LastThursday

@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.

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.

If you live long enough you get to go to many places in the world. My list so far is: UK, Ireland, France, Andorra, Monaco, Spain, Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Czechia, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Iceland, USA, Japan, Thailand, India, South Africa, New Zealand. There are a number of places I'd like to still visit, the South Americas, more Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, Pacific Islands, Vietnam, Cambodia. Some places I'd definitely revisit and explore more: Japan, Thailand, India, New Zealand. There's beauty and culture everywhere. Some places I'm curious about, but not so sure: Russia, China, Pakistan, African countries. And of course I shouldn't forget about the country on my doorstep: the Netherlands. When I visited New Zealand it was both a chance to swan about doing not much for a few months, but also with half an eye to checking the place out to see if I could live there. I definitely fell in love with the beauty of the country, both North and South islands. Strangely, one thing that put me off was its sparseness of population. Towns and cities are small in European terms. I felt as though if I settled anywhere in New Zealand I would soon exhaust everything there was to see and do in any particular town or city. Also, ten years ago when I visited I was unable to detach from being my mother's carer. Another point not in it's favour is the remoteness of the place. Even Australia is a long flight away. Physically visiting friends or family would be out except maybe once or twice a year. However, they speak English, I have skills New Zealand may like, technology now is such that keeping touch is easy, and I could build a tiny house there a lot more easily than in the UK. If I changed career to photography, I would have endless material. The only other country were I think I could live is Spain, but that's nearly a default option. Certainly I'd have to live there for a year if I wanted dual nationality and get my Spanish citizenship. Spain is a beautiful country and stuffed full of culture, and of course I have a large amount of family in various pockets around the country. Also, living there would "re-balance" me. I have a deep affinity for Spain, it's literally part of my DNA and the older I get the more neglected it feels. It's an odd sensation, spirituality says to dis-identify with everything, and yet I want to identify more with certain parts of me - it's all a game. I could also do with somewhat improving my rubbish Spanish. A good long time ago my girlfriend and I toyed with the idea of living in Canada and we nearly moved there. I think we would have chosen places with more temperate climates such as Vancouver or thereabouts. If I remember rightly, what attracted was generally the high standard of living and their English speaking, by that token we were less interested in the French speaking areas. We also both had desirable IT and engineering skills. We were young and excitable. But in the end the idea quietly dissipated. Another place that I'm intrigued by is Scandinavia and specifically Sweden. Again they have a high standard of living, they generally speak good English, and they have an aesthetic I like (I know that's nebulous). I did begin to teach myself Swedish a few years ago. If anything the Swedes are even more reserved that the British, but I don't think I would feel out of place there. I guess the only off putting thing, is the low light levels and cold weather - I'm very much a sun and warmth lover.

Fifteen odd years ago I was the team lead in a small set of three developers - me included. We mostly wrote web software for the large further education college we worked in, we also did a lot of reporting. Managing people and their workload can be an irksome process. Each person has their habits and foibles and you have to cater to those one way or another. One of the guys loved his mobile so much, I had to tell him to lock it away it in the day lest it distract him from actually working! The other guy was different. This guy was keen and he would constantly ask me questions. Now, I didn't really mind it too much, it was for the best in the long run - the more I helped him upfront, the less help he would need in six month's time. But he had a unique manner in asking his questions. He would ask, I would answer, and then he would argue about it. This used to wind the other guy up. It didn't get to me so much though, I would simply explain my reasoning because often he wasn't seeing the bigger picture. I was a pragmatist he was an idealist. Occasionally, my reasoning about some bit of coding was too subtle to even explain, and I would simply say: "do it however you want, but I suggest doing it this way". He would flounder at having nothing to fight against. I've noticed this style of question asking often in some people, lets call it "combative questioning". I think there's several things going on here. One is that some people are naturally contrary, they see the world in opposites. I should know, I'm one of them. Whenever something new comes into my system, my instinctual reaction is to reject it or at least question it, and then to make up my own mind about it. Deep down I can't abide being in mindless agreement, it makes me feel like a sheep, and I'm not, I have my own mind and will. It's a style. Another thing that's going on is looking for agreement. The question sometimes is simply a smokescreen designed to find people who are in agreement with their point of view. If they get lucky, someone will echo what they were thinking and they satisfy themselves that the question has been answered. Of course, this sort of thing is not questioning at all, it's sort of the opposite. Asking questions requires an openness on the part of the questioner. The questioner needs to be open to the possibility of both getting conflicting views, and views that conflict with their own worldview. Instead of rejecting all answers that don't "fit" their worldview, they should say "thanks" and then go and contemplate on the answers at length. Usually the most unpalatable answers have the most truth to teach you. Finally, they should have enough courage to update their world view without a fight. Both guys never did change their ways in the time I was there. But I did get them back by leaving behind a bunch of impenetrable subtle code for them to "learn" from.

Am I? Oh.

I'm blessed by not being ill very often. I think it may have been a few years, but this week I've been feeling under the weather. When it comes to the discomfort of illness the body will override thought and other things to get its own way. Even corporate culture can't dismiss illness, it's the one of the few "excuses" for being temporarily excused from wage slavery. Is there anything to learn from the body during illness? What illness does is to suspend normal activity and put you into a different state. We're very used to taking our bodies for granted and only notice them when there is some physical or emotional need. Even then, we try and ignore or misinterpret what we are being told: we carry on working or over indulge in one thing or another, and our bodies scream louder until we give in. If the body is ignored persistently and over time, then this will manifest in many different ways, either through attracting illness or through dysfunction. This dysfunction can then trigger mental illness as we try and battle with our bodies. Often, the different state illness puts us in has a dreamy or agitated quality. We feel like we've been taken out of ourselves and are incapable of normal thought processes or normal action. I wanted to take a long walk today, but I had to cut it short, the pain and weariness in my body wouldn't let me continue. And as I sit here, with a headache I just want to stare into space and not think at all and yet I don't feel tired enough to sleep. Often sleep is the only source of comfort and escape in illness. It is in sleep that our bodies recover and stop being abused by every day life: we are rewarded for it. Sometimes we don't know how to slow down and shut off our constant toing and froing, both physical and mental, we run ourselves ragged. Our bodies then either remind us or punish us for being so silly. Then we fight with our bodies with drugs and self medication and other dysfunctional behaviours. Doctors only treat the symptoms and not the causes, and they want quick results, it's what we want too. Illness has its own course however. It starts of at a whisper and then grows to a crescendo, before dying back down to nothing. We are powerless to hurry it along or to want to indulge it, it sucks, its painful, it makes us emotional and unstable. But when illness does disappear we have learnt our lesson and that is to savour every second we are not ill, and, not to abuse ourselves and our bodies.

If it never occurred is it all illusion? We're in a dream of nothingness where nothing happens.

Sometimes sweet, melodic, dissonant, quiet and in your face, just how we all should be:

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.