r0ckyreed

Depends on your intention of the practice. What do you really want to get out of your visualization? What is the intention you are setting for it? This is up for you to decide if you think it is worth writing them down. If I had some golden insights and ideas that outweighed my initial intentions, I may write them down as the insights are running through me. This is one of the reasons why it is hard for me to meditate. But for me, I think it is worth it. However, I am trying to go to the next level and working on trying to let go and detach from me wanting to engage in my creative thoughts. When you visualize, it is important to set an intention or question to focus on. Sometimes you can be playful and explore your imagination. Your visualization can be for insight, creativity, relaxation, identifying limiting beliefs, exploring trauma/shadow work, overcoming fear, etc. Sometimes, you can train your mind to let go of the ideas and continue the visualization. This helps you train your memory, as opposed to being reliant on remembering through writing it down. Keeping your focus solely on the visualization can help train other parts of your mind. If you keep going off and on then your practice will be weak. So it is kind of a trade off, and you are the judge of what is most important to you. EDIT: I would also note that you may miss out on an even deeper realization if you disengage from the visualization practice to engage with the ideas and insights. It can sometimes be hard to tell if the ideas you get in your practice are the seed or fruit of the insight. The solution can be to experiment with doing both ways to see which strategies work best for you. But whatever you do, follow your highest inspiration.

True Freedom is that everyone gets what they want, and as a result, no one gets what they want.

Good. Go act on that inspiration. Life is paradoxical. You find your greatest treasures in the areas where you never thought they could be. Doesn’t matter right now. All you trying to do is plant seeds and water them with inspiration. They will grow fruit only if you continue to water them. The plant dies when you stop believing in it and giving it love. I hear ya. It is tough. However, there are other ways to use your philosophy skills down the road. Getting work experience wouldn’t be a bad idea. How can you know what you want without knowing what you don’t want? Use early work experiences to figure that out while also making money and building resume. Good idea. What is your plan to stop? Also, it would be interesting to examine your feelings and beliefs more around sex. Use a therapist and a journal. Btw, don’t expect you quitting the porn drug cold turkey. If you can, then great. Sometimes, it takes small, brave baby steps to accomplish your goals. Strive to take one baby step of improvement each day. It is helpful to have an accountability partner or coach because if you have set goals and failed them many times, it is not uncommon to lose integrity with yourself. You gotta slowly build back your integrity with yourself by setting goals you know you can accomplish that day. If you set too many high goals and don’t achieve them, you can imagine what this could do to your self-efficacy. It’s like having a friend who promises and never delivers. If you have such a friend, you will eventually lose trust with them. The same can happen to yourself. Gain back that personal accountability and keep staying hard! This is my last post on this post here. Wish you well.

Best Productivity Hack For Spiritual Entrepreneurs by David Lion https://youtu.be/HDxmILIExeY

I asked David Lion about discipline and here is what he said https://youtu.be/C_p8wo_UV2U This may be the problem. No wonder you procrastinate so much. Your goals that you set seem to be too strict and unrealistic. It is like your trying to run a marathon when you haven’t even ran a mile or even taken the first step. Start small. Work out when you get the inspiration to. Be more Blissiplined instead of disciplined. The energy you approach things matter. What excites and inspires you the most in life right now? Do that. It depends on what it does for you. How does that help and serve you? Does it excite and inspire you to be more of who you are or is it an escape from something? Notice how you feel. Notice the impact it has on your life long term and your beliefs. Where do you think you should start? Start with what inspires you and excites you the most. Nobody can tell you what that is. You have to feel inwards. No amount of logic will help you decipher what you feel most alive about.

Your asking for a logical answer when the answer is actually emotional. I already stated it before. You need to act upon what lights you up the most. If you are inspired by animals, go volunteer and work with animals. If your desire at this moment is to go camping or see a friend, then go do that. When it is your heart it is freedom and when it is your mind it is fear. If the mind is not working with your heart, it is not working for you. Do an experiment where you quiet your mind, listen to your heart, and imagine what desires come into your consciousness.

