LastThursday

I have eight minutes before I turn into a pumpkin. How much can I get out...? Darn it. I had such an excellent thought after reading someone's journal just now. Gone! Alzheimers or just living in the moment or is it Bach distracting me? Four minutes. Three minutes. Ah! So in the last few months, I found an old short video clip I'd taken on a holiday in Iceland. Must have been about 2005 or so. Just three young blokes pissing about on holiday. I think we were drunk and somersaulting over the sofa or some such idiocy. Anyway I showed one of my friends who was on holiday the clip recently. His comment was that I was "completely different". My thought was "you haven't changed at all" other than slowing down and looking older. I took it as a complement. But essentially my thought was: if you haven't seen someone in over 10 years, then if they've developed at all in that time, they should be completely different. Ok I'm a pumpkin!

@Mosess don't worry too much about it. Things will readjust in the end. In my journal for example it can take me an hour to write out what took me a second to think about. Thoughts can be very "dense". In fact I would recommend journaling to you, it may help you improve your situation.

There is no returning. It's all the same dream. The base of reality is consciousness itself. Consciousness doesn't really have states. To use a different analogy it's more of a "flow". To say that one "state" of consciousness is more "real" than other, is to make a comparison. But what exactly is making the comparison? Consciousness of course. The circularity should be obvious. In reality no appearance in consciousness is more real than any other.

Watchwords for future me: love, attention, presence.

Making Decisions I had a lengthy (wine fuelled) conversation with a friend of mine this weekend. She was concerned about a decision she and her husband had made to move home. She doesn't want to move, he does, and this is causing an underlying tension. And for the sake of compromise she's going along with it. This lead me to try and explain how making and committing to decisions causes suffering - because I could see that she was suffering. Really, there's two parts to decision making. The first involves having an awareness that a decision needs to be made at all. I call this the "decision point". This awareness usually appears from nowhere into our direct experience. Now it's possible to rationalise and analyse why the decision arose and create a whole dramatic backstory - but the bald fact is that the need to decide arises spontaneously. It's very helpful to be cognizant of this. The second part is what I call "follow through". All decisions are about future action. Only when the future moment arrives and the action starts does the decision begin to be fulfilled. Normally the "follow through" itself involves a period of time and a number of smaller steps to fulfill the decision. So where does the suffering arise? A decision is normally a binary choice between two things. If both choices are unsatisfactory this can create suffering. In my friend's case saying "no" will create tension with her husband, but saying "yes" also creates tension because she doesn't want to move. It's useful to notice that at the decision point, no action has actually been taken. And until the action begins, the decision is irrelevant, because up until that point the decision is not being fulfilled. This points to a more balanced way of dealing with decisions: A decision point arises If a decision is made not to take action, then the decision should be completely dropped and forgotten about. Ruminating after the fact is fruitless and causes suffering. If the decision arises again in future then go back to number 1. If a decision is made to take action, then a plan should be made about when to take action. The decision itself should then be forgotten about. Ruminating after the fact is fruitless and causes suffering. If the time comes to take action, but action isn't taken, then the decision is not being fulfilled. Either move the start of the action or drop the decision altogether. Either way ruminating any more than this causes suffering. If the action does start, but it stops before the decision is totally fulfilled, then either make a plan to finish the action later or give up on it entirely. No ruminating. What the above process shows is that the decision itself is totally unconnected to the action based on the decision. The decision itself is of no consequence. The only part of the process with consequence is the action taken. The action itself may be seconds or decades away from the moment of making the decision. If the action hasn't yet started, then the effect is the same as if the decision had never arisen. In other words you are completely free to make another decision or to stop taking action on it at any point in time. Nothing is fixed. If any suffering arises, it should only be at the point the action is being taken - this is where the effort is taking place. Up until that point you are carefree.

Oh yes. Note for future self: dreams and persistence of awareness.

This is entirely the wrong time to post here. Primarily because it's 00:23 and by rights I should be asleep already. However... I've always been rather scatter brained. Or rather my attention has. I don't think I have attention deficit per se, I'm able to concentrate for long periods on one thing. But when a need to do something that piques my interest arises, I find it hard to not be distracted by it. This distracted feeling generally persists until I've exhausted its energy in some way - it can take days or weeks. So guess why I'm posting! It already feels better. After I can sleep. I chalk it down to yet another of my bordeline autistic traits. And yet, it has its virtues. Like a dog with a bone I will often investigate a subject or idea as far as I can take it. Over time I've built up a huge web of knowledge and this gives me the edge in communicating with people and in my work and just generally understanding how the world ticks. I do have biases in my interests, but really absolutely anything goes. The YouTube algorithm sucks for people like me - it's a real mess of suggestions - just like my mind. Good night.

