abrakamowse

And the Earth is flat too!

@Nahm Thanks! Very interesting exercise. I will do it. Thanks again for posting it!

This is me when I was like 28-29, drawing as usual. And this one is me with angry face

Listing from A and noticing if it is a belief or experience? Is that right?

Yes, today I realized that. It's incredible how deeply sleep I was... and probably still I am...

Not enjoying anything you do, it's a consequence of not seeing or feeling any purpose in your life. IMO.

The title of the post says that you don't find meaning in your life. I think that's what makes you not enjoy anything you do. It happened to me, that's why I shared that.

Today I had an insight about that. I was thinking too that life is meaningless and I was feeling sad because I didn't want to do stuff I normally do, I was procrastinating and just not doing anything important. I was pressuring me into doing stuff anyway, but I didn't feel very happy about it. There was something deep inside me that was not happy with that. And today at work I was thinking about that. And suddenly I had an insight that said "the ego doesn't want the freedom, you have to get used to not having a purpose. That's freedom, you do whatever you want because you can do it". It really didn't come with words, I am trying to translate what it came to me, it's like a sudden knowing. The ego doesn't like to have no purpose, because that's what he needs to continue existing. If there's a purpose there's a "self" (lower self/ego) who want's to achieve that purpose. But once the ego reaches its purpose, it changes. It doesn't want that, he needs to look for a new one. And so on...

There would be some difference in the way Christian call themselves, they are not really Christians.

Maybe Adam wanted to be expelled because Eve was a bit ugly, who knows?

Today while meditation I got to a level of concentration that I never achieved before. Nice. I have to continue working on that.

Very interesting video @cetus56 I think I will have to watch it several more times and take notes. Super interesting. My take on the story of Adam and Eve is that this is what it is, a Story. The only way to point to truth is through stories. So, that's what the old prophets who wrote the bible did. There's two main reasons to do this, the first one as I said, it is not possible to write or say anything about truth. The second, is because of the understanding of those who received the insights and tried to translate it to others. They will write in a way that they and others can understand. In this case, the bible says that Adam and Eve where in paradise. This is for me the initial moment when we were all awareness. God was one, so there was no separation, we were in Paradise, Adam and Eve, the whole humanity were in paradise. But we were all one thing. Truth was all One. But truth wants to experience diversity... how does he does that? Introducing what is false. The false thing is the illusion. When that is introduced in reality, is the moment where Adam and Eve are expelled from the Paradise. because now they understand what is good and bad. In reality good and bad are just concepts. They are the same thing, but know they know there's different degrees in good and that creates the bad. The bad is the degree where there's nothing good. Good and bad are two sides of the same coin. Like darkness is absence of light. Badness is absence of goodness. Now they see as separated from God and out of paradise. The idea of the Devil here is the ego. The ego is introduced, and if you read the bible you will notice the mechanism of the mind very clearly in the way that the devil/serpent convinces Eva that she must eat from the tree of knowledge. It is like a punishment for the ego, because now the ego is separated, or sees itself as separated from the whole. So, now he has to work to feed the physical body. The women have to give birth with pain to continue the human race, all of this was seen by this old writers of the Bible as a punishment. And, don't we sometimes when things don't happen the way we want, don't we say... "God, what did I do to deserve this"? It's not a punishment, IMO but the ego will see it as a punishment, as a sin. The sin, is the way that God creates the universe. So, when we cannot see truth as it is, we see separation. We can't see reality the way it is, we see it distorted by our mind, by our ego and that's the sin, sin means "the act or state of missing the mark". It's our incapacity to understand Reality/God with the mind. The idea of Evil can be in certain way associated with Maya. The Bible says that the creation of the Devil was needed for a purpose. We cannot understand happiness without suffering. If we were all the time happy, how do we know it if we don't know suffering? Right now it seem ridicule, because we know both, but we only know by comparison with other states or feelings. You need the false (evil or maya) to experience what is good. You need to lose someone, a relative or a friend to know what is not having that person with you. If reality is one only, how are you going to experience loss? If there's nothing to lose? The Bible they say is written by God, and that is true in some way because we are also God, we are also part of the whole. But as humans, we only can see parts of the truth, we see the truth filtered by our knowledge and by our egos. That's like the Buddhist story of the Blind men who wanted to describe the elephant by touching different parts of the elephant, each one arrive at a different conclusion. But it was the same elephant that they were talking about. The Bible is inspired by God, but it doesn't mean that a guy sitting on a cloud with a white beard wrote it himself.

That's a strong one. Cool! People gets scared of strong emotions. That's what keep them in the dream.

Pogo knew that...

@Natasha They are so funny. Love them too!

Happy April fool Natasha! This thread will be always alive hehehe... we are goofy seekers Lol

I totally understand, been there done that.

@pluto Cool !!!!

Reality does whatever it needs for the survival or interest of consciousness. It's not worried about the individual self, that's the hard part to swallow for the ego or the little me. Religious persons associate anything that happen like the Universe or God is helping us, but that's a projection of how they want reality to be. Then reality hit them in their faces, but they will say that is the devil. Lol

It will die the "you" that is a lie, and you will discover your real and true self, that is infinity. If you keep the illusion of the small self, you will lose everything.

@Joseph Maynor I don't make any difference between the label "God" and the label "Reality", but I know others don't do that. They don't get that all are labels and they give God human like attributes. But he doesn't have any attributes and he/she/it is impersonal.

Cool! Thanks! I did the exercise, but the first thing it came to my mind was that my purpose was to be happy. And I felt immediately that if I am happy, it means that whatever I am doing it will be Ok. So I stopped there, no need to search for more goals or purposes. Lol... That was my whole list.