Extreme Z7

<--[04-24-16]--> Trying to Drown a Fish I'm a much better writer than I am a speaker. I really think the analogy my mind came up with was clever but I could not speak clearly enough to really deliver it the way I played it in my mind. So I'm going to rewrite it as text. Without further ado, I present. . . An Analogy for Killing The Ego Killing the ego is like trying to drown a fish. You are a person on a boat who has grabbed hold of the fish. You're not allowed to deprive the fish of water or suffocate it to death, you can only make it somehow stop breathing underwater. Also, I'm not just talking about any fish, I'm talking about a big one like a sea bass or parrotfish, for example. Water is the fish's natural habitat. It's where it breathes and strives so no matter how hard you force it in the water, it's just going to keep breathing. How are you going to drown it underwater? Simple, you stop it's methods of inhaling. Now, if you do this, the fish is going to start thrashing back and forth trying to escape as you struggle to keep you grip. This is why it's so difficult to kill the ego. Interpretation Basically, the fish is the ego, whereas the sea or ocean is consciousness. The ego thrives in consciousness and would not exist without it. The person trying to suffocate the fish is the higher self or the true existential self (Yeah, just roll with me here okay). The fish (ego) is swimming about mindlessly through the ocean (consciousness) most of the time, playing around and sometimes interacting with other fish. One day, however, the fish swam too close to the surface and got grabbed by the person. This is more of a metaphor of the higher self taking over and trying to struggle with the lower self. The person will attempt to suffocate the fish with his/her bare hands. This is meditation. You force yourself to do the exact opposite from what ego wants to do. The fish will start to wobble wildly to escape. This is pretty easy to interpret. Most of the time the fish escapes but is so stupid that it keeps resurfacing only to encounter more struggle.

@Anna Konstantaki That's really great but I already recorded my voice and am currently editing the video so maybe I'll do it in tomorrow's entry. Also, I get a "Sorry, this content isn't available right now" error message from Facebook.

@Anna Konstantaki Mind if I talk about the painting in a video journal entry when it's done. It will be like a shout-out thing.

@Augustin You don't have to leave them physically. You can still talk to them when you need to but detach them from your identity mentally or psychologically. How to do that? I don't know. I'm not an expert but I still believe it is possible to do with enough time, patience, and emotional labor. Also studying, there's a lot of that.

<--[04-23-16]--> Dealing with Some Burnout Studied a bit too hard today. Really thought I could do an insane amount of studying today but I found that realistically, I can only study so much in one day. I reached a point of high stress that I really couldn't continue reading and taking notes even if I wanted too. I wanted to make another video entry today but I'm so stressed and exhausted that it'd be more healthy to just write a regular entry for today. Oh and yes, I woke up at about 6am this morning to keep working on the Techno track I was working and I finished it. Feel free to let me know what you think! That's all for now, I'll be doing some drawing after dinner because I've become really invested in it. Then I can enjoy myself until bed time.

@Augustin Practice more self emotional mastery. Learn to perceive these sort of situations as non-issues. It's going to take a lot of work, I myself still struggle a lot with worrying with how other people might think of me. Leo has some excellent videos on Emotional Mastery and Not Caring What Other People Think. You can watch them if you haven't already.

<--[04-22-16]--> Continuing the Journey

<--[04-21-16]--> I'm Trying Out Something New. . .

