trenton

April 19, 2020 Today I nearly fell for a trap. I thought that spirituality was often filled with vacuous truth of I was incapable of embodying what is being pointed to. This allowed me to set theory aside and start moving past the intellectualism. I saw Leo's new video titled "outrageous experiments in consciousness". Sometimes I am in no position to verify the things that are said, for example " what is death" may require psychedelics which are illegal in the U.S. and I am not realistically able to fly to Peru any time soon. This gave me the thought that it could turn into more beliefs and ideology. I decided to do an experiment to see what happened after the video. Some of his models lost me, and maybe the universe's death was an illusion like his other deaths, but I speculate. As Leo would put it, the love was so great that it radiated from him such that I could feel it. I learned to love my fear and inability to love more which hit me and it was healing. This has immediate real world affects where I now love my family more, and it can heal them too. From the point of view of a white supremacist, he is not an ideologue. From this premise I can question if I turned this love into an ideology. The consequences of the video are that I am more loving which can become a lens through which to see reality. It would be a useful lens from the standpoint that I easily and effectively reduce suffering of myself and others. It does not always feel like a lens from the perspective that love to me in the form that I currently describe it is such that I accept fully the hatred others within what feels like a white light and consciousness. Being mean is a form of love, but this gets complicated. I am an ideologue of what love is like to me because it is a lens that feels true, but my understanding may change, and thus my behavior and thoughts. I am also an ideologue of what ideologue means to me, but this is a temporary lens. I love you for no reason.

Today, I recognized many obstacles. One obstacle is the fact that I lay in my bed all the time. This makes me feel lazy, uninspired, and demotivated. I am now sitting on the floor and it is more comfortable anyway, and I feel more alert and focused. Secondly, I admitted to myself that I created my neurotic approach to personal development in order to slow my growth. It is like the critical voice in my head that judges and criticizes to be counterproductive while claiming to be helpful. This critical voice is false, and will not slow me down. This critical inner voice caused me to identify as a terrible person so that my thoughts were designed to make me self reflect less deeply. It is the source of a lot of anxiety and lies. It denies what my full capacities are and how powerful I truly am. It may make me feel superior or inferior to other people, and this is not a healthy way to judge others as it limits my own growth and often backfires. Finally, I would like to describe how chess ego is an obstacle to growth. Many players say I am underrated at 1774 USCF. I often play much stronger than this, but not always. This leads me to overestimating my true playing strength, which although at my best I surprise myself, it causes me to feel like I already know things that I don't know. This prevents me from learning as much as I could because I undervalued intermediate chess lessons which are necessary for me to improve. I love you for no reason.

I reflected as far back as my memories go. I did not know anything, but for some reason I spoke English fluently and could understand others. I was 3 at the time of this memory. I reflected as far back as I could until something popped. Prior to this memory, I was able to exist without any notion of survival. It was just one day for some reason everything existed when I was 3 and I began seeking to understand by accumulating knowledge. It became a great inner peace when I opened myself to existence without any need to survive. Death is never something thought of, and thus never feared. This is prior to the first memory. In seeking to understand the true self, I often run into things difficult to explain. 1. Our not knowing creates the experience which we know. 2. Separation between you and any object is conceptual and imaginary. 3. Deconstructing your current sense of self makes you closer to nothing due to separation being seen as imagination which thus includes everything. What is it like to experience life without any notion of survival?

That happened to me too and I felt the same way you did. Sometimes I feel incredibly peaceful compared to all of the ways in which I hurt myself and the difference is great enough for me to cry.

@Applegarden i noticed that too. When we talk online you are only reading my words. It does not actually help you to raise your consciousness, it just adjusts your beliefs no matter what we write to you. I use these forums to post interesting ideas and events which might teach other people various lessons, so they may find it helpful. The main benefit of this forum is that I can be more honest about myself. People may judge me, but I am less afraid of internet people than I am the people around me in terms of how they judge me. I would be blasted directly, emotions, words, insults and everything. Here it is just the words.

