trenton

September 14, 2020 Today I woke up early and could not get to sleep. The melatonin still did not change this result. I tried letting go of judgements which I did successfully at first, but they slowly crept back throughout my work day at Kroger. When I got back home, I attempted to apply for my chess job, but I needed to move to NYC. I am unable to get this job and I can't find any other places with jobs as a chess teacher. They might be more common in other countries, but this is a rare job that I would love to do. I like to improve the overall trajectory of a person's life through teaching chess. It is not just about being a good chess player and winning tournaments, although I can help you do that with enough training. I derive a deeper happiness from understanding that I gave a child all of my knowledge and understanding in order to help them pursue their dream of becoming a master. It is like the love a parent feels for a child except I don't care if you are genetically similar to me or not. I started feeling better and better as the day went on. Eventually my racing thoughts came back and I struggled to meditate. I did manage to meditate a little bit before starting work, but this was only about 20 minutes total. On my days off I can take my pilgrimage to the hiking trails for two hours. I sat downstairs with my family. I could have continued the life purpose course, but my jumpy mind made me forget. I can do a couple in the morning. As I say downstairs, I read the news to may family about NYC. Mom looked at me like I was crazy. I told them that I felt that it would be difficult to convince my family to let me move. Granny said that that is going to be the hardest part. Anyway, I am not moving. I knew it was a long shot. I continued sitting down there as my sister and mother argued about political correctness. I was able to see the partial truths in both perspectives. I tried to explain that these issues are complicated and can get very grey, like if one person likes being called black, but another African American. They also argued about systemic racism, so I showed them the quotes from the blog on this site as proof of systemic racism. The family got heated when mom said the n word aloud. Mom then told me about how we used to have white slaves in America. My sister told me not to trust her and do my own research. I have been practicing mental flexibility with spiritual teachers, and I applied to mom making claims about white slaves. I neither believed not disbelieved her. I listened to her perspective and with an open mind I considered the possibility. I then proceeded to do some research into white slavery. I discovered that there were white slaves before we officially became a country, but we switched to black slaves later on. Eventually, all the white slaves does and there were only black slaves. I did not draw any conclusions from the information in regards to modern systemic racism, but in case you did not know there used to be white slaves in this area. One drawback of facts like these is that they implicitly reinforce our modern racist worldviews such as blacks commit more violent crimes then whites, thus police force against them is justified. This can be hard to explain to some people who say "we are just discussing facts" unaware of what they are doing in the big picture. The issue then drifted to take culture. The argument became more and more heated. Granny and I agreed that this was going nowhere and we are making ourselves more upset. As they fought, I discussed several interesting points with granny. She finds spiral dynamics and ego development interesting for explaining our value systems. One point is that Peterson touched on sexual impropriety. He thinks that our society is not mature enough to discuss this issue. He believes that sexual impropriety is an underlying issue of abortion. Using this idea, I expanded to include issues like rape culture, LGBTQ rights, and our sloppy distinctions between rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. We also discussed how people underestimate how complex these issues are and our perspectives are easily over generalized. This is how there can be partial validity to contrary perspectives, but these issues can get grey and difficult. We also discussed how people get very heated and ideological when it comes to gender issues like what happened at Nanny's house. Granny agreed that our society is not mature enough to discuss sexual impropriety as mom and my sister continued to fight about rape culture. The fight was not going anywhere, but I can have interesting discussions with my grandma as we compare today's politics to when she was a child. Try to calm your mind down. You have a ton of energy now that your cold is gone. My energy is through the roof, but I need to sleep. Good luck.