Yeah. This can happen. You don’t want to complicate things to much. Your trying to conceptualize “work” too much when you need to have a direct experience of it. You are getting lost in your mind with different concepts. You have to see “work” around you and contemplate that. For instance, you may see people “working” and bees and butterflies “working.” Just observe the actual process of what “work” really is then ask more questions about “work.” Work ethic is a code and set of principles for how you use your energy. It is that simple. You don’t need to go into what code and principles are just yet. As long as you can grasp the essence of what work ethic is, you can then ask questions to contemplate deeper. Do animals have a work ethic? What is the importance of work ethic? How can I increase my work ethic? How does it relate to my life purpose? What is the opposite of work ethic? Why am I lazy and procrastinate? What are the obstacles to my work ethic? How is a bee able to have such a strong work ethic? What is the relationship between work ethic and survival? What are the most optimal principles that I could live by to increase the quality of my work/energy? These are a few examples to go around the iceberg, as well as penetrating deep down the iceberg. No. This is you getting lost in your mind. You have to focus on one topic of inquiry at a time. Use the example method I described above. You want to have a direct experience of it. You can always contemplate other topics that come up, such as what is direct experience? But don’t expect all your answers to be conceptual. You want the experience. To know what happiness is you have to experience it. Just defining happiness is not fully contemplating. Hope that helps.

Your own philosophy. Don’t limit yourself to one school of thought. Study all the schools of thought that you can and pick the gems you find resonate with you. Don’t be strictly Buddhist or strictly stoic or hedonist or nihilist or skeptic or solipsist or whatever. Study everything and just be you. Watch Cobra Kai on Netflix. Mr. Miyagi, a karate master, ultimately tells his student, Daniel to live by his own philosophy and make it his own. You have to see the creativity and ingenuity in just being yourself. It is so amazing that we would want to be somebody else other than ourself. Wonder about that. It boils down to finding out what you love most about life and doing that as much as you can.

Yes. You got it. Yes. You got it. Yes! Way to go. Get out of your head for a little bit and into your heart. Go out and have a little bit of fun by yourself. Go to a zoo. Go to a national park. Go to a nearby nature trail or lake or whatever. Feel what it is like to be a kid and have sex with life itself and see what you reproduce. Following your passion for career takes time. In the meantime, give yourself some self-care and feel alive. If you can let yourself go towards your highest excitement, you will have the energy, inspiration, and insights to do what you need to do.

You don’t. You only have today that is guaranteed. What do you want to do today? Focus your heart fully on what you can do today. You are living it. You gotta be clear about what you want. Be a leader of yourself and be a disciple to your heart’s desires. Act on your highest inspiration. Only you can know what that is. Explore why you backslide. You seem to have the answer in that you need a sense of direction. Get out a journal and write down your goals and dreams. If you don’t know them the write down your past dreams or read biographies of others can help. That’s the challenge in life. Ambiguity is part of this journey. You gotta be clear about what is right for you. Life is meaningless, which means that the only right path is the path you wish to lead. It takes time to sort out confusion. Take it baby step at a time. It sounds like you are focusing on the marathon instead of on the step before you. None. You want to be a leader and not a follower. Deconstruct religion. Live by your own principles or you will never be able to follow your own dreams. Live by your own philosophy and not someone else’s. Sounds like myself. It seems like you have fallen into the same trap I did, which is you have “put the cart before the horse.” You have focused on answering existential questions so much that you probably haven’t given your personal survival the same focus. Go on a vision quest and search for these answers. Nobody can tell you want your personal/career holy grail is. Treat your personal life with the same attitude you treat philosophical questions. Edit: I know your future may be filled with a lot of insecurities, but you are not alone. You can be secure in knowing that everyone is insecure. That’s my thoughts on all this. You can take it or leave it. Best wishes.

For me, it is acting from inspiration rather than force/fear/obligation. When you act from your highest desire and inspiration, you are positively motivated to achieve your goal. It’s about going after what you love rather than avoided what you hate. You will find resistance lower significantly if you choose the former. True. But is it done out of love or fear? Be clear on that distinction. Success to me is simply being able to do what you love most.

By having an awakening to what is true. When you have a true awakening, there isn’t any doubt in your mind. If there is doubt, then you know you have to go deeper. But beyond spirituality, you have to cross-reference from many perspectives to see where your “knowledge” falls in place. A good place to start is admitting that you don’t know and could be deluded. Most deluded people assume they know, and people who are wise question if they are deluded. You don’t. Knowing is itself a dualist thing that you need to transcend to reach higher states of mind. Knowing and knower are one. Being is more fundamental. Direct experience is all you have. Concepts are what is fooling you, which is why we have reality. Your sleeping dreams are as true as this life now. Your mind draws the lines between reality and dreams. Your direct experience may suggest that the sun rises and sets, but your direct experience can also tell you that the earth is rotating rather than sun moving. You see? You cannot get beyond consciousness. To know if your senses are “deluded” implies using your mind to construct that distinction. How you gonna tell a flat earther that the earth is round? Through direct experience from a certain point of view. That is what you got here. Direct experience from a certain point of view. This requires an alternative state of consciousness. It takes a raising of consciousness to realize how your mind fools you and deludes you. There are many layers in which your mind fools you. At certain states, it is hard to see the level of deception, which is why Trump and conspiracy theorists (flat earthers, etc.) are at such a low level of consciousness. The short answer is consciousness and a raising of it.

