LastThursday

Surely consciousness by definition is aware of itself? The problem arises when trying to define "it". Is that "it" allowed to be a flower or does it have to have "a brain"? The argument is definitely inside out. The "it" comes from consciousness not from the form consciousness takes. Consciousness first, everything else second.

Good and bad are only relative to your own survival. In those terms bad is something that diminishes your ability to survive. And, survival is just the avoidance of physical death. To understand the why you have to understand survival. Every single human being lives on a knife-edge in terms of survival. There are a zillion things that can cause your death and you are constantly trying to avoid those things. The potential for bad things to happen to you is very high. In fact it is a miracle that you are still alive. That miracle has come about from all the good things that have happened to you: having nurturing parents, having food regularly, bathing regularly, having common sense and so on. In a certain sense some people bring "bad" into their lives (and others' lives) precisely because they are not "good" at survival. But most of the bad stuff in our lives happens because the potential for it is very high.

1. Persistent long lasting depression and anxiety (thankfully subsided, but permanently changed my outlook). 2. Climbing out of the pit of my own mental programming (still scrabbling out of it). Letting things go and accepting. 3. Realising and loving the perfection and beauty in everything including myself - without trying to make it all perfect (still working on that). And sort of on the list, is becoming aware that a life without struggle is no life at all.

I think every friendship has different amounts of positivity and negativity. Friends will put up with the negativity because the positivity wins. But as soon as you start having doubts or the balance is wrong, the friendship is doomed. Cut your loses and move on, even if it's hard. Don't cling on hoping it will change or it will go back to how it was or because of fear of being alone. Keep moving forward.

If you've done all you can, why not respect your friend's wishes? If he doesn't want to change why force it on him? I think once you give up trying to help him, you will be less conflicted. Your relationship with your friend will change, but give it time.

There is nothing wrong with you. The software development industry (I can only speak for the UK) is full of people that are not competent programmers or systems developers. I've seen this over and over in nearly 25 years of being in the industry. There are several reasons this happens. The trouble starts with hiring. Job adverts are full of buzzwords for the latest programming languages, frameworks and trendy techniques. Generally, there will be very few candidates that match all the criteria. Instead they are just designed to be honeypots in order to lure prospective candidates. On the whole you will be hired if you fit some of the criteria. Secondly the interview process is inadequate to ascertain with any degree of certainty if you have the required level of skill. Most interviews are informal chats designed to see if you'll "fit in" to the culture of the company (i.e. Team Worker, Go the Extra Mile, happy to be fed pizza and coffee with no extra remuneration for hours worked, blah, blah, blah). The interviewer is hardly ever an actual developer. Lastly, if an incompetent programmer is hired they tend to be carried by the only one or two highly skilled programmers who have been working there forever. In other words the incompetent programmer wastes time and resources, but the good programmers are so good that managers don't notice the deficiencies. And further, the pay can be lucrative so incompetent programmers are tempted to try their luck gaming the system. And from experience, they know they can get away with it. I can only say, that if you are a competent programmer and can prove it, then you will eventually be well rewarded for your efforts. Stick with it. Don't despair my friend.

You're living in a hall of mirrors and the synchronicities are reflections. What is the purpose of a reflection?

Sorry for the essay I'm in the mood to write. I totally agree with you. As soon as you open your mouth and speak, it's no longer truth, it's just a possibility. Even "consciousness" is just a word, it's not a truth. The map is not the territory. The only truth is the territory. Most people around here call it "direct experience", and unfortunately direct experience can't be shared (although see Leo's latest video!). I think the delusion is happening not to Leo, but to the people interpreting Leo's words and body language with reference to their own experiences. It's your classic projection 101. You are giving the character of Leo life by creating a story around him, just like a character in a book. Yes, I am saying that we're both deluded - we both love a good story. We in fact know hardly anything about Leo. Telepathy (I don't know about healing) is in the realm of communication. Communication is a very strange beast. But at its core is: Correlation. Say you set up an experiment, where you stand on a hill with a torch in the dark. You have a friend on another hill in the distance looking out for the light from your torch. You can send a message say in morse code by switching the torch on and off and your friend can make notes of what s/he receives. The first strangeness is that you have no way of knowing if your message was received. Your friend may have fallen asleep for example or there was fog in the valley between you blocking the light. The simplest solution to this is for your friend to also have a torch and replay the message they received from you - that way you will know if they received your message. How strange! All communication is a two way protocol. Unless you have confirmation of what you sent, you will never know if your message was received. Ok, so what if the confirmation message from your friend is different from the message you sent out? Maybe your friend misread your flashes or got distracted. Then you can say, well most of the message is the same, so they must have received it ok. Notice how strange this is. Now we are less sure about whether our message was received. It's gone from a certainty to something less. It's gone from causation to correlation. No communication is perfect. The best you can do in any communication is to say that what is received is correlated to what is sent out. The correlation can go from 0% to 100% and everything inbetween. So back to the experiment. You decide to try out telepathy to communicate. You throw your torch away and sit there in silence. Instead you just think about the message you want to send. Your friend is now receiving your thoughts, but still sends confirmation back using her/his torch and morse code. Now you find that most of the time the confirmation message does not match your thought message, it's completely different; the correlation has gone down to 0%. But maybe, just occasionally your friend sends back one or two correct words! So the correlation is now above 0%. Did some of your message get through? Some will say it was just coincidence, some will say telepathy is real. And maybe there is a way to increase the correlation towards 100%?

