Barna

@RedLine This is actually a very good question. The answer is in realizing that you don't want the girl, you don't want money and you don't want status. It seems like you want these things, but actually, you don't. These things are just excuses to why you can't love yourself right now. Your subconscious thinking is something like: "When I get the girl, the money, and the status, I can finally allow myself to love myself and love my life. Until then, I should suffer, because I'm not whole yet." Notice the survival agenda in this. You made a contract with yourself that you'll love yourself only when you've reached your goals, and this way you motivate yourself to get ahead in life. But there are more conscious ways to progress in life. So why don't you just burn this old contract, and allow yourself to love yourself and love your life exactly as it is right now? This is what you really want.

I'm glad I fulfilled your expectations

It's a joke

This is the Christian worldview. This comes from the idea that God created the universe. However, if you had grown up in a Buddhist culture, you would see nature as self-creating and self-evolving. It's all just social conditioning. Try to change your perspective with more agility until you become free of any perspective.

Exactly. Whenever you have an intention, meaning arises out of that intention. Everything that helps you to fulfill this intention becomes meaningful, or in other words, a means to an end, as @A Fellow Lighter has put it. Or in other words, if you don't have goals, life becomes meaningless.

It's not like you meditate and then you get the results of meditation. It's not like going to the gym and getting muscles as a result. Meditation is the side effect of internally oriented curiosity. People who are curious about silence and awareness tend to sit and observe it. And other people look at them and say "they are meditating and they get all kinds of results from it". But this logic is backwards. First, you have to be curious about your own inner field. You have to be curious enough to sit in silence and observe it every day, even learn some practices to help you to guide your attention. And the funny thing is that while you have all this curiosity and the practice, you won't get any answers to your questions, you will just have deeper and deeper questions until you realize that you know nothing at all. And once you become comfortable with not knowing anything, fear starts to disappear. The more fear disappears, the more healthy you'll become mentally, and every other magic comes simply from mental health. The timeline depends on you. How curious are you about your deepest self?

I read somewhere that the greatest miracle of Jesus was that he had 12 friends in his thirties

Do some breakthrough doses of psychedelics to see the ultimate depth of reality. Then you'll see that life is a game, you won't take it so seriously so you can enjoy the hell out of it! This is what I did and it worked out perfectly. Now my goals are again very practical: financial independence and fitness. But I'm not suffering to reach these, I enjoy the path. Because it's an amazing game

Exactly, especially in the long run.

That's it. That's the post.

♥️

Gimme your best productivity music albums and titles. I prefer electro/techno, but I'm open to anything. I use YouTube Music, so you can link me some playlists from there as well. Thanks!

Of course, but helping others is also not a mission in which I seek fulfillment. There is no fulfillment in the future that's more fulfilling than the always present now moment. It's simply a choice that I'm making. Because sure, I could choose to lay on the couch all day. But is that the most loving thing that I can do for others? Probably not. And is it the most loving thing that I can do for myself? Well, laying on the couch is the comfort zone. There's nothing wrong with being in the comfort zone from time to time, but habitual comfort zone seeking is unhealthy in the long run. So laying on the couch is not the most loving thing that I can do for myself either. And I guess you do the same kind of choices instinctively. But I like trying to understand how my internal decision-making mechanism works because if I bring light into it then I can resolve the shadows there.

Fortunately it's not like that for me at all. I don't do anything just for the looks of it. It's just that every time I make a choice, I try to make the most loving choice considering the situation as a whole. Sometimes this choice seems selfless because it's the most loving thing that I can do for others. Sometimes it seems selfish because it's the most loving thing that I can do to myself. It always depends on how I can add the most value to the whole situation. I guess you just make choices instinctively. That doesn't work for me because in my perspective instinct is just a feeling, and I never know if that feeling comes from my ego or from my soul.

For me, responsibility is not about the consequences. Responsibility comes from love. Responsibility is the ability to respond. And I choose to respond in the most loving way that I'm able to. That's what responsibility means for me.

Exactly, that's the kind of advice that I would give people too (except for the lying to others part). See, this is called taking responsibility for our mental state and its effect on others. Maybe you don't call it "responsibility" because that's too much of an egoistic term for you. But in the end, we do the same thing, we just have a different vocabulary to describe it.

So let's say that when I get irritated, I'm mean to people. What kind of an advice would you give me if I asked you?

I'm not talking about mistakes in a selfish sense. I mean mistakes that have effects on other people. Like a badly worded response that hurts someone. Isn't that instinctual?

Living by instinct is the ultimate comfort zone. You can do all kinds of mistakes all day and you can always say "Mistake is a concept, I was just following my instincts". This feels like being stuck on the instinctual level.

If you have the possibility to help someone to improve their motivations, don't you have the responsibility to do so? Isn't that the most loving thing that you can do for a friend who is stuck in their perspective? Because the other option would be that I don't spend time with them anymore, and this doesn't feel like the more loving choice.

Thanks, I'll probably post about it when I have any success in it.

Nirvana is the state of non-duality where you don't differentiate between somethingness and nothingness, you love both as a unified whole.

I'm not even trying to develop spiritually now. I don't know why people keep suggesting that I should. Is it against the forum guidelines to stagnate? I've been doing spiritual work since high school (I'm 29 now, early mid-life crisis period), but now I realized that it doesn't make any sense to spend 8 hours a day doing something that I'm not really passionate about (framework development), so I try to spend all my free time and energy into changing my career. I simultaneously do crypto investing to retire early so I have to spend some time learning that too. So I have no time or energy left for spiritual work. I've been thinking about doing dream yoga because I can do that while sleeping. Thanks for reminding me, I should probably start doing that. Yeah, that's totally the case. Joy is a tricky thing because it's one of the most inner states, so to get there you have to peel down most of your insanity. So I think people who talked to me had the feeling that I'm skinning them alive. I had a lot of joy in that, but they didn't. That's one of my issues. I have a hard time tolerating other people's insanity because I subconsciously taught myself to not tolerate my own.

Nothing and something are the two sides of the same coin. Wanting one and pushing away the other is insanity. It's like saying that you want only shadows without a light source.

Me too It's not just about pain, it's also about intensity and duration. For example, people are also afraid of peace. There's a kind of peace that has such a high intensity and such a long duration that people call it death.