September 13, 2020 I spent a lot of the day in bed, but eventually I got jumpy. I did some running around until I meditated for about three hours. I am happy with what happens in deep meditation and I feel okay in spite of waking up at 2 in the morning. I continued with my life purpose course and I contemplated what do I want. I recognized that one of my questions was "How do I exist?". This is what lead me to meditation and contemplation. Maybe I could get a philosophy major, but I am still not clear on my vision. I am about half way through the first section. I then contemplated more deeply until I figured out why debating makes me feel dirty. No matter my position on any issue, religious, political, philosophical, ect., I still have a sinking feeling that I am hurting mankind. All of my judgements and criticisms are against my values. I felt worse about myself for judging terrorists and any other human being. My society taught me to be opinionated in politics, but I don't have to have an opinion. I am making a commitment to not judge anybody for any action whatsoever. True and false, good and bad, are concepts which imply opposites. Silence does not imply opposites like language does. I will keep meditating. My thoughts are slowing down and it is like peace comes from me. I would like to mention that My chess job is looking less and less likely. It makes me unsure about my alternatives for achieving financial independence, a job or career I like, and so forth. I am not satisfied with the default and I will make an alternative somehow. My search for my strengths continues. I have a limiting belief that I am too wierd to fit in uniquely to any one field. This could hold me back from finding my life purpose so I need to address this. Weird is good in terms of my unique way of thinking. Words cannot express how I feel for you.

September 12, 2020 I started off with a small cold that gradually got worse throughout the day. If the cold continues I may need to call a doctor. I ended up being less productive because I struggled to get out of bed. I was okay going into work, but it kept getting worse. I did not do much for the life purpose course or job searching. I might do that today, because I want a better job. I'm still sick this morning. Get well soon.

September 11, 2020 I was off work again. I did not sleep well because I kept waking up. I tried meditation, but I did not feel that I did good enough. I was constantly wavering and getting distracted. I still did the best I could. My sore throat was also bothering me throughout the day. It affected how much water I drank, not that it helped. Tylenol does not work for me. I still managed to continue the life purpose course. There is no way you can finish it in 50 days of you take your time and do it properly. I did more research into the chess job. Granny helped me find the resume which was for some reason on her computer. I did not edit it in two years, but I needed the format to help me out. I can finish my application for chess online tomorrow. In my self reflection I discovered that one of my most damaging beliefs is that a thing in reality is evil or bad. This makes me feel like I am unworthy of love when I remember all of my regrettable decisions. This belief is designed to make me feel worse about myself and create suffering. I this create a worse life than I need to and I have a lot to gain by undoing this idea that I am bad. A truer thought is that everything is good because everything is doing the best it can if that is what it is. I also contemplated deeply into the nature of opposites. I concluded that all thinking is relative to something else. I was seeking to understand that which has no opposite. It looked like opposites do not exist and they are imagined. I am not totally done, but I am capable of becoming conscious of that which has no opposite. I then did research and I encountered metaphysics. There was an ancient philosopher who felt like me. I seek truth because I feel like the opposites are at war and I am torn apart in the inside. Philosophers that came later said that reality is constant flux, but always the same. It talked about absolute unity and sameness vs. Difference like Leo did. I am interested in some of these alternatives to being at war. I am trying to become conscious of good and truth without opposites such that there is no opposite of opposite. I will probably take some philosophy courses of and when I go back to college. Meaninglessness is a vehicle for good in that it lets go of concept and imagination. One day I will become conscious of what is being sought. I think I will take the video of the 30 facets of awakening and contemplate one every day for a month. Apparently it is possible to become conscious of God within a month. Love has no opposite. I love you is relative love.

There are many people who could benefit from understanding politics on a deeper level. This includes spiral dynamics, ego development, the world values survey, and other useful models found on actualized.org. Many people don't know about these models, but we can use other political forums to reach them. The issue I am drawn to a lot is abortion because the fallacy of the heap implicates that all dualities are imaginary and relative. This includes the one true femto second at which abortion becomes murder. All of these positions are arbitrary and I think I can help people to let go of trying to objectify groundless positions. This gets people sucked into ideology and it gets harder to make progress in these complicated issues. I started a discussion on the following site. It is free to start an account of you want to. https://www.debatepolitics.com/forum.php In the abortion section I have a discussion about the fallacy of the heap if you want more people to learn about it. I think if there were many more people on other political forums discussing some of the models found on actualized.org, it would help more people to engage in politics on a higher level. It is hard to encourage people to do this because the lectures are long, but if we show the other sites how we apply the models for real practical benefits, they might look into it.

