Ajax

Self Actualization is living up to your potential. What do YOU need to live up to your potential? Nobody can answer that question but you. That is a good place to start. Preferably something creative. I didn't see you mention social activities. That is an important part for most people whether they want to admit it or not. Personally, I write, but to me that is not using my brain, but expressing myself. I enjoy coming up with ideas and exploring them. But we are not the same. I do martial arts. Self-expression is recreational to me.

Neither, both are paths, not the destination. What is important is the Ultimate Realization, which is "Knowing". Self-actualization is the path of living up to your potential. Spirituality is the path of realizing everything you think you know is pure BS. There is no path. Don't think of them as something to separate. Like you don't want to separate your heart and brain from your body. Develop each to the best of your ability. That being said, if you don't have the tools to handle the hell on earth, you will fail in both. So, focus on LP and financial security at least, so you don't get crushed by your environment. So, for you, I say Self-Actualization.

1. Other people’s negative emotions are simply unprocessed emotions. 2. Your ability to receive their unprocessed emotions and make them your own, shows that you lack the ability to fully process your own emotions. Thus, your mastery of emotions is lacking. 3. You are doing well on the path of mastering the subject of emotions, keep at it. Know that you still have plenty of work to do. Imagine this scenario, Joe loses the bowling tournament. He starts crying that he got 3rd place. Are you going to start crying with him, lamenting how life is not fair? If so, why? If not, why not? People Jail themselves by their thoughts. Imagine an inmate, Tom, that has killed his wife and is sad because he will never see his daughter or family again. He feels devastated by this loss. Is it easier or harder to feel his pain? You can see this scenario from different perspectives, you know Tom has caused immense pain to many people with his actions. You know his thoughts, decisions and actions put him there. You can tell he did it to himself. This is an exaggerated example, but people imprison themselves with their own false perspectives and choices. They are reacting to being in a mentally constructed jail of their own making. Even if you could break them out by sympathy or compassion, they would find a way to put themselves right back where they were. Now, let’s look at the sad stories shown in the media… Look at what it is, it is a production designed to make you feel terrible, guilty. It is engineered to make you feel a certain way and guess what, you fell for the trap. You are their puppet, take a bow for your performance! I used to have the same difficulty. What helped me is having some major realizations. First, knowing or realizing that I momentarily allowed myself to be the effect of the event that I allowed these feelings in. Then, I look for the positives of the situation until I start feeling better. Then, I noticed the areas where the person that pushed me into sadness failed to take responsibility for the lies, misunderstandings, limited beliefs or just plain BS that they are thinking. Or the actions/inactions they are refusing to acknowledge. This helped me realize they are doing it to themselves. Emotions seem to have a negative/positive pattern. The important thing for me was to continually create positive thoughts and the “silver lining”. Even if it is completely BS. The idea here is to nullify the negative effects. You see a video of a mangled dog on the street, look for the beauty, think wow, this could really reach someone. This could inspire people to adopt dogs, wow this could reach the right person… Wow, this could enlighten people to stop being so carefree to the plight of animals… Imagine the possibilities until the sadness starts to change. Then you realize that you have more control over the emotion. Just beware: Don't start laughing in the middle of a conversation with a friend who is brokenhearted about a fight he had with his GF, because you are imagining that he is so lucky she didn't kick him out of the house buck naked and he is forced to scramble around, trying to find clothes and shelter. It doesn't end well... Not saying this happened.