This is a tricky topic for me. I noticed that my mood is often worsened when I lie to myself. By observing this I lie to myself less and I become happier. Sometimes people judge me because I'm happy, but I would have to lie to myself to pretend I'm upset because of it. Some positive emotions, especially comedy are linked to lying. It can lead to me acting like some beliefs are true because it is funny to say that. This can lead people to becoming stuck in a perspective from which you are funny, but to others you are offensive, and it could bite you. There may be other excessive positive emotions. My questions are: How can excessive positive emotions limit growth? What happens to you when you let go of positive emotions? What are some examples of excessive positive emotions?

I think this is a somewhat shocking example of medicine for profit gone too far. It seems like something a lot of people would get outraged about. I'm curious about how effective protests would be when they are safe. Other than that I wonder what actions an individual could take to correct this. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/system-doomed-doctors-nurses-sound-nbc-news-coronavirus-survey-n1164841

@Aaron p interesting dilemma. I have adopted a hypothesis that God is a verifiable experience because the Aztecs and Christians and many different religions make many similarities even though they had not contacted each other. I notice that when I have a shift in awareness, I often tend to add interpretations. These interpretations might be one thing that builds belief. Do you add these ideas and did it limit you? Secondly, is it a problem if I listen to too many spiritual teachers? This might be the cause of belief. How much time do you spend reading and listening?

Our sense of reality is often threatened when opposed by contradictory beliefs. For example, Islam is the one true religion, Hitler is good, Trump should be re-elected, feminism is wrong, God is not real, and many more. A common reaction in humans is "my worldview is true, therefore the people with whom I disagree are evil and I should kill them". This can lead to mass genocide which happened frequently in religion. For example, "we should cut off the hands and genitals of Africans who don't convert to Christianity". Similar with Christian vs. Muslim. This creates corruption in religion because of the distinction between self and other being reinforced by belief systems. Many religions agree on this similar point. Murder becomes a consequence of clinging to the false self, such as an ideologue about any one religion. This denies the true self and creates hatred of anything in reality that contradicts the piece of existence you attach significance to. Human suffering is thus caused by misalignment with God. Recently there has been a trend where more deeply religious people open up to the theory of evolution. A similar trend could continue with relativism as sacred beliefs have been shown to change over the course of generations. If you seek truth, then you may recognize belief as an obstacle which when eliminated can reduce suffering and lead to unconditional love for everything. What do you think are some religious arguments for relativizing all belief systems? Could some people in stage blue be open minded enough for this? How might this perspective be rejected?

@silene You make a good point. You show how to distinguish between relative and absolute. I had a feeling after posting this that people would feel threatened. What lead me to typing this is how different society would look if this was common rather than backwards from most religions in the world. As for more advanced than anyone else, this is a great point as well. A sense of pride in many different fields can be problematic. I must observe this constantly because if I feel better than somebody, then I am tricking myself into denying the similarities which cause me to be drawn to the people I compare myself to. This becomes a shadow that limits my growth. That was painful, but honest. I learned something and thank you for that. I'm tempted to throw away non duality in order to avoid turning it into my own ideology. I noticed this tendency constantly and am not sure how to stop it, but when I am drawn to ideologues, then I know I've done it. My guess is that self observation will adjust this, but I don't know that that leads to truth. I see my frustration, but it is only temporary, and I will not give up on truth seeking.

I noticed that I often create my suffering as a means of achieving an end goal I want. The way in which I judged myself the most is that I cause myself fear, anxiety, hatred, and depression for fun because I seem to like making myself suffer while I have a preference to not be the way I am (which creates suffering). 1. Is it normal to enjoy causing our own suffering? This situation made me wonder if I was going crazy. I felt like I was the only one doing this and I struggled to tell if this is related to enlightenment or if it is serious problem. I am gradually causing myself less suffering. 2. Is it healthy and useful to hurt ourselves to get what we want? 3. (To moderators) in regard to the first question, I would like more clear guidelines. Sometimes it is hard to tell if something is enlightenment or abnormal psychology. People at lower levels of development might find it hard to connect to these radical perspectives and therefore call people at higher levels crazy. When this distinction of enlightenment vs. Insanity is unclear, is it okay to ask this forum or should I ask a doctor?