September 10, 2020 I did not continue the life purpose course in this day off, but I did a few other things. I walked up to the hiking trail and stayed in the woods for about 2 hours. I did not sit and meditate the whole time, but I did for a while. I had a very persistent spider who was just dead set on crawling on my face. It would just not go away. Eventually I sat on some rocks and my meditation is different out in nature. If I continue doing that as much as I can then I am starting to set up a decent habit. It is the days on which I work that I am concerned about. This is when I have the most fluctuations in my degrees of consciousness. My emotions can just turn into a bit of a roller coaster. I don't like my job, but it is still hard to get a good alternative. I am now thinking about archeology. My dad said he wanted to do that and I have similar motives. I want to travel and constantly learn so my mind is not numbed. New cultures can help open my mind which can help for self understanding and spirituality. I also wanted to be an explorer, but my mom told me that the entire earth has already been explored. This steered me away from exploration. I still want to see these things myself. The challenge is to set up my life such that I can travel more. I need enough independence to get on a plane for a week once or twice a year so I can go to another country. If I had an entire month off, I might try the meditation retreats. I could be searching for countries with psychedelics though to. I just really want to know. Next to I went to my grandma's house. I played some star wars and went swimming just before it started raining. I want to tell you that the clone army just sucks so badly. It is seriously hard for me to compensate for how bad the army is even with reinforcements. I had to redo yoda's planet, and I won by the smallest of margins on other planets. I think the enhanced blasters are better for gaining control of the map. This bonus is there the entire time and I don't really get to overwhelm the enemy with another garrison because I get limited units on the map. I had my brother play some parts of it as well. The most interesting fight was one I nearly lost in spite of putting in so much effort to kill large numbers of droids on my own. In the end it came down to the wire with 4 vs. 4 in spite of my extra garrison. I ended up killing over forty droids on my own, but my men were dropping like flies. Finally, I captured all the command posts in order to win on time. The droids were just about to take a post back, but it was too late. I had a lot of tense fights as I pushed through hoards of droids on my own. My men were standing in bunches blowing themselves up with their own grenades. The computer does not understand that spreading our is a necessary and good war strategy so you don't get everybody killed, but it was also a crowded board with many narrow hallways. Tough call on what to do with the clones. We have been having some power surges over here, and I hope the road work gets finished soon. It looks like it is getting better. Anyway, I will keep up my reflection to understand self and love. I need to sleep on a lot of things I contemplated and there is still many more things to read an review on actualized.org. Something is there which cannot be spoken or thought.

@Yog I reviewed the video on ideology. The trap I keep falling into is making an anti-ideology ideology. I never actually feel happy throughout the entire process of debating for a view point. I have removed the site from my bookmarks, and I might delete my account once I figure out how. Anyway, they told me that abortion was just a stalking horse and actually the fallacy of the heap is irrelevant to most people in this issue. Here is one thing that made me feel torn. On one hand, I could actually be doing good for somebody if they don't know about the kernel of truth within the ideology created. Because I felt that people might be helped by it, I started spreading the word, same with the psychological models. In the process I still feel dirty, but I am not clear on any other way to affect millions of people without spreading an ideology. Ideology is the short cut to doing it, but it limits me to one perspective as I constantly fear that I am wrong no matter what the content of my position. There is some impatience in helping mankind, so I will correct for that. Finally, how else to we affect millions of people without ideology? What is the alternative to what I just did? I am moving toward stay away from politics, but I don't think that works.

September 9, 2020 Today I worked from 10-2. I am typing this the next day so I don't remember as much. I won a chess game against an opponent rated 2180. Those guys used to be harder. I think psychologically a player can subconsciously be defeated when seeing a higher rating. I lose more against players rated 2300+, but I don't give up. I'm still around 2245. I then reviewed the episode on ideology. This is important for me to look over. I fell into some traps and I need to look at some older episodes again from a higher perspective. I don't need to make people non-ideological because that's an ideology. Finally, I did self reflection one what is a self. Eventually I had a conversation with God which was also myself. In the process I questioned where does my mind end and the body begin. I discovered that the mind is imagining where it begins and ends. Actually the mind is nowhere and everywhere with no beginning or end. I felt like I was the mind, but I assumed a limited mind located in the brain. There is still a lot of work to be done as this has not yet fully penetrated. I did not do the life purpose course as much, but I can jump back in that soon. I noticed that I felt like a needed to somewhat push myself to rewatch old episodes, but it is worth it just like my journey to the woods. I will tell you more later. Your beautiful.

