BlueOak

By taking an individualist view of empathy or experience. You are literally cutting yourself off from experiencing empathy for someone else or collective experience. Try looking at it collectively, as if the collective has emotions, experiences or even memory, that might loosen this really strict disconnected definition or belief you have. Rather than making a declaration about another, because by your own belief system, you can't possibly understand me or anyone else. Do you see that contradiction? It is because you believe so strongly in your own perspective and dismiss aspects of another you cut yourself off from empathy with them. I am literally feeling what you are putting out in this message in my chest :D. I do not know the nuance of it all, but that is where intellect and emotions differ. Emotions are broad concepts that don't require exact intellectual definition. They can be, and are often shared. Yes, you can see memories through another's eyes, I understand that. I've done that. However, that didn't grant any more empathy inside me than a deep and meaningful conversation that I can relate to. Watching someone on fire. If i've burned my finger, or my hand in your example I can related to fire and the emotion it brings. I don't need to set myself on fire 50,000 times to understand 50,000 people on fire. I understand fear for your life too and pain, perhaps not on that level but severe pain. You are referring to severity while ignoring I've already mentioned it. I'll do so again: The closer your experience to another's, the stronger the emotion or emotional reference point you'll have. The more you'll get them in simple terms. The empathy you can have for the perspective. Its not black or white, 1 or 0, life is rarely an absolute. You'll understand people more or less, depending how close their experiences are to yours, or how much you listen to or have experienced similar people sharing their life experiences with you. Your community, family, background etc. You've also again completely missed that there are collective experiences communities share, without individual recollection of them. The same is true for the human race as a whole. It's why we don't need to live 1 billion lives to have empathy to 1 billion people. By the way, you can connect to the collective depression if you want, its a like a huge void, or a huge sadness that is so big. For that it's good to be out in nature, listening to the earth, same with collective love or collective anger. In fact, people seem very good at collectively sharing anger.

We are different. Your strengths and weaknesses are not mine. Your inabilities or abilities are not my inabilities or abilities. Your lack of growth or growth in certain areas are not my own. This is not arrogance, this is a fact. It is your reflection of arrogance (that you keep seeing) to believe every perspective must align with you on certain areas to be valid. I don't hold the same view. I do not inherently think your perspective holds less meaning because it is not my own, because all of this is a representation of my own mind. I am able to perceive and empathize with people directly without experiencing exactly what they did. That is precisely my personality type, a mediator, diplomat or INFP-T to be precise. https://www.16personalities.com/infp-personality The proximity to what I have experienced in my life, may give me a stronger or weaker grasp on it or a stronger or weaker feeling, but it is there for everyone. As I have already indicated above, you can reduce these patterns to their base components and have emotional reactions to anything. All patterns have common components in them that can illicit feelings in us. Sure those feelings come from related experiences, but they also come from group experience, or as I have said recognizable suffering, success, hardships, or any emotion or circumstance. You seem to perceive people to be an island, that every experience is individual only to that person. This is not the case. We don't need to live a billion lifetimes to understand and empathize with a billion different people. You seem unaware that collectively there is a greater mind, or collective mind, or even subconscious outside our own focus, which filters through into each of us to bridge gaps in understanding. Yes, this is also us, outside of our immediate experience. Of course, people who empathize deeply with another take on a greater burden to add to their own. That is why most of us don't. That's why I am pretty hard with people. Why my boundaries are up most of the time, more so given my personality type. If you are in that field, where you open yourself up to often emotionally disturbed, suffering, or chaotic people you have to take time to clear yourself and look after yourself emotionally more so than usual. The argument you cannot know love without suffering has always baffled me. You don't need the opposite to experience the current. You may define it differently or appreciate it more certainly. Your argument though is I need to know 8 billion opposites to understand something. No, not on the emotional level which is inherently broad or collectively understood in nature. Intellectually it benefits you to have more experiences certainly but it's not as necessary emotionally. *In short, you are trying to invalidate anothers perspective because it doesn't match your own, and then saying you can't understand it. Well if you don't invalidate it, you'll be in a much better position to understand and empathize with it. If that is really your goal. You won't cut yourself up into pieces, the wall between them them | me, will dissolve more.