@Shroomdoctor Would you say that you fear becoming delusional and out of touch with reality? If so I would say that you already are. So how do you separate fact from fiction? Simple, if it doesn't seem true to you don't accept it. That's it in a nutshell. If you are putting together a large puzzle you want to put the pieces that fit and put aside the ones that don't until you can get to it. It is also helpful to realize that just about everything has some degree of truth/falseness to it. It would be helpful for you gain the ability to easily change modes of thinking.... You have probably heard the phrase, "put on your thinking cap." Well, to understand some of the more esoteric ideas you may have to remove your analytical/logic cap... perhaps replace it with a metaphorical/symbolic/figurative hat. For example, I am sure that the flow state, the zone and the subconcious and generally accepted concepts in the science community. They represent real phenomena. These abilities have been recognized by humanity since they became sentient. So who is to say that connecting with higher self,aliens, disembodied spirits,angels,God's, or whatever.....are not manifestations of the subconscious? By the way the subconscious is a very limited umbrella term to describe a very broad range of unknown and mysterious phenomena. Therefore your ability to make sense of different ideas is...1) dependant of your mental flexibility. 2) your courage level to meet face to face with ideas that that are totally contrary to the world as you see it. 3) your ability to have a total and thorough perspective of the subject as it is without prejudgement or bias. So to elucidate on the major points. 1. Always think for yourself and accept what makes sense to you. If you try to force something that doesn't make sense than you will remain ignorant of essential factors that relate to your worldview. 2. Know that an open mind is the seed to understanding. However open acceptance is not as it can lead to ignoranice which can be harmful. 3. Be willing to entirely destroy all your cherished thoughts feeling and opinion. A great deal of consciousness work is unlearning what you already know. 4. Anything that you can comfortably and fully face you can handle. Therefore it would be to your supreme advantage to develop and master this ability. 5. Communicate with the subject effectively. If you are having a conversation with someone and actually want to understand their point of view... You engage in active listening without intersecting your personal thoughts and idea but seek to ask clarifying question to get a more thorough understanding of the subject matter. I used this method to find some delightful practical applications in some previously unpalatable subects I was wrestling with including... self love, non resistance,acceptance,no judgement, openminedsess and channeling. I hope this helps

NO, NO and No Let me share an excerpt from the art of war,my fav book on strategy. "Warfare is a great matter to the nation, it is the ground of death and life, it is the way of survival and of Destruction and must be examined. Therefore go through it by means of five factors compare them by means of calculation and determine their statuses. 1, way, 2, heaven, 3 ground, 4, General, 5, law. The way is what causes the people to have the same thinking as their superiors, they may be given death or they may be given life, but there is no fear of danger and betrayal." Here is another excerpt(the commentary on that passage). " the first of Sun Tzu's five factors is the way or the Tao, which represents unity in a moral purpose. From top to bottom, people of all ranks strive for the same goal as if they are one person. The reasons they unite lies in the morality of the goal: the greater than moral cause, the tighter the union. If your way strong, you will naturally Garner strong support from others. With the support, you strengthen your position relative to your adversaries. The fear of betrayal mentioned here is not the people betraying the leaders but the rather the leaders between the People by not acting in the people's best interest." Pay special attention to the last paragraph I wrote. If you will recall, when bran showed the knife that littlefinger gave to him... sansa immediately reacted with suspicion stating that little finger is not a generous man and wants something in return. You see the fear of betrayal was already imbedded in her mind and she started to lack trust that he was acting in the Starks best interest. Now compared that to Donald Trump who many people don't trust... yet when he starts to get heat he will rally support by uniting them to a moral cause such as when he started a Twitter war with the NFL over not standing during the national anthem. Then that pacified the fear that he is not working in the U.S. best interests. Even Hitler had a moral purpose that he was selling that the Nazi party bought. Baylish may have had mastery over heaven and ground and some leadership qualities, but needed much improvement in cultivating the way which is a crucial element.

Yes, just get really good at something. When I was a teen I was the same way so I decided to devote much of my energy to martial arts... The more I put into it the more confidence energy and motivation grew. Find something you like to do and really throw your weight behind it. All the confidence you will ever have depends on your ability to believe in yourself and where I mentioned is a good place to start.

Hello electro, My dear friend, I don't believe female psychology works like that. In fact I generally don't even trust my female friends about attracting women... sure they can give you pointers on the external... and that is great but it is not enough it is the internal game that get you results. You can look like Adonis but if something doesn't feel right to the woman then you won't attract her. To be honest, just the fact that you asked that question shows that you really don't understand the female mentality which can be a handicap. The one thing I think is good to know is that they operate on feelings and feelings are not words... so that can be a problem.... Hell, it sometimes takes my wife between 10- 60 mins... to explain to what I did wrong and how she felt about it and I am actively digging out of her....it would be time well spent review the way of superior man...the section about dealing with women. In short asking woman for feedback after hitting on them isn't going to be that helpful, bad idea imo it would probably will make them uncomfortable. Maybe if you make a survey and ask women questions about men in general and what the do wrong when they approach them. That way you can learn without the awkwardness.