September 8, 2020 Today I tested out my idea to sit out in nature for some time. I sat on a rock in the woods for about an hour. I noticed a difference in the quality of my meditation and a moderator recommended getting more of this when I have the chance. I still had a lot of thoughts about personal development. This reduces the quality a little, but it was worth it. I encountered some men who were training for cross country. They want to go to California for a gold rush. I told one of them about how I was meditating in the woods near a creak. He thinks it was solid and I was happy to see this group of people all working to achieve a spectacular goal. I wish them good luck and I hope they get some gold. I tried talking with my family. My sister could not understand me and I keep making her feel stupid. I told her that I don't mean to make her feel that way and I am just trying to talk to her. She said that I am too deep of a thinker seeing connections that she can't see. I tried talking to her about the news and politics. I was shocked at how under informed she was. She didn't know about Trump bombing the Iranian General during the impeachment hearings and how self biased the entire American media was. The way she thinks about politics baffled me. She told me that Americans are supposed to just a pick a news station they like and stick with it forever. I asked her about cross referencing sources first of all. Secondly, I asked her how does she know which media source is right. Chances are she picked the wrong one and all she is getting is opinions. Again she thought that I was way too deep of a thinker and she could not understand me. I saw a similar problem with religion and I thought this was a logical connection related to his divided Americans are. She told me she would give opinions on certain issues, but it didn't help because I just fried her brain. The problem with this entire process seems obvious from my point of view but she has no idea. She said that I was philosophically intense so I tried to find something that interested her to no avail. Finally, I continued the life purpose course and self reflected further. I noticed my mind getting better at juggling ideas that I initially feel are not right. This ability feels amazing because I can feel the joy of seeing the world in so many different ways without my mind needing to agree with it. I would love to keep practicing this. Keep continuing your work, Find your purpose, and learn to communicate with other people. I wish you good luck.

@Nahm I tried that for this day I have off of work. I managed to carve out a small chunk of time to go on a hiking trail near a creek where I meditated. I noticed a difference in the quality of the meditation and how my mind quieted down a little more. I think it was something about the environment that made the sensations change. Nevertheless, I still had a many thoughts concerning the life purpose course, my books, and other things about personal development. The tragedy is that this thinking makes it harder to stay present. Although it is important that I get the life purpose in order, I can pick it up again after meditation. I could only stay in the woods for a little more than an hour. My family still had demands that I came back to meet. It is hard to get totally nothing to do even in days off. I will still try something like this again in the future. I was getting kind of bored at some points, but this was something I never did before. If boredom comes up I can feel it more deeply which makes boredom interesting. Maybe this can improve sleep.

September 7, 2020 I worked once again from 7-3. Throughout the day I had a lot of racing thoughts concerning the ideological crusade. I notice that my mind takes a couple of days to fully adjust and work through all of the things that come up in the process. On the bright side, I had a good opportunity for growth. Note that my emphasis on growth is something I want which makes me a little bit of a self help junkie. Anyway, I got home and began looking at some of Leo's new video. It was pretty helpful and I eventually watched the whole thing. I did not read through the papers yet which will be worth it. I had some qualities of the pluralist, but only a little bit of the strategist. The life purpose course can help me get to the next level once I am not pulling myself in too many directions. Instead of continuing the life purpose course, I took a pen and paper and walked out to the park. I sat at a table and began self reflection. I was contemplating dogma deconstruction. I realized that spirituality had manipulated the entire way in which I self reflect, judge, and interpret the thoughts I see. I began questioning this as I slowly picked apart this frame of reference. The thing is that I felt that deep down something resonated with me as I listened to different spiritual masters. This became the root of assuming it was right which spirals out of control into dogma. Eventually, it is no longer true from point of view and this becomes dishonest. I noticed how my entire way of thinking, acting, and interpreting was being manipulated. This was toward what I thought was good so I can't be upset with myself too much for that. Anyway as the process continued, eventually it broke down more. I would prefer to be free and look at the world from various angles. Spirituality becomes a limitation which leads to enslavement by my own mind and ideology. I wonder who I would be if I could not think along the same lines I was thinking. I would have a lot less physical pain caused by my thinking of I did this. It could help my physical healing and psychological health. Finally, I plan to go out into the woods tomorrow to do nothing. I will take bottles and lunch, but I will be bored for a bit as I sit out in nature. My goal is to relax myself and take a day off from doing any personal development work. I can try this once a week which would be a huge difference in how I meditate. The main goal is to get away from personal development, but I am still thinking of how I can get better at it by doing this. The goal is to let go of personal development for one day and be freed from this productivity for a bit. Good luck as always. Have a nice break.

