BlueOak

@Shambhu If you were to show an animal or child who had made no distinctions between the two they would treat the mirror as the reflection. Yes the mirror is also the reflection. It is the room. It is the people in the room. The interpretation of it. The different assigned pieces. Because all of that comes from you. There is nothing you will ever experience outside of what you observe in some form. There is nothing that will ever exist in your life other than what you define and how you define it. Including mind. In your example, I could further separate them instead. I could say there was light, glass, energy, your eyes, how they interpret light etc, and the more I knew about the subject the more distinctions I could give you. If you were talking to a scientist or better yet an optometrist no doubt he or she would give you many terms of distinction about what exactly was going on between that mirror and your eye. You could probably read many books on it. Or I could say it was a room, or an experience. A pretty picture. An ugly reflection. Everything in that moment would be my definition of it. Including the conceptualization of mind. Consciousness is realised through the observer. It is defined or conceptualized by the interactions of ideas, concepts, forms, forces, beliefs, and definitions within it. Otherwise, it is formless, it could not be interacted with, and it could not be seen. There would be no mirror, no reflection, and no mind. @DecemberFlower I haven't closed this duality fully, and I realise it's one of the last ones I will because it'll be the root of all the others. All I can give you is: What is observed is everything at once. Then you define things yourself, what their meaning is. How they will look to you. What their relationships are to each other and your life. In the process of doing that is how consciousness is seen or observed. The process of separation is how the whole is seen, in its interactions. Otherwise, it would not be visible at all. We'd just have static ideas, forms, forces, and belief systems that had no meaning. In their changing, separation, and interaction with each other is how we observe consciousness.

Because in life you can choose to divide something or see it as the same. A duality I needed to collapse was, that there is no difference. This conversation has helped me see that. So again thank you all.

Then you have chosen to create division and separation between yourself and consciousness. *Calling it mind. There is nothing wrong with that, I lived many decades with such a division, it was very useful to raise awareness. In a second you can realise that the mind is consciousness therefore what you are calling the mind, is also consciousness. Not a separate part of it. Same with Leo's experience, same with these words, same with these responses. All of it is you. If you want it to be. You'll assign meaning, perhaps emotion, or reason to each poster here, and then respond to what you chose. Nobody else will assign that for you. *I have realised I am repeating a duality here where none can exist and will reflect on it

@Shambhu Yes. The concept of mind appears in consciousness, whether that is while asleep or awake. It is illuminated by consciousness and eventually, aspects of it are longer necessary, This is what people often speak about when they say they are experiencing stages of mind or consciousness. Identity for example fades away allowing a greater perception of consciousness and awareness grows. Both in the macro around us and in ourselves. (The same thing). You are not experiencing the entirety of consciousness right now, you realise there is always more to experience or reveal yes? Do you not feel that over your life you have been able to experience more. That there has been noticeable progress in how aware you are now since your younger years? I feel this conversation has been engaging and allowed me to realise this understanding in more depth, thank you.

There are two ways to look at anything. You divide them up and make reasons for their existence or separate when it's useful. Or you can see them as the same thing. What conceived mind then if not infinity? What is standing outside of everything making things up? What is there but consciousness here typing these words back to me?

There is no mind. Anything in consciousness is consciousness. There is nothing but consciousness.

Mind is a conception of consciousness.

If we step outside of ourselves for a moment. We understand humanity no longer lives in caves beating each other with clubs (most of the time). We can see the states of consciousness and awareness that humanity on the planet itself has undertaken. So if you can completely put yourself aside, even in the macro alone you'll see it.