@John Mitchell There's no right or wrong answer to moving back in with your parents. It will have its pros and its cons. Whatever you do I would say that you need to concentrate on improving one thing though: your social anxiety. Depending on the severity of it, talking therapy may help or simply more exposure to social situations or both. I suspect both your depression and loneliness are a consequence of the social anxiety. You could start gently by going out more and just be around people, no need to talk or engage. For example go to coffee shops or bars or libraries, galleries, and so on. Places where there are plenty of people. Get comfortable with being yourself around people first and take it from there.

I prefer: "Nothing is lost". In other words every single thing that happens to you has value: the good, the bad, the ugly and the ordinary. Same idea, different perspective.

Has a scientist tried this? Not yet. It's unscientific to give an answer without experiment. The more correct answer to your question is: "Hmm I don't know yet." Why not use absolute truth to ground relative truth? Then use the absolute truth to do relative science with. Then use science to uncover further absolute truths.

Congratulations in advance Leo! Q: How will you celebrate? Q: Do you think it's possible to "lift" the whole of humanity going into the future? How will you/we do it? Q: When will you make a 10 hour video? Keep up the good work. Much love.

I can't decide whether to talk about projects and mastery or being trapped or something else. (Five minutes later) Being Trapped I often think about freedom and how I could me more free. We are held fast by our appearance and character and by our internal world. Society and relationships function around identity. Externally this is your appearance most notably your face, but other physical attributes come into play. Identity is important because dealing with people is cognitively taxing. If you had to learn about a person from scratch every time you met them, then nothing would function at all. Identity then is a shorthand that allows you to get up and running very quickly when dealing with people. Identity is a gross simplification of a living being. Once you have formed a mental model of someone's identity, it becomes fixed and inflexible. Their character becomes congealed in our minds and in our interactions with them. We think we "know" our parents, our friends and neighbours. Further, since we are all playing this game, everyone becomes trapped in an inflexible web of identity. Sadly, we also do it to ourselves. We often identify with our histories and with how other people treat us and we become stuck there, unable to change and develop. The bottom line being that if we change too quickly, panic and outrage sets in and it's difficult for us and others to cognitively process. When we change, our identities have to follow in lockstep inside and out, otherwise relationships don't function. This of course is complete bullshit. The real truth is that we have no tie to the past or our identity. As beings we are a completely adrift and free. We secretly know this and yearn to be ever freer, but can't quite bring ourselves to completely break free of our characters. We are scared of what we're capable of and scared of being labelled insane or worse: being insane. If we constantly become someone else, how can we function in society? Naturally, being identified by our passports or a social security number or our names or our skin colour or culture - all that is complete insanity. What we should be scared of is that we're already insane and we don't realise it yet. Unlearning our identity is the only way to really live. Points of View A question that was asked on one of the forums has been swimming around in my head for a while. It basically asked: "As God, why can't I inhabit someone else's body at will? - to paraphrase. One angle that occurred to me was, how would it be like if someone else started to inhabit my body? Now, that's interesting! Would you even notice? I mean if it was an outright replacement and LastThursday's mind vanished, what would it be like? Maybe the new mind would become aware that their body was new and different. Perhaps the new mind would think it was dreaming a very vivid dream? Maybe there would be some sort of hybridisation. The new mind would slowly meld with the LastThursday mind and would become a new entitity: LastThursday 2.0? How awesome (in the original sense of the word) that would be. As mentioned in previous posts I've been playing around with hypnosis, mostly through YouTube videos. One particular video encourages you to become a different character (for fun). You sort of step into their shoes whilst under the hypnotic influence. When it works, the effect is really quite strange. You get to spend a length of time as this new imagined character. You become it. The interesting question is: where does this character come from? Is it pure imagination or is it: "God inhabiting someone else's body at will?" Is the change permanent? Possibly. Projects Versus Mastery Having worked on many many different projects over time (both for work and self amusement), you start to notice some characteristics. This is the S shaped curve that most projects take. Take building a house as an example. The ground has to be cleared and the foundations dug and laid. This stage can seem to take forever for little change in outward appearance. The house then rapidly gets built. This is followed by the finishing, the minor details and decoration which can take a long time. This is the typical S shape. I remember having worked on projects where for weeks there was nothing to show: it was all groundwork. This makes managers nervous and they will often start saying crazy things at you. If you have the guts you stand fast and just carry on. You then start to rapidly have something to show for your efforts and the managers stop shouting at you and start bragging that they knew it was the right decision to get you on the job. You then release the project only to find that a million things are not quite right and you have to put the fine detail and "finish" on it - this takes forever. Mastering a discipline could also been seen as a project of sorts. But the BIG difference is that it is a project without end. Mastery has a different shape to it. It has humps and dips and sharp rises. Sometimes it can seem that nothing happens for years and then all of a sudden great growth and development happens in a short amount of time. This is normal. Mastery above all is an exercise in patience and self knowledge. It's having the wherewithal to notice that there will be peaks and troughs and that is completely normal - wait them out. Don't be neurotic and impatient: that is not the way of mastery - that is for people who do projects.

