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Im driven. I push myself, i set standards & goals and see them through regardless of the obstacle, even if the obstacle is myself. I have a level of aggression inside of me that pushes me to reach my goals by any means necessary.. often times the motivation is misplaced as well, where i find myself pushing my limits in order to promote an image of myself for others to view. The source of motivation is what bothers me most, i do things to please others or to fulfill my need for stimulation when deep down i know i should be doing them to please myself. I dont think that i was ever told to behave this way, but something registered with me early in life to "be better" than everyone else, to be the best at everything i do.. i think its a fear of judgement from others, but im still working on that... Meditation works very well for me. im just now learning to adopt the role of "the watcher" in attempt to view my thoughts in meditation, however i tend to latch on to them more often than not and they lead me to a day dream state instead of that of the observer. How can i observe more and direct myself towards mindfulness during meditation? I try to follow my breath throughout the day to practice a waking meditation as i perform day to day tasks, but often this inst enough on its own. Thanks for your attention to this, i really appreciate your input.

How ?

I have been thinking about this today and wondering about how the material circumstances in which each person lives contribute to happiness or well being. It may come down to the material conditions of finance or physical health. I am aware that I have previously had a thread on attachments and that there have been threads on meaning, relating to subjective and objective aspects of life. I don't think that anyone has raised this specific question though. The trigger for me thinking about this was when the boy who lives in the room next to mine remarked how my room was such a mess. He showed me his and I saw how neat and tidy it was. For example, mine has a torn curtain provided by the landlord while he has put up net curtains. I have chaotic heaps of clothes on the floor because my drawers are full of papers and he definitely doesn't have piles of books all over. It lead me to think of the way rooms or homes may be symbolic of mental states. I think that my neighbour was trying to help as he offered to help me organize mine. The point of my little funny story is how material circumstances relate to inner states of mind. Do the circumstances affect happiness or vice versa? It is likely that Maslow's hierarchy of needs which range from the physiological to the social and those of self actualisation come into play. Each person is unique but everyone has certain basic needs. I don't know how people who are homeless manage to endure and it must involve a lot of resilience. Also, aspects of mental health are affected by physical health and factors such as poverty. It is likely that a person who is depressed but in better material circumstances can endure suffering more 'comfortably' than an impoverished person. The cognitive behavioral school of psychology suggests that human beings do not simply experience emotional distress on the basis of experience but on how they think about it. There is some truth in that but material factors impinge on this. For example, a person with poor physical health may experience an event differently from someone in good health. Also, the experience of one's own body plays a part in psychology. In particular, how one sees oneself physically when looking in the mirror is likely to influence the tone of one's experience of reality. I am not wishing to see this question as simply being one of social psychology but as one with far reaching implications, such as poverty and political factors. Climate change does come into it too because extreme environmental factors of weather impact on wellbeing, just like being without food affects the mind and cognitive processes. So, I am raising the question of material circumstances in relation to happiness. The basis of this is because happiness is sometimes seen more in terms of being able to transcend the physical as a philosophical state of mind. I am wondering about this and how it may be negotiated in the worst conditions and how it relates to pleasure and lack of it. Any thoughts on the topic and the main questions raises here

During a period of self reflection I decided to be very honest with myself and pursue my own inner truth. At the time I believed that it was always better to pick truth over happiness. As I kept digging eventually I discovered that this preference was a lie and even somewhat of a paradox. As a general heuristic picking truth over happiness is close to optimal. If you choose truth you may be able to add happiness and retain the truth. If you choose happiness the truth will likely later destroy that happiness. But if you keep digging you eventually come to the last treasure chest containing the final truths. You open the box and you discover a choice where you can take one additional truth and that truth is such that if you accept it no being will ever have happiness again. Do you choose it simply because it is true? I would not. Initially that created discomfort for me as it implies that I may have already made such a choice. But that itself is a truth I am still willing to accept. If you still think you would choose otherwise I am left wondering whether you left one more thing in the box than I did.

Hiding my identity will eventually take its toll, whether it's being done consciously or unconsciously. For me the last few years of my teens were an incredibly difficult and anxious time. As my male friends started talking about girls dating and embarking upon long term relationships, I found I had no interest in the opposite sex at all, and started to feel like there was something horribly wrong with me. Over time this certainly impacted my own mental health and self-esteem. I tried to pretend to be like the other guy, but that didn't really feel good, I became far more interested in writing and making theatre than I was in girls , so I threw myself in to that instead.