I have had a lot of difficulty with moralizing myself, but in recent years my moralizing faded more and more. My main cure was self observation. I noticed how I was manufacturing my own guilt and how it made me hate myself. This is how I realized that I was lying to myself in my moralizing as I was hyper rational as well. One thought I never believed was that I should kill myself under any circumstances. First, by realizing how much moralizing hurts, you build a vision of how you would think and behave if you loved yourself. This can lead to you seeing that evil is created by your mind as you imagine values to compare yourself against. This applies to moralizing against others as well where you deny your similarities and look righteous. This further exposed the lies in moralizing. Secondly, you can realize that guilt is a dysfunctional survival strategy. Guilt is ineffective for achieving your goals and it drains your energy. This is not resourceful and I used guilt in order to get myself to act in a way that most people found pleasing and I still struggled. I constantly made people feel uncomfortable anyway. Finally, I often equated my immoral thought I had to the act itself. This false equivalency lead to me beating myself up more. Nowadays instead of pushing thoughts away, I observe what the thought is and without beating myself up, I explain how this thought can lead to moral anxiety. I notice the fear and judgement of builds up in me and if I love myself, then I would not do this to myself. The main cure is self observation, realizing the pain you cause yourself, and ultimately that your moralizing is not true, it is just self generated suffering. I don't mean to repeat spiritual teachings you heard, this was my direct experience from self reflection. I have become more and more disinterested in moralizing, and suicide caused by drowning ourselves in guilt is no longer a problem.

@InspirationToAction I think you have a very interesting perspective. This is what I have applied to chess tournaments where I am more interested in the journey rather than the end result. This is very motivational, and it helps me to learn constantly. You explain what I have done for my hobby very well. Now my family encourages me to have a different unrelated passion. If I use my hobby as a model for what want, then I will have something to reference in terms of enjoying the journey, motivation, constant learning, direction, ect. Good answer.

I noticed a source of neurotic behavior in that I was stressing too great of importance on finding a life purpose. I now see that this is counterproductive and it keeps me in place while contributing to misery. I don't want to continue hurting myself in this way which is why it dawned on me that I don't need a life purpose and it does not matter in the long run of thousands of years what I do In this life time. I often ignored this thinking I still needed to do something important to help mankind, but this leads to self generated suffering. Now I am trying a different approach to self actualization. I'm coming from a position that a life purpose is not something I need and it does not matter, but before I was afraid that this would have demotivated me. Instead I am overall happier and curious about the possibility of a life purpose and how other people may have found one without this clinging in the back of your mind. What kind of purpose did you find by accepting that it does not matter? Why did you select this purpose and how has it transformed you?

Lately, I have noticed some differences I have after consuming more media than usual in the past week. I tend to focus on the most outrageous forms corruption to the point that it makes our current system in the United States seem broken. Although I may have many ideas about what could be done about these things and why it is the way it is, I realize I have almost no control over what happens. The most I can do is donate a few dollars to causes I like, but on its own there is little impact. This makes me feel cynical like other Americans who feel that the system to hopelessly broken to the point that they don't bother participating. However, I am a little bit different from this. First I made myself feel bad from focusing on things like Trump blowing a trillion dollars on wall street brokers resulting in a slow reaction to COVID-19, corrupt police officers planting drugs on innocent people in traffic stops, the strong corporate grip over American politics, and many other systemic problems. After this I started consuming less media in favor of reading more books which offer much greater value than the daily news of outrageous things I have no control over, whereas many people may continue watching out of habit. Why is it that we focus on outrageous things? This can include focusing on your child's F instead of the A. When this approach is taken in politics, it can make us feel hopeless and powerless. What is the maximum control an ordinary citizen could realistically have? Are we better off ignoring the media and just reading books on emotions, spirituality, success, ect.? How does politics make you feel? When I forget about politics, I live in a pretty peaceful neighborhood with a relatively low amount of COVID-19 cases. There are some people who bum money off of me from time to time trying to get alchol, food, or a ride on the bus, but overall I can be very happy and peaceful when I focus on my immediate reality rather than the outrageous. Thank you for your consideration

