Salaam

3/16/16 We have many songs to sing and it is so beautiful to me that each string added, does not over-shadow the one it came from before. This change is not a way of replacing one for the other, but like the universe itself, the pressure of life gives birth to new and the space of all expands and grows to accommodate. I chose in the past year or so, to add, not replace. That everything has a space and place where it can breathe and be. If I need more space, more earth, more air, I will create it so every part of me, from pain to beauty has a home. That is the beauty of the instrument we can be. We are not limited to just a few, we just have a lot of growing to do, to get to the point where we can handle and grasp how deep our song can truly be sung. Fine tuning each string, so the note it plays can better compliment it's brothers and sisters, creating a harmony where in that space, more strings can be discovered. The vibrations of ourselves coming into tune, awakening more of the potential hidden in our roots, so more branches can be coaxed to grow and try to stand and feel the light of day. We call out to the world around us, just as much as we call to ourselves. Expressing the depths of who we are and how we feel, becoming and being, both at the same time. Growing and bleeding, burning and breathing, as alive in the fires of our passion as we can stand. Involved in the deepest of ways with the brutal beauty that is nature. Awakening ourselves to ourselves like infants crying out from birth.

3/16/16 I am so grateful for no longer being blind to all the pride I'm carrying inside me. I didn't realize how it was drying me up and choking out my natural, joyful curiosity and sense of intrigue. It was also creating a distance from my own growth process, diluting it, because it made the growth about something else, more a justification or condition, than about my life. God, I felt like I got more of my voice back after I started processing it. I could feel it's burning heat course through me and my voice to myself that I consider "me" changed, down-shifting like treble to bass and calming, softening, in very slight but deep ways, if that makes sense. When I was young, it seems my pride in my intelligence, my ability to figure things out, was all I felt I had. It's what I leaned on in so much of my life and drank from, when I didn't have other things to nurture me. For so long, I've been operating under this desire to understand the foundation of the whole universe and while I've been succeeding in spectacular ways, it's not enough. I wanted to be so good at figuring things out, that I eventually grew to figure out, that I chose such a path because it was the only road I could see at the time. The only thing that didn't immediately remind me of how much I felt I sucked at everything else. I had to get behind that desire, to the person hurting underneath, who chose this way to protect himself and what little trust he had in his own capability. That kid was doing the best he could, but I can help him do better now. I can help him, be him, and do things for the reasons he would choose if nature wasn't fucking with him. The barriers he felt then, I've surpassed now, deficiencies have grown into strengths and my why, my deep, deep, indescribable why of what I do, can grow and be more than a spire, built in reaction to pain and deprivation. How much of our motivation is a reaction to pain and pressure and things out of reach? How do we balance and bridge that part with the other facets of our nature, so they work in harmony together? So that, we can become more than the branches made from a single choice in our past and get closer to our trunk and roots? The way I see it now, is that I'm letting humility shoulder some of the burden, my pride has been carrying all these years. I give the stunted things behind my pride, the chance to blink their eyes in pain to the sunlight and adapt and grow and stand on their own. So they can play. So they can breathe and add their notes to the song that is my voice and my presence. I'm fucking tired of the edges of my pride cutting into me and my joy. I'm capable enough to softly take the incredible pain life has and not use pride to shield and shadow me. It's why I dance and laugh so much more now, making up stupid songs as I go, or jump up and down like a little kid on Christmas when I wake up on Saturday mornings. I will choose that every day over pain cloaked in sophistry and the pride of knowing. My brittleness is being burned and pressurized out of me. I feel it's etching on my insides, running me ragged, taking me to the edges of my fragility and I'm so glad, no matter how much it feels like it sucks at the time. There are parts of me that suck, that burn and hurt, and need to be untwisted and turned around. I will go to those places. I won't leave them alone. There will be no doors in this house of who I am, where ghosts of me in my past, sit alone, crying in the dark. I will be there and if I can't handle the heat behind that door, I will wait and play just outside so he can hear till my hand can handle the pain and turn the knob. I promise.