@Nahm that sounds amazing. There are rare days that I do a lot less and it actually feels better. Otherwise, constantly looking into personal development and life purpose might slowly eat away at me. One thing my mind is telling me is that it is a bad idea to schedule time off of work because I won't be as good as an employee if I request off to do nothing. I can at least do one it two days this week to start. I can walk up to one of the hiking trails and just sit. I will be taking several bottles and lunch supplies though for the several hours to be there. It sounds boring, but I think I will try it.

September 6, 2020 I worked another 8 hour shift. My plan for the day was to come back home and share my idea about teaching other people about spiral dynamics. I recommended the models to a few people already and they found it helpful and very insightful. Here is one of the videos in which I did it by leaving a comment. She found the alternative spiritual approaches to be helpful. I had no intention of forcing anybody to be like me if they did not want to be. By giving people new possibilities and new approaches that they don't know about, they can look into it on their own accord. Now regarding the essay about ideology. The only way I can logically explain how ideology is problematic is by talking or writing. This results in more ideology, but the intention is what it is pointing to, not the words on paper. I explained my idea that the fallacy of the heap implicates the collapse of all dualities in the issue of abortion. There are also a handful of people who find this helpful because they get stuck on arguing over whether or not it is murder. I In this way I am attempting to free myself and others from ideology, but I have still constructed another ideology outside of that from which I don't How to escape without being silent. The problem is that if I am silent, then I can't offer the possibility to anybody. It means that if we want to use spirituality in politics it requires speaking and spreading the word, therefore creating ideology and religion. I have not yet reconciled this paradox of conscious politics. I sent an apology to Leo to make sure I don't lose the life purpose course. I haven't yet watched the new episode of actualized.org. I will check that out and go to bed. I did finish another audio book, but no life purpose videos. I don't have a chance of finishing that in 50 days of I want to do it right. Don't get discouraged by failure. Don't fall down the negative spiral full of untruth about how bad you are. Get back on the horse and good luck on your journey.

@Yog I mentioned this idea in the outrageous quotes mega thread. I didn't mean to be a crusader blind to self bias.

If my recent post is seriously that bad, then I should mention it here. I seriously thought it was good idea, but actually it is so bad that no matter can explain how bad it is. I don't know if I should delete the post or not. the self bias comes from the moment in which we think we figured everything out when in reality we are so wrong that words can not explain it. Sorry.

@Lyubov I am getting worried and I will probably have to ditch this entire plan. I am thinking "Oh no did I turn this site into ideology?". " what have I done? ". This might be the worst political idea I have ever had in my life. I just be pretty bad at politics. Would you rather me get discouraged by this failure or keep trying to get better anyway? I think I should keep practicing. I thought this was a great idea because a few people actually found it useful. I must be the worst at politics for now.

@Leo Gura is it a bad idea?

September 5, 2020 I will need to hurry up because I have more early shifts tomorrow. Basically I slept better this time and I stayed more productive through the day. Despite 7 hours of work in the morning I continued with the life purpose course and played some chess. I began getting in touch with the joy of playing rather than the joy of winning. I played pretty well with only a couple of small mistakes. Outside of more productive things, I watched a speed run of son of Rome. I once played that game so intensely that I temporarily forgot how to speak English and I could not form sentences properly. That was ridiculous, but the game was fun. I ultimately beat it on Legendary, my second play through. I love the dedication of these speed runners. good job. Keep it up.

@Osaid i did everything except the psychological problem. That might be one of the causes. I don't drink caffeine at all and I do a lot of walking around the block. This messed up my tournaments so many times and sometimes the melatonin does nothing which is annoying.

@TripleFly I used to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor and did not have a problem with it. I tried that recently, but not for an entire week or so. I just kept getting into wierd positions on the bed with some parts sinking too deep and it gets uncomfortable. This leads to rolling around and that's annoying.