The reason I do all of this work is because I want to love myself. I am not entirely clear what it is like to love myself, but I think if I did it would help me to avoid causing myself to needlessly suffer in various ways including intense guilt, lying to myself, clinging to masks, and maybe something else. My questions are how do you love yourself and what is it like? Do you ever insist on causing yourself needless suffering, if so how and why does this happen? How do you tell when you love yourself?

@BETGR164128 I noticed the same thing happen to me. Except for me it is dreams during the day. I see imaginary people in hypothetical scenarios who act like me, make all the same comments and questions I would, and they emphasize the emotional state I am in. For example, I was late to work on a school project and I imagined how much everyone would hate me, but this never came to fruition. They were not judging me I was judging myself. As for real people, I found a similar situation. The more I where masks and entrench myself in self deception, the more they are disinterested in what I say. I will see how people act when I don't hate myself.

The work with actualized.org is starting to take noticeable effects. These effects are outside of what my culture considers ordinary life. It is as though my thoughts are not in my head, and that they are shared with other people who are more connected to me than I realize. Throughout most of my life all the way back when I was a child I created a mask of a stingy personality. That is I lied to myself by attaching extreme importance to money as if it were always scarce because I thought that if I hoard money then one day it might be useful. I never actually intended to spend it and would pinch every possible penny where ever I could. As I focused on becoming more authentic I started becoming more conscious of this mask. I noticed how I would rationalize any position to save my money. Although my arguments seemed convincing I recognized that I was contributing to unnecessary suffering because of my mask. Sometimes I continued doing this out of habit. I did not actually believe the motive behind words. A recurring thought pattern I had was that I wanted to remove the mask. I realized that it was bullshit, and this is where it gets weird. My family started to cut through this mask very easily. My father, grandmother, and sister would not buy any argument. They were suffering too much because I would do anything to avoid spending money on a new phone. I was looking for loops to jump through to get a free phone which I don't qualify for and my grandma needs one. I observed my anger and suffering quietly, recognizing that I created it. I was motivated by truth and I knew this was necessary. The mask still lingers, but it is a bit lighter. As I self reflect and unravel my self deceptions, I can see other people, not just the ones mentioned, helping me to see my lies. Although there is initial suffering, it is ultimately for the best. My mind becomes quieter as my lies are recognized, and my mind is not as distant from other people as I thought. This is another complex mask from my childhood that is not fully removed and I am "stuck in my head". This affects a ton of my behavior. I will contemplate what is my true self as I recognize this.

@Leo Gura That is an interesting counterintuitive point I noticed. My grandma told me about how she was nearly thrown out of a hospital because she did not have health insurance and she could have died so I would not be typing this right now. The hospitals charge a lot of money which a capitalist would think that this makes money. Actually it loses money if people who could otherwise pay more money throughout their lives would not die because they could not afford health care. The same counterintuitive point applies to getting the better of people in world trade, imperialism, and on an individual level criminal activity. According to seven habits of highly effective people, a win lose is ultimately a lose lose because nobody wants business with you anymore, which in the long run is bad for you even though you won. Meanwhile, someone I know, trying to survive, participated in a lot of criminal activity and he is still stuck pawning, plotting to screw others over, and people are stealing from him for all the same reasons. If society is a collective survival strategy, then eventually we are screwing ourselves over by undermining this survival mechanism. Can you find examples of selfishness not backfiring and actually being helpful? One idea is selfishness teaching us not to be selfish.