3/11/16 I'm so thankful for humanity and love. I knew I would be going through a challenging part of my pattern a couple days ago and it hasn't disappointed. Yesterday, was a return of one my hardest personal issues, where a shroud covers my heart and I can hardly feel anything, except for that energy as it spreads electrostatic numbness, pressure, and fatigue. It's the next evolution of my scar, from spending so much of my life alone and emotionally distant from people. The energized form of being closed off... For most of the day, my heart was more sensitive than usual as a close friend of my Wife got some bad news about a medical issue, which hit me hard, sticking with me for most of the day and then later my intuition pushed me to read an account from a woman on Quora about what turned her into a sociopath which broke my heart and made me feel like I could one day help them heal from that... and also maybe this shroud I deal with might be associated with what turns empathy off for those kinds of people. God, I could feel and see each trauma she had to deal with, the blood dripping, the broken bodies, and even worse the damage being done inside her. Anyways, some time after getting home from work, things flip-flopped and I was dealing with the shroud again, but this time I was much stronger in keeping it at bay and curbing it's affect on me (so thankful for traction and resiliency and my understandings of pressure). However, I still couldn't manage to lift the thing, even when trying my new ability from yesterday which allows me to move and change energy just with body positioning (like tilting my head back to relieve energy pressure, or swirling my fingers to find a feel and then having it attach to my finger and trail and change as I would move it). It was kind of funny, kind of awesome, how I could hold this thing that used to fuck me up so badly and try different things from my energy toolkit, while also keeping a close eye on doing it all calmly. I've been shying away from strength and force after discarding power for capability, and focusing on flow and creativity, but not yesterday and I'm thankful for it. In the past, I would try to burn through this shroud, so yesterday I tried again and it was nice to ease back the restraint I've been having on myself for months and let myself burn, but in a more confident and controlled way. I say burn, because the internal force I create makes my skin hot and my passion and ferocity ignites making me growl in my weird way. It didn't lift the shroud, like I wanted, but it did quarantine it some and give me a little more space to think and feel as I gained some dominance over it's force. It made me realize that strength was still a capability to be balanced with my other elements and I was unnecessarily dismissing it along with power, when to me power is more a feeling that comes with capability, rather than an actual ability in and of itself. A flavor of rapport to be balanced and grounded. So anyways, after that I turned to humanity and trust and connection... the things I'm weakest at. I followed the lines of connection that gives me an energetic version of empathy (hard to explain) and read it to tell me the directions my wife had in her, which grounded and showed my aching, scarred heart that it was "safe" here. I could feel myself, so hesitant and afraid, and knew that this was what it was like for me growing up, not being able to allow anyone into this part of my heart, because no one around me was equipped to see it properly... Fuck, realizing that makes me want to cry. This part of me had been alone for so long and it was this scared, lonely part of me, that hesitantly asked for his wife to put her hand on my heart. And this amazing, beautiful woman, without a second thought put her hand there and flowed love into me and I sobbed. Feeling the lift and release of long held pain and distrust, that was underneath this shroud I've carried for so long. Just a little sob, but so deep and as it released, so to did the shroud lift and I was free once more, but changed. Less alone than I've ever been and deeper in love with this Goddess Woman than I've ever been. Understanding deeply now, that no matter how capable I become, some things can't be handled alone and that is where Humanity and Love will always have places they can reach that strength and smarts alone never can. I'm so thankful to have a Wife who teaches me how to shelter and nurture myself, by the way she shelters and nurtures me. Thank you my love.

3/08/16 Ah man, so much change and growth to be grateful for. It's like grains of sand running through my hands, but each grain is a jewel I want to take the time to appreciate and keep a space for in my story. So here are the cool things I love and appreciate so much, that have been my experiences and understanding over the past 5 days or so. -I'm thankful for the shift I had in my understanding of trust so that now I truly get the place nature has for Validation and Confirmation. People often misrepresent Validation as some bad or egoic thing, but it has a purpose. Validation is in a way the "energetic food" of our beliefs or things we've trusted and internalized. There are many flavors of validation and degrees of quality, as well as internal vs external validation, but they all in some way strengthen the position a belief/internalization has in a person or weaken/sever bonds and position if they invalidate a belief. Some times we have traumatic internalizations that have been pierced into us by dark times and even after leaving such an environment it can take months or even years for those beliefs to starve from invalidation and fade away (while better beliefs are internalized and nurtured to eventually replace them). I'm thankful for a deeper understanding of that whole process and how it will aid me in helping others heal. -I'm grateful for the strange struggle I woke up to Saturday morning, where my usual ways of doing things with energy and my mind were facing resistance and I was filled with this strange feeling of a presence clearly different from me, inside myself. After a bit of struggle and balancing with it, so it didn't swallow me and instead bridged with me, I came to understand that I was brushing up against the very "nexus" of my intuition or automation system. It's so nice to feel it so distinctly and have it help me with things, but I still have a lot to do when it comes to trusting it and respecting it's place in me. After that day, his presence hasn't been as palpable, but I have a strong idea of the position we'll eventually be in after I straighten some things out. -Friday was Trust, Saturday