Just go in with the right attitude. You're not going in to be "cured". If the therapist is good, then their task is to hold a mirror up to you. This is so you can see all the pieces of yourself you missed before, to make it clearer what needs to be changed. You then need to pay attention and change those things. Good luck.

The greatest gift of science is that it gets around delusion and self bias. It does it by performing experiments and having consensus. If two people perform the same experiment and get the same results, then it's a lot harder to be deluded about what you're experiencing. Because science forces you to face your own delusion and self bias, it helps you to keep an open mind. The ideas of science are not incompatible with mysticism, because mysticism is a shared experience.

To be free and wild: http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2020/8/31/the-phenomenology-of-wild-2.html

If we were inclined to believe in God, then a curious type would actually go to the trouble of trying to find God - and not have blind faith. Those with faith would simply say: "Why search? It's blindingly obvious!". The retort ,naturally, is to say I was given curiosity by God and also that I'm stupid. How would you go about this task? Looking for things involves having some notion of what it is you're looking for. This is one level of indirection. In one sense you've already found what you're looking for, but only in your mind's eye. Is the God in your mind's eye, the God? Almost certainly not. The God you find in the end will almost certainly not be what you are looking for - but you need to start somewhere. A starting guide might be to examine what the attributes of a God are. Usually it's some sort of supernatural power with a bias towards meddling in the affairs of people. Another concerns the plurality of God. Is God one or many? If it's many, then finding God will be X times harder. Were the Greeks right or was Akhenaten? Either way, we can narrow our search to just one particular God. The supernatural power angle is interesting. By definition this is something outside of "nature" and beyond it. As a power it can affect "nature" as a by-product. So, is there anything in "nature" that has been affected supernaturally? Well living in 2020 as it is, science can explain nearly all natural occurrences as simply that: natural occurrences. It would seem that science has squeezed out all room for anything supernatural at all. What does supernatural really imply? It says that there are effects for which there are no explanations for their cause. Science is clever because it can explain away all effects by setting up experiments which replicate those effects and therefore give us causes. It also describes a large number of effects from a small number of causes (e.g. electricity). For someone that didn't understand shocks, they would be supernatural. Science says ignorance is no excuse: there are no supernatural causes; God in that capacity does not exist. What about stuff science cannot explain? We have to tread carefully here, because science is arrogant enough to say that everything will be explained in due course. But that's just crystal ball gazing - it shouldn't be believed. The hot potato that can't be explained is consciousness itself. Maybe God is to be found there? Is consciousness a supernatural power? That is very very hard to answer. Is consciousness the cause, the effect or both? Another feature of God is that they are omnipotent. God should have set up the entirety of existence in a manner of their choosing. They are the ultimate cause of everything. If so, then it may be worth looking there. What is special or weird about the set up of existence, something that could point to where God is hiding? Here are some strange things about life for example: There is currently only one species of human Humans are completely unique animals with many unusual characteristics The further we look out into the Cosmos, the more we realise the Earth is completely unique as the only place with life There is no reasonable explanation for how life arose from dead matter (no experiment to reproduce it) All life is extremely intricately arranged (constructed/evolved) All life interacts with other life and the environment in very subtle and balanced ways The whole biosphere of Earth works as an intricate whole, as a single entity Earth is in the habitable zone of the Sun Earth is protected from radiation by its own magnetic field Earth is covered in water I could go on and on. But you start to suspect something is up the more you look. These are all things science could explain - but a sample size of one is not good science. At least if I haven't found God, I've found the shadow of God.

