Extreme Z7

<--[03-24-16]--> Pondering Life Purpose I haven't bought Leo's life purpose course yet, can't afford it. For now I've just been pondering and thinking about what kind of life activity I will find the most worthwhile in life. I thought today about the different pros and cons and emotional attachment I have to creative hobbies like game development, software development, music, drawing and even animation. Here are the results: Animation: I actually found myself drifting away from animation the more I thought about it. I've always been a fan of animation especially western cartoons. I just love the wacky style and imaginative events that occur in most western cartoons. So fun to watch. But the more I think about what it would actually take to make good animations, it just overall felt a bit too far way from my strengths in life. I've actually had been considering animation for months now and even had ideas for cartoons back when I was in high-school but they were only vague ideas that were only in my head that I didn't bother to write down on paper because I was so naive back then. I think it's a good thing that I'm realizing that going down the road of animation is probably not that worth it in my life. It would help narrow down my target and increase my focus. Still, doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested to get opportunities to learn as much as I can about animation but I probably spending hours per week trying to master this field. Software Development: I am really good at programming and it's one of my biggest strengths in life. There's one big problem though. I have no emotional attachment in developing general desktop software even if it is going to improve the lives of other people. It just doesn't feel like the kind of creativity that would be authentic to how I think and come up with ideas. The fact that I have almost no emotion towards this field makes me distance from it even more than I do with animation. Game Development: I would say a big 'definitely' but within strong limits. I want to make games but only within limits and targeting only specific niches. I do not care for the most popular of video games nowadays and the most successful of mobile games. I'm a retro-hardcore nerd. I want to make games that challenge people's intellect and reflex skills while at the same time building game worlds that the player is interested in so much that it makes them want to learn about it more from a fan-made wiki page. I can probably build a good career out of being a game producer but games take a lot of time and money. Music: Music is something close to my heart ever since I was a little kid, just like video games. In fact, video games was the medium the introduced me to the beauty of music when I was little. Unlike games, I don't want to limit myself with music. I want to learn and do as many different styles of music before I do. I don't know, I seem to have a very very open-minded and adaptive ear. I can listen to all sorts of music and flow with it even if it's really distorted, noisy, or experimental. However, when I thought about it a bit more, I realized that only doing music in my life would not be fulfilling enough for me. Music is too easy and takes considerably less time to make compared to making games and drawing, speaking of which. . . Drawing: Drawing is something I've had strong negative emotions towards for almost all my life. I've never built up the skills to be good at drawing at my younger years. Which is a shame because I have so many ideas for visual art that are flowing in my head. I tried drawing at the earliest months of my personal development journey but I stopped after a few months. Looking back I noticed something that I didn't notice before, I was running on insecurity instead of passion. The more I think about it, the more I feel a sense of hidden passion towards drawing things (specifically cartoons) that the intense insecurity was masking. The more I develop my conscious awareness, the more I feel like this blob of insecurity is slowly fading and I could actually see a love for visual ideas that I have not imagined for myself before. I decided to spend a good chunk of today going back to drawing again. I decided to draw a cartoon robot and use it as my new profile picture. I really feel like I'm discovering a hidden source of light behind a looming shadow that I've been in fear of for most of my life. So this is what I ended up with: Result: It's probably a really good thing that I've identified that software development and animation are things I should not bother to focus on. On the other hand, I already know that I really love games and music and that it would give me intense joy to pursue both these fields. I want to make games that target my favorite niches but I really want to master the art of being a musical genius. I've also identified my insecurity with drawing and my awareness has somehow revealed some emotional desire to also be really good at this field especially with cartoons. Total Summary: Games, Music and Drawing but focus a lot on Music