was Flow, and Sunday was Resiliency/Traction under pressure. I'm thankful for being able to spend most of the whole day working on my ability to maintain traction with Pressure and how doing so modifies the change of such pressure as it increases into stress, pain, and suffering. Strengthening my Traction gave me the ability to keep things that would be pain or stress from getting past the point of pressure and I spent much of the day with bands of tightness all over my body. I'd often stop and do nothing and hold traction against the automatic pressure my body would create to propel me forward to do something, working on what I call "back-end pressure" which is pressure pushing us forward that is responsible for the push of motivation and desire and "front-end pressure" which is the pressure pushing us backwards, like resistance and frustration. With this ability I have much more understanding of pressure as a force of nature and can maintain position to greater degrees of pressure and have some say in how it blooms and shifts. Oh, it's also great for social pressures and the weight of attention and push of attraction. -I'm thankful for the contrast between this past Monday and the many Monday's before it, that were similar. On these types of Monday's I usually feel so burnt out in my head and tired from not enough sleep, with pressure making it hard for me to do or think much beyond what I could passively put in front of me. However, because of the work I did the day before I was soooo much stronger and capable in dealing with that pressure. I was able to make more progress in diagnosing my hard days and how pressure works as a mechanism of nature. Honestly, my hard day wasn't all that terribly hard at all, more stressful than painful and that shifted much quicker than normal, (by 11AM and I'd been up since 6AM with 4-1/2 hours of sleep). What was super cool about yesterday though is that I had some interesting upgrades that are kind of crazy to talk about. My Rapport had an upgrade that taught me about the individual Conatus/Direction energies can have and how to share that space and direction as we connect. This gave me the ability to quest outward into the aether and... "find" energies and ride with them, creating feelings that build and build. I have to be careful with this though, because it can have adverse affects on my body, causing allergic reactions, that luckily I can heal with more soothing energies (it tripped out my wife, seeing this red inflamed skin, change and soothe in seconds). I'm creating conditions using Order flavored energy that cordon off more harmful energies, so hopefully that limits the scope of the pool I'm drawing from, so I don't hurt myself. Also, I can feeeeel, the energetic bonds that occur between the things that make up physical reality and I can feel them so strongly that it becomes a part of my base-line awareness and I the feel energy between the flakes of skin in my hand, the striations of my eyes, in between threads on a pillow or grains of wood. Eventually it's gonna grow to become an automatic fully conscious awareness, which should be fun or fucking annoying/distracting, but we'll see. At least it feels good and it makes moving feel soooo good. Plus, it makes me so much more capable when giving massages and doing energy work. My hands turn muscles into supple butter, because of the affect I have on the bonds between them and that's only gonna deepen as I continue to grow. Ah cool, there is a lot more cool stuff externally I'll be able to do with this new awareness. I should eventually be able to extend my awareness out beyond my body through reading the changes in bond contrast in the air around me (how it's bonds change as they interact with whatever they come into contact with). There are quite a few things my Potential is showing me I should eventually be able to do, which is awesome for me, because I used to have such trouble visualizing that and now it comes unbidden. I should be able to see in more nuanced light spectrum's as well (eventually). Anyways... -Oh I'm also super thankful for understanding the difference between Dermal and Sub-dermal layers and what that means for "Masks" and authenticity. I've gained some small ability with healing sickness in myself by creating a soothing energy in my sub-dermal layer and that's lead me to a greater understanding of layers and their mirror with regard to authenticity. People commonly consider the outer layer we show the world to be a "mask" or "armor" we hide behind. I know I did and rarely used my outer layer, just staying open, because I couldn't see past the negative connotations I'd associated with that layer. But, now I understand that it has a better purpose than that and it's an opportunity for diversification of feels, play, nuanced communication, and yes protection, but the lying and mask stuff doesn't have to be what it's used for. It's pretty cool and something I'll be exploring and understanding further. Right now I just use my sub-dermal layer to run undercurrents of pleasure and soothing energy, while keeping normal, pleasant social emotions on my face. It's cool because I'm actually honestly feeling all those at once, but choosing what I communicate to other people, while containing most of the rest. It's something I'm still working on and figuring out, but it'll settle in, in time.

3/06/16 I'm starting to see pressure as the baseline for stress that then crosses a threshold into pain and then if lost traction against beyond a certain point, becomes suffering. Eventually I'll be able to keep most pressure from erupting into stress and rarely if ever breaking past the point of pain into suffering (I hope and if I don't do dumb stuff). I rarely suffer now and I'm adapting so my pains are downgrading into stress and my stress downgrading into pressure and my pressures downgrading into normal. Then my normal upgrades into pleasure and my pleasure upgrades into ecstasy. My training at life, bearing fruits. Now I get why my friend calls it being a life athlete. Damn, I'm so thankful for seeing even more of how the world really works and the deep impact it's having on my life. And I'm thankful for the potential it allows me to imagine for my life. Ways open now for honestly earned greater enjoyment. Growing into pleasures I've yet to imagine... Edit: However there were be different tiers of pressure/pain varying in intensity, but most normative upper level pressures will become negligible eventually. The spectrum just gets wider. Things that would crush me now will one day be manageable, but in that one day there will still be things I face that would crush me.