That's the problem. You don't understand what is meant by attachment.... you have too many preconceived and dualistic assumptions about what no-attachment truly means(hidden from your consciousness). It is more of a loving acceptance than a "passive discard"... if that makes sense. With No attachment one could possible love their enemy as much as they would their own child. Remember how Leo constantly preaches about the importance of paradox? Well, wrap you head around this one.... the more detached you become.... the more love you possess and exhibit! This is because one of your basic qualities is Love... however when you detach from fears, past-experiences and other forms of mental suffering the true essence of what you are begins to shine stronger and more brightly. Imagine trying to look at a window so dirty that light can not come in... now imagine slowly removing that dirt.... the more you clean the window the brighter it becomes. Similarly, the more you detach from the ugliness that clouds your identity the more love shines brightly. So an enlightened couple or even friendship would be more loving than a non-enlightened one because it is in a more purified form. Sex and intimacy is a natural biological function like food or sleep so obviously there will be plenty of that. The idea of enlightenment is pretty much being able to understand yourself. Well if you can understand yourself you can understand your partner much better. Therefore there would be very little conflict or arguments because there would be little misunderstanding and since each person understands each other so well.... the misunderstanding would be resolved before it became a problem. This is one of the basic patterns of most marriages... First a misunderstanding, then a miscommunication, then comes the hurt, then it becomes a problem, then the problem becomes a conflict and the conflict becomes a blow-out.... Enough of those routines and a relationship dies. An enlightened relationship can prevent such an occurrence. The simple answer is they work just fine...lol

It's just an example or opinion not advice or facts... learn to differentiate between them. I would highly recommend that you continually review leo's video on beliefs?

@Aamir King When you start seeing truth, you invariably start laughing. Just keep on the road of truth and you too will easily break out laughing at the ridiculousness that seemed so serious before.

My mentors, some online, some in person... I personally know about a half dozen of such people and it is common among them although me telling you this won't help you.

Laughter is your decision to reject something. It is the antithesis of seriousness which ego is pretty much composed of... so your reasoning is flawed and your loss of humor is due to your ego. An enlightened being has the ability to laugh at anything(or in spite of it). ?

Observe and experience it as close as possible. My Dad died a few months ago... He was a brilliant man but in the end he didn't even have his mind. However, I was fortunate enough to be there for his last few weeks. He was off of life support for 16 days and couldn't even eat or drink, we had to use wet sponges to hydrate him. My family and I insisted on caring for him at home... so I was able to observe his dying process carefully. I recorded those observations in a journal daily. I also took pictures of him everyday, to the point we visited him in the morgue. I made a slideshow of those 16 days and anytime I feel down or worried or sad or fearful, I pull out those pictures and look at them again. I remember his love of life, his struggle and fight just to stay alive although his body and mind were already gone... So I would recommend volunteering at a hospice or something around the terminally ill or if you have a relative, spend as much time with them until the end and keeping at least a journal of it... There is nothing like experiencing the dying process to contemplate death.

It is simply a tool and a very useful one at that. In the words of Maslow, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." But as we both know, the world is so much more than a nail, right?

@Emerald Wilkins How does this work with sexual polarity? Such Yin and Yang are so ingrained within genders in regards to physical attractiveness and sexual desire.. For instance a male may feel revitalized in a female with femininity but repelled by a male exhibiting the same traits as a female. Alternatively a female, according to some sources... such as David Deida, will not be able to maintain lasting sexual polarity with a man that possesses too many feminine characteristics... At this time it appears that there are too many biological sexual impulses... It probably could be over-rided with higher consciousness, however, without a greater awakening, it seems implausible. How would you address this issue?

Interesting that you mentioned this... I often look at ancient dictionaries to get ideas about how people in the past may have thought about various topics. Here is the definition of Feminism from 1912 " a condition of men who become hypersensitive, too imaginative and lacking in traits that are supposed to be masculine." New Webster dictionary 1912. Wouldn't it be interesting if more men were inflicted with such a condition? How would you say one would go about changing the social system? I try to see things at a case by case basis. You shouted at her. You created a confrontation. You kept shouting which made things much worse. No one likes to be yelled it can even be considered abuse if it is used as punishment, which in this case it was. The purpose of of punishment is to get your point across by causing pain. Any point worth communicating can and should be delivered with kindness and compassion. For the most part punishment does not result in understanding it results in more pain. Because of you uncontrolled rage you were causing pain by yelling. She only wanted you to stop the abuse, by your own words. So yeah you fucked up, a woman sometimes does things to piss you off to either tell you that you are doing something wrong and you better find out what that is or to test your emotional stability... either way you failed big time. But it seems you wanted out of this marriage and relieved that she left so I wouldn't dwell on it... Just educate yourself on how to manage the male\female relationships better in the future. It's all good.

@Mal Thanks to you I was able to know about strawmen, it really increased my awareness... That's a damn lie! I can swear to you that this one time... I saw my shadow on... this forum... and I punched it! Sparks flew and I became instantly enlightened....

