UnbornTao

It's a pleasure. I do what I can.

@Ramasta9 often likes to spread conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking. Is he a propagandist funded by dark forces working to destabilize the emotional atmosphere of the forum?

Yeah. And being a scatologist doesn't necessarily qualify someone as a professional plumber. We're talking about different domains. It’s like soccer players, on the one hand, and soccer analysts on the other. When it comes to actually playing the sport, the players know best. And even good analysts usually need to have played professionally to have any real credibility.

Pretty much. When it comes to an ability, whether you can do it - and how well - is the measure of genuine understanding. The opposite is believing you understand it, and/or understanding it conceptually. But the real proof lies in the doing.

I'd say that it depends on the purpose you've set for your meditation session. What you describe could just be the same distraction dynamic that occurs off the cushion - your mind coming up with excuses to stray from your main aim, whatever it is. But hey, it depends. How much leeway do you allow yourself? Maybe you have no specific aim when sitting down, in which case there's more flexibility to be creative, and more room to get distracted.

He doesn't. It's speculation, most likely.

"for many," "out of many," "among many" - Season 1.

Puerto Rico?

@CARDOZZO Thanks for the lists. Ew. uTorrent isn't that trustworthy and is also packed with ads. Do yourself a favor and switch to qBittorrent.

Indeed.

I'd say that these are aspects of yourself, not reality. It might be that you aren't your identity either. Identity might as well be part of 'doingness.' A good question here could be: What is identity? Because, as you say, there does seem to be a confusion for us between what we do and what we take ourselves to be. If we were to completely change, for example, our behavior and thinking patterns, how would we identify the character that we are? In both our eyes and others', we'd likely show up as a completely different person. Would we, though? So, what is identity?

I'm sorry to hear that. I like Real Madrid.

Praise the Lord!

I don't understand why people get so invested in such silly things. Why not let it be? (rhetorical question).

My omelette was DRM-protected. You've breached our contractual obligations, and therefore you will get sued. Call your lawyers.

Some humans have just gone to space and stuff.

"Claude, make me an omelette."

Fucking YouTube AI ads

The results I was getting were about 'intense pulse light.' Good to know, but I clearly don't watch it. Football (soccer) is more my thing.

With my mouth. Vegetables stir-fried, generally, and usually as a side dish. Soups, salads, purées, too. I used to add a handful of spinach to a blueberry smoothie, but it's been a while since I've done that. I often get precooked legumes (except lentils) and in a separate pan or pot add some spices, salt, and garlic, stir-fry some veggies (usually carrots, bell peppers, and onions), tomato sauce, chilli sauce, and mix it all in. Meat, mostly fried. Chicken, pork, beef. And lately with a chopped bell pepper or onions, too.

What's that?

Watched that yesterday. The song's not bad.

That might be. On the other hand, it can just be an emotion. Notice that we aren't talking about severity but about its source. We're not even dealing with the side effects and other accompanying factors attached to the feeling. Try to get depressed now. See what occurs in your experience. Boom. Magic. You got depressed. Now what? What's going on? How do you think you get depressed? Or angry? It's not out of nowhere but out of you. Do you think an external event has to occur to justify the existence of the emotion? An example I like to use is actors. Good actors know how to bring about the necessary feeling states to their performance. Excellent actors don't just fake their emotions but actually feel them. Sadness and apathy were brought up as different emotional states in the same category as depression. The point is that you can get depressed, happy, enthusiastic, loving, etc. To clarify what you said in your other reply: there's easily a lot of victimization around these things, where people may feel the need to give way more importance to their emotional states than they deserve - in the sense that they're taken as objectively true and real, and generated by 'the world.' This we agree on. What I'm saying is - everyone gets depressed from time to time, you included. It's not an esoteric thing. It can simply be a minor emotional upheaval, disturbance. It comes and it goes, like any other emotion. If you explore it you can get a sense of what the depression is and what it is doing - what purpose it is serving for you, since you're generating it to serve some purpose, whatever that is. Again, barring physiological malfunction of some kind.

Looking good.