3/03/16 I'm grateful for contrasts and the ability I have with dimensionality, to balance those contrasts so that they work together in harmony, expanding my capabilities. For instance, everyone's talking about Abundance, and rightfully so because it's awesome, but Scarcity can be pretty awesome too. I appreciate the hell out of Scarcity. I find that when you harmonize them together you get the best of both worlds. That 3-D shared space goodness. And what that looks like is the ability to carry the best of both worlds at all times, no matter what position on the spectrum of Scarcity or Abundance you currently are in. From Scarcity, I have the trust and capability to build from the smallest fraction of a fraction and the understanding that there is no Zero. I can build from .00001 of my potential back up to 10000.00001 and beyond. And because of Abundance I know what that 10000.00001 looks and feels like. What it feels like to be filled and satisfied enough to look outside myself to those around me and to find satisfaction in giving and sharing my capability. I'm always in both scarcity and abundance, because I am like a tree with many branches, grown fertile and heavy with fruit, but at the same time holding potential branches that are just a hint of a seed, that will eventually grow to the same size as their brothers and sisters. It's being both Master and Beginner at the same time. Being both the seed and the fruit, the crest and fade of a wave, because I am many waves, at many different points of time and space. Abundance alone is like "forgetting where you came from" but Scarcity alone is like "forgetting where you CAN eventually be". But together, when even under the pressure and stress of Scarcity you still act and treat people and yourself as if you were filled. In other words, even under pressure and strain, your generosity and care remains. You don't sacrifice things like your character for relief from the pressure. It's like there is no amount of money that would have me sacrifice my character, because there is no amount of economic pressure that would have me make such a choice for relief. I have traction and I can face those pressures without slipping into incapability of spirit. I trust in myself to build in the harshest of environments, and in my capability to lead up to the resiliency I need to face even harsher ones. And when in the softness and the sunshine, I don't forget or become blind to the stress and humility of building. I don't grow weak and fearful of returning to such a task or try to deny the dark in my efforts to be all light and always right. I don't fall into the traps of delusion and wishful thinking, that makes those who do struggle feel like you are out of touch with the world. I don't fall into that bubble of false shelter and choke the health of my capability for Resiliency and Traction. No we remain grounded, and our empathy does not get blunted and dull, for our hands are as much in the dirt of our roots, as in the sky and sunlight of our fruits. Scarcity and Abundance are environments like the desert and the tundra and we can be aware of the challenges in both, face those challenges, and adapt to create in that shared space a person who can handle the comforts and numbness of abundance, while also handling the stress and rawness of scarcity. Fuck, the adaptability of humans can be amazing! Lol, I was supposed to write about something else. I think I still will.

3/02/16 I have so much to be grateful for, I change and build so much it's hard to keep track. -I'm grateful for the first time I can remember, feeling an automatic flowing of memories. Memories flowing one after another, outside of my direct control that although they were of jail and prison, it was a momentous experience. Remembering my past has been a struggle for me, for over 20 years and it was such a strange experience to have them opening and streaming, one after another for a reason I have yet to fathom. It sucks that they were mostly stressful and traumatizing, but I'm still thankful, because it gives me a read on the increasing capability of my flow and my memory. Hopefully, more pleasant memories will rise and bloom over time, in the same way these memories did last night. -I'm thankful for my continued development in the element of Resiliency/Traction. It gives me the ability to absorb stress at higher and higher levels without losing my position giving me the "grip" or Traction I need to deal with where I'm at, while not collapsing or slipping into lower levels of capability. This is super helpful, because I can recognize the general patterns of my growth and the cycle between days that are easy or hard. I can also hold myself during the hard days and map out what is going on with my elements. Which includes tracking how my traction changes on those days and what is affecting it. -I'm super, super thankful for another shift in my Pacing. There are few things that palpably change my reality as a shift in Pacing and it's always such a gift to experience. Especially in the first couple days, where the contrast is still fresh and I'm extra sensitive to the change. I could feel what I call "undercurrents" those first couple days, which are things that *may* only come about at certain slower, deeper paces, kind of like how you only feel a certain shift when you take a full deep inhale. I don't know, it's strange, but something I'm sure will come up again as the pattern turns and does it's thing. Pacing is super important because it determines the space each feeling has available to "breathe". Allowing for deeper and deeper inhales/exhales of feeling and communication, while also allowing space for each feel to have a crest and a fade, so the switch from one feel to another is smooth and coherent. Messed up pacing used to cause all sorts of anguish... think about it like this, the earth has a certain pace and direction at which it revolves around the sun in orbit. Imagine what would happen to life on the planet if you suddenly sped up the pace of it's