The Mystical Man

And yet there is no end to death and reincarnation.

Actually, they were working on a new Jak & Daxter. They didn't like the concept, so they made The Last of Us.

I think The Last of Us is the perfect duology. I don't think we need a third part.

Yeah, it's about the importance of forgiveness, perspective, and letting go, the severe consequences of holding on to one's hatred, and the courage and strength that's required to break the cycle of violence; it's a very profound story. I had to write an essay to make sense of that experience.

I can't play most games anymore. Most games bore me and don't meet my quality expectations. But I am looking forward to the upcoming God of War game: Santa Monica Studio is the second-best game company. Right after Naughty Dog:

If I could have only one favorite song, it'd be this one. ? 2:53 is ?

https://youtu.be/9Zbhs8mHzK0 "We need to translate our most revelatory experiences into human terms. When you're in a state of openheartedness, what's important to you? What do you value, when your heart is open? A value that transcends self: Love becomes not only an experience but a value. It's something that has meaning, has significance. To be a loving presence in the world becomes important, when you experience openness." "To be wisely loving is a good thing. It's something that's worthwhile orienting your way of being around." "Maybe you don't feel so openhearted, but you can retain the knowing that from the space of openheartedness being a wise and loving presence in the world is an important thing." "Love becomes a loving action. Something that you have decided to embody. In the smallest way." "How about engaging at whatever the human scale of your particular life is." "If the Bodhisattva thinks that there are sentient beings that need saving, then that Bodhisattva is not a Bodhisattva." "A wisdom that can acknowledge the sorrows and the necessity of healing in life, and simultaneously sees your absolute wholeness, your divinity, from the very beginning, all the way through the most terrible suffering. To encounter that vision is itself extraordinarily healing." "I hope you will value your own presence of being and the presence of being of everybody because it is all our own."

This is normal. Here's what Adyashanti has to say about that: "As you open to yourself, you will go through the realms of the human psyche. Some heavenly and prone to get you cul-de-saced in a heavenly illusion, and others very dark, maybe even demonic. That's part of going to the seed of consciousness. Let yourself feel what you feel, but don't make any stories about it. It's the stories about it that become harmful." You can use active imagination to talk to that entity. But be careful: "Before starting Active Imagination be sure that there is someone available for you to go to or call in case you become overwhelmed by the imagination and can’t cut it off." - Robert A. Johnson

"Ego believes it has agency and that it’s doing things, and constantly things happen that the ego doesn’t want to happen. In fact, the ego itself does things that it doesn’t want to do; yet it insists that it has agency. Strange, isn’t it? We bump into that over and over, even in one given day. You hear it at retreats, like this: 'How do I not have this thought? How do I not have this feeling?' As if you had agency. If you had agency you wouldn’t have to ask the question, would you? If we had this so-called free agency we’d just go, 'Well, I don’t want to think—click. I feel bad, I’ve got free agency, I don’t want to feel bad—click—I feel good.' We think the enlightened ones figure this agency thing out. They’ve got total agency, so they can choose bliss, joy, and happiness, and they’ve got something figured out, when actually it’s just the opposite. They’ve realized just the opposite: There is no agency. Ego has no agency; therefore, it has no freedom. That’s why it’s constantly frustrated; that’s why it constantly lies to itself. It keeps pretending that it does. It would be terrible news if we were our egos—because that would mean we are locked into a prison we could never get out of. But of course, an ego is just a collection of thinking based on desire and aversion. That vast unified field of being—whatever we want to call that: pure consciousness, spirit, unified field—as that gets more and more conscious, as that wakes up to its own nature, the experience as it gets very deep is that 'Whatever is happening is what I want to be happening.' Because when you are only that field, you haven’t split yourself off; there’s only the One." From Adyashanti’s Course The Philosophy of Enlightenment, 2017

https://youtu.be/9sznUyPVUqs "Generations go into the understanding of a simple word." Adya mentions Civilization (TV series) (I think that's what he's referring to; he can't remember the title, though.) "When we communicate, we're drawing upon this immensity of history." "A few words artfully assembled, a good poem, and all of a sudden you're in tears." "We've forgotten the power to be informed by generations." "Walt Disney was brilliant at changing people's consciousness." "These are just ways of reporting back, 'This is how the world looks from here.'" "You can be a conscious intangibility." "Comedians provide this incredible social function. If they can help us laugh at ourselves, that's a shamanic act." "Dreams are sometimes carriers of great reality. An illusion can be communicating a truth." "Whenever we suffer, the first question we could be asking ourselves is, 'Am I perceiving this the way it actually is?'" "We have to value that kind of coming together more than we value winning. But you also retain your ability to have conviction in the way you see something. Historically, the most enlightened people, they're not pushovers. They have a backbone. But before we stand our ground, we better be damn sure of the ground we're standing on." "When you function with integrity, honesty, and sincerity, you notice it feels better." "The more conscious we get, the more attuned the body gets. We notice when we function in an unconscious way. It'll hurt more." "You don't want to halfway wake up and retain the desire to not be truthful, because it's going to feel bad." "Are we seeing things clearly or not clearly? Clearly tends to equal alignment. Not clearly tends to be agitated." "Bringing intelligence to our spiritual practice is extremely important: there's the same old pattern; what's generating and supporting that pattern?" "As you go about your day, any conversation you have, have it from that connected place. If you feel yourself veering away from that connection, stop, and say a word that feels true. It's an amazing practice. It's not only with people. When you're washing the dishes, do you check out? Have that intimacy of being, of actually there with what you're doing. You'll end up watching conversations go ways that you would have never dreamed of. Just by relentlessly retaining that sense."