If that TV was black and white, had a grainy picture. The programming behind it was poorly done. The team was not fully aware of how to make a TV program, they weren't aware of how their subject matter related to the wider world, or why they were making it in the first place. The viewer had yet to realise they were watching or choosing the channel, they were the channel, they were the TV, why the program was running in them and the TV, what meaning was behind it. They hadn't realised what in the greater context this meant for their life, and more of the intricacies of the watching itself or why this programming was choosing now to be run. On we can go. More they hadn't yet organized all of that in few, or single sentence to pass on to others, which usually only comes through repetition of a particular part of awareness and self-realisation. There is no end to perception and its influence on your life. None. All I can tell you is from experience, that the more conscious I am the more I perceive, and the more that changes everything about how I related to the world. Perception is inadequate to describe it, experience of life would be another word to offer.

Consciousness increases every second of every day. Moreso if you work directly on becoming more conscious. You cannot avoid it even if you try, life will continually find ways to make you more conscious even if you go into full avoidance mode. It's the one thing you are taking with you when you die, so it's the only thing of value to achieve here. What is it. That's is always a great question to ask. In that question is how you can expand it. It permeates absolutely everything that you will ever experience. It is everything. Its perception, how you filter, perceive, what you allow, what you experience, how it relates, its awareness, its observation, how you arrange experience, what meanings are observed, what's true, what's false. Its the heartbeat of the life around you when you meditate, it's your body awareness, energetic experiences, spiritual experiences, emotional awareness, truth, being aware of yourself/others, trends, patterns, all the strands that make up life. That's an inadequate way to explain what increasing your consciousness means from what I have experienced over my life doing so. It's everything, and all that exists or rather what you can perceive of it. Today when I was thinking about this, it's how and what you experience of god, the infinite, source, mind(or not mind), whatever you want to assign to that term. *If you want a practical application. Perceiving more changes everything inside you and how you relate to the world and others.

It's mostly the critique of ideology that people struggle with because they themselves are being critiqued depending on how attached they are to it. It's especially troublesome when one ideology thinks it knows best for another and tries to imprint over thousands of years of social and cultural development a different way of life.

Authoritarians have for the last few years projected that anything which doesn't agree with their worldview is in fact authoritarian. It used to be call deviant or bad, but now it's twisted into a projection of themselves. It comes about because certain liberal voices did stray into 'their way or the highway' types of mentality, there were a lot of arbitrary and similar comments being made. This of course came from those liberal quarters receiving a large amount of gaslighting from their political opponents but I digress. When you get gaslighted repeatedly you end up making arbitrary or at least stubborn statements more often. There is only one rule to magazine covers, whatever is selling the magazine. So if we were to be devil's advocates we could say money was the ultimate tool of control or in a healthier world, equilibrium. I do feel we idealize thin women too much, in other cultures larger figures are seen as better for childbirth for example. I often used to tell a beautiful girl of Norwegian descent that if Hollywood was in Norway the standard for beauty would be a larger build. Not fat but a larger build. Not to say thin women are not beautiful but this is the problem, when we start picking one body type over the others for everyone, we end up in a knot. So I like that more body types are acknowledged. I saw an article on this piece, and there were 4 covers, curvy, slim, mature and chubby. So unless choice is the new authoritarian buzzword Mr Peterson has fallen victim to a projection of his own ego. Telling people what can and can't be shown, while insisting that other people are doing so.

Her points were reasonable when discussing identity. The groomer language is tailored to put down your opponents and link them to things they have no place in being linked. Its part of the resistance to anything we are not, and this comes about because we are not the presence behind identity but a cluster of man-made split identities instead. We constantly fight over these identities and expend energy to protect them. We've got the right and left identities. We've got Joe Rogan's identity. We've got the TYT brand. We've got all these named personalities and words to argue over. All image. All about how it makes you, her, or Joe feel. It also depends on how much you like feeling a certain way. You could transfer some of Anna's anger here, which she's great at projecting, and then run with it. Build reasons why you are angry, justify it in your head, and then have it form part of your identity which you then have to defend going forward. All that takes a lot of energy and time to maintain. So consider whether it's worth it before continuing. Just be. Be the presence behind the identity and less of this matters. We still benefit from looking out for those people being persecuted for their way of living, if at the same time we encourage people to move beyond identity into something more permanent, that will be with them for an eternity.

