LastThursday

Warning: I'm going to be using one sentence paragraphs, heh. What is the real language of love? Is it gift giving? Is it hugs? Is it doting? Kisses? Valentines cards? Sex? No it's something more fundamental: being present and being attentive. Society is so contrived with its social mores and the corporate selling machine. We are so inculcated in all this that we throw out the baby with the bath water. Loved one forgotten our anniversary? Got the wrong year on the birthday card? He never buys me flowers? Takes me out? Boring sex? Doesn't care about Christmas? What's forgotten is that you are not entitled to have anyone pay attention to you. You are also not entitled for a person to even want to be in your local vicinity. Forget the corporate advertising, forget social functions; even having the same person near us regularly (and them not wanting to hurt us) is a great honour. And if that same person regularly gives us attention in any way: they love you. Simple.

Notice how in my last post I said Reality is not Consciousness. Neat trick eh? IT'S STILL A LIE. Reality is just a word like consciousness. You think you know what reality means. You do not. You are imprisoned by the word "Reality". If you are to push forwards in your development, then it can't be done with words alone. Notice how "development" is just a word. It's meaning is circumscribed and totally relative. IT'S A LIE. Development is not what is happening. Notice how "happening" is just a word. IT'S A LIE. I could go on. But hopefully, you get the drift. At some point you must stop reading and listening to others' words - and directly experience. Hang on. What does "directly experience" mean? Ahahaha, more words. I think I'm going insane. Must sleep.

@Nahm that's great! I must use that with my bosses. Constantly talking over each other like naughty schoolchildren.

What you need is options: Walk off and do something else. Ok ok. How about holding your hand up until they all shut up and then point to one of them to begin? Alternatively, do everything through email. Don't accept any other means of communication. This is the one I employ. Or you could be downright rude, get out your mobile and start playing a game. Or put your headphones on/in. Always look very busy and flustered and suggest they schedule an appointment with you. Just look at one of them as they talk, ignore the others completely, until the first has finished speaking, then say "ok" and move on to the next one. Don't say anything at all, until they've all run out of steam. Then say "ok". If it's in a scheduled meeting, then for the love of god don't ever have more than three people in it, preferably just two. And if you can get away with it just one (yourself). Let them talk for 1 minute (count in your head), then say "Oh s**t, sorry guys I have another meeting/hairdressing appointment scheduled." Get a colleague to phone you in the middle of it, to give you a good excuse. If there a multiple people talking to you, then make them feel as uncomfortable as possible: never sit, stand with arms crossed, look glum or off into the distance, breath heavily and deliberately, fidget a lot, shuffle your feet a lot or pace around a bit (so they have to follow), laugh mockingly or snicker at their suggestions. Last but not least, feign sudden illness (to be used in emergencies only). Good luck.

For years I ate sandwiches for lunch. So carbs and protein mostly. I always felt drained getting back to work afterwards. I did the 5/2 diet for quite a few months, which is basically fasting two days a week. Lost a good amount of weight, but now felt very fuzzy and lightheaded in the afternoons on those days - and concentration was zero. One thing it did though, is make me crave fresh juicy tomatoes for some reason. So when I stopped 5/2, I started eating salad for lunch. Problem solved! Keep away from carbs. Also chewing gum can help keep you alert through the afternoon slump.

I'm going back to consciousness, one of my favourite subjects of contemplation. I've noticed the way certain words get banded about on the forum. "Consciousness" is one of those strange words which bother me immensely. I think yesterday I had an epiphany as to why. Someone commented on the forum to the effect: "it's all consciousness, if there's something underneath reality, it will still be consciousness." Bam! It hit me at that moment. "Consciousness" is a label. You could argue that it's more than that, but it's not. The word "consciousness" and all its associated web of ideas is precisely just that. The absurdity of the concept arises because its definition is all encompassing. I'll try and give a flavour of why it's absurd: Q: What is between the planet Venus and Earth? A: Space. Q: What is between the solar system and the nearest star? A: Space. Q: What is beyond our galaxy? A: Space. Q: Ha! What is beyond the edge of the universe? A: Space. Q: What is beyond Space? A: That question makes no sense. And so it is with consciousness. The word itself explains nothing. Just as "space" explains nothing. It's a placeholder for something we think we understand and experience. So what? Well the word "consciousness" makes it seem as though we know what it's a placeholder for. It's supposed to be some indivisible all encompassing substance that we all experience. It's a bit like the following: Q: What is that animal with black and white stripes? A: Kibbu. Q: What is that little furry animal that likes to eat mice? A: Kibbu. Q: What is that animal with such a long neck? A: Kibbu. Q: What is that plant with pretty pink flowers? A: Kibbu. So even though we think we know what "Kibbu" is, its very definition is so broad as to actually be useless. But "Ah!" you say, that is the very definition of non-duality: everything is one and the same, it is therefore Kibbu. No. The word cannot come first, and if the word is pointing to everything, then it is no pointer at all. The fact remains we may think we know what "consciousness" points to, but it's a lie. Reality cannot be captured by one word alone (or any words).

Sorry forgot to include the name of the dish: ENLIGHTENMENT Best served to no-one.

@Bulgarianspirit Ingredients: Soul searching. Feeling lost. New Age. Identification. Religion. Disconnection. Space. Time. Method: Stop slicing the identification. Dice the religion. Boil the New Age for five years. Mix in the other ingredients. Slow cook in the pot of non-duality for an infinite time. You can substitute other things for Space and Time if ingredients are not available in your country. If you're feeling adventurous add a dash of Solipsism (taste preferences may vary).

Solipsism is weird. "I'm all alone". But surely to be alone, you need to be alone away from everyone else? Except there is no "everyone else". Solipsism still has separation built into it. @Someone here is not talking about solipsism but about non-duality.

@Leilani sometimes there is a strong disconnect between our actions and our desires. We repeat the same patterns again and again out of habit and because we hold on strongly to our identities. We build up a big story around our unconscious actions so that we can justify them to ourselves later: I always do X because of Y and I'm not in control of it - I'm a bad broken person. The only way to break out of a repeating pattern is to do something different. That means being conscious and aware of what you're doing in the moment and taking ownership of it. You have to be aware enough to catch yourself before you do something you regret later - and then do something different instead. It's bloody difficult to do, but it's not impossible. Do you think there's any chance you can make contact with the friend and apologise?

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