My intuition wants to add there is a singular pattern that all others are copied off, and if you understand this one, you can have empathy for all people. Love. - Lack of Love - Love - Lack of Love - Love - Lack of Love. - How do I get one and avoid the other? Everything else is derivative. Fill a void. Assuming an identity. Defending or strengthening the identity. Lust, Lies, Vanity. Defense. Protection. Evasion. Lies. Offense. War. Drugs, Drink, Loneliness. Possessions. Hoarding. Greed. Family. Social Group. Rebellion. Order. Self Worth, Self Pity. Avoidance. Escapism. Workaholics. Pride in yourself. Pride in your identity. Intellectual Curiosity, Acceptance, Denial, Overthinking a Problem. Everything. There is nothing anyone does that isn't directly related to the above pattern, even if it appears completely inverted. Life tends to be layered like this and if you get through all the conditioning it'll be this. With gradually more complicated patterns of behavior built on top.

I don't need to burn all five fingers, one is enough. I am able to understand why people make the mistakes they make without experiencing their full lifetime. Do I understand every nuance, no because it's not necessary for empathy. It would be more necessary for specific and detailed advice but that is different. A skilled psychologist or councillor for example can understand things about a patient just by observation, or a teacher, or a mentor, or a friend, or a good boss. They may have discussed, explored, or observed the more intricate details of that person's life, before offering specific advice to a problem or challenge they were facing, it depends on how specific the need is. There are common patterns inside people, cyclic events inside life, and even between lifetimes. You can see these and understand what generates them. There are so many commonalities between these patterns, that you can see them without being inside of them, especially if you've been in a pattern that is in any way related to it. Further than that I feel being supportive is often all someone needs, and helping where you can. I understand enough about you to know you mean well and try to help. You don't need everything to align perfectly with how you view the world. It doesn't invalidate your perspective. By taking such strict definitions you limit yourself. For example, thinking you need specific experiences of everyone's lifetime to have empathy for them. You don't. If we talked enough you'd probably see enough common patterns from me, to understand me. As a side note, there is no depth to consciousness. It is formless without dimension. Set an intent to experience that in your meditations.

Reaching self-love seems like a complete gamble, so much so the system is absurd. Each lifetime you guess a set of parameters you'll incarnate into or if you believe/feel we are attracted to incarnations, are attracted into a new incarnation. Then hope the experiences surrounding us, or we attract and seek out, somehow generate enough of an impulse toward love rather than conflict. Sure you'll have an impulse from the last lifetime(s) for better or worse, and cyclic repeating events, but that's not the main thing that drives you in your choices. The moment drives you, the immediate environment, the memory of your life experience, and maybe if you are lucky enough to catch it intuition. There are other places with different parameters than this world but duality is still the intersecting point of them. It really is just running forward and hoping conflict doesn't keep knocking you down while blind in each incarnation. Unless you somehow wander into a teacher (or events) who can help you out enough to see yourself? Then you get a better shot but not much. The older you get the more broad your points of reference, and the more conflicts are within your experience.

Maybe the cyclic events are what bring focus here, and if I persist I will have lifetimes of unconsciousness again. What are you becoming? Who or what is evolving? There is just this: ------------- ------------- Yet even though I know this in great unlimited depth without constraints, I am still here talking to myself. I could go on another billion lifetimes inventing flaws to solve. I am sure it would be entertaining, as it used to be. I don't want to be entertained or intellectually satisfied anymore. I've answered my own question. Thank you.

Inadvertently I understand your message we can learn by example. Good suggestion. I understand experience is required for many, but for me its not, a few points of reference are enough for suffering. I can experience empathy for another when I so choose. I also accept group consciousness changing, though I often try to resist it, I see it happen without experience of a direct event. You are in what you are referring to as a waking dream. So you do learn everything outside of physicality. If you don't perceive that, then imagine you are in your nightly dream. You are already learning something outside of physicality even if you perceive your experience as a body that way. For my own part, reality just is. There is nothing else. No dream, no body, no self-concept beyond what I (or the group) decide. I was fixing a split, an old belief I had stumbled over.

Thanks for the reply. Can you give me an example you've learned that is nonconflict related? By conflict I mean internal, and external, between two parts of yourself or your identity(identities). I can perceive spiritual experiences being one, but that would seem to fall outside of duality, and I feel can be learned outside of physicality. @AndylizedAAY

There is a large amount of energy in my head right now, that's all I know. There has been for a while. I should meditate to ground it but I haven't been doing so for some time. There has been an intensifying of the last 20 years issues, and I also have experienced that. I don't feel my emotional state lifting in the slightest, nor my physical body or circumstances changing much. I've been through actual ascension to reach infinite love (for all of 5 minutes which lingered for 2 days), and no its nothing like this. Its just a peak of energy at the moment. Come to think of it that's probably why I am not sleeping well, I will go meditate.