<--[03-23-16]--> I want to write my entry early today. This is because I want to talk only about my meditation session today and nothing else. So I started by telling myself that I wanted to do a 1 hour Strong Determination Sit but 5 minutes into the sit I changed my mind and decided to do it zazen style instead (Zen Meditation). I managed to get myself really really still during this session. Very little unnecessary movements. After about 20 minutes, I started to get a sense that my flow of thought seems to be slowly releasing itself from my awareness. It was like there was still a stream of thoughts in my consciousness but they didn't seem like they were mine. It was like they were just arising out of absolutely nothing. After about 10 minutes I could feel strong negative urges to stop the meditation. It was getting a lot for my mind to handle. My awareness was focused incredibly in my vision and the electric fan that was positioned right in front of me. The thoughts and the urges could do nothing. After several more minutes my field of awareness felt like it was expanding. It was like increasing a FOV slider in a video game except there was a monkey on your back constantly nagging you to stop doing it and just get back to the game. After several moments, my mind started to drift to sexual fantasies and urges. I admit I got sucked into it. It was just too enticing. When I snapped out of it, my body suddenly jerked and I bowed my head down with exhaustion. My streak of being extremely still and quiet was broken and my awareness took a few steps back. "I think God just kicked me out of his house", I thought Despite my higher self telling me against it, I decided to check my timer. 8 minutes left. So I probably spent a good 40 minutes in a very aware state. I felt my lower self tell me to just spend that 8 minutes lying down and relaxed but of course I decided not to listen. I decided to get back and do the remaining time. "I wonder if God will still let me back in". During the last parts of the meditation I probably just hung out at God's front porch. I would describe the state I was in the first part as being in God's living room though. I had more sexual imagination crop up but the timer rang and I just stood up and walked to the nearest soft couch and rested my body. Released the tension, the sexual imagination disappeared, and ultimately, I felt like I just had a very valuable experience. I felt like I gained some rare tidbits of wisdom from God today but yet I feel like there is still much more to learn. God's house incredibly difficult to get to and staying inside for a lengthy period of time is a completely different story. I did learn that God absolutely hates it when your attention gets lost in complex movies that play in awareness. He'll kick you out before you even realize it. But God is very forgiving, He is the ultimate forgiver. He does not even care that I keep referring to him as a "HE" when in fact he's not even anything. . . . I wonder if He cares that I'm writing about him in this journal. What does God actually care about though?

@ZenBlue Very much like me before personal development and my lower self today with personal development.

<--[03-22-16]--> Chasing Dreams Today was a pretty weird day, I woke up and I decided to lie in bed and think about stuff for a few minutes (Okay, I'm just too lazy to get up). And amidst the stories of fictional worlds my mind sometimes creates, I actually had a vision of all the positive changes that could happen in my life in the future. Last time I had something like this was during meditation some time last week. I don't know, they're different from just thoughts about what can be achieved in life. Kind of like faint mental videos that play that almost overwhelm my emotional self. Sadly the emotions and visions are usually then flooded over by reality and the boring, mundane stuff that don't interest or stimulate me in life. Speaking of which, you know what does stimulate me in life? Making music. I MADE A NEW TRACK! This isn't hardcore techno like I've been posting before. It's just straight up emotional electronic music. I named it after the mindset I feel like I'm in over the past weeks. I'm just chasing faint visions all the time. I love it when I get an emotional hit from some external source or internal vision or thought but they are extremely rare occurrences. I think I've only ever had three or four in my life including the one I had this morning. I really have to value these visions a lot more. It's impossible to get the motivational high that is possible simply through remembering what it was like. I really have no choice but to wait for whenever the next one comes and just savor the moment. My emotional state is mostly a state of mild stress or boredom or tiredness or being in a procrastination mood. I have a lot to learn about being in a productive state of mind or even what's been called the "flow state". Which is a state I wish could have everyday (I imagine, it's possible). I don't think I'll ever be able to have that if most of my time is still spent on activities I feel are not aligned with what I authentically want.

I like the mountain analogy for enlightenment. I remember hearing in an enlightenment lecture mp3 that there are multiple paths in life but if you cross the path that takes you to the top of the mountain, you can see all other paths and get a pretty damn beautiful view at that. It's just an analogy but it does make one think.

