Someone here

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?

@Nahm I have a question . You say to write what we authenticly desire on the dreamboard. But what if what we desire turns out to be a bad thing or unhealthy. For example if I'm being 100% honest about it ..I would like to smoke like there is no tomorrow but its ruined my goddamm life...should I smoke and sacrifice my health or should I do what I most deeply desire..? Same with jerking off to porn ..I do desire it but its unhealthy imo .. How do you solve this dilemma? Thanks

Thanks ?

Happiness leads to narcissism and is mostly temporary, and not as important as we think but it is very good at making us do stuff we don’t need in order to feel good. What is important to the human is Meaning. Happiness is temporary and The truth is always out of reach and suffers the null hypothesis. The meaning we attach to things such as happiness or our perceived truth. Meaning is laden with bias. But we don’t like that paradox, and so we eat more than we should, belittle women and children unethically, buy more than we need, believe in things without doing the research. Anything to keep us happy and an illusion of understanding the truth. That’s why it’s called ‘retail therapy.’ We are the Eternal Child that refuses to grow up, as Dr Clive Bromhall would say.

@Nahm @Gesundheit2 @Kshantivadin @John Paul thank you guys Unfortunately though I'm replacing my smoking addiction with video games addiction. I'm getting hooked on gaming recently lol Well at least I won't get lungs cancer from gaming lol

To add to this, one of the major steps of awakening is to overcome the need to use delusion for comfort. This conflict between uncomfortable truths and happiness is actually at the core of the human condition. Logically, all truths enhance your wisdom and thus your ability to act and make decisions. You are always better off with truth. Delusion may make one happy, but it necessarily inhibits progress by essentially placing a bookend to that path "this is correct, therefore I will leave it as is". In the example given, the one lied to will never progress in what is lied about, and sometimes the progress not made can be quite dramatic. Now the problem arises, what if bad news makes you feel bad, and inhibits progress? Or worse, sets you back. Well, the degree and ability to which you overcome this obstacle will ultimately define your success.

Btw if anyone is struggling with smoking addiction just PM me and I can guide and help you guys and share what worked for me to quit . Cheers

@Medhansh ? thanks bro.

I'm not 100% straight. I sometimes feel attracted to men .especially handsome men .at first I was feeling ashamed of my self and disgusted for having such attraction. But I gotta admit i do like attractive men . I also like girls .I guess I'm bisexual after all .it takes balls to admit as a man that you like other men .however I'm not planning on dating a guy as that goes completely against the cultural norms. So I guess I'm suppressing that part of my sexuality .

Same and no shame ?

I take INVEGA and prozac Rivotril and Zyprexa ...my therapist prescribed them to me .and I'm taking them consistency since a month ago. However I still from time to time get anxious and experience panic attacks. How to deal with this ? Like what should I do at the moment when I get the panic? I tried breathing slowly but It doesn't work.. If anyone has experience with healing panic attacks then please share . Thanks.

I'm close to two months clean in my nofap journey and I'm planning on going the whole year. and I knew a lot of guys struggling with addiction to masturbation and porn. Hope these tips help you.... Following are the tips that worked for me. 1. Reduce the frequency If you are watching porn and masturbating, Do not stop it! Yes, don't stop it. You cannot stop it all of a sudden. Because trying to stop suddenly will not only does not work for sure but also makes you feel hopeless thinking that it is impossible to stop. It makes you feel even more depressed. To stop something like that suddenly, you need high energy to overcome the compulsive force or energy which is making you to watch porn and masturbate. Obviously for such a state you are in, you do not have such energy currently to counter act that compulsive force and energy. So recovery does not work that way. Tip : Let's say you are watching porn and masturbating let's say, daily. If you do it today skip tomorrow and Do it day after tomorrow. Again following day skip it.. and repeat this pattern for few days. After you become stable enough for some days skip for two days and do it the following day and repeat the new pattern. In this way you reduce the frequency of falling or increase the gap very slowly. You can come to a point where you will be okay fapping once in a month. In this process you gain sufficient energy where your swapping frequency can become as low as once in a year. After you develop enough stability rest is your wish. 2. Keep yourself busy all the time The mood to fap comes mostly when one is alone and feeling bored or not having any work to do. So keep yourself busy. Intentionally get yourself involved in things which can keep you busy all the time. Tip: Going out, travelling, talking to friends over phone etc... 3. Exercise or sport: I don't think physical fitness and mental fitness are different. Both are same. If you are fit physically then you are fit mentally as well. When one is fit physically its very rare that one gets addicted to fapping. As said sound body is a sound mind. You would not get such thoughts or urges. Even if one gets they are very minimal. So excercising is a good thing to do. Cheers