We like wisdom that agrees with us. We rebel or strain against the wisdom that disagrees with us. Defining wisdom, or what is best for a large group of people would be impossible for one person. The most conscious (and qualified) being on the planet would tell you something like, we resist that which is different to us. This is partly because we have strong self-identities. While that individual would not, everyone he or she was governing would have. That natural push and pull is part of what makes life work. One way to do as you describe is with a varied council of teams, which make up individual services. Team of educators, Team of economists, Team of environmentalists. To take this further than I can adequately describe, they would need to be interlinked for cooperative reasons but still responsible for their own sectors. This way when one team has failed on a task, constructive rebuilding can be done within that sector, rather than throwing out all the successful governing sectors and having a huge unpredictable shift. A populist would say the people would elect those teams, an authoritarian might say I'll select those teams. Parties are more a hindrance than a help, they bring all kinds of baggage. Figureheads are not much better. The system I describe is not perfect I can see the holes in regards to budget, how that is decided, or how to respond to a crisis effectively, but it is not insurmountable. There can be policies in place to respond to crisis and every team can have a say in the budget. Personalities will still get in the way here, but it's so much better than what we have currently where it's all image-based arguments, or people voting against parties out of loyalty or past reasons. Rather than practically selecting which person does which job well, and taking the best specialists that we have to do them. The complete opposite to this would be to have electorial systems that have enough parties in them to represent every electorate, I am talking a dozen, and to have systems that encourage all of those voices to be heard equally, and govern effectively as a group. *To put aside my ego. I will say the upside to parties is that loyalty can get people interested in their governance, although it may be in a way I don't connect with, to some it's like their local sports team. Before you dismiss that entirely any way to get people interested in bettering their communities somehow shouldn't be ignored.

You can also take these traits that the bullies had, which you see you are missing, such as being powerful, strong, etc, and go build them into you. Only the healthy kind, where you get powerful and strong at the expense of no one else. Further, you can go and do it so it benefits others around you. It sounds like you are in knots, they robbed you of something by hurting you with it and making you hate it. I'm sorry for that, I had similar experiences. Start looking at what makes up a bad guy, and take the traits that you want, without putting others down around you. Women like confidence (I say honesty) most of the time, not cockiness, certainly not a lowlife taking them for granted or treating them poorly. Confidence is a trait you can certainly work on by being true to yourself. It was brave and confident, to be honest here, to put your heart on your sleeve and say hey this is me, this is what I am feeling. Realising what the abuser had that was missing in you shows remarkable progress with the trauma. When you come to terms with your abuse, the effect it had on you, your coping mechanisms, the problems that it gives you in relating to others or aspects of life etc. For those that are not yet there, go work on understanding yourself first. Otherwise, you can end up hating yourself more, until you can separate healthy relationships or interactions with unhealthy ones. To see it's not the traits of strength, control, confidence, or being powerful that are at fault, it's how people were/are using them. Many young girls might not know the difference yet either, which is why they fall for jerks and get hurt. It's like how a guy can fall for prideful femininity and then see it used against him by someone wielding it like blackmail or control. You are getting to the point where you realise you either took on parts of the abuser's traits, attraction to them, or wish to emulate them. If you had an abusive parent for example, that can be part of you, it was half of your upbringing. If you had a partner that was abusive, it forms part of your understanding of relationships and you seek it out again subconsciously. In your case, it was bullies and (perhaps) your sense of self-worth, what was right or wrong to be as a man, or the sense of control. If you worry about what you will become when you acknowledge this. Then picture yourself being bullied and what that kind of behavior does to people. Meditate on it, and talk to others about it like you are doing here. However, the fact you understand the pain by using power, strength, control, and confidence in an abusive manner and worry about it, means you are already well past the self-awareness of being a bully. I think you are closer to where you want to be than you think. Working out fully what you want. Who you want to be. Knowing how it messes others up if coming from a bad place. Now you just have to act on it, and find ways to get what you want without stepping on others, but lifting them up instead. All the best.