<--[03-21-16]--> Don't Mind Me. Just Trying To Self-Actualize Here So it's Monday again, this means that my college schedule for today will take up most of my time. To the point where I had so much to do today that the schedule ended at 7pm. I hadn't even meditated yet which means I had about an hour of free time then I had to do meditation then go to bed then sleep. I'm actually writing this on the Tuesday afterwards because I didn't even have enough time to write this at night. Anyway, I did manage to spend about an hour making some music and I've also got that new game review finished in my personal blog. What I did like about today is that I tried to sneak in a little self-actualization work while in the middle of academic activities. A little 15 minutes before next lecture? Let me just read this new self-help book I just bought recently. I was not perfect at reading. Of course with all the other people roaming around, it's a little distracting. So I may have to re-read some of the stuff I read to actually get it drilled into my subconscious. The book I'm reading by the way is the same book I mentioned in <--[03-18-16]-->.

@7oo13ad Well, working on emotional control is getting results for me. And would probably also make it easier to pursue truth @Anna Konstantaki Agreed, people who base their entire lives on mental models are kind of stuck in a labyrinth of their mind.

@Thesleeperhasawakened Ummmm. . . okay? That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said but good to know what you think, man. EDIT: Oh I see what your saying now. No no, I didn't exactly mean to say that we can tell if someone is enlightened or not. Those are just words I used. The point of what I said is that the concepts taught about enlightenment are very different from the experiences that occur from doing enlightenment work. I personally am still skeptical about whether we can really call somebody "enlightened". Maybe we really are already enlightened and just have a weird egotistical human being in our awareness who thinks he/she exists.

@Augustus Yes! Good question! I'm not enlightened but my intuition tells me that the concepts of enlightenment that are being spread around are nowhere near describing how it would be like to actually be enlightened.

@Falk Agreed, I would be lying if I said I no longer have addictions just because I've stopped watching TV. There are still a lot of habits in my life I'm not supposed to have. I still have a lot of work to do.

Confusion is a very common response to pondering about post-rational concepts. But what's really important is actually watching your emotions. Why is it a problem for you to think about valuing truth over getting results? Most of the time it's just emotional discomfort. Learn to get rid of that and the thoughts just feel like they have no power over reality.

<--[03-20-16]--> @&*&($#&$(&@#SKADNAKSNDKJHJNKASJNDKASNLABELSARENONSENSEASODJASDJ I just watched Leo's new video and did some meditation work shortly afterwards. This is a really really really good video. And I'm happy that I'm one of the rare people on Earth to have been lucky enough to have stumbled upon the schools of thought (which ironically are schools that teach stuff beyond thought) to actually understand what Leo is trying to communicate. I really hope he has struck something in the minds of even just at least 5 rationally minded people out there. I know most rational people are going to have really dogmatic reaction without realizing how petty and dimwitted they look to post-rationalists. I don't mean to be blunt and I know that it may seem like I'm trying to say I'm above rational thinking but really I'm not. Like Leo, I just wish more people were to experience real spiritual awakenings and realizations of the Matrix we're living in as a society. It's quite bad really what's going on around the world in people's minds, the chimpery, the lack of awareness, the lack of love for life, delusions of wisdom, delusions of intellectual superiority. All of that are stuff I personally like to blame on excessive worship of rationality. You may be wondering what's with the gibberish title for this entry. Well, I didn't think I wanted to come up with a rational title for today so I decided to arrationally let my hands go free to type what they want. Anyway, time to get down to what I did today. Finished some college work that needed to be finished. Listened to some good podcasts while I was doing it. Worked on some music production because I felt like it but ideas were slow and I completely forgot to let my emotions involved in the music creation process. Hmmm. . . I'm going to finish that new blog post I was working on. I just need to take some screenshots of the game I was reviewing, put it in the entry then publish it. After that, probably going to read a book or something. That's all for today and remember, pay no attention to Mr. or Mrs. chimp while your living your daily life, mm'kay.

