. The other side of the coin is that if you're going to rely on AI for all commercial coding practices, then it really has to be rock solid especially when it comes to the security side of things. I reckon you'll always need human experts in the loop to ensure you're getting good software out - those jobs won't disappear. The most likely scenario is that there will still be coders, but they will be more like "prompt engineers" where the AI does all the grunt work, and the coders have all the ideas. This is neither good nor bad, just different. But, there will still be jobs.

My feeling on it is that magic/k is not what most people want it to be. Literally immediately manifesting solid objects is not going to happen, or 1 million of your currency in your bank account. It's more about shifting probabilities and becoming more attuned to your reality. It's all about coherence. Reality seems to have a strong preference for things making sense and hanging together - so magic has to work within the bounds of that restriction. But if you give up the idea that reality is completely deterministic, then you open up the possibility that you can "guide" or "bend" the outcomes of reality while maintaining coherence. When things go out of your conscious awareness, where do they go? They kind of slip into an amorphous soup of probability, at that point things can become a little looser and that's where reality can bend. And when they slip back into conscious awareness they are changed, but still coherent. Magic has to work on the things you're not currently aware of, because that's when they're most pliable. We're also constantly getting information about things outside of normal conscious awareness (such as synchronicities and so on), but you can become more attuned to them and learn to understand that information. There's a kind of "leakiness" to reality's goings on, see it like a distribution, with the normal stuff being extremely common, but the more whacky stuff still possible just not very common. It's also possible to shift the probabilities so that the whacky stuff happens a little bit more. What makes magic seemingly so random is that coherence must be kept at all times, and so the whacky stuff that happens must fit into that frame.

Not quite ten hours, but this will give you something to chew on. I managed two hours before I got out of my depth:

That explains my confusion.

To be sure Leo himself is not grifting. He has to make an income yes, as we all do, but I've never felt pressured into buying or doing anything I didn't want to over the years, he seems to keep his income streams fairly separate from the rest of his free content. This is what makes me laugh about accusations of this being a cult, Leo couldn't be less cult-like if he tried - he's even vacillated about meeting people in person. Only the people who consume his content behave like cult members! Hilarious. Is Leo deluded about his claims about himself? I have no way to tell and neither does anyone else. Except to say that most people don't claim what he does, and so the balance of probability would say he's wrong - deluded if you like - but most people are not master violinists either (e.g.) and we believe them when they play. Leo's biggest problem is that he can't demonstrate what he claims very easily so that the masses can understand it, so there will always be doubt. Of course no one can know what "level of consciousness" anyone has, unless some form of telepathy or mental embodiment of other people exists (seems highly doubtful, but I'm open). Those claims should just be ignored as idiotic babble. I mean it's not even possible to define what "level of consciousness" really means, but, it's the same with defining intelligence and if you've got it, you can generally tell if others have less of it - who knows? Shrug.

It's the age old question: how do we know anything? The best you can do is ask and then observe the answer. But if you don't know what you're looking for then it's a dead duck even before you've got started. In general you can't trust what anybody tells you, because they could be grifting, deluded, misinformed, ignorant and so on. It's even worse in Leo's case because none of us has met in him person, all we have to go on are is his videos and what he writes on here and elsewhere. He seems intelligent, sincere, coherent, and the sum of his behaviour and output over time seems to support the view that something's going on him - so I would give him the benefit of the doubt. The problem with having any particular trait or experience (such as being awake) that nobody else has, is that it's blindingly obvious to yourself that you have it and others don't, but the converse doesn't hold, and no amount of grandstanding can convince everyone or even some people - because they don't have it and they can't understand it.

I like it. My CD stages are: Unicorn Pink, Tangerine Orange, Crimson Harlot, Sherbet, ok ok, it's a work in progress...

@MuadDib I do enjoy your right-brained responses as an antidote to my wordiness, I'll let it marinate.

What is this thread? I've got a new theory called Circular Dynamics with pretty colours which goes round and round instead of up and down and round. And for the love of all that is good, SD has never been about individuals: you are not on the spiral, your society is.

