LastThursday

What you're experiencing is the end of one phase and the start of another. Sometimes its obvious what the next phase is, sometimes not. More often than not there's confusion and uncertainty as your drop one thing, before picking up another. What is life like without being addicted self help? It served its purpose and now you're ready to move on. Paradoxically, it can be beneficial to just sit with the confusion and uncertainty and ride it out - it's like a kind of grieving process. The impulse can be to try and fix things or find an immediate solution or replacement, but this can be stressful and unproductive.

@Preety_India I always thought friends should be more about giving than receiving.

@BornToBoil even if you're quite introverted and find people exhausting, you will still meet lots of people over time. The secret is to be open with the people you meet and be interested in them. You don't need to be fake though, some people are just not that interesting, don't pretend. Being open just means talking about yourself more, and finding things in common with other people and doing things together. If people don't find you interesting, then don't worry they're not going to be your best friend, move on. It also takes a long time to make good friends with people. I mean it can take months or even years. This is completely normal. I've met many people that I didn't get along with for months or I wasn't interested in, only to make really good friends with them in the long run. You need patience. Also, you shouldn't expect anything from friends, instead you should give them the things you want. So you want a relationship where you help each other out in challenging situations. In that case you should be the first one to volunteer to help. In fact helping people out is an excellent way to make good friends. You have to live and embody the values you want in a best friend, even before you meet the best friend.

May as well believe in heaven and God, just in case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager

More like: "Emptiness is having the experience of somebody".

@Tim Ho I don't want to derail the thread, but I'm going to. No. Something always stops me from be able to: blocked toilets, can't find toilet, flooded toilet floors etc. It's both disgusting and annoying . It's probably a hangover from too many clubs and festivals IRL.

For me it's that time really doesn't exist. It sort of crept up on me and took me by surprise. Detaching from time is immensely freeing and I feel a lot lighter. And the implications are mind blowing, the main one being that "this" is all just nothing. Another is that I was created just now fully formed. Another insight which I had more recently, I can't even really put into words. But it's something like, all qualia are relative to each other, it's the contrast between them that makes them exist. And what creates the contrast in the first place is awareness being aware of itself. Something like that.

@Tim Ho I never thought of peeing as a special power. I don't think I can unsee that insight ever again.

It's a bit like trying to imagine what it's like to be a 99 year old. You have an idea, but you don't really know. So you go and talk to a 99 year old. You can see they're old and you ask them questions and they tell you all about it and their answers seem genuine. But you still don't really know. The only way to know for certain what enlightenment is like, is to wait until it happens. My guess is that it won't give you superpowers or take you to a magical dimension. But what it probably will do, is obliterate who and what you think you are.

Propaganda crumbles under the weight of facts. To counter propaganda and fake news, you need to keep yourself well informed. You also need a healthy sceptisism: don't just blindly believe everything you come across, apply judgement.

Who is King? Knowledge or intuition? I think it's safe to say that we all lie somewhere on the spectrum between cherishing knowledge or going with the flow of intuition. On the extremes of the spectrum it can be difficult for one type of person to understand the other. Knowledge hoarders are happy to pull out information and science and "hard truth" to advance their arguments. The intuitive types will gaffaw at the ridiculousness of relying on the word of other people that knowledge implies. Maybe I'm caricaturing for effect a little bit. I do suspect that those who rely on intuition don't see knowledge acquisition as a prerequisite to being able to get on in life. Dare I say, that these are the artists, actors, healers and earthy dreadlock wearing types? On the converse the knowledge mongers are the stiff analytical libriarians and accountants of the world. The average Joe is somewhere inbetween. Really, knowledge and intuition are not diemetrically opposed forces, it's possible to be in touch with and encourage both. If you believe in evolution and a 15 billion year journey to get from the Big Bang to you, then your body innately has a nearly infinite amount of knowledge. This has been accumulated in your DNA and its expression in matter over that time period (ok, DNA is not 15 billion years old, but DNA had its precursors). Is it possible to consciously tap into that tacit biological knowledge (a.k.a. intuition)? One way to tap into intuition is through a process of priming. This is where knowledge comes in. Knowledge in itself is just a web of connecting truths (facts) about the the world. In a sense this is codified explicit intuition. By explicit I mean consciously generated and investigated. The taking in and learning of facts is on the whole a mentally labour intensive process; whilst it comes naturally to learn certain things, such as walking and language, other things such as Quantum Mechanics are hard and unnatural. It's no surprise that we give people awards and certificates for the acquisition of knowledge: it's hard and takes a lot of time. Given enough mental - or even physical - effort, knowledge can become automatic. After nearly 40 years of programming I can honestly say, that my fluency in it is close to that of my English speaking. This is the priming I'm talking about. That hard work has paid off in my ability to "intuit" programming solutions. And so it is with other areas of intuition. Knowledge may be scary and hard and pointless, but get over the hump of learning and it gets transformed into intuition itself. Naturally things work both ways. Intuition primes the acquisition of knowledge. Really, intuition guides attention. I became a programmer precisely because my childhood intuition guided my focus into all things symbolic. A virtuous loop got set up. For a proper balance and an ever upward tractory both the acquisition of knowledge and a strong reliance on intuition are a must. One informs the other.

