Thoughts are a weird thing for sure..
I have no idea where they come from.

I suggest you to go to vipassana meditation retreat.Truth is found in silence.

Guys guys. You all mean different things by child and are misunderstanding each other. Someone here is using that to mean their body, someone their mind and someone their energy. They are all different in this context. 
A child, just like the self, isn't an objective definition. 
A pedophile can love the body of the child but not care about the mind. Or love both of them. Which one do you call love? Depends on you. Society calls the later love more often. Which is what the OP has mentioned he means by love. In this sense, a pedophile, in the sense that OP mentions he means it for the purpose of this conversation, a rapist of children, does not love children. 
But OP you also need to understand your definition of love is just a definition. Leo uses a different definition in his blog posts. Which allows for just the love of the body to be called love. In that definition a rapist of children does love them. 
You might say it's not love if it's not loving one's mind and energy. But that's another definition and there is nothing objective about it. Unless you want to call majority opinion as objectivity. 
The main confusion in this post replies is of misunderstanding what each here means by love and children. 
It's futile trying to argue whether someone loves something or not because the definition of love and the object to be loved in that context is at the hands of the debators. You can even argue I love my enemies because I focus my attention on them. And in a fight, I focus so much on my opponent that I become them. Therefore loving them. See? It's so easy to argue love because we already are everything. 
A rapist can rape not just for the sex but also for the screams and trauma he inflicts. There's a whole category called hurtcore many pedophiles love which centers around hurting children. Now would you say such a pedophile loves children? The one who thinks just love of the body qualifies will say yes. One who thinks love also means love of the other's mind and/or energy would say no. 
In this case not only does the rapist love the body but loves actively the hurting of the other's mind. Now, here's the most important bit. Would you call that hurting a part of the other's mind or something a part of the rapist's mind? Depending on this definition, will imply whether rapist loves his mind or the other's. 
Where. Do. You. Draw the line between self and other specially in the case of mind's? This is an important question to ask here, I am not just preaching neo advaitan shit here. 
What's important is not to see where a line is being drawn but that a line is being drawn in the first place. That implies oneness. You see since it's all one the definition of love becomes infinite and then it becomes a fool's errand trying to argue who loves what because love ceases to mean shit. 
 
So my main point here is that you guys mean different things here. The answer to OP of whether a pedophile loves children or not, is vague as shit and highly dependent on literally the definition of each word. 

You got to stop thinking that life revolves around women. That's your biggest problem. 
Invest in yourself. Take up some hobby that motivates you. 
Bring meaning to your life. Stop playing with your life. 
Try to lead a meaningful path. You're living in a shallow world of relationships and giving it way too much credit and importance. 
Your behavior could be the result of too much social media influence. Cut it down. Maybe you're busy comparing yourself to others. 
Life is meaningful with or without relationships. Understand this. 
You're desperate for female validation. Notice this drama in your life is playing out because of your excessive attachment to the idea of a woman or a perfect relationship. 
Remove this attachment and you'll notice a huge difference in perception. Everything will change. 
Say to yourself - "nothing matters." 
Make those words a reality. 
 

A common problem those involved with Kundalini, chakras, energy work or just plain spirituality of any kind might face in their day-to-day lives is how to explain all of this to the great mass of ignoramuses of this world, who may show a sceptical, belittling or dismissive attitude to something that to most of us here, is as real as the blood coursing through our veins and the air filling our lungs with each breath.
 
I use the word ignoramus decidedly as it best describes an attitude where one essentially ignores the signals and perception inputs of their own body, to the extent that they are completely unaware of the very processes that underlie every second of their existence in this reality. You really have to ignore an awful lot to take a strictly materialistic view of the human body, but due to the comprehensive programming and brainwashing we receive from birth, this ignorant point of view remains the norm.
 
So, should you meet a slightly open-minded person, who is ready to entertain that they may not know everything there is to know and empirical science, as a philosophical method of inquiry (being a tiny sub-branch within the vast edifice of philosophy) has its limitations, this is how you may go about explaining the ineffable and intangible reality of chakras, nadis, prana, kundalini, spirit and much else beyond to them.
 
The easiest method, I find, is to make them aware of their emotional body first. This is already an energetic construct (with an undefined form of energy and matter, which we can probably just label “dark” as scientists do, because it is not visible to the naked eye or scientific instruments), centred around the chakras and the nadis. If they were to say that chakras don’t exist as is the current scientific consensus, one might point them to the existence of love as an intangible force and its central organ in the body, the energetic heart (sternum), which according to them, isn’t a real organ and doesn’t exist. Yet, we experience our “hearts” as the energetic, emotional and spiritual centre of our very being.
 
Think back to the first time you were in love. Note the sensations you feel in your body as you remember this feeling. What is this feeling you feel, what is this organ in the sternum, where it is felt and what are those “heart strings” or gunas, invisible ties of energy that link you to the object of your affection?
 
When I was 18, a freshman in college and in love for the first time, I could not only “feel” the strings connecting us, but I could “see” them with my mind’s eye, or perceive it, if that is what you prefer and the energetic image or imprint of our love is still seared into my memory. What I saw back then, where three colourful strings of energy (Sattva, Rajas and Tamas Gunas) emanating from my heart, through the sternum all the way to the person I loved. In this state of “being in love” we were in tune and I felt every little energetic and emotional vibration of the other as if we were linked across space and time, which, we were. You’re probably also familiar with the sensation of being in tune with the person you love, to the extent that you know what they’re thinking before they say a word or if you are apart, they will know when you’re thinking about them, or you will anticipate a phone call or text from them, before it happens. Oxford biologist Rupert Sheldrake theorised that a phenomenon similar to quantum entanglement was responsible for this phenomenon, which we can all observe in our daily lives, especially around loved ones and pets. Yet again, it is unacknowledged by science and the sceptical mainstream, despite pretty much everyone having personal proof of it.
 
In fact, staying with Rupert Sheldrake’s research, who is an erstwhile colleague and now arch-nemesis of the famous materialist Richard Dawkins, it has been shown through various statistical research methods, that the “sense of being stared at”, premonition, telepathy and many other supposedly psychic phenomena are in fact everyday occurrences not just in humans, but animals too and must be fundamental to how nature and the universe operates. Yes, science hasn’t yet caught up to the reality of our everyday lived experience in this regard, but we can be sure, that once sufficient attention (and thus funding and recognition) is paid to this currently neglected and ridiculed field of research, large strides will be made in a very short time.
 
So, in summary, there are many spiritual and subtle-physical phenomena that we can’t currently explain using the very limited and rudimentary tools of empirical science, but that does not mean that we should ignore them and efforts should be made to trust our own perceptions of such phenomena and not to take the claims of scientists, most of whom have zero knowledge of the spiritual realm, as some sort of gospel. Yes, science is an important tool in understanding physical reality, but what it isn’t, is a philosophical and moral framework by which we can live our lives and understand the full spectrum of our existence, including that of consciousness or the spirit.

No.
There is no substitute for the underlying chemistry. Mushrooms are crazy powerful. If you were able to get that effect sober you would be classified as insane.
If you want the effect of mushrooms, take mushrooms.

Of course euthanasia and assisted suicide should be legal.

You mean to weigh the bag to see how much you got in total? Or just for each use, to get it out of a plastic bag and to measure your doses?
If you’re asking how to properly store it and use it, buy a small and dark glass jar and dump the DMT in the jar (see attached pic). If you got some left in the plastic bag, cut it open with scissors and put a glove on and gently with your finger/small toothpick pull the remaining spice in to the jar.
Store in a cool and dark place.
I recommend buying mg scoops. Unless you buy an expensive mg scale. 
And just scoop out the desired dose in to your glass pipe or vaporizer, and smoke away.
 

Guys,
 
How can you explain this interesting phenomenon: as your understanding of reality evolving, let’s say as you get more “deeper into the awakening” process, the universe gives exactly that block of information that is needed at this particular time for “your” evolution?
For ex: now, everywhere I go, every YT video I watch, everything screams that there are no others. I remember 3 years ago, I was desperately searching for this info everywhere to confirm and could not find. Like I could not find, I was asking desperately.
Now as I’ve become directly aware of this fact, I have been receiving this info from every corner I go.
We can call it “Synchronicity”, but are there any other explanation? This is crazy.

In all honesty how much thinking and theorizing do you do vs. actual practice?(observing direct experience, being present, meditation, contemplation, etc..)
I started out around 90% theory and 10 practice but after 5 years in the game it slowly flipped. 
 
I would consider being on this forum theory, obviously. 

If one does not want to dream any more, how could one cease to exist?
I know that death is not option, because one will reincarnate back , so it's pointless for that.
But how can one then cease to exist? I think beings should have the choice if thr want to.
I find existence to overrated.

I think the fake part is only the one about them being attacked and killed.

Yeah, one night upside down can ruin an entire week. Maybe take an Ambien.
There's, of course, Teal Swan's model of Reset. Basically, you stay awake for 36 hours and then you sleep 8 hours and your bio-clock returns to normal. Reset.
Check with a doctor about Melatonin in your brain, maybe you lack some or overusing it.
Be well,
Greg

There's simply no good reason to believe that is not the case, as I already see the illusion of the "passage of time" when every single moment remains to be "now" no matter how much time passes.
There is no good reason to believe the "now" moments cannot extend beyond your limited lifetime and ego self.
As a human being your lifespan is already limited. Most of us don't start forming lasting memories for a while, but you can go before your physical birth. You aren't confined to experience within this narrow scope of say, 80 years. And yet any experience prior to your physical birth or after your physical death ALSO happen "now".
The actual passage of time is a sheer illusion.
Why could there not be more "now" moments that do not adhere to your ego and memory bank? It's impossible that there not be, as experience never begins and never ends...

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain.
One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him.
“You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” 
The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. He thought:
'What a buffoon. At least, I got away with these clothes.'
The Master sat naked, watching the moon.
“Poor fellow,” he mused, ” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”
-----
A solid understanding of systems theory + a practical spiritual integration of its primary principles is essential for the investigation of truth. In fact, for a life dedicated to greater understanding, fulfillment and happiness at the deepest level.
As you view reality through the lens of systems theory, you'll see avenues you have yet to explore in your spiritual journey. It is a forever open feedback channel that is left within the system until your last breath.
Spoiler Alert: Your entire mind/body system and reality structure is expressed within the core principles of systems theory.
Here are some of my explorations and studies into systems theory.
The Essence of Systems Theory
1- Understand the Key Harmony of the System
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.
If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. 
This guideline is deceptively simple. Until you make it a practice, you won’t believe how many wrong turns it helps you avoid. Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others.
It’s amazing how many misconceptions there can be. People will swear that rainfall is decreasing, say, but when you look at the data, you find that what is really happening is that variability is increasing—the droughts are deeper, but the floods are greater too.
It’s especially interesting to watch how the various elements in the system do or do not vary together. Watching what really happens, instead of listening to peoples’ theories of what happens, can explode many careless causal hypotheses.
Every selectman in the state of New Hampshire seems to be positive that growth in a town will lower taxes, but if you plot growth rates against tax rates, you find a scatter as random as the stars in a New Hampshire winter sky. There is no discernible relationship at all.
Starting with the behavior of the system directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static, analysis—not only to “What’s wrong?” but also to “How did we get there?” “What other behavior modes are possible?” “If we don’t change direction, where are we going to end up?”
And looking to the strengths of the system, one can ask “What’s working well here?”
Starting with the history of several variables plotted together begins to suggest not only what elements are in the system, but how they might be interconnected.
And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution.  - The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, we don’t have enough salesmen. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town?
Listen to any discussion, in your family or a committee meeting at work or among the pundits in the media, and watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in “predict, control, or impose your will” mode, without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it’s doing it.
2- Explore Your Mental Models Clearly (After Direct Experience)
When we draw structural diagrams and then write equations, we are forced to make our assumptions visible and to express them with rigor. We have to put every one of our assumptions about the system out where others (and we ourselves) can see them.
Our models have to be complete, and they have to add up, and they have to be consistent. Our assumptions can no longer slide around (mental models are very slippery), assuming one thing for purposes of one discussion and something else contradictory for purposes of the next discussion.
You don’t have to put forth your mental model with diagrams and equations, although doing so is a good practice. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be.
Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.
3- Respect Data & Information Channels
Information (both conceptual and non-conceptual) holds systems in harmony whereas delayed, biased, scattered, corrupted or missing data can make feedback loops malfunction.
For instance, decision makers can’t respond to information they don’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.
If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information.
You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.
4 - Attend to What is Important, Not What is Immediately Perceivable and Quantifiable
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality. 
If quantity forms the goals of our feedback loops, if quantity is the center of our attention and language and institutions, if we motivate ourselves, rate ourselves, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result.
You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.
Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important.
So don’t fall into that trap. Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality.
Be a quality detector. Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality.
No one can quite define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value.
But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t directly experience and radiate them, if we dont point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist within the social reality the system is based on.
5- Generate Feedback Policies Within Feedback Loops
President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately, he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn’t understand feedback. Let me explain:
Carter was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped.
That never happened. This is a failure of feedback policy.
You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting feedback system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy.
It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system.
Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops—loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process.
6- Value the Good of the Whole
Remember that hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, not the top.
Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. Don’t, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all.
Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easily measured or not.
7- Listen to the Wisdom of the System
Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself.
Notice how many of those forces and structures are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Don’t be an unthinking intervenor and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities.
Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.
Get a feel for what to play with and what to allow its maturation process to unfold at its own pace.
8- Locate Responsibility Within the System & Open its Feedback Channels
That’s a guideline both for analysis and design. In analysis, it means looking for the ways the system creates its own behavior.
Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another. Sometimes those outside events can be controlled (as in reducing the pathogens in drinking water to keep down incidences of infectious disease). But sometimes they can’t.
You need to accept that.
And sometimes blaming or trying to control the outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system.
“Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers.
In a sense, the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions.
Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe. It could mean that neither insurance companies nor public funds should pay for medical costs resulting from smoking or from accidents in which a motorcycle rider didn’t wear a helmet or a car rider didn’t fasten the seat belt
A great deal of responsibility was lost when rulers of a nation who declared war were no longer expected to lead the troops into battle. 
These few examples are enough to get you thinking about how little our current culture has come to look for responsibility within the system that generates an action, and how poorly we design systems to experience the consequences of their actions.
9- Always Stay a Student
Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring- out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises.
Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know.
That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.” It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors
10- Embrace Complexity
Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity and uniformity.
That’s what makes the world interesting, and that’s what makes it beautiful.
There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery.
But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems.
Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces.
Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us.
We can, and some of us do, celebrate and encourage self-organization, disorder, variety, and diversity. Some of us even make a conscious moral commitment of doing so.
11- Expand the Time Axiom
One of the worst ideas humanity ever had was the interest rate, which led to the further ideas of payback periods and discount rates, all of which provide a rational, quantitative excuse for ignoring the long term.
The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments.
Don't make the same mistake.
In a strict systems sense, there is no long term and short-term distinction.
Phenomena at different time-scales are nested within each other.
Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago.
The couplings between very fast processes and very slow ones are sometimes strong, sometimes weak. When the slow ones dominate, nothing seems to be happening; when the fast ones take over, things happen with breathtaking speed.
Systems are always coupling and uncoupling the large and the small, the fast and the slow.
When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet.
You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system.
12 - Defy the Disciplines
In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines.
To understand that system, you will have to be able to learn from—while not being limited by—economists and chemists and psychologists and theologians.
You will have to penetrate their jargons, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their particular lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses.
They won’t make it easy for you. But you can do it.
Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary,” if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other.
Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct.
They will have to go into learning mode. They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.
It can be done. But, ego gets in the way if not careful.
13- Expand the Boundary of Care - Empathy - Compassion - Love
Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring.
There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones.
The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem.
It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.
As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to experience that which they know.
---
Hope you get value from this post. 
Let me know your thoughts.
Much love,
Arda
 

I don't know what to say during times like these; I'm sorry to hear that he passed away.  
I always think of this song when a forum member dies.

MY GRANDFATHER'S GHOST// INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA: I don't know why I find this a bit strange to talk about... after all of the other stuff I've talked about on here, this one might be a bit more normal, heh. And I don't even exactly know where to start talking about this one, other than to just start somewhere.
Naturally I find myself returning to the feel of this song.
This was completely unexpected for me. I had trouble sleeping last night for the first hour or two because I was visited by my grandfather's presence on my mom's side (I have had a number of thoughts on what a ghost even is my own frame/ understanding in about the last 17-19 years or so, but more on that a little later).
I started talking to my brother in the last half week or so, and one of things I wanted to know more about was my grandfather's death, because I wasn't present at the ceremony here late this summer/ early fall. I also have not seen him since I was about 16 or so. My family and other people (family friends and spouses of people in the family, etc.) have kept asking me if when I was going to see him again. Well, I have not felt good around my family, especially my parents, for years now (since about 14, really). I was a tween when I fundamentally stopped trusting them. (Like I trust them to feed and clothe me and take me to the doctor if I need it, and that's about it. Emotional well being or concern? Nothing. Zero. Zilch.)
Apparently he suffered dementia toward the end of his life, though I don't know yet how long it lasted. Also, I learned that he broke his leg and had trouble getting medical treatment during COVID and his mental state made it very hard to communicate with my mom. (Keep in mind also how crowded Hong Kong is, and this includes the use of all of their public infrastructure under normal conditions.)
My brother also told me that there have been odd, almost supernatural occurrences happening around their house in the last month or so. His wife had the notion that maybe it was his spirit visiting them in some way. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I guess they would be considered minor things, not major/ disturbing things. He was skeptical, as he tends to be with these matters, but he told me that the last 2 weeks or so have be frankly, crazy (not related to this specific issue here though).
I was never that close to him growing up, arguably my brother was way closer. My brother has seen him multiple times since then, even though he stopped visiting Hong Kong as a teenager and probably for a good portion of this 20s. But he was by far the more caring and affectionate person in my family, and certainly the most caring grandparent. (It seems that my mom did not inherit this quality for whatever reason, although some people might insist that grandparents have the sort of space to show affection to their grandkids that parents do not towards their kids, because parents are burdened with the role of being authority and structure-givers first and foremost.)
But it seems that he took it very personally that I just wasn't there. I knew that it would have meant a lot to him if I was there, but I was not. It seems now that there were things that he didn't understand. That is... kind of shitty. It seems that he thought it was something that he did somehow. But it had absolutely nothing to do with him, and everything to with the dynamics of my immediate family and needing a period of almost no contact for the last couple years, and before that, I didn't spend much time around them either after I had moved out. I had spent a lifetime pretending, if not that we were the perfect fucking family from the outside, that at least we were all perpetually ok, that I was ok.
And clearly, I was not ok.
It had to end.
Whatever my mom told him (and she did tend to confide in him and not her bio mom), she clearly didn't give anywhere close to complete picture. She seems to have told him something though, a decent amount, that I had some kind of "issue" of some sort (great, how ambigious. The honesty levels in this family though. And they probably have one of the closer/ more honest relationships too). How could she, with her inability to face anything difficult relating to choices or priorities she had made directly enough? (EDIT: I also have this feeling that my mom doesn't know exactly how he felt, not that she would be great at facing that either.)
Is this what dementia looks and feels like closer to from the inside? There is a lot of fear and disorientation and regret and there is hard to gain direct clarity from his perspective as a result here about a great deal about whatever happened without relying a lot on using my own inference and intuition (Not that I'm afraid. After everything that I've seen, felt, and experienced... what is this but just another drop in the ocean?) It reminds me so much of the rat that bumped into my shoe earlier this month. (And... I just compared my grandfather to a rat.)  (As a side note: This is what fear alone tends to do: it makes your vision narrow and much more scrambled and unreliable, and so naturally, your direct memory of it will not be better at all. This is where the reconstructive/ projecting/ perpetually reforming aspect of memory tends to come into play in an attempt to order and make greater sense of it all.)
There is also a mixture of Chinese beliefs wrapped up deeply in identity about the nature and the powers of ones ancestors which I find really hard to articulate. But I've never been too deeply onto this stuff. It is like I became aware that he was part of my mind/ self (in a way that would be closer knit that just any person or being)... but it's like the belief/ identity aspect factors greatly into this "truth" and I am just taking it in, accepting it, and dealing with the consequences. It's not that I have ever had an intrinsic preference or belief towards ancestry in this particular way even if I do feel all of these linkages, connections, and associations, and the psychic and psychoemotional charge and weight of it all.
It reminds me of this story I read earlier this summer by horror manga artist Junji Ito, where I had posted this comment and this image about it, it has a distinctively East Asian flavour of sublimated existential fear/ anxiety:
 
Older Chinese people (including my mom's generation) still pray and leave offering to their ancestors. My grandfather's generation, which grew up as a completely premodern generation at least partially because of his rural upbringing in China (what technology? what access?), and would have taken this even more seriously. I grew up doing this sort of thing. I wasn't really given a choice. I didn't feel much about it on a belief level, though viscerally the ritualistic nature of it affected me, for sure. The idea of disturbing your ancestors and the whole family lineage via your actions MEANS SOMETHING, but the responsibility goes both ways. Chinese people prayed (and still pray) to their ancestors because they believed that ancestors were meant to guide them, and if your ancestors are happy, then all will be right in the world and society. And conversely, if not, then the opposite was true. In Ancient China, there was also the component of making nature/ the nature spirits happy as well (this was considered to be the Emperor's primary job, and not doing this meant that nature/"God"/ the people would inevitably strip you of your powers and replace you with someone worthwhile), but that got stripped off as time passed. And this ancestral worship is actually more the bedrock of Chinese beliefs, and on top of that, we have other systems like Buddhism, Daoism, and of course Confucianism, the last "religion" being more of a modernized (in comparison), codified approach of keeping one's ancestors happy (while they're still alive!), as there really is no intrinsic separation considered to be real here...
Anyway, I spent a while reassuring him over and over again that this would all get resolved, that it wasn't his fault, that I had to be not present for the better good (I myself didn't feel particularly guilty about being absent, but this does go directly against a traditional Chinese sort of morality, perhaps being an even more heavily collectivist society compared to other traditional societies).
There was the sense of him catching up with everything that had been in my immediate family, of getting more of a bird's eye view. It's hard to tell if it was just before he left the physical body (while he was in the dementia state) or "afterward", as there appears to be a smooth sort of flow here from his perspective. This is about what I would expect here, and this is what disorientation does. To me, this suggests that he became aware before but in the feeling aspect of it that something was very wrong.
Like he, did not know that I was really not ok and how close to death and oblivion I've been. (Yea... you and everyone else. It's fine. Really.) I see and feel his disturbance. He was not ok. He saw it as it was, not how it is going to be.
And my mom was not ok following his death. She wanted to talk to me about her feelings and I was like... I don't have any spare emotions or listening for you in good faith at this moment, sorry (but not actually sorry). I can't fake it. Not right now. I still don't feel bad about my choice or that I made the wrong one, though I greatly would have preferred him to not to feel this way, obviously... (assuming that this was somehow preventable. IDK.)
I myself have no fear or anxiety about dealing with any of this. It's why I can deal with it as I do. I suppose there are a number of us who are just not skeeved out about dealing with "death" here.
My partner recently asked me a question that my students often asked me: which is if I would live or stay in a house where someone (or some people) had died or been brutally murdered. And the answer is always yes. Although in the case of my students, I would not explain too much about myself here at all, other than to say that I am not afraid but also not secular/ skeptical in this particular way either, but also that I am not religious/ superstitious either. (Not trying to be fresh or anything.) In fact, I can deal with the problems or irresolutions of the dead, that is no issue to me at all. As in, they can "talk" to me and I can release whatever. Also, people die everywhere, though homes have special significance and therefore attachments as well. If you go visit a historical castle as a tourist, there's a good chance there's going to be someone who was murdered in there, also there's a good chance that they might have a torture chamber. How is that not equally bad juju circumstantially speaking, or do you believe that something bad will happen to you because you happen to be sleeping in that place, possibly by yourself? Likewise, if you visit Aztec pyramids, if you're sensitive, surely you will feel the echoes of the blood of the dead running down the stairs, even if you do not see and feel the memories even more directly. Sacrifices in particular are high energy affairs and leave strong energetic/ psychoemotional imprints on physical places and and people. Belief, identity, meaning, attachment, and flowing with an experience (or not) is pretty much everything here, isn't it?
In a way, the problems of the dead can be much easier to deal with the problems of the living, if you know how. The past life persona mentioned above (Norse) also gave me the skills to deal with this rather effortlessly, but this extensive dialogue is a first. I have done some "sending overs" before (mainly pets), but I pretty much never talk to the dead, I simply feel them and know them (or perhaps more accurately, what is left behind that is unresolved, can you really call that a "person" as a singular soul/ being in any normal sense? I'm not sure that this does make sense. Something does not quite match up.) I am and have also been very good at not hearing and not dealing with what I don't want to deal with in ESP senses and phenomenon as well, except for when I have been in the more severe states of disarray combined with openness.
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Interestingly, this all comes to me now as I just finished reading a couple books on intergenerational trauma, which talks a lot about how we can inherit in unknowing ways the traumas of our ancestors, including ones that we have neither met or knew very well, and it can come up in eerie, recurring ways. The imprints of their griefs, their fears, and their irresolutions will repeat themselves in your emotional life and perhaps the circumstances you find yourself drawn into, even if their exact origin trauma doesn't repeat, obviously. (For example, for people who had relatives who survived the Holocaust or some other major war or hardship, which is just one of many examples given.) The link is so indirect that it strikes me as extremely superstitious by normal secular standards.