@ZenBlue You haven't been without TV for any longer than a week? That's surprising even to me. Actually when I think about it, I'm going to make a confession that I have probably never spent a day of my life without TV. It's not that I still actively watch TV everyday, it's that I still live in a household where there are other people who spend hours watching TV everyday. My bedroom is next door to my brother's bedroom which has a TV but mine doesn't and I every night I can hear my brother watching TV 'til 11 o'clock. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, my parents love to watch TV in the dining room so I have to actively will myself not to look at it. Even as I type this in my room, I can hear the dining room TV downstairs as my father washes the dishes. It's not a nightmare but it's so far away from living a life truly without TV having some sort of effect.

<--[03-19-16]--> More Actualized Life Prep Work As I said in yesterday's entry, I wanted to dedicate today to only doing academic programming work. I did just that only I shouldn't have been surprised at how inefficient I felt. The task was just so boring that I couldn't focus on it properly. I procrastinated for about 45 minutes total during the 4 hours I spent doing the work. On the other hand, I decided to bumble about with FL Studio and I had no complaints because thinking of different ways I can create and arrange sound was actually challenging to my mind. It should be really clear now why this mundane college work really gets on my nerves. I'm tired of having to spend hours of my time on boring tasks that I need to do to keep living in a house but don't fulfill me in any way. It's not the fact that the college work is programming that makes it boring, it's just the fact that I don't feel like I need to put any creativity and it's just not challenging enough. *sigh* oh well, few more months and then I'll graduate. I better have fucking clear plan of what I'm going to do by then. I know what I WANT to do but that's only half the solution of the problem. Good News though, I actually finished writing that new blog post but I haven't posted it yet because I have not yet re-read it for spelling and grammatical errors. Also, I have not yet added images to the post. This new post is a Retro Review for the PlayStation Title "M&M's Shell Shocked". I'm not really sure yet what type of content I want to put in the blog but for now I can only think of doing game reviews.

@ZenBlue Thanks. Despite trying to find the right paths in life, I still feel very lost. Still feel very naive about a lot of things. Leo talks about the first years of personal development being just prep work for the real thing so I might not have even truly begun my journey yet. Well, good luck with your TV habit changing challenge. Personally, I think TV is not inherently harmful. The chimpery of mainstream modern society is. TV is just like a funnel for the bullshit keeping society in groupthink. Cartoons are pretty okay though but still not perfectly devoid of chimpery. But I'm probably just saying that because I spent most of my TV time watching western cartoons even at my teens.

<--[03-18-16]--> Pondering the Future of this Journal I wonder how this journal would be like once I really start getting the results that I want. I can't help but notice I mostly post about mundane happenings in my life and my petty troubles with academics. What would be my attitude to it? How will I see my past self? How much personal growth am I going to notice? This is just some stuff I decided to think about just before I wrote this. Anyway, let's just get to what I did today. I decided to focus mainly on academic/college work today. I know I complain about it too much in this journal but I think it's about time I just deal with it and get what I need to do for it over with. It's only going to be for a few months anyway. I'm also going to focus tomorrow on more college work because I have quite a lot of programming to do as a computer science student. Decided to buy a new book today. It's called "The Magic Ladder to Success" by Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill seems to have built his career out of writing books about success-building. Quite interesting but what's really interesting is that the book warns you not to read the book without taking notes. I've never had a book tell me that before. Of course, I'm going to do it. I have a bunch of green index cards I can use to write with Didn't work much (at all) on creative work today. I want to focus for now on academic life. I'll get back to creating things when I can. Becoming Steve Jobs is still in my queue of books I want to finish reading. I may want to talk about it again when I'm done. Finally I ended today with something I'm not proud of. I spent 2 hours today just watching Let's Play content. It's been a while since I decided to let go and watch junk content for quite a while. I won't be doing it often obviously, definitely not going to waste hours of my time doing stupid shit everyday.

