SriSriJustinBieber

I see, thank you for the learning. From this I would say that purpose must be discovered through sincerity and spontaneity. The more we are mechanical about it the more we transform it into merely a philosophical question

Yes I agree, the biological answer is clearly not satisfying. For example, contemplating the stars at night or listening to a beautiful song don't seem to participate to survival, yet they are very enjoyable activities. It seems the way we have used the word "purpose" is the problem, because, what is "purpose"?

Yes it is confusing because how do I go from survival to love? It seems love itself is used as a tool to survive and reproduce. Love seems to be an empty word. I think we should first inquire what the concept of "purpose" is before finding it, what do you think?

I have no clue, you have left me hanging, can you help me inquire more by suggesting an answer?

Is hope a positive emotion?

Oh I just checked, I got a feeling for it from the messages you posted on this page, I couldn't have said 7w8 however because I don't know the enneagram very well.

@thisintegrated You would have Ti & Ne, right? ENTP most probably.

Well, if you start filtering life or social interactions through any label, you can only extract from them the learning that this label has in store. Therefore, if you do this long enough, you start learning the same things over and over again, which means learning nothing new. Edit: it's perfectly fine if you are doing that currently, maybe you have already guessed some of my cognitive functions by now

Yes interesting. It's a rabbit hole, so beware not to become too geeky about it and start seeing everything only through cognitive functions (it's okay if you have a period like that at first). As for resources, here are a few in english (you probably know some of these already): - Objective Personality on Youtube (if you don't check the oldest videos you will not understand much). - The blog "Type in Mind" - Sara MBTI on Youtube - Casual Cognition on Youtube (oldest videos with the INTJ girl, I don't vouch for the recent ones) - Carl Jung's description of the types in the book "Psychological Types" and in some interview you can find on youtube (in my opinion it's a bit outdated but still quite insightful) - This longer list from Reddit

In my opinion, naqshbandi teachings and principles are great and this text seems to stem from good intentions, but is itself heavily influenced by the beings it warns about and is subject to some cultural distortions which makes it quite dangerous, because your heart recognizes that there is something deeply true about it and yet, it twists the essential and important truths. This is just an opinion. Here are a few parts in which the text misses the point: - The definition given of enlightenment - The literal interpretation of the 2nd coming of christ - The understanding of the 3rd eye as a device for control of the heart and mind control - The underlying tone of doom

I've read his translations of the upanishads & the bhagavad gita, he is really insightful

The 2 best translations of the Tao Te Ching in my opinion are Stephen Mitchell's and Jonathan Star's.

No you are not wasting your time with meditation but it's not a priority as you desire to be in achievement/performance mode. So you must include practices that sustain and empower the fire to achieve, and become good at them as you go (and abandon them if they become useless). I would say keep meditation but do it at night just before falling asleep. Your anger is not supposed to decrease but to be leveraged in a positive way. Anger seems destructive only if it's blind, but if you look at it in essence it's simply the drive to change things, so you must learn to discriminate between the essence which is useful, and the destructiveness which comes from blindness. What is blindness but the inability to concentrate when high amounts of energy are released? Hence the relevance of concentration. You are definitely not too damaged for this work, if your life right now depended on doing some urgent thing like going to the hospital because you are injured, would you start second-guessing yourself? "Oh, I can't do this, because I don't know who I am and I was hurt by my family when I was 7 and now I take antidepressants or stimulants (or whatever) and can't do shit without them" No, it wouldn't even cross your mind that you don't have a car or that you feel too much pain to walk, let alone that you are depressed or have social anxiety or something like that. Suddenly, all your will and all your energy would be concentrated upon doing that one thing. Suddenly all the cynicism and the anxiety and the scatteredness are gone as if they never existed. If you can do it in situations like that, it means you can learn to do it at will. The past in our minds always makes us think that we are not fit because of this or that circumstance, right? But you must learn to ignore that shit and concentrate on what matters. As you concentrate on what matters, those issues start spontaneously healing. It really is a matter of will and what you choose to focus on.

Fuck meditation, the do-gooders and the proponents of slowness. Monks have been meditating for 40 years in monasteries and what have they achieved but dullness and stupid beliefs? You don't need meditation for most of this but concentration, discipline and inspiration. You need to be able to apply OCD-like levels of concentration when it matters, and have a good baseline of presence in general. You also don't need months of work to get results but several weeks at best depending on your cognition (you will probably not become a master at concentration but it doesn't matter). Here is an exercise that will do as a first step: visualize in detail a cloud every day for 15mn and imagine you are that cloud for 5mn (in 360°) and feel how it must feel like to be that cloud. It must be the same cloud every day more or less. Do this for a week upon waking up and try to carry that level of attention and concentration for the rest of the morning (don't beat yourself up). If you try this, update me about the results you get.

That "not knowingness" is annoying because if you don't know, then you can't go back to automatic sleepy mode as easily, can you? So the practical advice would be simply to relax your way through the not knowingness, because not knowing is natural, your mind is simply protesting against the fact that it is loosing power over you. The mind always wants things to be very clear and mechanical: "this is who I am, these are my values, these are my habits, this is my story, etc" but then if you go in autopilot mode and let it handle this stuff, where is the spontaneity, the authenticity? Does a kid know how it feels like to be authentic?