tsuki

Ignore the anger and move on, clean the kitchen myself. I'm sorry but I will have to hold off for now. I just returned from our couple's therapy session and announced to the therapist that I will seek a different one. I could not get past the fact that he was my wife's therapist and judged him to be biased. I viewed it as a 2 vs 1 situation where 90% of the problems in my marriage is on me. He kept alternating between "respecting my decision" and hammering the point that I'm responsible for the problems, that he is wholly objective and that I will reject all other therapists because I'm a narcissist. He said that I have basically zero self awareness that I'm slowly learning how to feel anything and that I'm a ticking bomb that is waiting to explode.

When I'm writing this text, deliberately, I'm focusing on one word-chunk at a time. The general outline of the sentence and the intention is presented instantaneously and is linearized then, squeezed through, the thought medium. I focus on each word and observe its sincerity, how well it conveys my intent. However, when I'm idling, occupied with something else, the idle chatter is a mush. I am perfectly capable of repeating the Jesus prayer and breathing consciously while listening in a conversation. If I dedicate the time to pray, I am able to think that prayer, breathe consciously and think about the process of the prayer the same time. If I'm unfocused during the prayer, I can also think about something completely different. I can't do that when speaking out loud though, but I can do that while reading. My relationship with thoughts is such that they arise on their own accord and their quality is dependent on how I feel that day. Caffeine, lack of sleep my emotional state, all influence it. I do not intervene in the thought stream too often, unless I see that it is self-destructive. Making my thoughts external, speaking them, is a deliberate choice. She can't speak English, I would have to translate it for her. I understand the intent and agree. I think it's wonderful. This is true, I have observed this in myself. This part is tricky for me. The "wounded child" story comes from our couple's therapist and it definitely relates to the past. However, for me, experientially, it is directed from the present moment towards the future, as in: "I can't keep living like this", "it's too much!" or "if we keep going in this direction, we're gonna crash", etc. I see that these two are connected because the root of this anger is fear and it was instilled in the past. I/the wounded child was abandoned emotionally and this part of me lives in fear and protects itself by swallowing all of the inner space when threatened. When it does, there is no detachment from feelings or thoughts like it is right now. I can relate to the statement "the past is viewed only form the present". However, I must clarify something. When I'm angry, I'm not consciously re-living the past and comparing the present to it. Let's say that I'm getting home from work and my wife has a day off. I'm walking through the door, going to the kitchen to make my dinner and I see that the kitchen is a mess. I'm not thinking "OH MY GOD, she's made such a mess and when I made mess when I was little, I was yelled at" (or something). There's just that: anger. The burning feeling in my gut that I can either swallow and clean the kitchen myself, or go ask my wife to clean her mess and probably hear her passive aggression in return. Yes, I am anticipating her passive aggression and bringing the past into the now, but this anticipation is accurate. She does not like to be reminded of her messiness (which is not my intention btw.). I need to pause for now, I will address the rest of your post later on. Thank you for your time.

That very thought, the part of you that you call "negative", the attitude towards what you deem unacceptable is the lack of self-acceptance. Don't blame that on your lack of authenticity, that self-judgement is of your own making, here and now. You need mindfulness of the present moment to catch these thoughts, observe and re-write them. Ultimately, self-rationalization is a form of justification and that stems from self-rejection. Love yourself, be kind to yourself, like a loving parent is to its child.

I understand and I choose to forgive when I notice that judgement. They are not guilty of not knowing any better. They did the best they could. However, I think that saying that "now is a squeaky clean fresh start" is an oversiplification. The mind has its momentum, the things we chose to let go of tend to come back. Letting go is the freedom of now, its cleanness, but it's the conscious choice to let go that disarms this momentum. I choose to let go whenever I see the opportunity. I was talking about the roots of this momentum, and not judging myself for being damaged somehow. Completely, 100% agree. Even the previous section of my response does. Forgiveness is the action that heals. No, I don't. Not in the conventional sense. People commit acts of (what is conventionally called) evil out of hurt and desperation. Sometimes out of ignorance, not knowing any better. All "evil" is self-inflicted harm. I do believe that anger is a short-term solution that kicks me in the ass in long-term. I do not know when it is appropriate to express it, so I'm bottling it up and arranging my circumstances to avoid it. This flew right over my head. Please write some more about this. Let's say I'm getting frustrated because I'm not getting enough sex from my wife. I feel unwanted, abandoned and overlooked. I blame myself for causing it by being controlling and demanding, not giving my wife space to feel safe. She's overworked and can't relax. My wounded inner child trusts me for some time and lets me take care of my needs, but if I don't, it takes the steering wheel and throws a tantrum. This tantrum is purely destructive because my wife, to get aroused, needs a mature man to feel safe with and not a three year old child to take care of. How does self-judgement come into this if these statements are factual (judgement type 1 as opposed to type 3)? How do I flip the script? That is an awesome practice. I don't know whether I would be able to explain it to my wife. She would perceive this explanation as me trying to control her. Gosh, I wish that were possible. That would be so awesome.

