The Mystical Man

https://youtu.be/nVgj68tcCbU "The great religious stories, east and west, are there for the purpose of evoking the sacred in us, the numinous. We turn them into history lessons. They were meant to be stories that could wake up some dimension of being within us." "Because we can give it a word, we can lose the sense of how mysterious something is." "People can be in a given environment, and they can leave a signature of presence in that environment, and sometimes they can leave it there for hundreds of years." "The bigness of a given experience has no indication of how deep it has gone and how lasting and transformative it will be." "One good encounter with the numinous can alter someone's entire life course." "It's a transformation in our vision, not in our being. We don't become something that's numinous. It's a transformation of seeing, not a transformation of being. That's so important to understand." "If it has no intimacy, then you know it's just something that someone's baked up in their mind." "The secret to being still: grant permission to all movement." Adya references this movie:

My favorite Beatles song:

Great scene. No music, no sound effects, no gimmicky camera movements to keep the viewer's attention. Just flawless writing and pure acting. I love it. I appreciate writers, actors, and directors. What would life be without their creativity, brilliance, and genius?

This is so cool: Just in case you don't know who Michael Imperioli is, he played a mobster in HBO's The Sopranos.

Michael Imperioli is great: I'm happy that he found the way.

https://youtu.be/V-CgjoXtkwc "We don't want to be going around for the rest of our lives chasing after someone else's experience. It's a stupid way to spend one's life force." - Adyashanti "Just through the act of watching your breath, your nervous system starts to calm down." "There's nothing more divine than fat and sugar." "Am I functioning from that connected ground? When you're not connected, it's because you didn't want to be. That's why we meditate. I don't care if you get really good at meditation. But when you start to see in a way you can't deny that there becomes recognizable a gap between your deeper ground and whatever the next reactive moment can be, and in that gap, if you've never seen it before, you will see it someday, any day, and in that gap, what's going to be horrible and wonderful, equally so, is you're going to see that something in you chooses which way it's going." "What am I really valuing here? It's a horrible thing to realize, because it takes the victim mentality out of the equation." "Whether there is a chooser or not, there is choice." "What seems to make more difference than anything else, maybe more difference than anything else combined, is those people who love that true nature in everyone, and they love it, and they're devoted to it, and they're choosing it over and over and over. They're the most mature in spirit. Without that element of great valuing, a great love, a great devotion to our true nature, to reality, without that, nothing else can make up for it."

I think you're misinterpreting my response. I meant no harm by it. I'm just playing. I'll remove my response. Sorry.

*removed*

Adya is taking a break until next year. This is an excerpt from a letter that he wrote: "The immensity of life moves on and continues to reveal the endless opportunities, and the necessity of loving and caring for one another in the myriad ways that life presents. It’s as if, in every moment, life is asking us, 'are you willing to be awake and present for this moment? And what are you going to value and uphold here and now?' This is essentially our practice, to be conscious and awake moment to moment, and to embody the enlightened values of love, wisdom, and compassion to whatever degree we are capable and willing." "From this stillness arises the greatest activity, where body, mind and spirit express themselves not as fractured parts but as an embodied whole."

Pressfield on the importance of consumption: Study the Canon "There are books and movies and plays and songs that you simply have to know if you call yourself a writer or artist or aspire to one day become one."

It's okay. If you're looking for something that's easy to watch, you can binge-watch this. It's lightweight entertainment. It's not scary. The "dramatic moments" made me laugh; it's a funny show. It's a fun guessing game. What is the true story behind The Watcher on Netflix?

There's a place for those titles, but I don't enjoy those kinds of games, either. It's a different kind of entertainment. I prefer the kind of entertainment that has fascinating setups and payoffs. I want to have the sense that this movie, series, novel, or game is setting up a satisfying payoff, not just at the finale but throughout the work. However, the final payoff, the climax, has to be the best one. When I watch a movie or play a game, I can tell very, very quickly: "This is not going anywhere. The creator doesn't know what he's doing." I want meaningful emotional experiences, but those are hard to come by, which is why I cherish a masterpiece very much when I find one.

If you haven't played Uncharted yet, it's going to be released on Steam in two days. I just realized that the original trilogy is not included. Just the final installment and The Lost Legacy. Good enough for me

All of them.

I'm not a big fan of video essays, but this one is good:

Yeah, well, she's got a point, but I still don't think that this is a wise approach.

I'm happy to hear that. I'm slowly getting better, too. I hope the worst is over.

Scorn has a lot of potential. It could've been a much more profound experience.

No, they are disappointed because they expected something with more substance. It was already clear that this was not going to be an action-packed game, but people were hoping for more substance. They worked on this game for almost a decade, so obviously a lot of work went into it. But taste? No. A creator's taste gets expressed through the choices that he makes to fulfill the purpose of his vision. Unfortunately, the creators of Scorn didn't have a vision, for the desire to create an atmospheric experience inspired by Giger does not constitute a vision. That's like making a post-apocalyptic game just because you're inspired by cordyceps, and the only thing that the game has to offer is cool-looking cordyceptic environments. But that's not what The Last of Us is about.

The Sopranos is not a show that you can binge-watch. Ideally, you'd watch it over the course of a year or two. It's like slowly digesting a massive piece of literature like Moby-Dick. These masterworks aren't meant to be gobbled up.