@ZenBlue You don't have to cringe about mechanical/automatic habits you've had in the past. If your conscious of it, you can work to make your future less mechanical and more intention-driven. I'm 19 years old, I've only been doing personal development for over a year. My biggest regret in my younger years is not that I spent most of it playing video games but that I spent almost all my free time being a daydreamer. I'd daydream about all sorts ideas for cartoon shows, video games, comics, but I was so completely unaware that I wasn't actually doing anything. My younger self was always focused on quick stimulation and the older I got the quicker and better stimulation I demanded until I suddenly had an existential panic attack at 18. It came out of nowhere. I think I mentioned this in my Actualization Journal, I was so confused and so lost that I searched "What is Happiness?" on YouTube. That's when I found Leo's work, that's when the trajectory of my life completely changed. I look back at those days and notice just how robotic and clueless I was. I assume you can relate to that very much. Everyday of my life now is trying to learn how to realize all the ideas I had in my daydreams. This is why I also commit myself to self-actualization.

@ZenBlue Thanks! You have no idea how obsessed I am with finishing this new game. I started work on it last year and after several months I've gotten good progress in it but I still think it will take more months until I get anywhere near finished. I'm a single developer but I recently asked one of my college-mates if he was interested in helping me with the background art. This game is a 2D platformer mainly inspired by the Crash Bandicoot series. I'll likely release it as a free product but I feel like I should get some payment for all the effort I'm putting into it so maybe I'll put up a donation campaign for it when I reveal it to the world.

<--[03-17-16]--> Becoming Steve Jobs I've been reading a book called "Becoming Steve Jobs" recently. Written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. I spent 2 hours of my time today reading it just after meditation because I had the free time. I've only read the first three chapters. I really want to say that I was amazed at just how much of a failure Jobs was at his early career. I don't mean that he struggled with success, he was just unrealistically ambitious and that backfired on him multiple times to the point where he quit the company that he started. Not to mention he was hard to work with and was insanely arrogant and couldn't stand not producing the best products he can think of. I've always had this idea that successful people earn small levels of success early on and that just grows and grows until they achieve big success but this book so far has shattered that idea of mine and I haven't even finished it yet. I'm already in the fourth chapter and I don't think I've gotten to the point where he managed to rise to be one of the world's greatest entrepreneur. I know have the idea that truly successful people experience massive disconnects with their ambition in life and only slowly bumble their way too it by numerous hurdles and delays. I think I made the right decision when I told myself that I would invest what little money I have right now on books. I don't know why I have not yet talked about a single book I've read in this journal until now. I only have handful and I think "Becoming Steve Jobs" could be one of my top ones so far. But who knows, I'm bound to find more high quality stuff in the future but for now, I want to focus on finishing what I have. Also spent a little time working on the game I'm developing. It's been a while since I've done that. Can't wait to finish it though, I am really ambitious about game development as well as music production. I feel to lazy and unmotivated to write even a single paragraph in the new post in my blog that I'm working on. Doesn't matter anyway, it's not that important, I guess. Also I watched this half-hour film on YouTube and it is fantastic. It's a claymation film about ghosts and burgers. Who wouldn't want to watch a film about ghosts and burgers? Kudos to Lee Hardcastle for this wonderful film! EDIT: I JUST NOTICED THAT THIS IS MY 100th POST ON THIS FORUM! I think this deserves a celebration gif!

<--[03-16-16]--> Getting Back On Track Okay, so today I had to work on college presentation. I spent a good part of my day practicing and rehearsing and it went out pretty well. The instructor had his criticisms and I paid attention but I listened. I actually do not consider myself a very good speaker or even writer but that's only because my ego is still an ignorant and neurotic entity that can't help but judge itself for no good reason. Meditation today was okay. Another one of those inconsistent ones though were I spend one part very unfocused and then have a high sense of awareness and then unconsciously fall into a daydream. I decided to start writing my 3rd blog entry but I don't want to spend the entire night writing it so I decided to write a short section. That's all for today. Thank you for reading.

