LastThursday

Once an addict always an addict eh? Thing is it's not true, addiction is not a static thing, you can become unaddicted again. Avoiding strong triggers can be part of the tools to use against addiction. Trust me, keeping away from smokers when trying to quit makes it a lot easier. And I can now stand with a group of smokers and not crave a ciggy: I'm unaddicted.

You could waste a lot of time in any activity. The word to pay attention to is "waste" not the activity itself. I'm sure YouTube has plenty of high consciousness vids, you just have to find them. You just have to be more aware of your own intent. If your intention is just to relax and have some fun, then that's ok, don't beat yourself up. If your intention is to develop yourself, then use that to guide your actions. It's a matter of building up a habit of strongly focussing on what your intention is at any particular moment. Environment plays a great role too. If you're addicted to doughnuts, you should probably avoid Dunkin' Donuts the triggers are too strong. If @trenton is actually addicted to YouTube he should probably avoid it, at least until his intention is strong enough to override his default behaviour. The internet is big though, go somewhere else for high consciousness resources.

I'm in a pensive mood today. In a sort of segue from my most recent post, I think I've identified the cause of my, what do I call it? indifference? limbo? stuckness? It's the existential tussle between stillness and motion (a.k.a. The Story) . I think I need to elaborate. For me stillness has the following connotations: Centredness, stoicism, reliability, steadfastness, confidence, aloofness, status quo, minimalism, low effort, avoidance. You get the picture hopefully. In turn these things are about the following possibly unconnected ideas: Protection from and avoidance of bad stuff; freedom from others' problems and needs and dictats; freedom to be and do what I want; yearning to be accepted and loved; being respectful and trustworthy; being decent to others; being unemotional. A large part of my character is pensive, passive and analytical. Whether by nature or nurture (my father is pensive, passive and analytical) I don't know. So far in my life the Stillness has served me well enough. I have plenty of money, stability, health, a roof over my head and peers to keep me going until I die. This is contrast to my immediate family, who are on benefits, needing to be financially bailed out, needing a crutch of a man, or perenially skint and in varying states of ill health. I'm the wonder child. I'm the sensible first child. Except this is never acknowledged whatsoever by anyone. Instead I just get used by everyone - basically it's low conscious ignorant behaviour on their parts. I suppose I'm virtue signalling here, I'll stop. To summarise stillness has taken care of my survival needs. Ok, so on to motion: Excitement, energy, fun, laughter, purpose, direction, change, flowing, freedom, creativity, curiosity, productivity, novelty, collaboration, building, adventure, development, optimism - all in no particular order. The other side of the story of me, is that I have a boisterous, funny, loud and energetic side. This is connected with the following ideas: Getting attention and love; authenticity and freedom; feeling good and/or high; connection to others; helping others; bringing joy and humour; being silly; physicality; breaking rules; making and creating stuff; being responsive and fluid; improvisation. I was quite an energetic kid. From a young age I spent all my time outdoors, in an urban environment. Occasionaly it was threatening or physically dangerous. Physicality was the order of the day. Saying that, I was never that boisterous or overbearing, not a bully. And it was mostly about playing games, exploring the environment and being part of a group. In summary motion is about living life and being in alignment with it, flowing with it. Reading the above back to myself is actually useful. Due to my age, circumstance and super ingrained habits I've become very insular and still and now it's hurting me, despite it being authentic. I need much much more motion to be fully authentic and respectful to myself. Otherwise life is not worth continuing with. The big question is how? How do I achieve that motion? I have no choice other than to be an adult, and a not young one at that. I can't behave like a child playing games and going exploring any more - I have to do grown up versions of those if at all. And people rely on me for their survival. I am actually completely lost on how to do that. It seems that everyone around me acts in the following way: thought -> want -> action. That seems to be motivation enough for them. I find it exceptionally robotic and mindless. I only appear to act out of necessity, none of my thoughts seem to generate any form of motivation or want or at least enough for me to take action. The way other people carry on seems alien to me, even if it's authentic to them. I'm not a complete lost cause though. I do have interests and minor motivations. But the interests are very analytical and pensive, mostly programming projects, or musical interests. And I have desires, but these are too vague or big or overwhelming to take action on. Put a different way, any motion I desire is in complete contradiction to the stillness I desire. Stillness is winning, but it's unbalancing me. So here are my ragbag of my Vague Desires in Motion (I really should get a dreamboard going and maintained): Not to work for someone else To be out in the sunshine year round and to be closer to nature To use my body constantly, be physical, exert energy To be with an authentic beautiful woman who is self sufficient and energetic and adventurous Not to have money concerns or survival concerns (I have this already though) To build my own house with my own hands To tread lightly in the world, be self sufficient and connected to my environment To be highly creative, use intelligence and skills and make an impact on people Just to be allowed to be "let loose" and be me without judgement Give up programming and sitting in front of a monitor, and just have it as an occasional hobby To be away from the death grip of my parents' problems One of my old maxims apply here: if you do nothing, nothing will change.