Day 17,436 Long ass meeting this morning at work, completely sapped all my momentum for anything at all. Took lunch soon after. Then took a walk for an hour. It's surprisingly warm here in Kent for mid September, 26 centigrade. Back in now listening to Chemical Brothers, in the hope of some momentum. Instead I'm on here writing to dear diary. I've got to set up and code an automated SMS for incoming property valuation leads. Simple enough, but also complicated enough to not want to engage with it. I can get away with it for a while longer, but not much. Then I've got to modify some Excel reports so they have a column for revenue. A friend of mine wants to try out his fancy camera later. His idea was to photograph the sunset at Beachy Head on the south coast. It's nearly an hour's drive for me each way, good thing I enjoy driving. I'll take some shots as well. I'll probably use a shot for a later post some time - and then spout some nonsense about appearances and how the Sun is not real blah blah blah. Sunset 7:14 pm local time. All that faffing about (I mean socialising), should take me up till nine at least. Might engage with some more self hypnosis later (more in a later post), I'm kind of getting addicted to it. Then to bed at midnight and day 17,437 begins.

@Dazgwny what you're talking is Existence and Continuity. For something to exist it has to be continuous in time and space. A good example is continuity in a film. Say there is a dialogue scene, from one angle the character is wearing a red shirt and suddenly from a different angle they're wearing a yellow shirt. That's jarring, and we know they've messed up the continuity. What you've realised is that Appearances are discontinuous. So when the appearance of say a friend disappears from your immediate direct experience, and reappears a few days later wearing a different shirt, you don't assume there has been a continuity error. Instead you infer that they must have existed somewhere in time and space and they changed their shirt. It's a story. It's the same when your friend is standing in front of you. Say they suddenly turned around, their back towards you. It's a completely different appearance. But you don't assume that your friend has suddenly disappeared. No. Instead you infer that they are existing continuously, and so it is still your friend standing in front of you. See how it works? Appearances are constantly coming and going. We just cast a mental net of "Existence" over it, to give the illusion of continuity.

There is no determinism either. We would need free will in order to be free to interpret what will be determined. If you follow me. Determinism cannot be absolute, because there's too much to be determined. We really do need a permanent thread for these free will questions.

OMFG

Just keep calm and carry on. You already know that 90% of posts are irrelevent to you, and 90% of you won't be here in a few months. Why take it personally? Keep up the good work @Leo Gura and mods.

I like a good thought experiment. There's a number of questions raised on the forum which are actually thought experiments. Most of them come in the form of "Why can't I do/become X?". Top of the pile is "How do I become enlightened?". Really most of these questions are hypotheses. The questioner has forgotten to actually run the thought experiment themselves. Instead they're asking everyone else to run it for them. This is not necessarily laziness, just inexperience at working through the consequences of a hypothesis. For kicks I'll run through an example and the reasoning as I go. "Why can't I time travel?" To start with, always always start with empirical evidence. Yes, I know it's a thought experiment, but most thought experiments are based on the real world. So these two further questions should immediately come to mind: Have I ever time travelled? Do I know of anyone else who has time travelled? Normally this should be enough to squash the hypothesis. It's the law of large numbers. If someone "out there" had actually time travelled, the media would be all over it. But in this case Andrew Carlssin comes to mind, so there's plausible grounds, even if very very slim. Next comes the mundane answer: You are actually time travelling into the future all the time There's always a mundane angle to a hypothesis, it shouldn't be dismissed as an uninteresting or unsatisfactory answer. Sometimes the mundane has a very deep truth to it. And often further questions come, which can help explore the original hypothesis: Why is there travel in only one direction? What does a "direction" mean anyway? Is it possible to change the rate of travel into the future? Does everyone travel at the same rate? Is the motion into the future fluid or jumpy? What about when I'm asleep? Does time stop? Next is the familiarity angle. This is kind of slippery to understand, but it goes like following. Say you were born into a race of beings with abilities and you could actually time travel whenever you wanted. Basically, you invert the hypothesis. What question would you be asking then? Maybe it would be: I've just realised I can do this thing and I call it "time travel", anyone else? How long is it possible to go without time travelling? A whole lifetime? I've never been stuck in a time loop. Why not? You then invert the hypothesis a second time: What haven't I realised yet about time travel? Am I actually time travelling without realising it? Do I actually have abilities that don't seem like abilities? Am I missing the blindingly obvious? Lastly there is the embodiment angle: Who or what is actually time travelling? This may seem obvious, but it's not. It can open up a whole can of worms: Is it your physical body? Is it your mind? Something else? Does the whole world change around you instead? If you time travel into a younger self, are you still you? Does you current mind replace the mind of the younger/older body you jump into? Does your physical body go with you? If so, what about physics? The movement of Earth and Sun through space? Do you actually jump into some other historical person's body? What controls the jump? Is there an incantation or special formula or special state of mind? And normally this is where the hypothesis blows up and you move on to the next one!