I am curious about why solutions are often not discussed in favor of making our opponents look bad. It seems that a country would be more dysfunctional if we all use our hatred of each other to avoid improving our way of life. I have several observations related to this. The pendulum swings from left to right in the United States. People tend to think I'm opposites and it causes them to miss what I describe as the third side of the coin. These are reasonable solutions that seem to come out of left field because we rarely discuss them. Here are various examples. Should we go to war? Should we not go to war? Or should we teach the Israelis and Palestinians about Spiral Dynamics? Should we impeach Trump? Should we not impeach Trump? Or should we correct the system which allows for his corruption? Should we vote Democrat? Should we vote Republican? Is it a false choice? "We need better Democrats." Should we be pro life on abortion? Pro choice? Should we have free contraceptives? (There are other more complex solutions as well like how to stop politicizing the issue) Should we ban assault weapons? Should we keep them? Or should we increase the quantity of public schools combined with some online courses in order to reduce the classroom sizes therefore reducing the number of children killed in the event of a school shooting while making a school less of a target? Examples like these are everywhere and there could be hundreds more. Sometimes I am shocked that we could easily reduce the suffering of mankind, but we are completely close minded to it. Using this information to self reflect I have some plausible reasons why this is. When I visualize myself debating people I feel a sense of pride and superiority. This is my least favorite thing debating because it leads to lying and shows how I could easily contribute to the suffering of mankind and I don't want this. So long as we have debates over discussion, we are reinforcing this unhealthy form of pride and hurting mankind. Do you notice this feeling of superiority in you? Are there other reasons we don't discuss solutions? How can we make these discussions more common? What third side of the coin solutions might you be missing in other issues and how will you find them?

@remember that was an interesting video. The Cuban population seem to contradict themselves wildly when it comes to Cuban immigration vs. Mexican immigrants. It seems like shocking hypocrisy at first, but if we apply spiral dynamics we can explain this. Trump being a reddish orange is within the range of the Cuban immigrants who are strongly nationalist, a common quality of stage blue. The arguments and positions remain irrational because it does not depend on logic, but rather the level of cognitive development. Another interesting video could be about why Mexican immigrants often prefer Democrat so we can contrast these groups of immigrants.

I think it was interesting to learn about how people live in Cuba. I felt sorry for them because I would not want to live in this way. The partial truth in this video can be how essential basic rights are to build a function community and how government corruption can filter into the rest of society like police knocking down your door. The part I was less interested in was the capitalist propaganda. They seemed to eager to jump to the conclusion that socialism is terrible. I then noticed the nice sounding words about how we wanted this in America combined with a sad piano to appeal to emotions in order to persuade me. I think this libertarian perspective is too simplistic and prone to making over generalizations about socialism.

I have contemplated many questions in a journal, but this one turned out to be much more threatening than expected. This question is actually useful if somebody contemplated a question like "how am I full of shit?". In this case I realized that I care more about preserving my identity as a person who cares about the thing than I do the thing itself which I claim to care about. This is why acting as if I care about things which I don't care about is considered bullshit and all of the justifications are considered the shit which I am full of. One good example would be if I claim to care about truth, but actually I care more about preserving the identity as somebody who cares about truth especially if it benefits my survival. There are many more examples everywhere. I also learned the source of one of my pet peeves. This would be moral righteousness. In this case moral righteousness comes about when I am seeking to preserve my identity which is why this stance of moral is a mask which is actually selfish. There are many good examples in politics. The most clear is a transgender female demanding to be called ma'am. If somebody by mistake or on purpose calls her sir, then she will get angry and morally righteous because she wants to preserve her identity as a transgender female. This leads to a lot of difficult questions like "do I actually care about any of these issues, or do I just care about my identity and my righteousness?" If I claim to care about an issue, then the actions I take become a projection of the desired identity. Taking this into account, what do I actually care about? Do I actually care about anything or nothing at all? How do I tell if I care about something? On one last funny note. You can a imagine a politician like Bernie Sanders coming out and ending an inspirational speech with "...so we can preserve our identity as the American people! Thank you very much."