Do you believe conflict is the reason everyone incarnates into duality? Or do you believe there are several reasons?

Your probably just training yourself for the moment. Everyone gets another go before they incarnate again, your choice. No rush, that choice comes for everyone, and you might as well enjoy the time here for now. I once heard someone say, being small, and being big were precursors. Being infinite is just another state. I had a few where it felt like there was more but the experience stopped before I reached it. When it happens you'll just be without any sense of time or space and that will be okay. Then you'll be here again, in this state of mind. After that I don't know what my next one is, I had no resistance at all when I became big enough to be without form or sense of dimension. I just was. Maybe connecting infinite love to that state mentally, as i've only had both experiences separately. That could be it. Good luck to you anyway, many happy experiences.

Associations are useful. Suffering bad is one I suggest everyone make use of, otherwise you'll walk into walls for the rest of your existence.

They do at the time of conception. If I write a book, after a page is done, much of it is already flawed. Growth happens as we observe things. The problem(s) are how often the teachings are adapted and by whom. Additionally how restrictive people are to adapting their lives or connections to an ever-changing matrix of realities, rather than a singular truth. Which I believe you touch on in your videos, and is why many religious or spiritual practices lag or drag behind. Even if I sit there and try to let the absolute consciousness act for me to greater degrees, its going to come out more in patterns or often seemingly random acts that I might not understand in the moment, certainly not if its intended for something great than this identity sitting here typing it. Buddhism as a symbol or nexus cuts through a billion different realities, in a billion different ways. With many billions of connections, relationships or references to or with it. Who is to say that it isn't exactly what it needs to be, exactly now? Its inspired you to type this for example, and its inspired me to reflect on what you typed, forming different references, and relationships to the material within my perceived reality.

You could be an Adventurous Meditator. I used to think the spiritual experiences were a great adventure. They can still be fun. Part of meditation is getting a headstart on your day with intent, its you letting YOU arrange the day before you begin. Its also taking minutes in the middle of a hectic schedule to settle the mind/body/spirit. Some of the most successful people out there have a small amount of downtime mid-day. The mind needs space to organize, if its rush rush rush, then there is no structure or organization.

Yes and No. Yes. In dreams your limits dissolve and can come into reality. I have only experienced this out of curiosity/realisation/awakening, rather than material gain, or wanting a specific result. That was being me for a time, not the illusion of me I create for myself. Created so I understand that dreams from the absolute me bleed into or shape the waking world, as well as the other way around. In the correct state, operating from a place of love for yourself/others/all of you, yes. You did construct these limits, by dividing yourself - That doesn't mean start dreaming up sports cars and trying to pull them out of dreams :D. It means becoming/accepting/loving you, and things appearing in both dreams and life naturally. What part of yourself do you want? Or better what parts do you not want? You are everything, and the more you realise it the more you connect/integrate/align/resize/re-field/ yourself.

As we accept all. Heal all. Love all. Things become more settled. We are in a period of consolidation at the moment as well globally, drawing back, conserving, doing more with less etc. It rewards efficiency and refined routine.

I envy your upbringing and structured mind. My life was a mess of illogical inconsistencies. Vague metaphors. Decisions made out of fear. A constant uncertain environment. Unexpected spiritual experiences and general insanity for the first 30 years or so. You are your reality. So that's what I was.

Whatever you decide is wrong or right about it. Whatever meaning you assign to it and whatever connections you make to other beliefs or experiences you've had. The Ego can feel threatened and that puts you into a defensive mindset, survival, loss of identity, feel like you are dying, or what you consider important in life is fading away. That happens to all of us in life sooner or later, because that's how life is designed, this work speeds it up. Most people face their identity falling away for one reason or another. Most people feel what they considered important to their life fading away or passing away literally. Whether they are spiritual or not, everybody goes through it.

Gratitude En-joy. Someone once told me, Master any one thing completely and you'll reach similar conclusions about life. So far i've found this to be true. For me it was writing, and coming across dualities. Then listening to the frequencies of the sun in the most raw form I could find. I'd had a few as a kid without realising before that many years earlier, consciousness growing/shrinking etc.