<--[04-20-16]--> Time to Stop Wasting My Own Time! I bought a new desk clock today. It's analog not digital, I like it oldschool. I got it for me because I wanted to have a much faster way of checking the time without having to look at the time at my Windows desktop taskbar (I keep my taskbar on auto-hide so I have to drag my mouse towards it so I can see the time). I've also wanted to use it as a symbol to remind me of how little time I have each day. And you know what, surprisingly I actually think it's working. Ever since I got it this afternoon, just glancing at the clock gave me a little push away from procrastination towards doing something I needed to get done. I also think the clock looks really nice so that's an added bonus. Okay, so enough materialistic praising, let's talk about what I wanted to get done today. I decided to work some more on the game I was making while replaying Leo's video "The Benefits of Enlightenment" so I can listen to it a second time as I code. It actually struck me a lot stronger than the first time I watched it by itself. Really felt bad toward the end. Like, I had a feeling that I really, and I REALLY am wasting my time. If I really want enlightenment, then there are a lot of stupidity in my routine that's still there that needs to be removed if I am to awake from hell and into heaven. I found myself getting trapped in academic life worry again only this time instead of falling into the trap of thinking that doing more work is going to solve anything, I decided to sit back and decide a more long term (and more emotionally difficult) approach to deciding what I want to do with my very important free time today. So, I decided to check out actualized.slack.com to see if there was anything interesting. Someone there posted a TED video about consciousness. It taught me that scientists are really curious yet really goddamn clueless about the truth about consciousness (which is not what the video intended to teach, by the way). Makes me wonder how different the talk would be if the speaker knew about enlightenment. Decided to check YouTube for another video on consciousness and found this, pretty cool. Took notes. Then I read a bit of a book. Took more notes. I'm starting to see that studying really is becoming one of my stronger points. Probably how Leo felt early in his personal development, maybe.

@EnlightenME You sound a lot like me at my first self-actualization journal entry here in the forums.

@Henri Awareness, mate.

<--[04-19-16]--> Got Lost in YouTube again Had a whole load of free time show up today. One part of my mind was like "Wow, think of all the work we can do with this". So I started to get down to business. Finished a project requirement for college. Then spent about an hour reading lecture notes and rewriting it on my notebook. Then I there was still quite a few hours of free time left that I don't usually have. So instead of using them for something creative and productive, I wasted most of the hours watching YouTube content (Specifically Jim Sterling stuff). I actually felt really bad and guilty after about 3 hours of time wasted. I started having thoughts of other better stuff I could have done if I had not fallen into my soft addiction. *sigh* Weeell. . . tomorrow is a half day so. . . . looks like I still have a chance to catch up. I still have loads of schoolwork to do though. I really can't afford to just sit by and spend hours watching video content especially if it's not inherently educational. I didn't even enjoy it that much. Still some good news though, after the marathon, I decided to spend some time doing pixel artwork for the game I'm making. It's been a really really REALLY long time since I've worked on it. I've been putting it off for a long time because of schoolwork that's been approaching by the truckload. I really want to get back to having the free time to work on it 'til it's finished. I still not ready to share screenshots of it yet. That will be for a future entry. Oh well, it's almost bed time and I'm already too tired to work right now. I actually plan to just spend more time relaxing myself and play a free online game on Kongregate. Night time is usually a good time for entertainment.

Start learning about self-actualization. Take baby steps to change your life. Nothing is going to fix itself overnight.

<--[04-18-16]--> Another Day, Another Time To Exist Yesterday's video really had an effect at least in helping reduce my overthinking. Sitting on my bed for 2 hours doing nothing was definitely. . . . . . interesting. Not something I would be able to do everyday though but just that one session alone was enough for me to get a step closer to clearer consciousness or pure awareness, whatever you want to call it. Today, I started noticing things in my peripheral vision a bit more. Able to control myself and my thought process a bit more. Still not perfect though. Still have quite of addictive compulsions and uncontrollable thought processes that arises regardless. Although, I did try to see if I could get an enlightenment experience but that did not end up happening, pretty ambitious of me actually. Anyway, let's talk other stuff. Still keeping my balance on schoolwork and creative stuff. I woke this morning and first thing I did was grab my sketchbook and decided to draw XJ-9 (again. But this time with a full body pose instead of just faces like last time (see <--[04-16-16]-->). Then I needed to attend more college lectures, took a lot of my time and tried doing mindfulness meditation before lunchtime. Then another college lecture then some studying then went and drew again then decided to take a break to watch YouTube videos yada yada yap yap. . . pretty normal day. Nothing special, nothing terrible. Just another day, just another time to exist.

<--[04-17-16]--> Just Watched Leo's New Video Today Wow. . . i'm going to go sit on my bed and do nothing for 2 hours. . .

<--[04-16-16]--> Not Overdoing Schoolwork Anymore Today was equal part work, equal part creativity and equal part fun. I feel like I was able to actually do things today. I started with working on a project requirement in the morning for about an hour, then I meditated, then I decided to spend the remaining time before lunch studying. A little bit of distraction here and there but I didn't get too carried away. Instead of music, I thought I decided to do some drawing instead. I drew today on my sketchbook and just decided to play some YouTube videos in front of me on my laptop. It actually turned out to be a very effective method on keeping me focused on drawing. I basically treated the videos as background noise to drown out the voice in my head as I drew. It was fun. My 15 year old self would probably never imagine that I would actually reach a point where I could feel some sense of flow from drawing, I was too insecure back then. I think I'll just end this entry today by sharing a couple of pages from my sketchbook right now. I tend to draw various different ideas that come to my head and just spread them out on the page. Keep in mind that I don't draw everything on a page in a day. I usually draw something on one part of the page on one day and another idea on another part maybe the next day. Anyway, here two pages of my sketches and doodles. <From Left To Right, Top To Bottom> Cartoon Head from a Tutorial from this article. KZT, one of my original characters (The main character of my next upcoming free indie game) A Boom Box (An enemy from the same game) Kranky (My planned first boss of the game) Three Faces of XJ-9 or Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot. OverDrive Hell Logo (A Japanese Hardcore Album Series by the Sampling Masters) A TNT Crate from Crash Bandicoot A comic involving my profile picture character A random pizza slice on a pig next to accompanying text An cartoon face showing either a display of annoyance or skepticism <From Left To Right, Top To Bottom> Mandy from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy And there's Billy, he looks a bit confused. I don't know why. . . My profile picture character taking a sneaky peak from the top of the page A Sign that says "The Needle Way" Aaaaaand here's Grim, feeling a bit. . . uh . . . . Grim. A Floating Bomb. A reference to Level 5 of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. A pretty badly drawn pineapple guy. Some text hovering above him says "Confused Pineapple Guy" as he says "wut?". A brain dreaming of a stick figure sleeping on a hammock as a Nitro Crate with legs charges towards him. (yep, my imagination can be quite wild at times) A guy holding a cowboy hat riding a rocket with horns Finally, a puppy (ｗｕｆ!) What's the end goal of this? I don't know. This is art. You just do it because it's fun, not because you need to. I dream about maybe being good enough to create my own cartoon characters to put into my games or who knows? Maybe I might actually be involved in animation studio. Or what's more likely I just make some fan art of stuff I like and put that up on DeviantArt or something. I don't know, the future's still kind of blurry for me. There's one thing I can say though. . .

<--[04-15-16]--> I'm Too Stressed, I'm Giving Up (This is Actually Good News) I realized today that I've been lying to myself this past week. My plan for mainly focusing on academic work very harshly was not motivated by want of strong work ethic like I originally thought. As I meditate today, I started to realize the real reason I was focusing so hard was because I'm too afraid to handle failure in academics that I started to try to chase absolute assurance that I will not fail in my subjects. In a way, this habit was a way sneaky way my ego created to avoid focusing on my passion in life because that would be more emotionally difficult because it would mean taking the risk of failing a subject in college. Just a thought of that happening scares my ego. I can't believe I was so unaware to see this going on. The majority of the mental process that brought me to the decision to be so harsh with a study and academic work schedule was not intuition or passion but just mental chatter. I'm reminded a lot of Leo's video Fake Growth vs Real Growth. If I take the lesson from that video and take this situation into context. Fake Growth would be to believe I did something by passing my all my subjects but in reality, the Real Growth would be realize that it's a stupid game that my mind is playing with me. Don't get any wrong ideas, though. This does not mean I'm going to completely ignore academic work or not care at all if I fail a subject. Instead of focusing extremely on making sure I've studied everything in a subject and spend a huge chunk of my time on the required home projects, I'm going to have to go a middle way, do only an adequate enough amount of study and project work to pass my subjects while still being slightly above mediocre and of course, not avoid my life passion for the sake of trying to pursue comfort and safety. You have no idea how significant this realization is for me. Not only have been constantly stressed and anxious for the past week, I started having this kind of worrying mindset since last year. The only reason I've been thinking this way is because I kept having thoughts about comfort and safety. When I had this realization about an hour after I finished today's meditation session, it felt like a huge load I've been carrying on my back since last year got completely removed and I feel like I have a little more freedom. The road to achieving my dream life has become more realized after this. I'm going to have to spend more time and effort thinking about how to really get my creative potential realized. I want to be able to make a living making music. I want to make games people will find awesome (or at least be part of a game development team). I also want to have the creative ability to draw art that entertains people. I have my entire life ahead of me, who knows what I could do? I shouldn't be wasting time worrying about security. I'm going to REALLY learn how to take control of my life. EDIT: Whoops I forgot to mention I uploaded a new track to my SoundCloud page. Now, I don't consider this as one of my best works but I still don't want the work I put into it to go completely ignored. This is a speedcore track by the way. Really intense and really distorted, it's not for everyone!