There is only mind. The concept of mind is in the mind. So there is only this. I still find myself at odd times picturing there are many minds, then I remind myself that nothing exists but what I perceive in my mind, or feel in my chest. Other than that I am not sure what is left to learn, no direction is tugging me, I don't feel pressure like I used to or create it outside of myself. In meditation I've sometimes gone further into the sensation I feel, especially around the forehead, they are different states. One was full and liquid almost, I've experienced that only once. It felt a more full sensation than air usually feels. I was practicing going back to my writing to see if I could stay in a greater state of awareness, without being drawn into the characters or story. This is a bit like lifting weights or meditating in a loud area. Possible but it can be challenging. If I stay in a wider awareness I don't connect or form the identities required for those characters to have life. I've taken a couple of days off writing, which I carried on for a good few weeks. I am not sure if this will be a permanent break, it is still a gift I have cultivated, but each word forms another block of identity. I watched Acharya Prashant give his opinion on how people not valuing consciousness, but only thinking about the body, leads to things like prostitution or eating meat, where everything is just carbon/water. I related this to the abortion debate, where before the fetus is conscious it is purely part of the mother's body/consciousness. When it has awareness it becomes its own conscious being. His talk helped elevate my understanding of a few topics. I also watched him recently go through a phase I went through, and many of us do, when his ego realized that after he's gone so little progress will have been made. I like and relate to him as he acknowledges his ego and vulnerabilities. It's a big world we don't change much but our words go further than we know, eternity is a long time to carry them on. I am still looking for how I will contribute. I am seeking. All the best. *Here are the video(s)

After gaining a deeper understanding from a certain couple of video's Leo created. Part of me still looked for other. Before these videos I was at the point of believing all others were me but were still other, having their own dream as I was, connected but separated. Now i've accepted that all is self everything is created in mind, experienced by mind, reflected by mind, and aspects of me depicted to talk to or argue with, referenced and transitioned into other things by me. The resistance initially I think was also that felt selfish :D. I heard the phrase all is self in 2011 or so but I never understood it so much as I do now. I've had moments where reality fell away more and opened up in the last couple of days and I realised why for 10 years I stopped caring about most things. I didn't get depressed or lonely because i'd already had that part of the awakening. Also I realised where reality can be manipulated slightly around the edges more. Especially in acceptance of self and so what is accepted in you to then be shown back. I've seen how reality shapes around myself more. Many more aspects of reality have been accepted as mine, and parts of me that I resisted. I repeat these words to my own dream to understand them further. To invite everything created to be realised fully. But I still seek control of the dream. Understanding intellectually I am controlling it and seeing this in its reflection to how it changes as I do, I am lacking in actualizing my own will upon my life/dream, which is entirely built inside of me. A paradox. To thank Leo again. I keep spelling your name Lego when I type :D, for me your words were the blocks I was missing. I still feel occasionally drawn into events, I still feel pulled but nowhere near with the velocity or speed that I had in the past. I feel I am choosing more than being drawn anywhere. It hasn't gone away yet. Maybe in more videos or self reflection that lack of control will ease as I feel I gain more of it internally or at least my apathy will finally be no more. All the best. Gratitude

It's part of conscious development, there is no above, or below There is just this. If you have a problem with the title, good

It can like to keep things that might make it look bad quiet, stuff it values it often likes seen. Depends what your ego is, if its formed to be as honest and open as possible, then that becomes the ego you are dealing with. If it's formed as a revealer of hidden facts, then that's what it's going to want to see done for example. Never trick yourself into thinking the ego isn't at play on some level, in all actions.

