mandyjw

@jbram2002 The earth doesn't like to be scorched. It's fine with air.

wrong journal! sorry

Funny how two different people see the same movie and see themselves in the same character but in different ways. @jbram2002 just described spiral dynamics as "the color scale of self-righteousness"

@jbram2002 I was always concerned about the bus drivers at the school our kid attends. They are old, smell terrible, don't have many teeth and are extremely simple minded. They were the most striking change when I learned to truly see them. Since I didn't trust them with my kid, irony or karma meant that I had to sit in the lobby and talk with them everyday when I went to pick up my kid at the school. They truly and honestly love every one of those kids, and every one else they encounter. They will gossip and complain about people who are not around but when they interact with you, there's this absolute clear good intention and love in their eyes. I realized that was something I was not capable of, in the least. I was always interacting with people with judgement, with lots of reservations in the background. They were truly present in the moment. I still pick up my kid and the bus driver lets me go ahead of the bus and waves to me every single day with a big smile on his face and love in his eyes. And I wave to myself back in the same way.

@Nahm You mean we should try to sort out the mundane things from the spiritual/amazing ones?

@Nahm That's my ultimate dream, one I realized when I read that book, that I want to be just like him, traveling and helping people but never, EVER missing a single summer here.

The other thing about this place is not that nature is inescapable, it's that it is also a ghost town. The population peaked in the late 1800's. There are so many empty houses, abandoned things, and stuff falling apart. As an artist I really started to see the beauty in it and developed an attraction to abandoned houses. There was one a few years ago on the water down a dead end road that I'll never forget. It's a spectacularly beautiful and secluded spot. The whole thing was overtaken by wild roses, the field was left to grow up into wildflowers, lots of old apple trees around the place. We couldn't tell if the front door was black or if the house was just black inside with no door. We got closer and closer, and there was no door. Eventually we got the courage to go back and went inside the house, just barely because the floors were rotten. The have since burned the house, but something about feeling the energy of a place that was once something busy and beautiful and now in total decay and yet... still perfectly beautiful, made me think that "yeah, that's what life is really about."

@Andrewww Clairvoyant Reminiscences and Herbal Recipes @Preetom I'll send you the best real estate listings if you want. @Lister You are right about the downsides but the law of attraction works really quickly with people and relationships. It's really easy to avoid the gossip if you refuse to engage in it.

The are EXTREMELY closeminded and rednecky. But here's the unexpected part, I hated it all my life, and I was a hermit. As I started doing spirituality I realized that I couldn't stay withdrawn from people anymore. I really started to practice seeing myself in them. The more judgement I let go of, the more beautiful they got. I started really seeing the values from stage blue I was moving back into. The love for community, the love of place, the love for hard work that connects you with nature and other people. One of my biggest mentors when I was a kid was a Buddhist. She moved here from away and was the well educated and grew up very wealthy. Instead of having a job she was the most loving involved member of the community, she made an effort to know everyone and treat them with love, even if the community shunned them. She befriended and took care of the elderly and did hospice care and she was an artist and gave me lessons as a kid. I remember telling her that she was wrong about religion, I was a stage blue Christian kid in a stage blue Christian family. She didn't see us for being stage blue. She saw through us. And here she is still in my life 21 years later and we're talking about meditation and reiki together. There are other people popping up around the place too, mostly they are stage green but some beyond too. They come here for the same reason I can't leave. What if highly conscious people started becoming gravitated to a place like this? What would be the power in having a pocket of stage yellow, stage turquoise people in a rural enough place that their energy could not be watered down by the stress of a city? What if they created a community with the giving caring values of stage blue but without the prejudice and ignorance? What if they designed a place that incorporated nature instead of fighting it?

It does matter. But we can't really be green if we deny the other colors in the rainbow as valid choices. You have to choose green as your favorite color, because you love it. Not because the other colors are the wrong choices.

Yeah, it is confusing. Both are true at the same time. Being present is being present with what arises... there's no ideal way to be, circumstances are always changing.

The heart and mind are the same.

You want to be and you also want/need, are called to create. It's tough to balance, I'm in the same boat.

I have found that I can find false spiritual reasoning for everything I do. My bad habit of being messy, really that's just because I'm more focused on spiritual matters than material, not because I can't focus long enough to get my shit together.

That reminds me of something Tim Ferriss says all the time. At 4:50 he says how Cato would wear tunics in the least popular colors just to make people make fun of him so he could train himself to be ashamed only of those things that are worth being ashamed of. There's really no difference in dressing like a slob or overdressing, depending on your setting you could still be accomplishing the same thing that Cato did.

@tsuki Is there some sort of societal pressure to look professional and presentable all the time there, or is this just a preference? I do not understand. I'll pick you tarot cards at times, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to freak you out.

Your shirt didn't dry? Do you not have more than one shirt? Are you really that hardcore of a minimalist? Want me to choose you a tarot card? Sometimes you don't want to know what they tell you but in my experience when they are negative they are a nice heads up for stuff that's going to happen and/or help you get insights and guidance faster. But maybe it works better if you do it for yourself.

I hate the dreams that have even worse limitations than real life, like suddenly the car you're driving has no brakes or power steering. A lot of my dreams are about living life like normal only I can't control anything the way I normally can. I guess control is an illusion that is more powerful when we are "awake" during the day.

Progress is not fluid, but it's ok. It's ok to miss meditation. It's ok to forget spirituality for awhile. The problem is not that you aren't living up to some ideal, it's that you have an ideal and you are beating yourself for not living up to it. There's no ideal you, there's just this current you. Your present state of consciousness is all that matters. Can you be present when you are beating yourself up for not being hardnosed enough? Self love and self care is key. Make some time for yourself to do things that you enjoy. Have some chocolate, bubble bath, stupid cat videos on youtube, whatever it is. Carve out the time for it, make it intentional. The rest of your life and spirituality will flow a lot smoother.

I really believe that you can. But you also have to combine it with some hard-nosed approaches and truly feeling sorrow and depression without distracting yourself. It's about fully embracing all aspects of life and dismissing none.

Prayer that is meditation with a little law of attraction and intention mixed in is incredibly powerful.

@EvilAngel Yep trying. You seem to be convinced so you're trying to change OTHER people's minds. So either you don't believe in free will or you don't believe that you are also other people and their opinions simultaneously.

You're still trying to pin it down. You do have free will but you don't. Did you choose your parents? Did you choose to be born? You have free will thanks to your limitations.

I really liked Leo's explanation of ultimate freedom in his latest video. You can't have ultimate freedom without giving someone the freedom to create limitations. Freedom and limitations are concepts that you just can't pin down.