<--[04-15-16]--> Still Working Not going to talk too much in this entry. Still keeping the daily habit of trying to strengthen my work ethic at the moment. It's usually the case that I would distract myself every 15 minutes with a short YouTube video to ease the stress for a few moments but I'm really making an effort to lessen that a lot right now. Probably going to watch a comedy video on YouTube after I write this entry though because I've been studying for the past hour and I need a break. I probably also want to keep working on electronic music after studying. And then, I have a craving to draw some more. Yes, I'm still trying to keep that new drawing habit consistently but I haven't done so in about 3 days because I've been so busy with schoolwork. I miss it already. That is all for now.

@Anna Konstantaki Can't say I agree completely with the old man's thoughts. However, I will say that he has a point. (I mean you should read my latest entry). Education is a very important tool for mastering life but the academic system just doesn't seem to care about that. Instead, it's all just performance and learning to cooperate with other people, even if it's work you don't enjoy and is not helping anyone, just more requirements to complete. I hold the opinion that the old man is simply focused in learning what he wants to learn in order to find satisfaction. Universities and schools are so broad and too demanding in their approach to learning that it just ends up being one huge distraction.

<--[04-13-16]--> Academics is just pure chaos! Since the start of this week, I've been really working on studying my subjects very rigorously and very early in the hopes that it will prevent having to worry about it in the future. The more I do it, the more I realize it's impact in my life. It's a part negative and part positive impact, unfortunately, it's mostly negative. Let's talk about the positive impact I see this habit is doing in my life, it's making me realize just how much time I'm spending procrastinating and idling in this distracting techno age and the value of sacrificing pleasure time for investing in the future. I normally spend about more than 2 hours a day on assorted entertainment content. It's already a very small amount of time spent relaxing but with a demanding situation like the one I'm in right now, it really is making me realize just how much focus and energy it's taking out of me that I can channel to productive work. In the long term, I see that this experience will help me build a really strong work ethic that will make me achieve levels of productivity most people can only dream of. Aaaand there's the much bigger negative side, focusing so much on academic life for survival at the expense of working on my passion is very emotionally draining for me. It feels soul sucking, not to mention energy draining. I want to keep pushing through because I want to get what needs to be done as early as possible so I can get back to building my dream career with less worry. I'm not ignoring my life purpose entirely, I still find time to spend half-an-hour writing electronic music but that's almost the maximum with my schedule at the moment, I'll be lucky if I find myself having 1 hour free time to make music. Not only that but I also want to spend time developing games and drawing cartoons. My dream life is literally just me alone in my bedroom, making creative stuff and being paid for it. That's really all I want, I don't want to be reading a 500+ page text book and taking notes on it and listening to nothing but this. Now, if that's not enough, there's still the fuckin' group projects. They're a bit more tolerable especially because I have other people to help out but they're still dull as hell. I can listen to a podcast to liven things up but they can usually take more time than studying. (It depends on the task though.) I will still stick with this study and work plan though. This semester will end this May. I hope that by then, they're won't be anymore pending requirements, I passed all my subjects, and I get to spend two months of free time the way I want to. Can't wait to see how my creative work habit will be like after practicing strengthening my work ethic with this plan, though.