Work on improving your falsetto for massive results. Chest voice is your natural voice. Working on falsetto not only strengthens your head register, but also your chest voice as well. Be sure to warm up your chest and mix before doing falsetto, as you could potentially lose range in your chest/mix without proper warmup.

Yup. No problem. My favorites were the first 3 Harry Potter PC games.

1. Uncharted 4 2. Life is Strange 1 3. The Last of Us Part 2 4. Skyrim 5. Black Ops Zombies 6. Star Wars Jedi Academy 7. Old School Runescape 8. Harry Potter PC 9. Pirates Online

The deepest love I received from my parents was them making me feel special and gifted. They made me feel like a hero to them, and they would engage in fantasy play with me as a kid. I think a big thing was trust. I felt like I could trust my parents and they could trust me. However, it was different with my sister. My parents making me feel special and gifted ended up making me become an asshole in my life. My high self-efficacy turned into narcissism. Narcissism definitely plagued my psyche throughout my life until my freshman year in college. The specific ways that it backfired was I was always competing with everyone, which led me to have hardly any friends. My sister wanted to spend time with me as a kid, but I was so competitive that I kind of drove her away. To this day, I have a great relationship with my sister, and this is in part because I have changed such that I was more open and humble about my flaws and mistakes, and I started to make other people feel special and gifted like the way I felt. Some ways that I did this was through magic tricks. I initially did tennis and magic for selfish reasons. Magic was to help me to make friends in school, but I eventually did magic because I liked how I could make people feel. This led me on to getting a master's degree in mental health counseling as an existential therapist. But in my childhood, my parents gave me everything that I wanted really. I was spoiled, but I had deep respect and listened to their wisdom. I think what helped me to respect them the most was the fact that I knew they respected and loved me. I always felt accepted and belonged. I felt so accepted by my parents that when I went on to Boy Scout campy, I became homesick because I missed my parents. Some of the small things that made me feel accepted and loved was the fact that my parents would do literally everything for me. My dad would always get me up in the morning and make me waffles, eggs, pancakes, etc. My dad would take me out for tennis lessons, trumpet lessons, etc. My mom would support me as well. Looking back, I realized that I spent a lot of time with my dad, and I wished I had spent more time with my mom. My mom's job was not as flexible though so that complicated things. Whenever I was sick, my dad would take off work to care for me. The deepest love I received and still receive is having all my needs provided to me. I feel so deeply loved by my parents that I still live with them today. I have never left my home because it feels so much like home. A downside to all of this is that my parents never taught me how to be independent. Like I said, I was spoiled, but I was taught that my opportunities given were a privilege, and I was taught to have gratitude and good manners. What helped me understand this was being exposed to a variety of cultures throughout my life. Ever since I was around 9 years old, my family would go to Mexico every year. We experienced great delights, but I also remember seeing the poverty that people had to live through. This helped me to gain more appreciation of what I had. My parents also showed me great love by the education that they gave me. They told me at an early age what sex and drugs were about and to avoid them. My dad shared with me many of his mistakes. He was so vulnerable with me about his stupid errors that made me respect him and listen to him. I learned a lot of what not to do from my dad's stories. With my mom, she advocated for me all throughout school because of my ADHD. I could sense how much my mom cared for me by her being assertive to make sure I was treated fairly at school. I felt like both my mom and dad had my back, and I could always go to them for help. I typically go to my mom for emotional problems, as she is a therapist herself. My mom and my dad have always empowered me and highlighted my strengths such as being passionate, ambitious, hard worker, etc. They have always encouraged me to succeed in my dreams. I had dreams of being a professional tennis player and trumpet player at around age 11-12. My parents showed me love by encouraging me to fulfill my dreams, and they never told me I could not achieve my dreams. I know some parents may discourage their kids, saying "you will never amount to that ..., etc." In addition, they helped me reframe many negative experiences I have had into positive ones. Having ADHD and being held back in school were some struggles I was faced with and embarrassed by initially, but my parents had me see my ADHD and being held back as strengths. Other ways were my dad spending many nights helping me with my homework. I realize now how much I took this for granted because after a long day of work, it can be hard to help a child with their school work. What my mom and dad did to help me with my school work showed that I was worth their time. I never felt like I wasn't worthy to them. They always made me feel worthy by verbally expressing that they are proud of me for my accomplishments. They were always quick to compliment. The big takeaway from this exercise for me is that I felt the most love from my childhood when my parents and sister treated me special with respect, provided my basic needs, recognized and highlighted my strengths, provided time for me, and encouraged me to follow and actualize my dreams. I think a theory of love based off of the common themes of my childhood is that the deepest love comes from making others feel special. Ways to do this are to highlight their strengths, express they are worthy of your time, and encourage them to be themselves and follow their dreams. Just giving positive attention to someone is enough to make them feel special. EDIT: Love to me boils down to making other people feel like they can be themselves around you, as well as helping others to bring about the best in themselves. This first starts with me being authentic first but authenticity is another matter entirely to contemplate.