To labour the analogy. You could say that the left hand doesn't exist at all, but it's actually five fingers and a palm. Or you could equally say it's the end of a left arm. Or actually it's just one part of a body. It's all a matter of perspective. Each perspective is true with regards to its own definition. You current perspective (POV) is being actively defined by the "I" that thinks it exists. If the I were to redefine itself or disappear entirely, believe me, the perspective would change. It's impossible for your current "I" to appreciate this, because it's stuck in its own perspective.

Can the left hand feel what the right hand touches? If it could, would it still be a left hand? Can you feel with both hands at once? Are they still separate? Or are they both just parts of one body?

It's an ongoing battle of mine to reduce all tension and anxiety in my life. Part of this is to do with physical tension. Where to start? My observations are that I have tension: Around my neck area In my jaws Around my face More on the right side of my body: shoulder, arm, leg. I'm also prone to getting headaches and that would tally with the tension in the neck and face areas. I also know that another source of headaches is prolonged pressure on my back, mostly from sitting for long periods. I've also observed that I'm more likely to have a headache if I sleep too little or for too long. I do also suffer from mild lower back pain on occasion and this is almost certainly from prolonged sitting and stiff posture, i.e. tension on the whole back. And sometimes I will wake up with back pain. I would like to eliminate the headaches and back pain. But I would also like to have a more fluid walking style and relaxed posture. Some of the causes of tension might be: Embodied low level anxiety Prolonged computer work Overcompensating for bad posture I've made a solid effort to install a habit of releasing tension in my body regularly, but it feels like the effects are only temporary. How do I fix this tension permanently? Maybe some history will be helpful. I was first made aware that I'd developed bad posture in my early teens. One striking photo showed me with a pronounced hunched standing posture. At the time I was addicted to my computer (still am) and my parents blamed my posture on that. I would sit for hours on end in front of my computer. Looking back on it I'm not so sure. I remember distinctly the point where I became quite insular. This was after some trouble with some rough local kids where the police got involved. Without being particularly conscious of it, I think I decided to withdraw socially at that point. I was also bullied at school, despite it being low-level. My parents were also arguing a lot, and my dad largely absent. Several physical changes happened around then. My eyesight became rapidly worse. I had increased sweating especially in the hands and feet. My posture worsened. My sense of smell worsened and my nose became blocked. I had a lot of tension around my stomach. It could have been just bodily changes associated with puberty. But really I think I embodied the social withdrawal and anxiety. I literally didn't want to see the world, and I wanted to curl up and hide or at least protect myself by always being in a tense "fight or flight" mode. I think I also embodied a lot of my mum's anxiety as a kind of mirroring. I believe that the increased sweating was a manifestation of this. And it would be very effective at stopping me from being more social: shaking hands and intimacy were out. I made a concerted effort to improve my posture when I went to university, and my new found social confidence helped a great deal, as well as a conscious effort to stand straight. This has largely worked: my massage therapist said I had quite good posture recently. But years of forcing myself to improve my posture I think has created lasting tension around my back and shoulders and a stiff walking gait. I also think computer work and using a mouse has increased the tension around my shoulders and right side of my body. The tension in my face and jaws is more intriguing. I've always been quite prone to smiling even as a small kid, which I think mostly is an appeasement signal rather than a friendliness signal. So it's a manifestation of social anxiety. Whilst smiling has it's place, it's not a particularly masculine trait. So it's useful to be able to turn this off when necessary. The tension in the jaws is definitely an ingrained defence mechanism and probably the main source of my headaches. So much for causes. Solutions? Not many as yet: Continue the habit of noticing and releasing tension, hoping it has a long term effect. Maybe some form of hypnosis or CBT or talking therapy for lingering anxiety (although I'm reluctant to get back into this) . Iontophoresis machine for sweaty hands - which I use, but this is not a cure Change diet and intake - I've already largely cut out caffeine, as I'm pretty intolerant. I've stopped smoking a few years now. Improve movement and decrease sedentary lifestyle - I walk and play sports regularly, but my work is very sedentary Any ideas welcome.