Things I cannot let go of. I had another of my weird synchronicities recently. There was a period in my life when these used to happen fairly frequently and I had a love/hate relationship with them. I've never particular been spooked by synchronicities but damn they're very inconvenient at times. I remember parking up at a friend's once with the intention of just popping in and seeing them for a few minutes. They live in a quiet residential area, but parking is permit only, which she had but I said but I told her I would be quick and not to worry. In the space of those ten minutes I got a ticket. Bear in mind a physical person would have had to give me the ticket. There was no one around when I parked up, and there was no one around when I left! Aside from synchronicity, there is the weirdness with people. It's particularly hard for me to put my finger on it, but it's mostly the I-think-about-them-and-they-appear effect. Many times I will start thinking about someone absent-mindedly and they will contact me soon after or I bump into them in the street. It could be brushed off as coincidence, in that I think about a lot of people a lot of the time, but those particular instances have a "feel" to them that are different, like a feeling of something imminent approaching. At times it's got so bad that I have to purposefully not think about people! As you can imagine that is quite difficult to do, but thankfully I'm adept at both distraction and quieting my mind. When I was younger I used to attract a lot of weirdos and randos in the street. I would be minding my own business and they would come up to me and ask me for cigarettes, or money, or directions to some random place I've never heard of, or want to invade my space. My girlfriend at the time in fact used to get so annoyed by the whole thing that she would blame me for "looking at them and encouraging them" - my retort was to say to her "what the hell should I look at then?" lol. But I think it was more than that, there was some kind of vibe I was emanating that was being latched on to by others in need. In fact was I followed by someone like that into my workplace lobby once and security had to deal with them - obviously, I got blamed for that too, for "bringing them into the building", all I could think was WTF? Thank god those days have left me behind. People mostly leave me alone nowadays. Although I did have an odd experience on a train a few years back, which I've written about here already. Then there are the "bad feeling" vibes I get. One especially salient experience was leaving my car in London (where I don't live) to go on holiday. From the get-go I had a bad feeling about leaving the car there, but for the wrong reasons. The area I left my car in was a little rough and I was concerned it would be broken into or whatever, but I kept telling myself it would be ok. A week later I returned and it was absolutely fine. I needed to reverse out of the tight parking space to get out, and realised I might hit the car behind me and slammed on my brakes - at the point there was an almighty crunch and I thought I had in fact hit the car. No. But now I the car wouldn't move, I tried the ignition the engine was going, but the car was immobile. It turned out that transmission drive shaft - which is a big hunk of metal - had broken in two. Nice. The great question I cannot let go of is, is this shit real? I think it is. The greater question is can I control it and if so how? I have my theories and it's largely about being in a certain state of mind, attentive, but inattentive, focused but unfocused. It's certainly slippery to grab on to. Anyway, what was my latest synchronicity? I'd had an odd thought pop up about a YouTube channel I watch called Tokyo Lens. The guy there does a lot of stuff about the culture Japan and what it's like there - I like his energy - but he's not from Japan. At one point though he decided to learn to fly and was going through why it was such a difficult thing to do in Japan etc. That was years ago though and it kind of went cold. Earlier in the week I thought "I wonder what happened to this guy's flying aspirations?" At the same time a friend of mine said he'd lined up some sort of surprise for me, as a thank you for all the hours and days free work I'd given him working on his house etc. That was supposed to be Tuesday, then he said no make it Wednesday. I had no idea what it could be. Lo and behold Wednesday morning this Tokyo Lens guy drops a video about his flying lessons and explains that all those years ago there'd been some sort of accident possibly involving him and it was all on hiatus in Japan - he'd instead gone back to Canada to take up flying lessons again. That synchronicity made me laugh. Of course the other synchronicity was more ridiculous, my friend had got me this flying lesson the same day:

Almost exactly a year ago now I voluntarily gave up working. Working for other people has never gelled well with me. It got so bad at my previous job that even just talking to the boss would induce a fight or flight reaction, and I was losing sleep at night. It was a real shame in a lot of ways that I came to the decision to quit, the job was perfect in a lot of ways. The office was down the road a less than a ten-minute walk away, but ridiculously and amazingly I got to work from home four days out of five. And, I mostly knew what I was doing very proficiently. What spoiled the broth was me changing job positions within the company about a year before I quit. I had been doing work for a particular client (which I'm sure I've written about in this journal), but then that client decide to collapse (their company was sold up) and my job position was gone, my bosses since they ran another business moved me over to retain me. But in that move the whole complexion of the thing changed, most of the work I was to do would be directly for my boss and not for a client. Every relationship is different and this one didn't work out so well. In many jobs I've had many managers who basically treated me badly. Despite having obvious prodigious ability in coding there is something about my character that rubs people up the wrong way. I essentially know what that is: I'm my own person who doesn't tolerate bullshit, I have a lassez faire "mask" to my demeanour and don't do getting flustered or standing to attention. Some bossy people don't like those attributes. And so I get maltreated as a response. I'm reminded of a little competition we had once in one of my previous jobs where we were to design a spinning roulette wheel for a gambling game in HTML. I ended up being the only person to complete the thing in the allotted time - did the bosses award me the prize? No. So what have I been doing for a year? Not much. That "not much" has to be qualified however, I have been working consistently since 1996 and the last stretch of non-work I had was around 2001 for about 18 months when the dot.com bubble burst. A year of "not much" is nothing, in fact I want to get another year in if I can, and indefinite is my dream. A friend suggested a job opening at his place in London for mega-bucks with the possibility of working from home. I can't bring myself even to contemplate it, it's just more of the same and it fills me with dread. But that same friend and I were discussing little project that we had in mind to work on. He wants to create a paid or subscription service to get high-school maths questions posted every month for those parents out there. I had an idea for a phone app for hiking. ChatGPT has been instrumental in getting both these ideas off the ground, my main friction being I've never developed for Android or iOS. But I have a working app now, and have been wrangling with 60,000 UK place names and Welsh don't even talk to me about Welsh. But I hope to push something to the Play Store in the next month or two. If I could make a few thousand a month: an app a month say, then I could stay afloat indefinitely. Please god make my dream come true 🧎🙏