Nobody. The only person who can awaken is You. The question already assumes duality to be true and other selves existing. There is only the One Self.

Leisure or technology/social media slavery. I know it can be difficult and draining at job slavery. Your leisure time is time to have fun and do things that level you up to escape all slavery. It is easy to turn your leisure time into another form of slavery. If your leisure time isn’t helping you, I would consider it a form of slavery. No amount of social media use can get you to escape wage slavery unless that is your side gig for making money. However, most people don’t use social media in a conscious way to make money, they use it to kill time as a form of drug.

Having the freedom to be in solitude, particularly in nature. Don’t have one. True freedom to me is not following a schedule. It is to be able to follow my intuition at any given moment. Routine can be beneficial, but not for creativity and spontaneity. There comes a point when too much meditation stops being productive. I personally only do formal meditation for 10-20 minutes every other day. I think you could try 20 minutes meditation and try some other practices like contemplation and reading books. Read my post on Long-Term Meditation is Crap to understand more on what I mean.

Idk. Why don’t you contemplate that.

Evil is like poop. You may not like it, but it is part of you. Evil is part of infinity like poop is part of you. Without it, there is no you and no reality. Everything that you see, smell, taste, feeling, hear, and think of is always a part of you. All of them together make up a you. One main purpose of life is learning to love yourself. This means to fall in love with yourself and see the beauty that you are. You aren’t just a human, you are everything.

The perception of evil and wrongness is what I think can lead to a lot of suffering. Total peace to me is feeling complete and marveling at the perfection and beauty of reality. To me, suffering is when you see evil all around you; thus, ceasing to see the magic of reality. But there are many forms and degrees of suffering. Suffering isn’t necessarily good or evil in the same way that anger isn’t necessarily good or evil. I personally prefer to not experience suffering or anger but that is one of my biases.

Evil doesn’t exist. Evil isn’t the absence of love. Evil is love such that you cannot call it evil. A rock isn’t evil. A hand isn’t evil. A knife isn’t evil. A human shooting a gun at a rock isn’t evil. A bird eating a snake isn’t evil. A human eating a bird isn’t evil. A human eating another human isn’t evil. The location of evil is in your mind. Evil is always an abstract concept for the benefit of your survival. Notice how emotional you are and get on this topic. What makes killing an animal good and a human evil? What is wrong with cannibalism? If you are honest and if you wake up, you will see there is nothing wrong with the world. Evil is the belief there is something wrong when there really isn’t. Evil doesn’t exist because evil is the perception of wrongness in the world when such a thing doesn’t even exist. If the earth blew up tomorrow, it would be insignificant to the vast infinite universe. Thanos murdered half of all life out of love. As long as you perceive evil in the world, you will never awaken to experience the infinite beauty and love of existence. The concept and perception of evil is your obstacle, your ultimate gateless gate that needs to be deconstructed as part of your journey to awaken from this dream.

The end of the Contemplation video.

The realization that you are God is all you need. Everything is infinite beauty, infinitely perfect, infinitely divine, and a reflection of yourself. What is so astonishing is that one could take the magic of reality for granted, and thus, not see the magic. It blows my mind how unaware most people are. I find it amazing how even I, myself, having knowing this and experiencing it, can easily slip back into unawareness of the magic, where I take the miracle of existence for granted. That should be enough to interest your friends. You don’t need a crash course. It is better if it comes from you than some video. To answer your question though, The Book of Not Knowing and Leo’s video on Life is a Maze will be sufficient.