tsuki

@Zigzag Idiot Still agreeable. My wife is like that, but much less skillful than you are. When I'm trying to touch her shadow, it looks like she spreads thin, like a person that is stretched across the whole room. You sound like that when you're nice sometimes. Are you sure that you're not type 9? You are not a slow thinker, stop putting that spell on yourself to show humility.

@mandyjw You are correct in that light and dark do not need to be balanced, but it does not mean that you should choose one over the other. Choosing one end of this duality honors the whole of it.

@Zigzag Idiot I was hoping to invite you to open up, but you chose agreeableness instead. I'll take it as a no and not press any further. If you ever feel like it, I'm here for you.

You are not cringeworthy at all. I find that you are one of the most genuine people in here and I enjoy your company tremendously. In fact, I kind of look up to you and this is why I wanted to comment. The parts that I underscored sound like you are reacting to your past that you could work through. Like you are protecting something. This is not the place from your past. Nobody can hurt you if you integrate what you now consider flaws.

@mandyjw I bet that a term I=you=we rings some bells with you. @Zweistein and @now is forever would like to have a word with you .

@mandyjw It is. If he's willing to take it one day he'll be surprised. On the other hand, I just realized how deeply I believe that he's above. I guess that the equilibrium of teacher=student can be reached from both ends . How's that for an opportunity hahaha. No wonder he doesn't engage with us.

@Joseph Maynor oh man, being recognized by you feels so good. I'm really happy that we're opening up.

@Joseph Maynor Maybe you have to work both ends of that paradox? Hahaha

@Ampresus Your original post sounds like you are outgrowing your current lifestyle, but you see no alternatives to it. On top of that, you are comparing yourself to people twice or thrice your age and forming unreasonable expectations. These conditions are perfect to create a spiral of rage and anxiety in my experience. If it looks like everybody around you is doing all the wrong things, then it means that you are trying to outpace yourself. You can't. Personal development should be practiced in your everyday life. If you can't see how to apply, lets say, shadow work or contemplation to cooking, or pickup, then it means that it is not the time to do them. It is great that you know these advanced teachings because you can always return to them later when they solve problems you encounter in life. For now, I'd suggest sticking to things that are directly applicable to avoid creating artificial life centered around things of no apparent utility. Leo has a tendency to teach spirituality in a hardcore way, but you need to understand that he is on the path himself. This is his description of what it should be like and personally, I think that it says more about him than about practices. He is a very passionate personal development teacher and unless you want to follow his footsteps and become one, don't take everything he says on the face value.

@mandyjw You are a breath of fresh air this place needed. Great post. I resonate with what you wrote a lot. Don't expect Leo to meet your criticism with a serious response though. This is an enterprise that is entangled with his livelihood. He's not going to give up what he's selling. I'm not saying this to berate him in any way. I consider this a service to us. He's giving up a part of his personal growth so that this place can flower. This commands respect.

@Zigzag Idiot This is a very powerful confession. Do you welcome comments on it? I struggle with this myself a lot.

@Serotoninluv ? I hope that @breathe582 can make something out of our jumbled mess of a conversation. We were literally fighting over who's gonna make your life better!

Like I said, I felt compelled to respond to your post to straighten out the parts that I found to be misrepresented. The angry part came from the fact that I don't consider my advice in opposition to yours, so your responses felt unearned. I was confused into thinking that you are responding to me because of that, but you are simply trying to communicate with @breathe582 . I do have personal history with abuse and women though. Both as a victim and as a helper. Not voluntarily. It definitely contributed to my emotional response to your assumptions about me. No hard feelings left.

You're right. I responded to the parts that I find offensive to get them out of the way of our conversation. My 'advice' that both parties take part in a relationship also applies to conversation that I'm having with mr Serotonin. I don't consider anger as a fault, but a guide to wellbeing if used responsibly. Every one of my responses was a clarification of what he implies about my message that I find false. The last post where he first accuses me of lack of empathy, and the just proceeds to floor me is just too much to respond to neutrally. @breathe582 I'm sorry that this is happening in this thread, I hope that you find some value in this back and forth.

One thing that I can't get past is how people freak out when they hear the word 'abuse'. To one person, it may mean an insult, to another person it may mean a slap and to yet another one it may mean a daily beating. What unnerves me is the uniform green response that says 'run'. Abuse had become synonymous with unconditional plea for help. Especially when a woman says it. Men, by definition, cannot be abused in our society for some reason. It may be a grudge I bear against the world for not intervening in my early childhood. I didn't know the word, so I clenched my teeth. I'm just a 30 years old kid, but that makes me feel old.

Today's hexagrams: 63 After completion, line 3. 3 Making a new beginning.

@Serotoninluv You're not reading my responses, but reacting to your green ideology. Going through hardships of life does not ennoble you. It ennobles your self-image. I am giving the best advice I can and it is based on whatever life experience I have. Don't you dare to reduce my life to keyboard jockeying, or entertainment, mister moderator.

@Serotoninluv I never questioned her words and never wanted any evidence. All I am saying is that she needs to find resolve and take ownership of her life. This is the message. The other part says how to do it.