I caused myself a lot of suffering after realizing that I lie to myself constantly in order to make the impression that I know my current worldview is true. I sensed this in the background constantly, but did not understand how to deal with it. It did not matter what I changed my beliefs to because that just became an alternative lie. This constant doubt linked to me not really knowing became a catalyst for me to tear myself apart by trying not to lie. Politics helped me to figure out what the problem was. One of the fascinating reasons I am drawn to politics is because I often see a reflection of myself not only in corrupt politicians, but even more interestingly in the collective ego at play. The phenomenon takes place collectively and individually. When people debate with each other, they are not getting any closer to truth, they are simply allowing themselves to be entrenched further in their current worldview. The same applies to science vs. religion. As I tried not lie, my thoughts only repeated themselves more strongly on an endless loop. The same phenomenon is occurring where all of the internal resistance to lying only leads to more lying. Similarly if a politician loses a debate, they are not going to change their mind, instead they will come up with 20 more rationalizations for why their position is still right and why they should have been elected instead. This is just digging myself deeper when I resist lying. Meanwhile, if I try to compensate by telling the truth, then I will just lie that I am telling the truth, thus moralizing only leads to more lying and it fails. I did this a lot as a child. In short moralizing is extremely self destructive even if you make all of your peers, teachers, classmates, family members, and co-workers uncomfortable, scared, confused, and angry because of your typical patterns of behavior and they think you are a freak. The contrast in the peace I experience when I stop resistance to lying and stop moralizing rather than the alternative is very liberating. This is a far better way to live life and I cannot explain how much happier I am to live life this way. It is a matter of observing all of the suffering I ever caused myself through these blunders (about 95% of all the suffering in my life) vs. peace and unconditional self acceptance. I think this work is worth my while.

One idea is something I learned from a book called "seven habits of highly effective people". In this book there is a section about synergy in habit 6 about a classroom. The principle that the author operates under is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is common for students to run off of the script that they just have to do whatever the teacher makes them do. A second common script is that math is going to forgotten because they cannot apply it anyway. "Synergy is almost as if a group collectively agrees to subordinate old scripts and write a new one." if I start looking for ways to avoid some of the toxic scripts you could run into as a math teacher, then I see how it can be necessary to give the students some degree of freedom. I don't know what kind of math teacher you are, but there are some examples from many different kinda of math. One way in calculus would be to compare how a sailboat works to how an airplane works. This could include a wind vector problem, and you could take into account things like how long does the runway need to be for the airplane to make a smooth take off. There could be many other factors surrounding the take off which students could split into groups in order to calculate. This could create a small degree of freedom while demonstrating how calculus saves lives and how often it is applied, creating big picture thinking. Alternatively if you teach statistics then you could have a problem with lake pollution in which chemicals have seeped into the drinking water. You could know that a small amount is insignificant and would not hurt you, thus you would need to calculate how polluted the lake would have to become in order for the average glass of water let's say 16 oz for this problem to become too dangerous to drink. There could be serious real world problems like these studied in physics and chemistry as well. If it were chemistry then you could have them take a few samples from the lake and try to find if the water is dangerous to drink. This way they would be participating in something larger than themselves throughout the process which could improve interest in what they are doing. On one last note you should be aware of backfiring mechanisms. If you try too hard to avoid common scripts students run off of, it could become a self fulfilling prophesy. It is like the problem with evil and suffering. You would have to be careful to make sure not worsen the problem by trying to stop it. Therefore, you should be careful about which advice you follow and why as well as the motive for following it. Perhaps you could stay on track with a positive motivation to make teaching even better with some of these suggestions rather than by operating from fear of these scripts. I hope something I said here helps.