September 4, 2020 I lost the entire day to bad sleep. I am currently looking for solutions in the forum because my doctor visit isn't for another month. I did do a couple of interesting things even though I did not continue the course. Apart from being in bed all day, I watched the world record progression for speed runs. If you want to see real mastery and clarity, you can take some inspiration form these gamers. This particular runner made over 34,000 attempts. His life purpose in the video game became a full time job and he never gave up despite his thousands of failures. Just look at this man's dedication. I also addressed some of the anger that came up when attempting to compliment my sister in writing. I will do a little bit more of that because I want this out of my system and gone. It lessened after I slept, but this clearly is not functional. I seem to be afraid of what I will discover, but I will search anyway. I am paying attention to my breathing problems. I think this may be What causes me to suddenly wake up at 3 a.m. My upper back keeps sinking into the bed and that feels a little uncomfortable at times. I will not give up and I will look for everything that could possibly be holding me back from living up to my potential. The key is to frame all of these problems as a chance for improvement. I have a chance to become more consistent in everything I do If I get this straightened out. I'm also not listening to any scary stories. As cool as they are, there are no real benefits. An interesting pattern I notice is that I have an intuition that something will hurt me. I eventually do it anyway and then never again. This is a trial and error process, but if I listen to this intuition, I may avoid needless mistakes in order to grow. My intuition seems to nearly always be correct. Fix a couple of practical issues and then get back on the horse. Good luck.

September 3, 2020 I didn't need to work until 7 pm. My day started out nice and I spent most of the time contemplating my life purpose while emptying my thoughts. I also brought a paper with me to work so I could continue writing before clocking in. My day was very happy. After continuing my routine of audio books, walking, and life purpose videos, I found that writing seems to be effective for me. It gets the thoughts out of my head and onto paper so they stop swirling. This leads to stability and happiness. I then worked until 11:15. I did not eat dinner or drink anything because I thought that might be the cause of sleep disturbance. I fell asleep okay, but I woke up at 3 and did not get back to sleep. I know sadguru can sleep for 3 hours and be fine, but I feel bad. I get all kinds of muscular reactions from these annoying interruptions that are too common and lead to crashes on the next day no matter how good I was doing. This problem came up in chess tournaments and I can't let this go on. I tried many different things already, and I can't see a way out of all of this. I remember my dad took sleeping pills and started sleep walking. He nearly killed himself with a kitchen knife if not for the fact that I took it from him while he was sleep walking. I also hesitated to get the first pills for anxiety because Cindy was on pills for anxiety and depression before she mixed it with alcohol and died. I feel less trusting of the medical process if I fall down a slippery slope with 5 different medicines with wierd effects. Dad told me about how over privatized the process is and writing this down removed one stressful thought from my head. I am not thinking as clearly today. I want to know what to do If I had poor sleep or I want to prevent it. Enough is enough and one way or another this needs to stop.

September 2, 2020 Today I watched a little bit of the life purpose course and an older actualized video. It had some useful exercises for contemplating death. When I did this I asked myself if I were to die very soon what would I do? I said that I would drop everything, fly to Peru, and see if psychedelics confirm the existence of God. Philosophy is problematic because I have a hard time knowing if the metaphysical claims are true. This is why I would rather hold all the God theory loosely as I see if it is possible that it is true. I spent a lot of the day contemplating. I played a couple of chess games, but I realize that They can turn into distractions from something much bigger. I played a nice attacking game with white when I over ran the black king's defense. With black I misplayed the grunfeld and lost pretty badly. I normally play a different set up, but I am curious. I did finally go to a political forum and describe the fallacy of the heap as it relates to the abortion debate. One thing that bothers me is that people get stuck on ideology and they look like narrow minded slaves with no openness to life. It can lead to violence so I offered a perspective that includes links to spiral dynamics and conscious politics. I hope somebody finds it useful. I want mankind to be free from the dangers of ideology. I also went to the dentist today. The dentist thinks that my teeth are especially susceptible to cavities like my mom. I had 7 cavities last time and 5 cavities this time. I need to request off work a few weeks from now to get this fixed. My face Will get very numb, but I like getting my teeth fixed. The dentist also pointed out that my wisdom teeth are getting worse. I don't know when we are removing them. Oh dear that sounds painful. I guess I accomplished a fair bit today. There is still that nagging tension between my sister and i. It did not explode, but it is constantly there bubbling up again and again. It starts with little things like how I do the dishes. I might need to talk to her about this as uncomfortable as it makes me. I will do what I must.

September 1, 2020 I did not need to work until later in the day, so I spent some time playing with a friend online on chess.com. As I waited I studied the Berlin defense and I seem to prefer the Bd7 variation. I noticed that all of the moves seem similar to me in this ending so I don't play it well. I still make several mistakes and kasparov managed to get a pull with black. This is interesting but still dry. I could improve a lot of I learned how to play equal endings well. Finally I played with my friend online. I won the games with the time control of 3+2 and lost the 5+0 time control. I struggled to make a practical decision and played the best after a long time. I won two and lost three. He thinks that I would be about the same rating as him if I played more blitz games. I then watched a couple of life purpose videos. I feel like I'm doing the best I can but I get an uneasy feeling that it is not enough. This is why I need to continue meditation and self reflection while finding ways to effectively manage myself. I also spent a lot of time writing about what kind of job I want. If I want to constantly learn and seek self understanding, then life coach seems to be a promising try. I would need to learn a lot about communication and relationships in order to be good at that and I would benefit from all of it. Advertising would be a much more shallow pleasure because I am not growing as much as I could be. I also enjoy self reflective writing while avoiding opinionated political papers. This makes me feel dirty because I am stating my opinion as if it is a fact even though my perspective is partial. This leads to attempting to mend reality to my lies. I would be making objective the unobjective. although I may convince other people I seldom feel good about myself in doing so. There is a lingering fear that I am wrong and I am hurting mankind with my lies which are seen as objective rather than an opinion. I still wish to be as objective as possible and this wish may be the source of my self image and interest toward politics if I learn to be objective, not persuasive. If I go back to college I can look at psychology, philosophy, public policy, and any useful course for personal growth. For now I will continue my course to see what else I can do.

August 31, 2020 Today I had another long work day. I have short days for the rest of the week so I should be fine to continue the life purpose course. I watched the other half of Leo's new video. I noticed I have some qualities achiever, some of the expert, I don't know anything about part 2 yet though. This video drew my attention to how much theory I end up with versus actual results. These take a long time to produce. I also noticed that similar to my competitive mind set, I have a strong to desire to make a great contribution to the world. I think if letting go of the results in chess helped me to get less stressed during tournaments, then maybe if I let go of achievement, it will reduce unnecessary stress, self judgement, and guilt. This would translate into a happier life, and I sense that it is an admirable, but selfish idea that I need to accomplish a lot. I don't mean to judge myself for this, but I have a hypothesis that letting go of results can improve my focus and thus make me more productive. This achievement oriented mind set comes with a burn similar to extreme competition in its lies, but it is not as harsh. When I got home from a long day of work I ate a bunch of junk food and did not continue the life purpose course. Throughout the day I felt a little bit of guilt because of this. I slip into my old habits when I get exhausted. This is a challenge I need to maneuver around somehow. Maybe a different job would make me less winded, but the new car isn't finished yet. In the meantime I can still use the course to help me figure out what kind of job I want. My interest in chess began to spark again. I noticed that I was interested in learning the Berlin defense, but I normally ignored this opening because it has a lot of draws. This is how My focus on trying to win could be undermining my learning process and backfiring while making me less enthusiastic about learning. As I learn more, I can discover beautiful ideas in a variety of openings even if they don't have big winning chances. I crushed my own creativity before by studying the Sicilian Najdorf with success because I wanted more wins. This realization and self reflection is helping me to grow in chess As well. This is amazing and my interest is coming back a little when I explore something new. I didn't study it yet because I still have a life purpose course to finish, but I think this would be fun and interesting to learn along with more audio books. I highly recommend getting the paid products because you miss out on so much development without the books. The books help me to view myself through several perspectives, allowing an to stand on the shoulders of giants as I practice self mastery. As I let go of each lie, my mind approaches silence and inner peace. I would describe consciousness as a light which becomes more clear as you learn about yourself. I am starting to see a slippery slope that is actually powerful. It is hard for me to explain what I feel in silence, but that is what I feel.