@Serotoninluv Like I said, relationships are mutual. There is a reason why she is attracted to him despite her thoughts about abuse and toxicity. I haven't found a single mention of how the said abuse is done other than it is verbal. For all I know she is unwilling to break off by wallowing in pity for him and herself. I was very careful to not suggest neither breaking contact, nor continuing. The quoted passage can indeed be me misread if not considered carefully, but I am neither condoning, nor condemning. The first step to healing is a conscious decision to undertake it and relationships can be a tool to attain clarity. Even if she's hearing advice to leave her current boyfriend from her environment, I am not going to deprive her of the resolve to make this relationship work. If a person is locked in a victim mindset, she is very likely to attract abusive environment that can suggest all sorts of ill advice. Regardless of her decision, first of all - I wish her resolve to take ownership of her own life and make decisions for herself. I know she can do it.

@Serotoninluv Very, very unfortunate. I suppose this is the true value of Actualized.org. A place where we can mix and match ingredients of various spiritual traditions while sprinkling it with our own advancements. In growing ourselves, we let our approach speak for itself and let other people decide what they gravitate towards. This way we don't have to convince anybody and avoid external conflict. I always thought that the lesser jihad is a distraction. I also think that criticizing traditions for their lack of efficiency in awakening people isn't right either. These movements are integrated with society and are something that helps establish its order. Spiritually speaking, at the very least they serve as big signposts that there is something out there beyond ordinary dormant state of being. There is a good reason that the path is called a path - one needs to find what serves him best and in doing that learn to transcend suffering independently. Actualized.org in this sense is a path within a path - a honeypot on the verge of society for those of us that want to go really deep. The last observation I have is that spirituality that is separated from everyday life is wasteful. If we can't get people interested in what we do simply by spending our lives doing everyday matters, then no verbal convincing and arguing will help. People that do not apply their spirituality and just engage in non-dual chatter are just as dormant as any other transmitter of culture. This is fine, spirituality needs to live, but there is so much more one can get out of this. This is why I think that depth is a trap and Zen deals with it very elegantly. It uses its simplicity to shine the beauty forth and lure people in as a form of marketing. From an outside perspective, zazen looks like an insanely advanced technique that is a pinnacle of a very long tradition. It's deceptively simple and anybody can learn it, but precisely because of it, it is so easily misunderstood. It's like all of those yogic traditions that sound superstitious to modern people because Western point of reference is out of focus with the context in which they were developed in. No wonder that Zen doesn't have much to show for, but there has to be a path within Zen for genuine seekers too. That lineage would have died a long time ago otherwise.

@7thLetter Ego's fixation about death is just hilarious. Exactly the same thing that was happening before you were born. Do you have a memory from before you were born? No? What if this is the genuine experience of non-existence?

@Dorotheus I get your point. Very good post. The thing is that willingness to die a virgin is a perfect ground for a mature relationship. So is being broken open by years of suffering in image-driven world of pickup. You cannot outsmart genuine growth.

@breathe582 You can do better does not mean that you should find a better boyfriend. It means that you could be a better girlfriend. Relationships are always an interplay between two people. At the very least you can investigate why that person is perfect to teach you about all the parts of yourself that you simply cannot accept. If you undertook the journey of loving what you hate within you, your relationship would improve, and you wouldn't need it anymore. The reason why you are attracted to him despite that it seems like he makes you suffer is because he also seems to promise to fulfill your needs. Needs that you have, but also cannot accept. Seeing what you don't want to see within him and loving what you hate about you is the key for growth in relationships.

@Serotoninluv I didn't mean to imply that Zen is the best teaching there is. I started this discussion in relation to the way in which Leo talks about spirituality using terms with cultural baggage. Since I have no experience in formal practices of this tradition, I avoided addressing this topic. After this whole discussion I came to realize that I was hoping that there could be universal, integrated method for enlightenment that would be resistant to egoic influence. Zen seems that way because it is a distillation of advanced spiritual teaching to the point of silence. This silence however seems like a reason for why it is so widely misunderstood and traps people in all the wrong places. I suppose that the best we can do for now is to attract highly realized people to observe commonalities while trying to minimize nondual bickering. Thanks @ajasatya @Serotoninluv @Joseph Maynor .

@Shaun It is not right to say that the world does not exist. More accurate would be to say that nothing within the world is the ultimate basis for everything else. Everything is interrelated and that includes the person - psychological being that is going to die. The dream Leo refers to is the illusion that there is something within you that has an essence of its own that grounds everything else. Every single thing within you is as "mechanical"/"organic"/"divine" as everything outside of you. All of your thoughts and emotions are not of your own making, but are an expression of this divine whole. This is how the mind realizes that it is ignorant, deceptive, and lets go of its beliefs. Once you are able to experience this divine whole, the mind will identify with that, which underlies all of it. Emptiness, love, truth, reality, God, consciousness, etc. This process of identification is actually the same process as dis-identification from everything else that exists in the world. Death. What is being arrived at is peaceful, stable, presence in the eternal now, your true self. The whole show that plays with itself.