To sharpen the sensation of impending death, just look at life expectancy in your nation (thanks Google). Plenty of nice graphs and maps there: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Never mind about @Leo Gura. What are your personal biggest flaws, especially when it comes to using the forum? Here's some of mine: I don't post enough questions. I don't always bother to read all responses in a thread. I get irritated when someone misunderstands or twists what I'm trying to say. The non-duality this and that are the same, and everything is relative non-answers drive me insane. I use too much flowery language. I'm sure I have more of them.

I went through a phase over a decade ago where I would cry at the drop of a hat. I would be in the car say listening to some music and I would have tears streaming down my face. Some would say that I was having a nervous breakdown, which is obviously not a DSM recognised condition, but it would have summed me up nicely at the time. In my insanity at the time, what was making me blub? It was really about feeling an intense beauty in everything. It was like electricty coursing through my body which I couldn't subdue, sometimes it was overwhelming. I've always been more sensitive to music than other modalities, so that would often tip me over the edge. Obviously, socially, it's not the done thing for a grown man to start crying for no reason, and the worst place was work. I would be working, and suddenly I would just be overwhelmed. I often had to leave the room and just walk and breathe to keep myself under control. At home I would just let loose. Films especially were bad. It was intense and awkward at times. What was going on? The flipside is that I also had a real drive to both fill my environment with beautiful things and to create beauty in my world. It was the only time I bought prints of famous paintings and had them framed. I still have them hung up. In hindsight I was having some sort of enlightenment experience. The side effect of that was that my emotional body was re-calibrating. Before that point I had always been very controlled and distinctly un-emotional, it simply wasn't in my repertoire to feel or express strong emotions. I was confused for a long while, like suddenly the emotional lights had been turned on and I was dazzled by them. The crying and the desire for beauty slowly faded over time, and the re-calibration had run its course. Occasionally I still cry at films or an emotional tune, but it doesn't overwhelm me any more. And I've become a more balanced and caring invididual than I was in my twenties and thirties. I can also see that the world is still a beautiful place, you only have to look.

@modmyth what a gorgeous death that would be. You can nearly taste the stillness and gloom. If I know that death is coming, shouldn't it be simple and beautiful?

This made me think of this painting for some reason (Ophelia by Millais): There's a kind of surrender and serenity to it. Anyway, not sure what I was trying to convey other than my spontaneous thought.

@Nahm thanks I take the compliment. I'm just practising some altruism and trying to hold up a non-judgemental mirror. Or something like that! Thanks to everyone so far for your wonderful open and frank answers. Keep 'em coming.

I don't think there's anything wrong with either short or long responses, except at the extremes. Single word or three word sentences are probably useless and 20 paragraph responses are probably not going to be read in depth. But hey, that's just my judgement.

@fridjonk what? Not use the forum? Now that's something I definitely need to go off and contemplate deeply.

Sounds like a useful technique, something like the Neti Neti method.

No matter how fast you drive, someone will always be able to drive faster. You can only know what you know I guess. I'd say I don't understand about 50% of what's said or being pointed to: I'm just not there yet or been bothered to do the practices.

You are 100% right. Although, if I'm going to use the forum at all, then the forum beast needs feeding. If I'm only doing half a job (by only posting comments), then what am I really doing on the forum? Dunno, feels like it's a flaw, but maybe not?

Not a flaw lol I think it comes from my belief that the onus is on the person doing the explaining to make themselves understood, not the other way around. But I try and keep in mind that it's easy to be misunderstood, especially in writing. Still drives me nuts though - that's the flaw.

Man, I've worked against impulsiveness my whole life - and it's got me in trouble many times. Definitely up there for me.

What you are reality pointing to is entirely different paradigms for knowing the world. Each has its problems, some of which you've pointed out. It seems like materialism is the default view for most of us. The number one problem it has, is that there is no space in it for the raw experience of consciousness. In other words, it has a lot of trouble explaining non-material experiences. The other paradigm which is Subjective Idealism (SI - the default view on the forum), has it's own issues. The main one being if consciousness and subjectivity is all encompassing, then what is the purpose of form (material objects)? And what happens to stuff outside of consciousness? If there is nothing outside of consciousness, then where does stuff disappear to and reappear from? Also once you go into SI deep enough, there is this notion that really the experience of it is no different from a dreaming state. Unfortunately, this has two unsavoury connotations: anything is possible and without rules, and everything is an illusion or false in some sense. You can see how mismatched to your everyday (common) sense these two ideas are. You could look for a middle way in the hope that two shonky paradigms make a good one. Start by looking for commonalities. The main one that jumps out at me is persistence. Persistence of form (objects) seems to underpin materialism. You know, conservation of mass and momentum. In materialism stuff doesn't just disappear, at least it takes time for objects to change, normally under the abstract force of increasing entropy. Persistence is also present in SI. Yes, stuff is discontinuous in actuality - you stop directly experiencing the beer left at the bar - but it can come back again. So materialism has a kind of smooth persistence, and SI a staccatto persistence. The other commonality is time. Or in the very least the notion of change. Under materialism stuff is subject to change, sometimes spontaneous (radioactive decay), but mostly due to one thing impinging on another (Newton's laws of motion, Navier-Stokes fluid flow) - this is just good old cause and effect. But SI also has a notion of change. It's very clear that the conscious experience is under constant flux, some of it smooth and some of it discontinuous. In fact this seems to be one of its primary facets, nothing is ever really static. TLDR: I don't have an answer, but I suspect there is a way out of the conundrum.