LastThursday

You believe you exist. It all comes from there. You can't get away from belief, not even with meditation.

@Parththakkar12 you are entitled to your opinion. I won't labour my point any more.

Come from a standpoint of love. Love and accept people for who they are, and love and accept yourself for who you are (jeez I sound like a hippie). So sometimes cutting friendships is an act of love in itself. Sometimes sticking around is also an act of love. What I'm getting at, is not to blame or shame others for how you feel - this is unloving. Take responsibility and admit that you're ready to move on and then actually move on when you're ready to.

Don't forget, the lockdowns are not caused by the virus, but by government themselves (look at Sweden). So people ARE scared of Covid, and this fear is represented by government. What people want is to remove the fear of dying from the virus. What I will say, is that people are pinning very high hopes on the vaccine, and that many people see it as a "cure" for the disease - which it isn't. It's just a way to reduce the infection rate, in the hope that it will eventually disappear or is kept at manageable levels (endemic in the population). The vaccine(s) will have been tested extensively before release. If therefore it show signs of harming people when deployed into the general population, then trust me they will immediately pull it, because there will be legal and criminal ramafications. The government and pharma companies are accountable to the law. The same law that says killing people is unacceptible.

From my experience there are two sides to social awkwardness. The first side is that there are unwritten rules to social interaction. You know, correct level of eye contact, saying the right things, talking enough, being relaxed. And a hundred other things. The only way to improve, is to pay attention to when you feel awkward and ask yourself "why?". The awkwardness is a signal that you've broken one of the rules of social interaction; find out which ones and correct them. The second side is that the feeling of awkardness is not real. It's not life or death, it's just a feeling that will pass. It's good practice to just let the feeling wash over you and to "own it" rather than to shrink away from it. Admit to yourself you feel awkward and say to yourself "so what?" and let it pass. If you can learn to do this with confidence, then it won't be a problem for you.

Naturally?

The latest version of me, so people know what they're dealing with...

It's all about risk. Is the risk of catching Covid - and being permanently injured or death - higher than the risk of taking a vaccine which is NOT the virus? The UK at least has NOT cut corners in testing the vaccine, instead it has poured a huge amount of resources into it, so it could be released as quickly as possible to for the good of the population. They stand to gain nothing from injuring the very people who put them there in first place. In any case, young fit people will be the last to have the vaccine, the old and infirm and health workers will be first. If there are any major negative effects from the vaccine, you can bet it will be pulled immediately.

Fair enough, but then it won't be a Yellow club. Not unless someone is there to continuously enforce Yellow ideals. Otherwise it degenerates. It's just like this forum, anything goes which is great. But don't expect high consciousness in return. Leo and mods are basically enforcing higher ideals from the top down. But if you want a certain standard from the get-go then you need a way to vet new comers.

If you start a club or organisation, you'll need entry criteria: a questionnaire (and a bouncer). And lo and behold top result in Google: Is actualized.org really the top resource on the internet for these things? Or does Google know me too well? Well done anyway!

@Tim R you're right. There will definitely be a skew towards the States - as Leo is American. You're not negating my main point though, in that bilingualism is not that surprising. Saying that however, being taught a language in school is in no way indicative of having any level of fluency (I guess that wasn't the question though). Mon French c'est terrible. So I wouldn't count my French as a second language.

Well. If the people who are interested in the forum are equally distributed around the world, and the forum imposes the rule that you must communicate in English - then it's not so surprising that bilingualism comes out on top. Yellow thinking. But what can I say, I'm bilingual? Ha ha ha.

@Michael569 good to hear. There was me thinking there was a conspiracy. Sorry, I know that's a dirty word here. Anyway, Monaco and Leichtenstein are small, Slovakia and Czechia not so sure Keep up the good modding, much appreciated.

I woke up in a funk this morning. There is still definitely an undertone of not wanting to pander to the crap of life. I need a permanent escape from it. Anyway, that was the first time I woke up. The second time (after I had disabled my alarm) I was a lot brighter, and just got on with my daily routine. And that is something I have to keep reminding myself of. That however bleak things appear in one moment, they can seem completely different a few days or hours or weeks later. The feeling of doom and gloom ebbs and flows. And anything which is not permanent in life is hallucinatory. The doom and gloom is not "out there" it's all "in here". So thinking is the cause of bleakness, but it can also be the way out, or at least a stabilizing influence. I like to label it "wonky thinking". It's really because the process of thinking is completely relative to itself. As such it is ungrounded or can be, and left to its own devices can easily wind itself up into a tight spiral and go wonky. What stops the wonky thinking? Mostly wonky thinking stops with input from other people. Other people point out your wonky thinking and this gives you a point of reference, an anchor for your relative thoughts to tie themselves to. In other words your thinking is corrected by other people. But, it should be borne in mind that two people's relative thinking doesn't necessarily stop all wonky thinking, it may actually amplify it. But on average, there will be a smoothing effect. That is why having relationships is critical to good mental health - and why being open and receptive to criticism is also beneficial (you don't have a monopoly on being right). It doesn't need a lot, just that one person who is willing to honestly give you their two cents now and then. How scared a lot of us are to upset the balance of a relationship and not speak up, but that really is detrimental in the long run. We shouldn't tolerate the wonky thinking displayed by others, but aim to correct them and help them. So what is really causing my funk? Mostly a distinct lack of novelty, fun or joy, and just the self absorbed nature of all the people I care about. How can I connect to people that don't want to connect? I don't blame them, they just weren't the people I thought they were, or at least they changed along the way. So in a word: people. Getting out of the funk involves having some strong anchor points for my thinking, to stop it spiralling away. And that in turn will allow my sensible executive functioning to kick in and to plan a way out of and into something more desirable. I will need to connect with people who will be long term fixtures in my life, who will reciprocate my love, and who will correct me when I go wonky. From there I will have a springboard for a better more joyful life. Amen.