For practical every day purposes, yes of course. But that's only from the perspective of separation. If you remove the separation, then there is no "you" and there are no "other beings", there is just one you/other beings entity. It's like you're the milk and they're the coffee, if you remove the separation, then it's just milky coffee. If there is no separation, then there aren't separate minds and thoughts either. If there were then there would still be separation. But it doesn't mean there would be a mind-meld or something strange like that. Your mind and thoughts are not separate from stuff "out there" either. You mind and thoughts are the same thing as the chair you're sitting on. Hopefully you see where it all leads.

@Amaal This is a matter of perspective only. From an absolute perspective separation doesn't exist out there or anywhere (non-duality). The separation only arises as a thought or appearance in awareness. For example from one perspective the hand has fingers and a palm, from another it is a whole hand (+arm +body). Only thought creates the separation.

Something to try would be to reflect it back on to your friends. Start calling them sweet and adorable and pixie fairies or other cutesy names. At the very least it will raise awareness within them. Secondly it will be a softer indirect challenge - since it is not your normal way of addressing them - which may work better for you.

You're being deliberately daft. Would a sword protect you from a gun etc. etc.? How likely is it you're going to be beheaded in London? Don't you get the gist of what @Preety_India was saying?

No way is language consciousness; language is just a brushstroke within the picture of consciousness. Admittedly language can modulate consciousness. But the bigger picture is that consciousness modulates itself to its own ends - that is its very mechanism of creation. If it decides to modify itself through language or by any other means it can do so. But language is neither the only means nor the primary means of self-modification. Inserting "free will" into the equation is unnecessary.

Exactly. But you only understand better what the concept of consciousness is. It's worth thinking about what equating one concept to another actually does. Does it collapse the boundary between two concepts? Does it create a hybrid concept? Or does it create a new concept that only has the shared characteristics of both? The "danger" of equating concepts is that the result isn't known. I think that is where you're going to struggle on this forum to get any agreement. There's a strong belief here that all language is one step removed from "direct experience". I'm in partial agreement with you, that language can inform experience directly, but it's not the whole story. I'm in definite disagreement that language is primary in any way. Consciousness first.

There is a big difference between talking about consciousness and the actual experience of consciousness (whatever that is). One is the map, the other the territory. All you're doing here is using language to equate one concept to another. It doesn't wash. And WTH is "direct experience" anyway? Experience is experience no? whatever flavour it comes in. Also, meaning is far too woolly a concept to be useful. What is it? Recognition? Awareness? Feeling? Epiphany? Rant over.

Granted, you wouldn't see a chair without having a concept of one. But before you learnt the language concept "chair" I'm sure you sat on one - so there was something there, even if it wasn't identified as a chair. So qualia are "prior" to concepts. But I agree some qualia are the results of concepts. In general for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I stand corrected and I apologise. I was being lazy in not reading all the posts. Although in my defense (as if I had to defend myself), in my answer I was pointing out that consciousness is a concept in language - which it is. Whatever you equate consciousness with, it's still couched in language (on this forum).

That infinite intelligence decided to provide an answer through me rather than someone else? Is your beef with psychedelics, infinite intelligence or just infinity itself? Or is it just the combination of these things that bother you? Infinite means unbounded, without a limit. But just because one aspect of a thing is unbounded, it doesn't follow that all its aspects are. I mean you could walk in a circle for an infinite amount of time, but its radius is still finite. So infinite intelligence is unbounded in ability, but bounded in time. So what?

I just dipped into my infinite intelligence (without psychedelics) and it told me that if you draw a line from the right angled corner of a triangle to the hypotenuse so that its perpendicular to the hypotenuse, then you will have three similar triangles, and as such the area of the two smaller triangles equals the area of the larger one. QED. My point is you're being ridiculous. If infinite intelligence takes a thousand years or a micro second to prove a simple maths problem, it doesn't disprove infinite intelligence.

You're being disingenuous. You're assuming that psychedelics will somehow guarantee you access to infinite intelligence. Is that actually correct? You're also making the assumption that somehow infinite intelligence works at infinite speed. Maybe it takes twenty years to get back to you with its answer to the maths problem?

@Cosmin_Visan do you have a high quality answer?

I have no answers. But the following two thought threads come to mind (persistence might be more accurate a word than consistency though): 1. Consistency is a kind of absolute. In a sense the consistency of your hand is absolute. So if all is flux, then where is the source of Absolute in all this? Is it god, existence, something else? 2. Consistency is an impression or feeling. You have a feeling that your hand is the same hand from moment to moment. Say that you're in the matrix and a giant computer is generating your universe as a snapshot. Right, NOW! In that snapshot there you are with your hand and all your memories and feelings - freshly created. Those memories give you a sense of consistency. In other words you and your hand don't exist except as a timeless snapshot. But you are hoodwinked by the nasty overlord computer into thinking you are in a persistent consistent moment in time. And then POOF! Gone. This video is loooong and technical, but it's a marvel and if I remember rightly discusses the interplay between change and permanence:

Consciousness is made from the alphabet. But what do I know? But how do I know that I don't know? Arghh... help.... me.....

The collapse of the duality between mass and energy. Was Einstein into spirituality I wonder...?

Dunno. Glitches don't like to be looked at in my experience. They are like wild animals. But maybe there's a way to feed them?

They are one and the same thing. No pushing was done. I am both a son and an uncle simultaneously. The real mystery is why this something - which is unanswerable in my opinion. And secondly, why does it hang around like a bad smell? Why doesn't awareness flip into an alternate universe every Thursday? Oh well.

Set up a camera and film yourself. I bet the inconsistencies will disappear.

Drama, gossip, intrigue. Who doesn't like a good story? Especially if it involves people going through hardships and transforming themselves in the process. What things go into the stew to make a gripping story? Novelty This is the bedrock of a story. The only reason to tell a story at all is to discover something new. This is what drives gossip at the water cooler. We as humans are insatiable information hoarders, especially when it comes to facts about people - we just can't get enough. It applies to both sexes equally; just the way it's shared may differ. Conversely, if you are simply recounting a story where the listener already knows the facts or the facts are not that novel, then it's a crap story. So a good story will continually drip feed you new tidbits of information; even better if you have to piece together the information yourself. This is the stuff of detective crime dramas. The other form of novelty is not so much about gossip as about setting. If the setting is wildly different from your everyday life, then nearly everything will be novel. Mostly every book and TV show is about different settings: places, periods, planets, people. Transformation Going from point A to point B is often not the point in good story. "It's the journey" as is often said, or more accurately plot. What drives a plot forward is the trials and tribulations of the characters in it. These hardships then change the character through the course of the journey, It gives the characters in the story meaning and depth. So it's sort of beside the point if a character starts off sad and becomes happy, or vice versa. It's what happens to them to make them the way they end up being, that is interesting. I think the reason why transformation is so interesting, is that we can relate it to our own selves. It's clear that we transform over time, but it happens mysteriously and slowly. In a story that transformation gets condensed down to hours or a few hundred pages. And maybe we can even guess part way through the story what the transformation will be in the end, and have the satisfaction of being either right or bamboozled by plot twists. Hardship In nearly all great stories, something bad happens. The bad upsets the happy balance of the characters' lives at the start of the story. If the character is bad themselves at the start, then we want to see them transforming into good people, but through the medium of hardship - they have to work for it. If the character is good, then all we wish is that they deserve a good life and that they settle back to normality by the end, after all that adversity. The ups and downs of a good plot, then creates cycles of tension and release, which we find mesmerising. There is also the sense in which if the characters don't encounter the bad, then their transformation wasn't earned. If the alcoholic reforms by page 3, then what's the point of the story? Unless, that is their spouse dies in a horrible car crash on page 4. Do they go back to drink? Or not? Hmm? So to the point of my story, I mean, post. We are all living in our own narratives. Our whole identities are bundled up with the story of our lives. These are the settings, the hardships and the transformations we are a part of. And we take it very seriously indeed. We are and become the characters we weave into our own stories of ourselves. This activity really is very odd. When we talk to our friends it's clear that they are living in their own individual dramas of which they are the main protagonists. They are so embodied that if told to behave or be different they will actively resist it. You are no different. A huge amount of "self development" is coming to grips with the fact that you're fabricating a story about yourself - you are even fabricating the notion of a "you". Even the phrase "self development" implies the transformative aspect of a good story. It's stories all the way down. There are two ways to go. One is to completely throw out any sort of narrative and become untethered and completely free. This then becomes a drive towards recognising that all is relative and a drive towards meaninglessness - where the narrative would normally supply meaning. This is understandably a scary process. Surely meaninglessness is just a kind of death and dreariness? Meaninglessness is bad right? Another is to stay in the narrative, but to actively and consciously manipulate it to "improve" your life. And the way to do that is to constantly apply the three aspects of a gripping story to your narrative: novelty, hardship and transformation. So this is the drive towards more meaning in life. Take a holiday to somewhere exotic, grind your way through the mortgate, make a family, and transform into a virtuous wise person by the end. The story of Western society. Personally, I would like a dramatic life full of meaning, but it seems I'm slipping inexorably towards having no narrative at all. Please god let me have both? Stay tuned for the next episode of life and times of LastThursday!!

What's a systems level view of beauty and attraction? We all have personal ideas of beauty and things or attributes that sexually attract us to people, or of sexual fetish. For brevity I'll be lumping together beauty and sexual attraction (although these two things are not necessarily always in alignment). And, I'll call the individual different things that attract us attractors. Each of us then has a personal set of attractors. Whether hard wired into us as human beings or learnt over a lifetime, is not particularly relevant for this discussion. In terms of people, the set of our attractors defines who (and what) we are attracted to. Also, not all of our attractors need to be triggered in order to find someone attractive, indeed some attractors may have a stronger effect than others. It goes without saying, if you take a single attractor such as: "has blue eyes", then not everyone in the population will fit this criterion. However, other attractors are less specific or in other words a greater section of the population will match, say: "is female". Not all attractors are binary on/off, some like for example head shape may vary between turn off and turn on or somewhere inbetween. So an attractor can sort of half trigger as it were. So we can find a person mildly attractive. Already there should be something here to work with. People who trigger more of your attractors will be less common in the population - because the probabilities multiply. Say the probabilty of blue eyes 1 in a 10, and the probability of female is 1 in 2, then the probabilty of finding a female with blue eyes is 1 in 20 - so less likely, more "beautiful" people are less likely. The more attractive a person (by your standards) the less likely they are in the population. The obverse of the rare beauty is that average attraction is far far more common (because of normal distribution). If being female is enough then its 50% of the population, or if blue eyes its 5%. Average attraction is simply that less of your attractors are triggered. Of course the situation happens both ways. For mutual attraction it's necessary that both party's attractors be triggered. That means the probabilities again multiply, making mutual attraction far less likely than the attraction any single person feels. This can even make for lopsided attraction, were one person finds the other more attractive than they find them (maybe the attractors a person has forces them only ever to find average people). Worse still, you may have a set of attractors for a very slim percentage of the population, in which case you may never meet those people. On average, average people will find other average people attractive, but will always find beautiful people (or ugly people) a lot more rarely. But in a monogamous culture, that will mean that most average people will be taken by most other average people. What about the people who are left over, the beauties and the uglies? One more dimension to attractors is that in general you are attracted to people who are similar to you. Your set of attractors is largely linked to your upbringing, social circle and physical appearance. Beautiful people will end up with beautiful people and ugly to ugly - because all the average types are taken and you're attracted to mirrors of yourself. The upshot of all this, is that there is a kind of stratification of couples in terms of beauty and attraction. People end up being with others that look or behave like them and have the same level of beauty. If you want more beautiful people in your life, then you both have to make yourself more attractive in general and increase your personal range of different attractors. It's all maths.

Did god give us free will knowing that we will commit sin and suffer a consequence? Or was god hoping for a different outcome?