This is the biggest manipulation I have seen on this site in awhile... all generalities, no specifics. What was the manipulation? To get a response... it even worked on me ***sigh

@Heart of Space What caused you to have these opinions? This isn't an existential question... I am looking to modify my dating model and I am curious about what lead you to these conclusions..

I normally am able to figure out my own problems, but a host of family and personal tragedies has hit me at once.. so my sense of clarity is not what it once was. Ok, so about in Nov of '15 my wife start talking on the phone with a man she met at the gym. She would get up from our bed and talk to him for about 3-4 hours every night. This got on my nerves and I complained about it but it still continued on. Then, on Dec of that year, she started hanging out with him usually into 2-3 in the morning. Finally she told me that she went to far but they were just friends. Well, that started to grind on me too much so I left the week of X-mas. She continued to talk to me on the phone nearly daily and so we discussed me coming back which I did in early January. So then everything was fine until around Easter of this year and she starting the same pattern of talking to the same man all night and seeing him into 3 am. I decided I had enough as I had work and a child that was picking up on my anxiousness and becoming increasingly anxious and unhappy herself. So when she admitted cheating, I gently kissed her on the cheek and told her is was over and left back to my hometown in Texas. Since I make decent passive income and I own a small home here in Tx, I don't really have to worry about working. So everything was great despite the circumstances. I could keep busy doing actualization work, teaching martial arts and cooking. I even found a lady companion I could enjoy spending time with. Then about a couple of weeks ago she starting calling more frequently complaining that I haven't called and thought I didn't want to talk to her. So I started doing so, however this started to make me a little unhappy because she was not as responsive as I would like. Nevertheless, I continued on... She started telling me things like she doesn't want me to that of her as a person who does things like that anymore. She also says that she only wants to devote herself to one person. She also wants friends but can only make male friends... She says that I don't comfort her enough, I am pretty open minded and so I ask her for details and she says that the fact that someone online knows what she means and that "Tim(her paramour)" knows what that means, that I must not care about her because I don't get it. I tell her that I try to be attentive as possible, cook for her, hold her and watch movies with her and try to talk with her... she says that I don't get what I am saying... and I ask for details and she hasn't explained so far. She says that she thinks that I don't care about her. She says if I am unsure about something it makes her unsure about something and she doesn't forgive or forget at it escalates... Anyway, every thing seemed fine until a couple of days ago, when she said she wanted to come down here to see me and to attend my father's funeral. Then she didn't respond to any on my texts or phone calls. And she tells me this morning while trying to books tickets that Tim keeps texting and that she wants to go to lunch with him. I said you should do as you like, but I don't like it. She blows up on me and says that is why she never tells me anything because I am going to say no. I just said, you asked my opinion and I told you want I thought and so she got upset with me. Anyway, this whole situation has gotten me quite miserable. I am normally a very happy and positive person. I wouldn't even bothering trying to reconcile if there wasn't a child involved but I am getting quite tired of the old push-pull... I know she is going to keep asking about those tickets... should I rescind my offer? Or is there something going on here that I am not aware about? What should I do?...

Thank you, so much@MartineF you are so right, I was thinking along the same lines and I agree completely with what you were saying. She doesn't provide me with practically any needs... and I do feel better when I am alone and not hoping for a change to come. I am so grateful for your response. It is wonderful to have feedback from this community when one needs it

@reez Thank you so very much for your imput I really need that right now. Yes, I especially like how you wrote that I shouldn't be so easily to forgive and start over like nothing happened... I do have an issue with that, I am a very forgiving person, much too forgiving it would seem. I can't tell you how much your advice means to me. I thank you 1000 times, sir.

@abrakamowse @Natasha @Mal Thank you guys so much for your sympathy. It is very kind of you all. I am touched by your compassion.

...then whatever you sewed is harvested to forward the life process. As you have received... so shall you give.

@ashleigh Practically speaking, I doubt that you can even experience Truth, I certainly haven't. Theoretically, Truth means a total absence of falseness. Since direct experience doesn't reflect a Total absence of falseness, it can not be Truth in the ultimate analysis. However, direct experience can be useful because it reduces falseness and increases understanding. Besides I haven't experienced the earth being flat have you? I may have looked out in the distance and saw that the earth appears flat but I have experienced enough to know that appearances can be deceiving, therefore appearances alone are not sufficient experience. However, this could be summarized in one sentence: