Extreme Z7

<05-03-16> Too Much WOrk The end of the semester is coming. I'm really spending a lot of time trying to finish the huge load of requirements needed. I've been re-watching (or rather re-listening) to most of Leo's older videos while I work on my projects for the past few days. It's really giving me the feeling that I've been ignoring a lot of personal development work for quite a while now. Who can blame me, though? I've been really distracted by quite a lot of stuff recently. I'm going to take full responsibility for this though. (A common theme among Leo's older episodes). I'm going to have to get back to focusing on implementing all these personal development concepts in my life because otherwise, they're all just going to be concepts and nothing is going to change. I'm literally the only person I know in real life (i.e. not online) who has great ambitions for the kind of life I can create for myself for the future. The problem is I still have a lot of hurdles I don't know how to jump through and a lot of ball-and-chains I don't know how to remove. This is going to take massive commitment and I'm not going to let my academic pressures hold it back. (I'm still going to do the academic work as best as I can, though. I mean c'mon. . .)

@Anna Konstantaki Maybe you're right. A short version of my entry would be: "I have too many things in my mind and I feel like I'm doing a mediocre job on each of them because it's hard to focus on one particular thing." Maybe something to clear the mind will help stop me from thinking about too many things at once.

It's pretty dangerous to even talk about it. The more enlightenment concepts that are ricocheting inside your mind, the harder it is to get enlightened. Even what I just said in itself is already concept.

<05-02-16> I Always Have Excuses I'm not really sure what I want to write about today. I could talk about how I find myself trying to fall into old habits when I really need to be taking massive amounts of productivity if I really need to move forward. I want to be able to master a lot of areas in my life but I find it so hard to focus. My mind keeps trying to point me in other directions when I'm working on a task and there's always stories and excuses on why I should stop doing what I'm doing now and go do something else. It's making me feel like I'm doing a very mediocre job on all of them each day. I'm going to have turn this around as soon as possible. Oh and I finished a new track again. Still lovin' music ans still lovin' the grind that is music production.

<05-01-16> I'm Sick of Life (but I still don't want to give up) I have to be brutally honest here. I just finished not only watching Leo's new episode but really getting into the meditative state Leo asked us to be in for the guidance session and I came out of it feeling very angry, very miserable, and very very frustrated. You should probably tell that I did not get the experience that I wanted to have yet I felt like I should. I really felt failure deep in my experience. Again, I want to be brutally honest despite how I want to feel or how you think (yes you, the reader) I should feel. I felt like punching something, it was genuine frustration. And I felt hatred. . . . at nothing. Not hatred towards nothingness, I mean I just felt hatred towards nothing in particular, not even myself. I just 'felt' hatred, it was both a very weird and uncomfortable experience. Then I got the usual feelings of dissatisfaction and loath towards the life I experience in general but stronger. I'm sick of life and I don't want to tell anyone, except online. It feels like all the suffering I've experienced through life in my memory all cropped up at one time and I just feel hatred towards all of it. Society has screwed over my life and for a very long time, it seems I haven't had the awareness to admit it to myself and now I do. It should be shameful how stupid and ignorant modern society is and just how easier life would be if everyone was more aware than they are now. But, I still feel like I should keep pushing through regardless. Notice that despite how I feel, I haven't mentioned feelings of doubt, hesitation, or quitting despite my angst. It's almost like my emotions aren't dictating my actions and they are completely separate. I have this intuition, just a gut feeling, that I need to keep advancing regardless simply because I have no other options. I want to examine those other options very closely: Give up - That feels impossible for me psychologically. I've crossed a point-of-no return not only with enlightenment work but with personal development as a whole. Kill myself - I literally have no reason to do this. I'm not even anywhere near considering it. Run Away and Find a New Life By Myself - And how am I supposed to do this? It's simply unstrategic. And you know what, I had to try to come up with those other options and I think the last one was forced. Keep moving forward and persisting is the only thing I know. It's almost depressing to me that this is the only thing I know to do when dealing with failure. It's like I have no control or choice whether I should keep moving forward. I JUST DO IT. I don't even want to mention anything about my ego right now because I don't want to write an entire novel in just one entry.

<04-30-16> I'm Tired Weeeeeee! Strong work weekend! I'm tired. I'm going to take a rest.

<04-29-16> Next Month is Going to Be Intense Finals week is coming up and aside from studying, I still need to accomplish the required projects for the semester. I have to be really strategic, the first 3 months of May are going to be very critical. I know there are much bigger and more long term goals I need to achieve in life but sometimes, one must focus on the most urgent of matters. I probably won't be making any videos to have more time to improve my academic performance. I'll likely resume after finals week is over and all my projects are done. On other news, aside from Leo's videos, I really haven't been reading a lot of personal development content over the past weeks. I've been spending almost no time reading books probably because I have to spend more time studying for college. This will probably be another thing that I will have to resume when finals week is over. However, I have gotten really really serious about mindfulness work over the past week probably because of Leo's "How Your Mind Distorts Reality" video. It's been a pretty weird week for me because of this. It's has not been as serious as say being in a Chinese monastery, but I've been more aware of the phenomenon in my experience than I usually am not only intensity-wise but also duration-wise. I also seem to be have some gains (or rather reduction) in my levels of stress and worry. I still stress and I still worry but it's starting to feel more and more petty. Even if I don't do well with my grades in college, I should at least remember to be mindful with everything. So far, the majority of the results I've gotten from my personal development journey have been from my daily meditation habit. I want to see how far I can take this. I wonder. . . no no. . . I've done that too many times.

<04-28-16> College, College, College I'm starting to wonder if the way current academic systems are structured are too outdated. At least where I'm at, the college system almost seems to assume the fact that so many ways of having a career of sprouted over the recent years especially freelance or self-employment careers. Not to mention there are so many ways to get yourself hired nowadays that are so much more effective than getting a college degree, although granted these strategies are usually more challenging to implement. I bring this up because I can't help but notice how the college I'm in keeps pretending like I already know I'm going to work at the software engineering industry just by the fact that I have a computer science major. I'm lucky enough as a millennial in today's society to actually have clear interests that will influence my future career choice and I can say for sure that if I get a software engineering job, I'd probably only trying to plan my way to getting out of it. I'm currently waking up at 5:30am each day just so I can have extra time to learn music. Yet the academic system seems to think that by putting someone on a schedule of a certain amount of hours per week of training on some arbitrary subset of education that you will become one of the smartest people in society. So far away from what I actually see. This academic system completely ignores advanced concepts of human psychology. It's like the people who engineered these systems where themselves pretty ignorant. I've taken more notes on the concepts that are being taught in my college than from Leo's videos or whatever educational material I find on the internet. Yet, I've reread my non-college related notes more times than the noise they teach at the college. I have short stories worth of notes per college subject yet I don't remember anything from them. Yet, whenever I learn something from creative work or personal development, I only have to bring up my notes half the time to remember them. This has been a pretty ranty entry. Don't really plan on doing this a lot, so I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.

@Anna Konstantaki No Problem! If I make more videos, it'd probably be best to accompany them with text, anyway. I think the video format is best for showcasing good internet videos I came across during the day. Not so much what I did or how I felt about what I did today.

<--[04-27-16]--> Gotten Very Pro. . .Pro. . .Pro. . .Productive Today! No video again today, but for the exact opposite reason from yesterday! Yesterday, I was so freaking depressed from exhaustion that before I went to bed, I told myself to make a commitment to optimize my energy for the next day. And I have been able to do just that! Granted, I still have a load of work to do until the end of the semester, but I've actually gotten a lot of work done today where I felt excited to do and finish. Aside from academic work, I just spent a lot of my time working on a new song. I'm really excited to share it with you guys! A NEW ELECTRONIC TRACK! I've gotten a really good amount of work today that required me to exert a lot of effort and I feel just as exhausted as I was yesterday only I managed to get a satisfying amount of work done. All I want after I finish writing this entry is have a good night sleep. Oh and as far as videos go, it looks like I won't be making that much in the future. Making those videos takes a lot of time and I'm not even that passionate about them. When I first started making them, I thought it would be a good idea to at least try to make one daily but I don't really have a lot of time in my daily routine for it. From now on, I'll only make a video entry if I feel like it's worth it and if I have the time.

You want an enlightenment joke? You are. . . .

<--[04-26-16]--> Gotten Very La. . . La . . .La . . . Lazy Today Sorry, no video today. I just don't feel like I have to energy right to make one, even though I got the time. I found myself getting drowned in thoughts and imagination for most of the day and it really has gotten me struggling to get productive. At least, I managed to get a decent amount of creative work done especially this morning when I still felt energetic. I woke up at 6am and managed to get 1 hour and 30 minutes straight of electronic music producing before I needed to go to school. That's longer than how long I spend on it on average! And you know what, I was proud of what I was able to get done. It was the afternoon where I felt a sudden decrease. I didn't feel like I had the focus to effectively do what tasks have been given to me. I was actually able to get some drawing before I started writing this entry but I stopped from lack of motivation to keep exerting effort. On the bright side, I did feel joy and pleasure from making music and drawing today. This is something I've recently tried to work on is getting rid of the neurotic thoughts that push me to do what I do because they suck the joy out of work and also life in general. I almost feel like music and drawing isn't even as much work as it used to be, it's starting to feel more like personal recreational fun. Anyway, I feel sooooo exhausted to the point that even though I still have more than an hour until I go to sleep. I feel like I just want to play a video game with that free time. I'm going to try my best to be mindful as I play it though. But I hope tomorrow will not be the same.

<--[04-25-16]--> This one's got Thomas the Tank Engine in it (Because, why not?) I really have to practice my speaking skills. Their honestly quite awful and I don't completely know why. I recorded the audio for this multiple times and even then, it still came out slightly worse than amateur in the recording I decided to use. I think I'm just too introverted to the point where I barely know how to speak by myself. I can write just fine but speaking is not something I have a lot of practice with. I don't even have a lot of anxiety, I just don't know how to speak well in front of a mic. Anyway, enough of that. . . Shoutout to @Anna Konstantaki ! Come check out her journal, Sonder: http://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/2137-sonder/ TED: TED's secret to great public speaking by Chris Anderson: http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_teds_secret_to_great_public_speaking Great Video about public speaking! If only I could get to put it into more practical use . Thomas the Tank Engine (just in case you wanted it ) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnrwM7vFn_U UPDATE: As my video was uploading, I decided to play a flash game while I wait. Then I came across this BRILLIANT ad banner. Yep, that's right! "Prepare to say goodbye to your free time." I'm not making this up, this is a real ad banner I came across. Probably the best (or worst) video game ad I've ever seen. It definitely made my day.

@jcgiusto Damn, the notes I wrote on some index cards can't compare to this.

<--[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.