@Argue LOL, I didn't do anything of value. The Youtubers deserve the credit here.

@Argue Why videos? How about actual channels, instead? Excluding, TED, (Which is already very popular) and Actualized.org (obviously) here are 5 of my personal favorite educational channels. Probably check out a few of their videos if you're interested. They're mostly pretty high quality. Big Think: link Short bite sized videos featuring various scientists, celebrities, and authors talking about various topics. CrashCourse: link They put a lot of hard work into creating various free educational series called "Crash Courses". They have a wide variety of courses ranging from Physics to Philosophy to Economics to Government and Politics to even Video Games and so much more. The School of Life: link Videos mostly hosted by author and philosopher , Alain de Botton. The videos are mostly animated (although some of them are live action film) with a narrator talking about different aspects of life. Topics range from Love to Work to Happiness to Parenthood and other topics you can think related to Life. Sometimes they release videos relating to Philosophy and History and the different ideas and people who advocated various schools of thought from the past. YouAreCreators: link Huge advocates of the Law of Attraction and Spirituality. Although they mainly seem to be interested in how to achieve success through Spirituality and Law of Attraction. They do like to talk about how spirituality changes ones psychology though but they don't seem to really talk about enlightenment that much. They're main interest seems to be to attract the audience with the promise of success in life. Still a very positive thing to be doing, though. I still suggest you check them out if you're interested in spirituality, they may still have some valuable insights. Fight Mediocrity: link Last but not least, a channel by a guy who usually reviews personal development books he's read. He's claimed to have spent a large portion of his life reading books and he really seems to be interested in sharing through his channel what he's learned so far. Pretty much the only personal-development-based channel on this list, I noticed. Probably because unlike other self-help channels which mostly involves videos of a guy in front of a camera making a short motivational speech, he really mainly focuses on what he's learned from various books and probably a good source of good self-help book recommendations.

<--[04-12-16]--> Been Really Really Busy Really am sacrificing a lot of my time and pleasures right now to make room for studying. That's really what I'm doing with most of my free time right now. My semester ends next month but there are a LOT of requirements in this semester. If I don't work as early as possible, that's going to mean big trouble as the semester ends and even worse, it's going to affect the quality of my time and mood after the semester's over because I can't just skip a requirement and I don't want to deal with failing grades. I'll probably get back to more interesting stuff when this is all over. For now, I want to be really strategic about my time. I don't really see my other classmates doing this sort of thing, even when they're not fucking about with games or 9GAG. Some of them are really smart and effective results-makers but it's for me to really feel impressed about their work ethic and work strategy compared to mine. Not that it matters much, I'm really just doing this strategy of time investment for personal emotional relief in the future. I really can't wait until the semester ends. If I can do all of the requirements to the best of my abilities. You can bet I'll be using the few months of free time to work on creative practice to the best of my abilities. It's what I want for my life.

Brain Training apps are a waste of time at best and a scam at worst. I recommend you start a meditation habit if you really want to improve not only your memory and focus but also so much more beyond that. For intelligence, there is so much free educational content floating about YouTube. It's just a matter of what you are really curious to learn about.

<--[04-11-16]--> My Feet Is On The Fire Of Reality (and it burns) One of my college professors decided to bring to our attention today that almost the entire class was doing incredibly terrible at their recent test scores. Myself included. This particular subject is a very content-heavy subject and none of us had the foresight to see it. If I had known about it, I would have been studying from Week 1. Know I'm kind of taking all the free time I have to studying not only this subject, but all other subjects at the moment. I'm going to cut a large portion of my entertainment time and also slim down my time for creative hobbies. This semester ends next month anyway so I'm going to use this temporary adversity to really build up my work ethic. I'll stop here. I want to keep this entry short because I want to get back to studying. That is all for now. . .