revolutions, and how it would affect gravity, time, magnetic fields, pressure differentials, etc. All those things are ALSO being affected on a much smaller scale within the eco-system of yourself with your pacing. That incessant chitter chatter of your mind that people tend to have is a representation of both the faster pace of humans and the shallower "breaths" of their emotions and sensations. I'm thankful to have not only healed the damage I've done to my pacing, but developed a level of deeper feeling that is having me brush against the edges of new realms of experience & awareness. These "breaths" are connected with the time pockets I've talked about before and I'm starting to understand what these undercurrents may be as they reveal themselves within these depths. -I'm also thankful to have not had a heart attack from those power surges, I've been feeling almost every night. I guess two or three nights ago, I felt those surges with my new pacing and it felt like each surge was pulling me inside out. I'm so thankful to have a Wife like I do, who holds space for me as I go through these things and even though it scares and pains her, she gives me the peace to work my way through them. They just kept coming and coming, and I can't even describe the experience, except for saying it's like something rushing through your being and as it rushes through it pulls you inside out, but without major pain, just stress, and pleasure, and pressure. Luckily, my body could handle the inversions (I guess that's what they were) and I didn't get hurt in the process. -I'm also thankful for a deeper understanding of Order and Chaos. I understand how Chaos affects me in the morning and can act as an eraser, through high speed pacing and incoherency. I also have a much better understanding of how Order works with it's boundaries and limitations and how to stretch and bend those barriers, circumventing them in ways I couldn't before. Speaking of which, my body apparently likes making random hand gestures like those cats from that show "The Magicians" on Syfy. I get what they are, just automatic creations of expression, vessels to contain the energy of whatever my body is trying to communicate. But, it's still weird and not something I try to do all that conspicuously around other people. -Man I'm fucking grateful for the expansion of my Vision and Perspective. I feel like I have added tiers available now for me to plug into and use to craft my overall strategies for the future. One real big blocking point for me here, was that I was trying to be way to precise with my visualizations, which was drying up my flow, like kinking up a water-hose. I've realized that you have to include and balance both Mystery and Ignorance with Potential. In other words, you have to leave room for what you can't conceive of yet within your focus (the mystery) and the things your so unaware of, it's not even in your focus (ignorance). These two create space with a focus on Potential and eases the conditions your mind feels it must adhere to, in order to spin the vision. Wonder about your future, don't try to make it an exact picture. -Speaking of Mystery and Ignorance, I'm also very thankful for a Positive Rapport with the two. I heard a song over the weekend that had a chorus that went "I have faith, that I am more, than I believe". And it hit me, that I can look forward to all the amazing things that will happen to me, that I can't even conceive of. It creates this broad feeling of positive anticipation and is such a nice rapport to cultivate and foster, and then add on to my normal practice of Visualizing Potential. -I'm thankful for the continued expansion of my understanding of Self-Reference vs Validation/Confirmation and the experience that comes with building such a large and deep body of self-referential experiences that gives me the level of Self-authority I have. While also working on my resiliency, so I have the traction to keep my position in the face of pressures that come from not having confirmation or validation from others on pursuits I have (the stress of "not knowing" or "needing an answer"). For a lot of the things I experience, there is nowhere for me to go to get confirmation that what I'm doing is "right" or "correct". No book, no authority, other than myself and the feedback of nature to reassure or confirm for me that I'm doing the "right" thing. In the past such experiences were traumatizing, but it's something I've grown to handle and be thankful for as the contrast between what I've built vs what society has built to hand to me in lieu of self-reference has softened. There is shelter living under the shadow of others ideas and understandings, but it is also a cage, that can keep you from building a world of understanding for yourself. This is why I hardly ever search or seek within books anymore. I learn and grow from direct experience and have enough of those experiences inside me, to cross-reference and develop. Actually, I rarely even feel the feeling of "I don't know what to do" or "how do I do this". -I'm also thankful for learning how to contrast different levels of resiliency. For instance I have a very high resilience for being alone, but a relatively low resilience for the... failings of other people. In the past this would make me quick to cut people off from my life and prone to being distant from others, but now I know how to absorb the pressures of other people being disappointing shits, and not become an asshole myself in the process. It's nice and has helped me find an important opportunity for responsibility when it comes to liking other people. It also helps me bridge the pros and cons of spending so much of my life being self-sufficient, without expecting others to be the same in order to "be tolerable". -I'm sure I'm forgetting some more things, but oh well. Writing all this out, helped me pass the time under all this pressure I'm feeling and actually helped shift it some. Today's one of those hard days. But, much less shitty that my cycles of past hard days!