Figureheads do. Anything which over emphasizes identity. That capacity was obviously always there, this is a funnel for it. Now. It is better than having just celebrity figureheads. So I wouldn't want to see it removed. Attention would then just go back to what the TV provides. In future incarnations of social media, i'd like to see teams working on projects, or community groups with a healthy dose of personal identity, within those groups. This is something I used to try to organize in life, I almost had a desperate need to see it realised when I was younger. Society wasn't ready to give up their egos enough to see something like that realised often, even in many spiritual groups. Part of the problem as Acharya Prashant might phrase it, people value the body (I will say image/identity) over consciousness, and so celebrate their image/identity expressions of consciousness rather than their consciousness itself. I want to say that's beautiful but also builds a fragile place that people need to then defend, or continually keep up with effort/energy to keep alive. By focusing on their immediate image or identity they don't get to appreciate what four, or twenty, or a hundred people working together can feel like. Not when they are forced to for money but when they want to come together. I almost get heartache or nostalgia when I remember sports teams and what felt like, several people part of something and working together. Individuals are not ignored but celebrated as part of the team effort. Additionally of course focusing on individual, image-identity, when someone is censored it feels like they are censoring part of the identity, which that person has held to be supremely important, as opposed to a transitory experience of consciousness, or a group purpose. *Also want to note when you alienate your image/identity as bad or wrong, you end up in a terrible place as well. So avoiding that is wise.

Drug Use Abuse Rape Poverty Hunger Neglect Too many children already. Parents splitting up Parents arguing all the time. An overworked foster care system. People doing it themselves anyway, as they used to do before. Only now for Americans its unsafe and without medical supervision. There is nothing humane about having a kid raised in an abusive household. Trust me I know. It messes them up for life. You can work through it but its not till decades later that you see the effect of things you were not aware of. After all the work you can do on yourself, your personality is never 100% as others might more commonly be in a situation. There are still aspects of you from that abusive household that form your core identity and your mind forever. So for those in favor at least walk a few minutes in those shoes. Go sit with a few drug addicts, and talk to them and what they put their families through, they tell plenty of stories if you are willing to listen. Put some time in with people who go through physical or sexual abuse to see what you are condemning kids to.

Again a sample size of one! Society is a product of billions of lives making billions of decisions. Billions of environmental factors. If it were to rerun from beginning to end the result would most certainly be different. However as there is only now and everything else is imagined, none of that matters or will ever happen. A truism of life is, that you can't predict it. I sometimes see things others miss but life still blindsided me often enough, because unlike a lot of people it's not mechanical in its decision making. As a combined thing, existence, life, even humanity is more organic.

I perceive all politicians to be corrupt because they are working within a corrupt system. You are what you do day to day, and sure you can make small changes for the better (all that most of us ever achieve), but that's just how it is. Money first people second in politics.

I've been through phases. I've feared what would happen at the start. I've hated Russia for what I saw. Now I'm at an acceptance. This is how Russia operates its military. We just have to accept this is the reality. Bring those to account when we capture them and give Ukraine every possible way to push the invaders as far out of the country as possible. The main problem is if Russia take any significant territory, Ukraine doesn't join NATO (or possibly the EU), Russia don't withdraw and Ukraine doesn't surrender, then this could well happen again 5 or 10 years from now for the third time. I don't see many ways out now from having a constant simmering war. One I see possibly working is Ukraine joining the EU, and getting defense treaties from Europe, that only happens if they are in a strong enough position to tell Russia that is what they are doing. If the main powers in Europe accept and pledge to defend Ukraine at the end of this war, then we might have a peace everyone can accept.

You can't possibly predict what happens over a large enough group free to create whatever they want. A sample size of one or a handful doesn't reflect billions of voices. *Again I'll say that, the way the internet is designed, to be focused on he who shouts loudest or replies the most, for example, facilitates the most extreme eye catching material to be in focus, isolating more moderate or reasonable conversation.