@Space I'm originally a Londoner and I know Greenwich too well @SirVladimir, good pie and mash there lol. In Tunbridge Wells now though. Do you have to be British to be a mod then?

There are some of us Brits floating around these here parts.

What pure survival looks like:

Ah Lori Singer in spandex BITD. Sorry, did I say that out loud?

You don't have a choice. You're always in the present moment. If older people have experience fatigue, then the only problem they have is lack of imagination, lack of self development, and being a slave to their circumstances. If you're fit and healthy, there's no reason not to keep on living and expanding your experience (so I keep telling myself).

Surely not, row row row your boat?

It's not simulations all the way down, it's consciousness all the way down. Consciousness is unbounded, and consciousness is aware of itself. The simulation hypothesis is a kind of recursion (like Matryoshka dolls). But recursion is already built into consciousness itself, not need to invoke anything extra like powerful computers etc. With recursion you get lots of things for free. You get copying (forms and concepts), imperfect copying (a.k.a. evolution), infinity (unbounded repeated recursion), fractals (copying within copying) and so on. So here we are in a structured, evolving, infinite, fractal reality.

Solipsism? Hmmm.....Naaaahhhhhh

And... they have blue blood.

@Twega I don't have answers or even a position as such, but I like to tug at different strands, to see where it leads. Imagine a story in which the main character is a novelist. In the story the novelist is hard at it, writing the next best seller. She writes about the entire life story of the protagonist in every detail. But for some reason or another her book never gets published. On her deathbed she thinks back to her early life when she wrote that damned manuscript. In a moment of clarity she realises the story she wrote was exactly the life she lead. So my point is, is the brain in consciousness or is consciousness in the brain? Taking it as a system there really is only three ways to view things: The entirety of reality is produced by the brain (and matter), and consciousness is just some emergent function of the brain's function. The entirety of reality is produced by/inside consciousness, and the brain is an emergent function of that. The brain (matter) and consciousness are two separate "systems" in a symbiotic relationship, and one cannot exist without the other. Take your pick I suppose. I've currently plumped for the middle one. So that being my position, then somehow consciousness has to explain the senses; as opposed to the first, where the senses have to explain consciousness. Or the last where we can explain nothing. That is the primary observation about the consciousness first idea. Consciousness somehow seems to be very well ordered and structured. We inhabit this persistent point of view and a consistency of experience which we label as sight and sound and smell. These in turn seem to be tightly bound to this hulk of flesh that follows us around, so much so that if we poke our eyes out, we become blind. Surely eyes are critical to our sense of seeing? But. If consciousness is well ordered as it is, then there has to be a chain of orderliness to everything. In other words there is always a reason for things having a structure. That is the very definition of a structure! This is as opposed to chaos - or complete disorder - which has no reason for itself at all. Now we're getting somewhere. It's clear that vision for example is structured: there is light and shade and different colours and positions and depth and a billion other elements to it. And lo and behold some of that structure is associated with these spherical appendages in my head. What I'm saying here is that vision includes eyes. The structure and order of vision includes the structure of my eyes within my consciousness. My sense of vision is seemlessly integrated with the consciousness of the existence of my eyes. What this says is that consciousness produces or brings forth or is responsible for everything it experiences including all the senses. Still. Consciousness does give itself some wiggle room and allows you to see and hear without being correlated to physicality - as in daydreams and memories of youth. A man who becomes blind may still dream. And consciousness is probably completely let loose by psychadelics. TLDR - Senses are in consciousness. Consciousness chooses to restrict itself because it's structured.

It's really quite simple. Go back and relive yesterday. Go to bed, set the alarm clock and wake up yesterday. What? You don't know how to do that? The answer is simple, yesterday never existed. What does knowing that change? On the surface, not much. But imagine you were a time fugitive, where's the best place to hide? Now of course - they'll never find you there. More seriously, it allows you to disconnect yourself from the nasty past and the horrible future and live in the happy present. The past and the future are stories inside your head.