I understand what you mean. "Positive" in the conventional meaning is indeed a feeling. By "positive description" I meant a description that adds concreteness to the subject. For example, this is a progression of positive descriptions (concretizations) in the sense of the word that I intended: This. This is a human. This is a human with one arm and two legs. He is a human with one arm and two legs. Joshua has one arm and two legs. Joshua is a Saudi Arabian carpenter. He lost his arm in an accident. Each of the above descriptions is progressively more "positive" in the sense that it further constrains the imagination and contains the previous sentences. It is a "positive" description as opposed to "negative" description which is neti-neti (not this, not that). In my book, that is a judgement of silence and the most subtle of the three types that I presented in the original progression: I classify concretization ("positive" description) as judgement because it creates meaning by constraining imagination. ________________________________ I understand that and agree. The mind, understood as heart~>intellect pair is directed. The flow of energy is from heart to intellect. This energy, the "~>", that flows between the two is "feeling". Through intellect, feeling bursts into thoughts that are "flavored" in various ways. Some of them are judgmental in your sense of the word. Preferences in this context are the seeds of feelings that reside in our hearts. They are what gives us our individuality, as Love pours through each of us. By aligning our thoughts we have the opportunity to purify our minds of preferences that make us miserable. It really sounds like Karma Yoga to me. I classify preferences as judgement because they constrain Love in its purest form to our specific, individual, expressions of it. In essence, we are self-aware prisms of Love. That is Good. ________________________________ I recognize this to be similar to what Byron Katie is teaching. I always found her style to be confusing, perhaps because I tend to be focused intellectually. Are there any practices to increase my awareness of feelings? Meditation perhaps? Throughout the day I'm very mindful to be present to my body and heart. Unfortunately, I have difficulties recognizing uncomfortable feelings and expressing them in terms of thoughts, making them a conscious part of experience. I also have difficulties with consistency of practices - I tend to leave them when I feel like I don't need them. Inevitably, things go downhill and I pick myself up from there. I would absolutely love to do that. The problem is that I don't know what I want other than peace for the moment. My dreams are so wild that I don't even want to say them out loud. ________________________________ I will address the rest of your reply later today. Thank you for your effort @Nahm.

I've been wondering about you latest video @Leo Gura which was excellent. I actually had flashacks of my trips as I was watching it and felt that my "pure consciousness" knob was turning. I think that this video, apart from its significance to psychonauts, is particularly important because you elucidated your metaphysical understanding of reality with unprecedented clarity. By no means I'm an experienced tripper, but whatever little experience I have with psychedelics (and other practices) confirms what you are presenting. It is also congruent with other sources that I respect. That being said, there are some sticking points that I would like to address to confirm whether I understand your teaching and its agreement with my own conclusions. My impression is that you use terms: infinite mind, consciousness, God and "you" very loosely and interchangeably. While it is true that they point towards the same "thing", I believe that mixing these terms impairs the granularity of your teaching. My understanding of them is following: I agree that reality is "the mind". There is, however, an important distinction to be made. The infinite mind is, what Hermeticists call, THE ALL. It has infinite capacity to imagine and everything exists through it. You rightly claim that the "external, objective reality never existed and is purely a hallucination" and provide examples of why "you can't go through a wall". That is because the infinite mind hallucinates, along with infinitely many other things, the "objective, external reality", the universe, along with a particular body and its brain. "Matter" and "physical interactions" are the rules/constraints of hallucination of the infinite mind. However, that is not the end of the story. This infinite mind imagines things in consciousness, and this very same consciousness "goes through" the brain, that is hallucinated by the infinite mind, to create the finite mind, which is the subjective experience. We derive our will, capacity to imagine and the possibility to create our subjective experience from the infinite mind. That is why, by studying the finite, it is possible to derive deep insights about the infinite. The finite mind is possible because reality is fractal, it is self-similar. This "going through" of consciousness, through the brain, this self-intersection, is the strangeloop we perceive as the "I". It is like a hole that is punched through a piece of paper and that same paper wraps itself through it. The size of that hole is the "pure consciousness knob" you were talking about in the video and it is selfishness/selflessness of the person and the measure of the person's, as you call it, "purity". We, as finite minds, can create such strangeloops ourselves and we're seeing that with the Internet, or videogames. We can "lend" our limited consciousness to entities such as video game characters and create minds that are more constrained than ours. There is no end to this, as we can create computers within computers and so forth. Insight, defined as "direct consciousness of the nature of something" is the opening of the strangeloop, the hole, through which we become one with the object of our contemplation. That is how the correspondence theory of truth is reconciled within this paradigm. We are free to align our inner world with the outer (as perceived as two sides of the consciousness strangeloop). The more open-minded we are, the more impression this unity leaves unto our minds in form of knowledge. The measure of truthfulness of knowledge is its usefulness for survival of our self-concept. This self-concept can be viewed from both ends of the consciousness strangeloop. From the point of view of the finite mind, the self-concept is our imagination of what we are. From the point of view of the infinite mind, our self-concept is our body that it imagines. The latter is constrained and external, but the former, what we think we are, is up to us, as we can influence our minds through the use of will. When we choose to forsake our subjective self-concept through practices, stop imagining what we are, our consciousness matures into non-duality. We become the subjective nothing of the finite mind, in the image of the objective Nothing of the infinite mind. That is the distinction between "I" and "God". It is the difference in levels of self-similarity of reality. So, to sum it up: While it is true that I am God because my existence is wholly grounded in the infinite mind, and ultimately I am the selfless Nothing that is omniscient and omnipotent, I am also not God because I am finite. While it is true that consciousness is one, my finite capacity to tap into it is not the same as that of the infinite mind. I am God, but I am not God. Consciousness is one, but it is two. I wonder what are your thoughts about it @Leo Gura.