"If people think they’ve woken up to their true nature, yet they can’t sit still without going crazy, then they aren’t half as awake as they think they are." Get the book here.

"The thirteen programmes in the series outline the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages." Civilisation (TV series) Get it here.

Robert Iler's performance was amazing. He's a great actor. It's unfortunate that he gave up acting for Poker.

Spiritual wisdom in The Sopranos: There is a scene where Melfi quotes Carlos Castaneda, but I can't find that scene on YT.

Jed?

https://youtu.be/2uGP5AxTpsI "The commitment to truth, or peace, or God, reality, imagine that that retreat never ended. That that was a lifetime commitment. That your life and spirituality are actually the same thing, they share the same commitments. That's what makes for a profound life, a beautiful life." "Spirituality is seeing where we're holding, where we're fixed, where we're planted solidly in opposition to life. Our most fixed position is our whole way of defining and thinking and feeling about ourselves. It's not the only one that's there, though. The primary fixation is the fixation of my idea of me." "Life brings humility. The longer you live, the more you realize that life isn't the way you thought it was. And it's certainly not the way you think it should be. You're not going to conform life to anything. Our mind can recognize this, and as it recognizes this, it stops trying to define and interpret and analyze every little thing that happens." "Trying to be humble is a very arrogant thing to be doing." "Meditation is the embodied form of humility. If meditation is anything, it is a deep and profound willingness to listen. That's what silence is about. Don't try to be silent. Instead, just listen. Listening is a humble thing. You sit down and you listen with your whole being." "The ability that we human beings have to be unconscious is beyond imagination. Come to know that about yourself. It is easy to succumb to unconscious ways of being. Without the acknowledgment of how prone we all are to unconsciousness, to untruth, to unreality, one hasn't made the beginning of the spiritual life. Until your breath is taken away at how vulnerable we all are to unconsciousness, the spiritual quest for deeper truth hasn't begun, because it's predicated upon seeing that vulnerability within the human psyche." "You will never get to a point where you will know the totality of all. You can think you've got to that point; you can imagine it. Even if it is all consciousness, consciousness is conscious of an infinitesimally small amount of consciousness at any one moment." "The idea is to realize that you are It. You are reality. You are the totality. That doesn't mean that you comprehend all of it." "Experiencing life, the way life experiences it, or how the ground of being sees and experiences life." "That may be the very defining characteristic of reality: its unknownness to itself. The reality itself is knowing itself as the unknown itself, as that which cannot be known." "If we're not getting shocked, we're maybe not as conscious as we think we are. We're being shocked by our former state of unconsciousness. 'How could I have been so terribly asleep at the wheel of my own life?'" "You can delude yourself with the truth. You can delude yourself with the awakening of truth, not just your idea of truth, but your actual awakening to reality. You can easily delude yourself and use the truth to do it." "The most dangerous thing in revelation is inflation." "Exposing untruth in oneself. That's what spirituality is. The rest is just a bunch of nice-feeling, nice-sounding, sleep-inducing ideas and beliefs." "To be relieved of it all is part of the great buoyancy of what it is to be awake, because you're not carrying this whole sordid edifice of glorious delusions. You're much more innocent. You walk into a situation; you don't know what should be happening or what shouldn't be happening. But there is something else that does. There's something that can respond to a moment, when we're no longer constricted by everything we think we know. Something can then move, something can then respond, something can relate. But it doesn't respond and relate from a host of ideas and judgements. It relates from being in contact, almost a physical contact, with the whole of the moment." "Contemplate complete silence. Feel into the stillness that always accompanies silence. Not trying to stop your mind. Listen to the silence whether there is content or not." "I hope what you always take away is this silence of the heart and this commitment to sanity and truth and love and the living of it."

Where were you when I was lonesome? Locked away with freezing cold Someone flying only stolen I can't tell, this lights so old I don't wanna swim the ocean I don't wanna fight the tide I don't wanna swim forever When it's cold I'd like to die What was that my sweet, sweet nothing? I can't hear you through the fog If I holler, let me go If I falter, let me know I don't wanna swim the ocean I don't wanna fight the tide I don't wanna swim forever When it's cold, I'd like to die I don't wanna swim forever I don't wanna fight the tide I don't wanna swim the ocean When it's cold, I'd like to die I don't wanna swim the ocean I don't wanna fight the tide

My favorite guided meditations: "Meditation is a tool for returning to our essential nature," says Adyashanti. "As we grow, our motivations for meditating evolve. Yet we can always become wiser, more loving, and more deeply connected to who we truly are." Get it here.

Be still, my tongue Be still, my tongue Winter is wet And stops my days from lighting Be still, my tongue Be still, my tongue

@Lila9 You reminded me of this song: Rows of houses all bearing down on me I can feel their blue hands touching me All these things into position All these things we'll one day swallow whole And fade out again and fade out This machine will, will not communicate These thoughts and the strain I am under Be a world child, form a circle Before we all go under And fade out again And fade out again Cracked eggs, dead birds Scream as they fight for life I can feel death, can see its beady eyes All these things into position All these things we'll one day swallow whole And fade out again And fade out again Immerse your soul in love Immerse your soul in love