@Spinoza you have to follow the train of thought and the implications. Materialism: the world is "out there" and made up of tiny bits of stuff (atoms, elementary particles, forces) that obey consistent laws. The world works like a machine that just runs by itself, and it all started with a "big bang" and has been going on ever since. It's possible to invisibly transmit messages, but this is just electromagnetism which obeys its own set of laws. It's not really possible to explain consciousness with materialism, because consciousness is not made of anything and doesn't obey laws - instead it's bodged so that "somehow" the matter machine produces the "conscious experience" via the brain. Telepathy is not explainable, because conscious experience would have to be transferred directly from one person to another - but there is no explanation for the conscious experience in the first place. Non-materialism: the world is exactly what you are experiencing - it is the conscious experience and nothing else. There is nothing beyond the conscious experience, everything is encompassed by it. The brain and atoms and electromagnetism are just experiences within consciousness. More importantly they are just inferences based on analogy and memory, in other words: stories and beliefs. The natural question is then to ask where the conscious experience arises from - and if it's separate from other people's conscious experiences - and even if other people are having a conscious experience. The "simple" answer is that there is no separation at all. Consciousness cannot arise from anything because there is nothing beyond consciousness to produce it. Your consciousness is not separate from mine, because then your consciousness would be beyond my consciousness. Hopefully you see where I'm going. If there is no separation at all then it is possible for one part of the conscious experience to affect another part without any force or particles or transmission of any sort (because they're not needed). That is telepathy. The final question is one of ownership. The conscious experience is exactly that, an experience. Who is experiencing it? That's where much confusion arises. The "who" is just an experience inside consciousness, it is a side effect of consciousness not the source of it. Consciousness is therefore not owned by you - and it is not really an "experience". Technically, you don't need to exist for consciousness to exist. So, you cannot "do" or "learn" telepathy, because "you" are too limited. But consciousness (a.k.a. reality) itself is not limited, it can do what it likes. Telepathy is perfectly possible, but you have have to remove "yourself" for it to happen.

@Preety_India it looks like you're confusing two different things in what you want. You say it yourself: What is a talent? Isn't that just mastery in a certain subject? I may have talent in maths, which just means I have a certain mastery of maths. Naturally, mastery doesn't just "happen", I wasn't born knowing maths, it took work. Some people may find the work easier, some harder - but the end result is the same. What is creativity? Isn't that the ability to come up with something new and original? I would say that everyone has that ability from the moment you are born. The question of talent or mastery is simply one of time. Do you want to dedicate twenty years to improving your talent with a guitar for example? Talent can be measured by taking a test or by the appreciation of your peers. But the more mastery you have the less you need vindication from others - you can be self sustaining after you reach a certain level. Creativity is a natural state for everyone, but it needs to be channelled and shaped. That just means focus. Whatever you focus on, your creativity will eventually flourish in that area. But creativity needs to be nutured, it needs to feed on excitement and passion and calmness and love and support and self belief. So you are looking for reassurance that you're not wasting precious time on something that you might never master. But whatever you decide to focus on, you can guarantee that your skills and talent will improve over time and if you have a good environment creativity will be there. Nothing in life is wasted, what you create and learn in one area will transfer over to another area later in life. After all, you can always change your mind and take a different path.

Nothing is hidden. Nothing is finite. You're staring into the infinity of God right now. Here it is! God loves to hide from God only to discover God again. What a good story.

@Preety_India you can learn to appreciate the immensely creative talents you already have. Just to utter a word takes great creative skill and dexterity; just to walk takes immensely precise control and creativity. It's taken me 47 years of creativity and mastery to create that last sentence

Is a river just a stream of water? It's easy to drown in words.

If somebody pushes you and you lose your balance and fall, do you feel upset? Your normal life and routine has been pushed off balance (we all have). Give yourself space to feel upset - as long as it takes. Then when you're ready get back up, dust yourself off and stand up again.

Leo! Happy Birthday man, keep on spinning that love vortex, the world needs it.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe?

Splendid. Not sure I've ever activated anyone before. Was it the beard? The soft focus? The esoteric triangle? Thanks! Fortress is a doubly apt word at the moment. My roof is conical and somewhat fortress like!

The following interview might be of interest: Also you could take the quiz here to get an idea of your chronotype: https://thepowerofwhenquiz.com/

Because many of us are addicted to drama and a good story of struggling against adversity. How else do we get noticed by other people? How else do we make our ourselves interesting? How else do we become heroes? Intelligent is boring.

@abrakamowse you're right. (Sarcasm warning, for those culturally lacking it) 1. It represents Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 2. It's the pyramid of Egypt and I'm the pharoah (God's divine incarnation on this Earth). 3. It's the hierarchy of society. 4. It point up towards God (up being the opposite direction to gravity on a spherical Earth, but I digress). 5. It's a roof therefore representing shelter and protection. 6. It's a multidimensional surface floating in infinite space. 7. It's the symbol of the Illuminati. 8. Erm....

"If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides." -- Montesquieu And a gender.

There isn't one. That's like a child explaining what it's like being an adult. Or for some, like an adult explaining to a child what it's like to be an adult.

Think of it more like a system with a temperature control. The more numbers of people you have, the greater the (economic) activity and the higher the temperature. Lower the temperature by having less people and the activity drops. Capitalism is predicated on always getting a return on your capital, i.e. constant growth. If the growth goes permanently negative, it's no longer capitalism - and a different system is needed. So what? But also, realise that the world is very interconnected as Covid-19 has shown us. Any "deficiency" in economic ouput in one set of countries will be made up by other countries who have an increasing population. The global temperature is still going up.

You should also observe your feelings of disappointment and frustration, they're also part of the illusion.

Why not focus on a project? Any project. Instead of passively consuming, actively create. And for bonus points, even better if you can put your creation back into the world for others to appreciate. Saying that, I should follow my own advice!