"Point" depends on your position on the relative enlightenment scale. "Meaning" or "point" can be understood as the force that drives the dormant mind's mechanicity. It concludes that something is better than some other thing and it takes off, starts to value and pursue it. It is the driving force of psychological time which is the movement of becoming. Intellectuals seek to understand (or rather, to know) because they believe that it will bring them security. When that is seen within oneself, experientially, deliberate becoming dies off with awareness, meaning itself is seen for its meaninglessness. Then, understanding becomes a naturally occurring phenomenon that accompanies expansion of consciousness. There is no "point", or "meaning" to expansion other than Love that is so free that it cannot contain itself. It is realized that it has always been the case, but it appeared to be something else (ie. "I am doing something to learn"). Insights in this sense are Love in the domain of reason.

Thank you for sharing this. Your sincerity is sensational! Thank you for sticking with us and have a fruitful journey. Godspeed and bless you!

!!!!!!

@Nahm I have a question regarding how you understand judgement. This may be elementary, but it's important to me. Do you understand judgement as: any positive description (as in: "this is a human", "this is a monkey", "this is a thought" etc), a preference (as in: "I would rather have a scoop of ice cream than of dirt", "I would rather be clothed than naked right now", etc), a polarity with one-sided attachment (as in: "Killing people is wrong", "Anger is bad", "You shall not steal", "I must be rich", etc). In my experience, judgement is the whole spectrum of the above. I'm assuming that you mean the option number 3. I'm open to acknowledge that the following is a rationalization: I'm treating anger as a negative emotion because I've been taught that expressing it crosses people's boundaries. I understand that I'm angry when my boundaries are being broken and I should do something about it (express the anger), but for the time being I think that I have so much anger in my reservoir that my reactions are disproportionate. I also think that I'm overly sensitive to external manipulation of my inner world, when someone else lectures me on what is right without my explicit request (this does not apply to you). This goes back to my family situation and the way I've been raised. Even though I love my parents and they are giving me space now, I believe that they are myopic and they've been forcing their limited perspective onto me for years. I acknowledge the possibility of their influence on my growth, by being a "pressure cooker", but I also acknowledge that I'm protecting myself from realizing the depth of their myopia and the damage they've done (unknowingly). Additionally, my wife has symmetric wounds. She witnessed her parents' fights ever since she was three until it culminated in a nasty divorce when she was thirteen. She was emotionally used by her mother as a crutch, to shoulder the emotional burdens of being wife of an adult child of an alcoholic. She's depressed now (very common in such situations), taking SSRI, and struggling with co-dependence. She is hypersensitive to my mood (like she was in her childhood) and deems me as "controlling". I have no space to express my anger explicitly, in the moment, because she is threatened, drops her boundaries, and submits. She feels angry because of that and it turns into guilt, shame and resentment. We had many anger resonances because of that, where we would become periodically mad at each other for trivial reasons. Thanks to therapy and her medication she slowly starts to learn to cope with anger in other ways than disregarding it (in herself and in reaction to its expressions in others). So, I don't believe that anger is absolutely evil, as in option number three. I acknowledge its importance, but I think that I need to manage and vent it in dosages until we heal as a couple. I just hope that I'm not pushing myself too hard and I will not pay too great of a price in terms of my physical health. It's getting better though. Crying helps a lot.