@ZenBlue Nice to read those awesome things from you. I get how you feel about TV because I was like that as a child before with video games. I still play video games though but I almost never exceed more than half and hour of playtime per day, usually just 10 minutes. Problem with TV though is that it expects you to waste hours of your time to get any sense of satisfaction from it. Hope this is going to make some major life trajectory changes for you. There's so much more out there to discover for yourself. Currently I'm studying about stress and how stress works. Like actually deeply trying to get an understanding of it. I probably wouldn't even care about it if I spent hours of my time lazily sitting in front of a TV screen or playing video games.

Ooh. Glad to know other people here follow Mooji's lectures. I listen to them as mp3's whenever I need to go outside.

<--[03-15-16]--> Getting Worse Didn't feel very energetic today. A lot of my energy was basically drained by college work again. I did manage to work a bit on music. I wrote a memo in my phone to remind me to work on music as much as possible before I graduate and have no choice but to jump into the real world. Class ended 7pm today. I'm so exhausted. Another one of those days that I don't want to write about anything else because I'm so tired. I have to sleep early. Good Night.

Getting Really Good at Meditation Building Mindfulness or Pure Awareness of your Perceived Reality Strategizing What's It Going To Take To Make Big Life Changes Delaying Gratification Getting Rid of the Addiction of "Doing" Getting Rid of the Addiction of "Thinking" Getting Comfortable Doing Stuff That Is Radically Different From What Modern Society Does Getting Comfortable With Loneliness Getting Comfortable With Being In The Spotlight Losing Your Sense Of Self And those are just the first things that come to mind, there are so much more I can list. I myself still have not fully mastered the principles needed to even get close to solving any of these problems. But again, don't worry about this now. You'll cross these bridges when you get there. Personal Development takes a lifetime commitment. I've been without television for about a year and a half now and it feels like it wasn't even the beginning of the true difficulties of this commitment.

<--[03-14-16]--> Getting Better I want to start today's entry with the boring stuff first. NEW TRACK. I uploaded it last night after I wrote yesterday's entry. It's still hardcore techno and it's based on an obscure internet meme created by an obscure youtuber who goes by the name of "I Hate Everything". I'm getting really used to hardcore techno and I'm not really sure if I should focus on it a bit more or if it's time to leave my comfort zone to expand my horizons when it comes to musical skills. Currently, I think I need to focus a bit more still on hardcore techno but not for too long as that would be bad strategy. Speaking of strategy, I've been thinking a lot about the principles I learned in Leo's latest video. It seems like another one of those episodes where the topic is so incredibly deep that we may need to learn more about it ourselves very rigorously. Other examples of this I can recall was the "Understanding Awareness" and "Curing Perfectionism" videos. I decided to convert this episode to an mp3 so I can listen to it multiple times as I walk to college and back until I get sick of it or a new episode comes a long. This video felt like another game-changer for me. As I walked contemplating the routines and habits in place with my life and combined that with the results I want and the problems I still currently have. I was just amazed by how the majority of what I'm doing is just a huge waste of time. I can't help but notice the routines that are in place that my ego fools me into thinking needs to be done but can actually be minimized/cut entirely. Again, this new video introduced an incredibly deep topic that I feel I'm only beginning to scratch the surface of. Just like the "Understanding Awareness" video caused me to go through the next several months constantly noticing how clueless I am with perceiving reality, this new video has caused me to notice all the pointless (or should I say unstrategic) things I'm doing. Here are a few examples: Being stressed out about college work (This is a big one) Worrying about lack of finance Obsessing over quality of my creative work instead of learning to increase creative ability (this has wasted too much of my time) Forgetting the importance of allocating time to read books Almost letting video games back to my daily routine (Almost!) Forgetting to make plans to achieve goals before executing (this is pretty unspecific but you see what I mean)