We are not really looking for happiness, because that inherently involves and inevitabely brings sadness on the other side of the spectrum - When that happines if over, which it always is, then emptiness naturally 'takes its place' - and emptiness compared to happiness is kind of sad, right? What we are really looking for is familiarity and non-change.

@SgtPepper isn't meaning a construction? Life objectiobjectively has no inherent meaning. We make up whatever meaning that suits us . As for love..I can't say because I need Awakening to the nature of love .I'm lacking in this area.

@VictorB02 @Gesundheit2 Thanks for your reply. The idea of how important are material possessions is probably the basic area of questioning. My own view is that ideally it would be better if they were kept to a minimum. However, in some ways they can be important props for human life in coping with forms of suffering. But this may be the 'trap' because as the Buddha suggested it may be going down the spiral of craving, creating more and more suffering ultimately. My own story about my room being a mess may have been an unhelpful diversion in the post really but the way it seemed worth including was in relation to the misery of having to live in the chaos of the physical world. I guess I also was wondering if my next door neighbour wishing to change my room was based on his illusion. Even though he means well I feel that he doesn't understand my private world of reading and music at all and really far more concerned about appearances in the outer material world which can be illusory. I am not sure that my introduction conveyed properly, but what I was trying to do was ask about the underlying issues of human sentience too.

Yeah man. It hurts when the community dismisses or attacks your identity as a bi person, pushes you to the fringes, stereotypes you or denies who you are as a ‘phase’ or a ‘lie.’ When I told gay and lesbian friends of mine that I was going to tell my parents I’m bi, they told me I should ‘check’ first by sleeping with a woman. When I look back at that, I’m disappointed that they would doubt me and put me down instead of raising me up the way I hoped they would. After all, I know myself better than anyone.

@Medhansh yes im an Indian. of course I'm keeping it a secret lol

@Preety_India @flowboy @Gesundheit2 @Medhansh Thanks for the helpful responses. My problem is that I wanted to be myself, but I hoped and prayed that my feelings would go away, because I feared rejection. Growing up I didn’t have the language to tell people I was bi. I knew I wasn’t only attracted to women but felt ashamed and had to hide it from my friends. At school, calling someone a gay was considered the worst insult, so I knew that if I came out, I’d risk losing people or being treated differently. That made me push down my feelings and hide parts of myself, even from myself. I think that denying my experiences lead to anxiety and negatively affected my self-esteem. I couldn’t express, explore and embrace my full self.

I was fortunate never to encounter homophobic, biphobic or transphobic (HBT) bullying at school, I didn't come out until my mid-20s. I did however grow up hearing HBT language on a daily basis, whether it was using the word gay to describe something that was 'a bit rubbish', or as an insult. So I never even considered that I might be gay. Gay was a bad thing, a negative thing. There was no way I was gay. Growing up meant that there were no 'out' teachers at school, and organisations like Diversity Role Models (DRM) didn't seem to exist. Sex education was strictly heterosexual and only about reproduction. So, without positive LGBT Role Models, healthy discussion around sexuality or the tackling of HBT language in schools, I had no point of reference for myself as a young gay man. I'm feeling my gay side getting stronger recently. Any advice?

Bisexuality is more complicated than that, of course.such as pansexuality and omnisexuality, bisexuality implies an attraction to multiple (or all) genders. The simplification of being attracted to men and women (especially wherein these genders are assumed to be cis) is not only incorrect but also harmful. But as a kid without a deep understanding of gender, I was nonetheless struck by my best friend’s definition. You see, growing up, I was confused. Many queer kids have a similar experience: We’re presented with only one option of what relationships look like—cis man plus cis woman equals true love forever!—and we can sometimes sense early on that something about our internal experience feels different. In the fifth grade, when a friend of mine sneered that I was gay as an insult, I thought maybe I had landed on a name for what I felt. But I went home and asked my dad what that meant, and it still didn’t fit. I wasn’t straight like I was supposed to be, but damn it, I wasn’t this countercultural “gay” thing either. I felt stuck. As I saw it at the time, there were girls who were attracted to boys, and there were girls who were attracted to girls, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t simply pick one. I was both—and I thought I was the only one.