This post is off the rails of our conversation, but I just had a hilarious insight and I want to share it. Hentai is the vegetarianism of masturbation.

As someone who's done a lot of cannabis in the past, I'd say it's very, very difficult especially if you don't have prior experience with other substances. I started doing it for recreational purposes, but I soon discovered its contemplative potential. Unfortunately, I got hooked up psychologically, to the point where it became difficult for me to share the drug with other people. This is when I decided to stop using it altogether. As for the tips: remember that despite its relative accessibility, it's not a toy. If I were ever to try it again, I'd go as far as conducting a one day retreat before smoking and writing proper trip reports afterwards.

Resentment, shame.

@Nahm That sounds almost too good to be true, but I know that it is. Taking ownership of self-created suffering is difficult. I mean, recognizing exactly how I'm doing it to myself so that I can stop. Sometimes, when I'm angry, I know that continuing will bring more negativity, but in the moment I feel that something is very important. It usually happens when I'm dependent on external circumstances and I'm deprived of something I need, or feel entitled to. I am not allowing myself to express my anger because it's threatening to people around me. I think that I will be ridiculed, or that I will have to escalate to be heard and I don't want that. I've been holding back for years, avoiding it until it periodically blows up in someone's face. Am I mistakenly assuming that I'm dependent on external circumstances? Is it the thing that I ought to stop doing?

Are you saying that judgement does not exist? I understand that the labels such as "good" or "bad", or even "human", "monkey", "thought" are insubstantial (relative). That what is, just is, prior to thought. Within that isness thoughts exist as well, prior to naming them, prior to thinking about thinking. Is that what you are pointing towards?

I do.

Is all judgement unnecessary?

True. True. All judgement is relative to the self(-concept) and its survival. Feeling good, or being a good person is good, for the self. Nonduality is not relative to the self-concept and is not dependent upon its existence or non-existence.

I'm confused. You sound like @Nahm, but it clearly says @mandyjw. Have you been sniffing @Nahm's and @Faceless' posts all night again? @Marc Schinkel You just completely blew my mind! Talk about joy, huh? It's a thread between threads! WOOOOOT?! AND I GOT A GAY SPIDERMAN! WOOOO! AND A FUCKING MASTERPIECE TO WATCH! DUDE, IT'S VALENTINE'S DAY BABY! I love you! I LOVE YOU! So much confusion!

@Marc Schinkel AWESOME! Thank you!

I wonder whether it fits to this sub-forum, but I find them endlessly fascinating. Cellular automata are discrete models studied in computer science. What they are is basically a lattice with cells that in the simplest form can either be dead or alive. Then, there are rules that define whether a cell changes its state depending on the state on the nearest cells in its neighborhood. For example, a cellular automaton called "Game of Life" is defined as such: Any live cell with two or three neighbors survives. Any dead cell with three live neighbors becomes a live cell. All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead. The lattice is then, either seeded with live cells randomly, or created manually to engineer specific behavior. I find these automata to be fascinating because these rules are so easy to understand, and yet produce remarkable, life-like complexity. Here are some examples: Someone even understood these rules and built a programmable computer in it: Mandelbrot set: And finally, "Game of Life" described in terms of itself, simulated in itself: There are other rule sets, also in 3 dimensions. This one is called "Accretor" and is simulated in a comprehensive program dealing with chaos theory:

Today I had a conversation with my wife about joy. I'm really good at identifying negative emotions, but positive ones elude me. Joy is a spontaneous fascination with details, a non-discursive immersion in their depth. I think that the most profound joyfulness I experienced was on LSD. My wife says that she notices that I'm joyful at times, but I'm oblivious to it.

What do you mean? I agree that the mind is already whole. Contrary to @Faceless' post, division and separation are not in opposition to it.

I feel inferior to women because women feel. That doesn't sound right, but it is. Sigh... I judge myself to be inferior to women because I envy their ability to feel themselves. Without this self-knowledge, the mind is just a tool for survival that can only transform and never create.

Time is imagination constrained by self-concept. Past is the analysis of the self in terms of its strengths, while future is the analysis in terms of its vulnerabilities.