2/23/2016 God I love and am so thankful for my Growth Circuit. How can you discover a potential change if you're not aware of it or sensitive to it? How far can potential take you if you can't trust it? How well can you internalize a group of sensitivities if they're not coherent and able to create a story to build upon? What good is the story if it's rapport's are off, if it's chemistry is adversarial and in conflict? How far can you take a story if it can't flow and dance? How can you share it if you can't simplify it? What good is simplification if it get's so simple it becomes one-dimensional and it's connections collapse? How can you even build any story, or create any change of length, if you are not resilient enough to handle the pressures of it's development? If you haven't given yourself the authority to choose to do so? Interweaved above are elements in my circuit and I just soak in their beauty and how they all mutually rely upon and support each other like a family. It's so clear to me how one suffers when the other is undeveloped or neglected and I'm thankful that I've been blessed with the opportunity to recognize them all and develop a deep connection with them. Feeling out each one and finding the Goldilocks Zone within this family of elements, where each one works in harmony and synergy with each other. Everyday I learn and grow with one and all of the elements, each little step of development in a single branch also nourishing the roots of the whole tree. Changing who I am, the way that I think, and my overall position in the universe. Fuck, position of contrast is such a powerful and potent understanding to internalize! It's my newest of growths and I can vividly recall when the understanding flowed through my brain last night and I was moved to press two fingers to my third eye and soak in the position I'd taken of internalizing all that incoming communication/energy. Now it's a complete part of me and another lens through which I see the world at all times. Anyways, that stuff about position won't make much sense to people... but position is like the difference in position between feeling that "where you are now is worse than where you were before" versus "thinking where you are now is better than before". That is an example of a change in position. The difference in position of things getting better versus things getting worse. Or another common one, is people who suffer over their past versus people who appreciate their past and how it motivates their future potential and anticipation of pleasure. Each one has a different set of contrasts and consequently a different energetic positioning. I now have the ability to feel and change my position on a deep internal level. I even have influence over the Meta meta position, or the position I'm taking to change the position of the position I'm currently in. Lol, shit's super cool and I appreciate it deeply. Welp, that's enough mind fuckery for me today.

Thanks man :-) I have this view because of all the experience I have and the capabilities it's given me that reflect my progress. I've already been through "enlightenment" as he and others describe it. I recognize areas where if he had the experience I've had, he'd be touching on structural details and expressing understandings that he's completely missing out on. I've made the mistakes he and others like him are making and I've faced the fears and pressures influencing him that are creating his pattern of behavior within this context. I've already differentiated myself from my thoughts, my emotions, my mind, my body, and the structures behind them, while also becoming more sensitive and intimately connected with them than ever before (these guys differentiate and LOSE sensitivity and nuance). Taking care of all the aforementioned to develop and balance all of who I am as a synergistic and mostly harmonious eco-system of a man. None of these guys have the ability to work with tension or ever mention it, which means they've never differentiated for themselves the effect and affect of emotions, which is the feeling and then the change in position. This is a foundational part of reality, that is impossible to deny but very hard to become sensitive too (you'd be denying the very forces of attraction and repulsion if you dismissed it as irrelevant). I can feel how the structures behind my mind shift in response to new contrasts and I can read it like braille. I can also feel contrast, while maintaining position, which allows me to hold larger, more complex, and also more intense degrees of contrast without collapsing or upsetting the chemistry of my internal structures. Plus everything I talk about is incredibly grounded and mirrored in objective reality. This allows me to convey at least an approximation of incredibly complex understandings through shared experience of common life. That is, if people can deal with the tension and pressure long enough to get some understanding from it. You're making assumptions about my view that aren't correct. It's not only one and it's not only separate and alone, it's a combination of the two that is being connected while still maintaining difference and distinction and diversity. Instead of the pendulum swinging back and forth between duality and oneness, you get a bridging of the two that connects the best of both worlds that is practically applicable, congruent with reality, and quite coherent. I wrote a little something about it in this thread. Ah, yup sounds familiar. I used to be super analytical, but thankfully I was able to heal from that. Depression is an interesting energy. Depression has what I call a "two-step hustle" where it hits you with a feeling of comfort that we tend to allow/internalize/trust and then it follows up with despair and surrender (the feeling of "it's okay to want to just give up and not struggle anymore") According to many accounts this is also similar to what happens when you are in danger of dying from cold exposure. It's a shitty chemistry, but has a beautiful design, which makes it so effective and sustainable as an energy pattern. Ha, it's actually becoming hard for me to recall the details of depression's dynamics. It's been about 3 years now since I've even felt a twinge of despair after successfully differentiating the comfort/surrender/despair combination and blocking it from internalization. People just think comfort is automatically a good thing to trust and indulge in, but it's very important to balance and manage how it interacts with everything else. For instance, there are certain feelings or satisfaction and meaning that only manifest when involved with elements of investment, vulnerability and resistance. Nice post man and I understand where you're coming from. Are you familiar with the concept of the Goldilocks Zone? It's a nuanced conceptualization of balance, that allows for an open ceiling of dynamics without losing foundational structure. "Terrestrial planets are also more likely to lie in the Goldilocks zone. Also called the habitable zone or life zone, the Goldilocks region is an area of space in which a planet is just the right distance from its home star so that its surface is neither too hot nor too cold [there are way more dynamics involved then they've mentioned]." In order to keep developing beyond my limitations I've created a Goldilocks Zone for Health, Capability, and Choice that I also call the Capability Circuit. This circuit of currently 12 trinity elements