Having this in mind, then with the simple fact of alluding to structures of reality we can explain how things move or behave. There would be basic structures in terms of existence, where we no longer find inferior structures, this is necessary for a solid basis of the behavior of things, but they are structures of reality as such, which could be said to move, but as basic structures movement is all of their property, besides their form (see in work “Propositions”). This is in general terms different from the idea of the unmoved mover, and we can allude to this to explain the movement, so that we do not need to speak of a first unmoved mover in the Aristotelian sense. In a way what I propose is similar to logic in the world, it is part of reality, is embedded in it to say it in a way, and it is not necessary to go beyond reality to talk about it, there are axiomatic things of reality that simply are. In the same way the basic structures of reality plus the change of state of things (the change of state as the closest thing to the movement in terms of Aristotle) would explain how things manifest in the universe, that is, we have movement that simply is and the form of it, which would be given by the form of the structures of reality, so that the movement and everything that in Aristotelian terms refers to actuality and potentiality of things is contained in the things themselves, in the material universe that we inhabit.

Some people view the world and how it works as a series of causes and effects, with one thing causing another thing, which in turn causes something else, which in turn causes yet another thing, like the butterfly effect(not the movie). Similarly, you can look at the universe as a series of causes and effects. However, if you go all the beginning, you seem to come to a first thing, which itself has no cause. What was this first event, this effect that has no cause, this mover of occurrences who has itself never been moved? Is it God? An external force such as the Big Bang? And how does the universe exists? From non-duality perspective there is no beginning or end to reality. So there is no such thing as the first cause or unmoved mover

Thanks for the quality response. The idea of movement in Aristotle seems to go beyond the displacement of an object, it also includes other processes such as the evolution of potentiality to actuality, the modifications of things, the processes of development, growth, change, etc. Aristotle argues that in order to explain the movement of things in a solid way, we need a first unmoved mover, that is, a cause of the movement of another entity that in turn does not move, is fixed, that is, remains unchanged and nothing is the cause of it. I develop similar concepts in a certain way, but with marked specific differences. Aristotle seems to speak for example of the motionless cause or the first immobile motor as an end, that is, that moves entities in terms of a goal, as something that attracts something, that generates or induces its movement but that in itself does not change. If we think about the causes of the movement of the entities, to explain it we have to see what led to their movement, and we probably find a reason that generated it that in turn has another cause that generates the movement of the latter and so on. However, to continue infinitely we would have problems to explain the movement, something should be the basis, which means that the latter is not in turn moved or affected, hence the idea of an unmoved mover. This has been identified with God and many times the argument of the unmoved mover is used to justify the existence of it since if it did not exist, the movement would not be possible, and therefore the reality would not be as we observe it. For many it seems that this also has moral or ethical repercussions to the point that we can only argue an ethical conduct based on purposes or goals given by God or this unmoved mover, and that without it we would live in a universe not only impossible but also without moral sense. In the thought of Aristotle this unmoved mover comes to be conceived as something eternal composed of pure thought, beyond matter. But outside of this, what I want to reflect on here is the idea of something in some way additional or external to our material universe to explain the movement, that God is necessary for the existence of our universe and how then all this has repercussions by extension in moral issues. Well, the first thing is to consider that such an unmoved mover, at least in an interpretation of it as a fundamental cause to explain processes in reality, is not something separated from reality in a certain way but part of the structure of reality itself, something embedded in reality, so that the entities themselves are merged with it, so to speak, so the argument does not become a necessity to explain the movement of the entities of the universe, but the unmoved mover is the movement itself to put it in a way, the movement is such given the very structure of reality, that is, movement is part of reality itself and has no need to be explained or sustained by any unmoved mover. And that this is so is necessary in fact in the sense that to generate the movement of something, apart from the way in which something moves, we need to talk about movement previously (in the broad sense of the term, as the change of things), so that the concept of movement is already presupposed in our reasoning, so that it is something axiomatic, it is part of reality and something not caused, and ultimately, it does not need to be caused. Stephen Hawking, in his book 'A brief History of Time' infamously wondered what 'breathes fire into the equations'. As such, the notion of a prime mover or first cause (cause behind the BB theory) has puzzled science/physics for centuries... . Philosophically, using logic, the most we have is the notion of a necessary being (cosmological argument, ontological argument, etc.). However, since human consciousness itself is beyond pure reason (yet exists), understanding the nature of existence becomes somewhat illogical, and beyond or transcends that same sense of reason. As it should be. Perhaps this 'moving force or particle' (thing-in-itself) has some semblance of the 'God particle'/Higgs Boson energy field... . I don't really know