Enlightenment. Is to en-light-en. For me it was literal. You become a white light reality and if you are able to stabilize divine love or infinite love as Leo calls it, you are everything, and no longer a dualistic human being for however long you are in that state. The more I say about it the less it is, divided up into pieces. Its everything. Where you are all things, accepted and loved. If you are able to observe that and experience it. It will be the single most beautiful state you've ever had. If you do, try to hug it, without moving. It'll stick around longer. After just five minutes of infinite love. The white light part of it stuck around for two days with me, I was at the train station a day later and the reality was cloudy white still. There are no prerequisites, there is no judgment, there is no requirement. No substances needed. Just love. That's it, that's all that exists in that state of reality/mind/body. For me its one more observable state, leo says infinite love what we all become (already are) when we are done with earth or duality (maybe both are true). The same as if I observe I am so big time and space no longer exist as a concept. That's still just one more observable state. I'm still just the observer. How did I get into that state. Gratitude for everything. -> Joy for everything - Love for everything. Every event, every person, everything you come across because its all you. My challenge is, loving any unresolved issue in your life can cause pain/conflict and pulls you out of that state when you are confronted with it. But that's why I started incarnating on earth in the first place, I sort out conflict and became the reflection of it. Although I have no idea if it will help your own journey, I used these steps. Toltec Shamanism, the fifth agreement is a great start, for one path I took. I purified my body with a very strong detox to get metals out, the secret energy website/group used to have a great detox that moved through each organ, pushing the toxins from one to the next as the body does. I did a lot of kundalini yoga - http://www.biologyofkundalini.com/. I switched to raw vegan and did a lot of energy work. There is an energetic release when you eat uncut raw foods, and it's always a great opportunity to experience gratitude and put that into your reality to experience it reflected. Self-inquiry for the mind to remove identity issues. Meditation, of course, a lot of facing the sun when doing so, barefoot out on the grass, a lot of time in nature away from electronics. Electronics interfere, and so do metals, and when the body's energy is moving, you will literally mess up computers when you touch them. Which was hilarious at work, every time i touched a screen it shorted out the till, metals might actually hurt you to wear. I also spent time seeking out spiritual masters, especially using the dream body before bed (dreams - when you have no boundaries, no limits). Closing dualities was also useful, I don't have a list for them to hand, but you can search for a list of dualities. Spend some time realizing how they are the same thing, and close them in yourself so you are more whole. Other than that, burn some white sage for clearing the space (which is you), do some crystal work, realise that when you can connect with yourself, you will answer any question you've ever had. (Because you made them all). All the best. Gratitude. Hope it helps.

What does enlightenment mean to you?

You have certain understandings and a sincere desire to share them. Parts of yourself have different perspectives. People use those perspectives to say one is better than the other, or something should be worded in a certain way. We are all ignorant until we come to realizations. Accepting that and hearing it voiced might allow you to better speak to that person (part of yourself).

If you want to experience people who are enlightened be enlightened. Whatever you consider that to be, be it. 1) Set the intent, then be receptive. 2) Use your dreamstate, set the intent before you sleep. Time doesn't exist while you sleep, there are no boundaries or rules. Set the intent to meet those pieces of yourself (them) in the dream. 3) Seek them out with an open heart/mind. 4) Start loving yourself. That's every piece of life (you) that you see, hear taste or touch. Be the reality that you want. If you want enlightenment or to experience it, its all coming from you. Like this post for example is a great start.

Are you creating a duality between your preferred state and the states that you observe in yourself?

Influenced sure. I am not the only piece of me represented in our dream. There are many billions of representations all interconnected, and their relationships with each other continually create reality out of them. This part, you, I am talking to is influencing reality right now. I am representing what you say to myself and then seeing, interacting, and experiencing reality slightly differently. People dismiss conversations all the time on this forum when they realise its themselves, but its the fundamental nature of you or life. Do you want to experience the development or the ability? Because we can create the need, the want, the process, the challenge, or the journey rather than the ability. Then let everything fall into place at the right time. Most of this stuff only happened, for me, when i'm focused on someone else AND in a self-loving state. I've had small experiences. Nothing huge or flashy. Shared dreams and reliving someone else's memory via the family tree or connection. Letting answers guide intuition is an easy one to show. Do you do any group work? That's where it might manifest with the least static or resistance, where its just fun for a small group. When everyone is in a state that is allowing it. Allowing yourself to find an object someone put in a room for you to find, when you both have the intent, drawing a message for the other person, those are fun sorts of activities for anyone reading. Act as a kid does, because every day to a kid is a magical mystery to observe. Letting reality guide your feet, is one I like doing in public, not caring where it wants to take me that day. (If anyone ends up walking in circles learn to laugh and let go a bit)