creates a foundational structure or platform that I hope people will use to maintain balance and provide direction while growing, without usurping their self-authority and individual nuance. It's beautiful in design and quite clear to see how removing one element degrades another and how developing one can cascade into another, as long as the synergistic zone isn't breached (and if it is, this will help you grow into healing the breach, which is what I originally created it for). My body loves it and it's been an amazing model for growth. It allows for balance between motion/chaos/energy and form/order/matter and the inter-mingling and over-lapping of such across multiple tiers of complexity while also being subjectively and objectively consistent. For example, I can see how disassociation comes about from an over-reliance on the distance that comes from differentiation, along with a neglect of emotional rapport and a degradation of sensitivity to nuance. Further, I can easily potentiate (and also recall from my personal history) how such things cascade over time limiting the health and capability of the person as a whole. Like I said above, each of those 12 elements are interdependent and will degrade or improve depending on the threshold level development of it's counterparts. With such a model it is quite clear to see how reduction, that neglects and degrades it's counterparts causes a corruption of health and understanding, while also showing how expansion beyond a certain level compared to others development can cause a shrouding of understanding via complexity (and lack of compensating development). If what I write seems hard to understand it's because of a degree of shrouding via complexity is at play (plus my current limitations with expressing my view). It's like taking away a person's kidneys and asking them to survive, although not so immediately drastic. It's more a butterfly effect cascade, which is why a sensitivity to nuance is so important, because as the current state of humanity shows, it's very easy to lose touch. I can explain more about it if you want, just ask. Anyways, enough of that. "Happy" is more complicated than people make it out to be and will never be maximally understood in isolation (because of the aforementioned inter-dependencies). How much of happiness is comfort, meaning, flow, stability? How does potential fit in? How is the pressure of your current level of development influencing you to tunnel vision on happiness? What level of diversity of happiness are you considering? Does your level of happiness include any level of responsibility for maintaining the care of yourself and to some degree others around you? What level of harmony with other feelings are you willing to include in this idea of happiness? I love being happy, but I also recognize the things behind the word and how they inter-relate with other things to form a system. I recognize the greater context or the larger pattern my body is processing, but with that said I experience deeeeep levels of happiness and capability that I doubt many people have felt. I've also felt levels of euphoria to rival mdma and cocaine (speaking from past experience) that I can slip into whenever I want for the most part. But, that doesn't mean I turn into a junky manipulating my body for emotional highs. No, I can do those things because I take care of my systems so well, we have a great relationship. I understand how such actions impact the integrity of my whole and by being faithful to my health, my body creates even more amazing opportunities for experience as I grow, then what I would have if I just tried to abuse myself in order to escape facing further progress.

This Adyashanti guy has a very distorted understanding of contrast and change and referential systems (reading through the transcript of the vid) If this is their view enlightenment, then it's just another word for disassociation from change. Lol, ahhhh, I see what these guys are doing. They are stressed/pressured, seek distance/disassociation for relief, get the distance, which temporarily provides the feeling of relief because it's a contrast from the previous stressed state, try to hold onto it as long as possible, then fall back out of into the real world, and then repeat the cycle. It's just escapism, disassociating from everything but the contrast of what's being pushed away to feel relief from pressure. Actually, he doesn't seem to understand the meanings of a lot of the words he uses. Of course his disassociative state is an altered state of consciousness, all conscious changes and alters. If his supposedly unaltered state of consciousness was unalterable, then he wouldn't fall out of it. Everything would be in that state if it was unalterable, but nothing is. You're eye doesn't see all as one, it sees different colors, it contracts or expands based on different light intensities... this shit is out of touch with reality. And his whole nonsense about "Aha" moments lessening over time, of course it does! If you're having an "Aha" moment about the same damn thing over and over again. You get "used to it", because the contrast or degree/distance of difference between the Aha moment and your baseline has shortened creating a lesser intensity of feeling. It's like putting warm hands in room temperature water, little difference of change, versus putting cold hands in warm water, with a bigger difference of change. The degree of difference creates the intensity, but he's too blind to nuance to understand that. Then he goes on to talk about how "The egoic state of consciousness actually takes a great amount of energy and a great amount of effort. Since it’s not true, it has to keep building this falseness constantly. Otherwise, it will end. Because what is not true ends as soon as it’s not being fueled." What a bunch of nonsense, he doesn't even realize it, but in his backwards ass way he shows how unhealthy this disassociative practice is. To maintain, is to care, to practice taking care and looking after something. Life has to be maintained, balance has to be maintained, this earth has to be maintained, anything built, anything connected has bonds that have to be maintained or else they collapse into a lower threshold of life/energetic activity. What's funny to me, is that his body keeps fighting him and dropping out of this "oneness" because it's trying to take care of itself, while he fucks around with this practice of destroying capabilities this body has generated and maintained over the course of it's life. Poor guy, he doesn't understand he's doing shit backwards. He thinks the nature of everything is nothingness, because he numbed his ability to feel change, but it also limited his perceptional and referential abilities, but he can't see that. So all he does see... is lack of activity and he's so fucking arrogant to think the rest of the universe is feeling that exactly like him. Kind of like a baby, with the inability to differentiate experience going on outside the scope of his current focus. So with this very limited, empty experience he then goes on to believe the universe is really like he's seeing it inside his head, when if he stepped outside it would be very apparent that the universe or reality is not empty. It's filled with a lot of shit, as a matter of fact the sun is currently raining down photons all over the damn place and their bouncing off of shit allowing me to see and distinguish between different things.