The only true cause of death is birth. Anything that is born will die. Everything that is created will be destroyed. When it comes to so-called "causes of death", the rest is at best merely a matter of perspective, if not a deceptive shell game. For example, consider a cigarette smoker who dies with lung cancer shortly after catching the common cold. Would it even make sense to debate about whether the so-called "cause of death" was (1) cigarettes, (2) suicide, (3) lung cancer, or (4) the common cold? I propose that it would make no sense to have such a debate or to assert that one of those is or could be the cause. No human can be saved from death. Thus, nothing else causes a human to die because the death is inevitable from the birth. The human will die regardless of whether they smoke, whether they catch a cold, whether they get lung cancer, whether they drive a motorcycle, whether they are suicidal, or whether they desperately cling to life in terrified fear of death. Neither the presence nor absence of any of those things--or any other things like them--will prevent the person from dying. Thus, those things and anything like them cannot be a true cause of death. One could argue instead that a given event or factor (e.g. the presence of smoking versus non-smoking) would speed up the time of the death. Slightly accelerating or postponing the timing of something is very different than causing it. Moreover, analogous to accelerations or decelerations in Newtonian physics, these factors are cumulative not mutually exclusive, and are thus in practice immeasurable and countless if not infinite. For example, if 8 dogs are pulling a sled, it does not make sense to say which dog is the cause of the sled moving, nor is it true that only the dogs are responsible for the sled moving. Rather, there are countless and presumably infinite factors at play, such as but not limited to friction, gravity, the weather, and how much the guy riding the sled ate for breakfast. Imagine the proverbial sled is going down a steep ice-hill, having black-hole-like properties, and thus the sled will reach its destination very soon regardless of any of those other factors, and some of the dogs are futilely trying to pull the sled up the hill but can only at best slightly decrease the rate of acceleration. That would be a more accurate analogy to anything attempting to prevent human death, such as exercising daily instead of smoking cigarettes daily. There is no preventing death, and no practical way to significantly change to its timing on cosmological scales. The length of a human life is but an itsy bitsy teeny tiny sliver in cosmological spacetime. As a human, each of us is going to die very soon. Every human dies quickly. There is no cause of death, besides birth itself. Once born, the death is inevitable. We are going down the black-hole-like ice-hill quickly, from birth to death, and no dog can reverse the trajectory. When one of us humans reach the bottom of the ice-hill (human death), it is absurd and nonsensical, worse than false, to point to any one dog, or even a few dogs, or even dogs as a whole versus gravity or what the sled rider ate, and accuse that thing of being the cause. It doesn't matter what any of the dogs did, and what the rider ate or didn't eat, and thus those kinds of things cannot logically be considered causes. If you take the cause away, then the result cannot happen. Therefore, if you take an alleged cause away, and the result does still happen, then the alleged cause is no true cause at all, reductio ad absurdum. Thus, the only cause of death is birth.

@Breakingthewall ?

What if there is only a continuous dynamic flow which never had a beginning, of which the Big Bang, which hasn't actually been confirmed as THE BEGINNING, is merely a manifestation? The Unmoved Move paradigm is simply based on a cause & effect motive, an archetype which amounts to a humanly devised sequential view of understanding vis-a-vie a holistic one where cause and effect motives were never part of the equation. That's a wonderful question, indeed ....a couple thoughts: If there is an ever expanding universe (multiverse, etc.) and we are just a bubble/baby universe as part of an eternally expanding system, then too, the idea of 'eternity' makes a bit more sense. Nonetheless, causation would still rear its head because we would still wonder who, what, where, why... caused eternity

Back you move ..you won't find the beginning. Ahead you move ..you won't find the end. It's beginning less endless creative energy.

The only cause of death is unprotected sex lol?

Totally agree ?

@Mu_ it's not bedtime now lol

@Loving Radiance thanks for the explanation.

@Loving Radiance care to elaborate?