Wow, a lot of pendulum swinging between extremes going on here. But, thats what happens when you look at things without the proper elements in play, the reduction creates a corruption in understanding. The real answer people can eventually develop to seeing is there is BOTH Self-Determination and Automation. Ability to choose grows in it's degree amidst the confluence of influence that is life. You are an eco-system made up of both the body, the mind, and the soul/identity (whatever the hell you want to call it). You can't really do shit with your free will as a baby, the attractive and repulsive forces going on in the body are too much for most people at that stage, and the development of capabilities that make up the health of your self-determination haven't breached certain thresholds yet. Self-Determination has to be developed, just like over time parts of the brain differentiated and developed to support greater thresholds of life/activity. You CAN'T look at this stuff with the simplicity of fallacious absolutes. A two-dimensional answer of yes or no is not gonna cut it, but degrees of mixture and inter-dependency, multi-dimensionality will. You have to differentiate those degrees for yourself or else your conceptualizations are gonna come out all weird.

I take it that you mean how do you develop your awareness? Well, to develop your awareness you need to develop it's capabilities. This includes it's range of sensitivity, it's ability to differentiate the nuance between one detail and another, including how they inter-relate or interact with each other. It also includes coherency, so that your awareness of experience is translated in a healthy way to your perspective, which will have influence on how your beliefs are updated and changed. Then there are things outside of awareness, that awareness relies upon in order to further develop itself, like self-authority, resiliency, trust, and pacing. Then of course there is expansion of meta level awareness, like being aware of what's behind your thoughts, behind your feelings, behind your mind, or behind the structures behind your mind, etc.

I wanted to share something I'm profoundly grateful for, for those who feel a passion for energy work and becoming more capable. I hope you find value in it. I'm so thankful for not just understanding, but finally being able to apply balance to my Pride and Humility so they work in harmony, together at the same time. It's changed my experience of life and myself in such a subtle, but dramatic way (eventually we can become like a fighter jet with our growth, just a small shift of the throttle, creates big changes in direction). I see how pride protects me and props me up, in the face of pain and doubt, but I also see how it can shroud my perception and distort my ability to process and understand life when under stress. I see how humility, can ease the "puffing up" that shrouds understanding when my pride reacts to my pain, opening me to more sensitivity and internalization, but I also see how humility can distort things, deflating my gratification in self-achievement and the proper internalization of my growing capability. Basically, the pros and cons of pride and humility manifest depending on the chemistry you have with both characteristics and I can balance this chemistry with my energetic proprioception so a "charge" is created that bonds them in harmony and healthy connection. I can then feel the health of that bond and when it's chemistry shifts out of balance, towards either too much pride or humility I can take the necessary action to re-calibrate. For the more sceptical who have trouble believing such things, this is the same way covalent bonds work, like two hydrogen atoms sharing an electron pair. I'm balancing the charge of attractive and repulsive forces, but instead of between atoms, it's the chemistry between pride and humility. What's awesome is this small shift in harmony and health between these two facets not only enhances my rapport, but also creates a cascade through my other capabilities. I can trust my own feelings more and internalize them deeper because my pride doesn't shroud them and my humility doesn't doubt them in the improper contexts. I can feel both my authentic pleasure and pain longer, because my past imbalance is no longer there to cut them off "mid-breath" with some form of invalidation. Both of these then also contribute over time to building a better me, with higher quality feelings and experiences changing my story and enhancing my potential as well as my reflections on my past and the beliefs tied to them. When I was in the shower over the weekend, I remember feeling like I had faced so much that every single letter in every single alphabet had been carved into the skin of my soul and as I sobbed with that wound I also felt so happy and close to my pain, because I could finally express and feel it, without questioning whether I was being too prideful or dramatic in that moment. I could trust it and internalize it deeper, without invalidating it and even in the midst of that pain I felt so much more free and more me than ever before. And with that experience, so too has my pleasure gone and it feels amazing, to basically just exist with a greater clarity in the connection with my own feelings and reactions. Has anyone else done similar work on balancing these sides of themselves? I'd love to talk more about the process of this with other facets of our nature. People so often automatically seek one thing to replace another feeling. but I find it much more sustainable to build and change through addition, harmony of contrast, chemistry, and synergy. I know people are super into the whole mindful "let it pass without identifying" but to me the former is also a valuable practice for adaptation and growth.