alyra

what you call "pain and suffering" is just a sensory signal. the belief that it is bad and negative is just one belief. this is not to be confused with the ever so popular "nothing is real!" that is so popular here. but whether it is real or not, illusory or not, it is only what it is because of what you believe of it. You could imagine it as nothing more than a warning signal, like that silly confusing "check engine" light that usually just means an oil change or something minor. or like hunger or tiredness. These things - how are they negative? they are signals to help guide our actions of maintenance.

wait but - awareness, concentration, and direct experience could be just as sensory as the rest of it. or all sensory just as thought as our monkey mind.

sight hearing touch smell taste concept being seven senses.

there is a natural trend for humans to dislike pain and suffering, and to avoid it. but this is nothing more than the path that we are most likely to follow. it is not the only existence in the world regarding the destruction of things. and destruction of things is nothing more than the necessary second half of construction. and it is very easy for humans to label a certain thing as pain, and then feed it until it is certainly a false thing and not at all what they believe it to be. in a similar way it can be labeled the opposite and minimized until it is nothing. @eskwire what if pain and suffering is not sensory signals at all? what if they are just something our minds create. what if sensory information is nothing but a red herring.

you are the one who labels it as such, this is what I am saying. you are so arrogant as to think that your labels are truth! it amuses me, I hope you don't mind me appreciating your clever jesting

eh, it's too cynical imo but cynicism is not bad thing. just no my preference. I do not understand what is sympathy. it is pity, right? I do not pity others and do not expect pity either. i do not find pity to be nearly as common as people like to project. and I see empathy more common that people belief it is. it is certainly a possible case that humans illusion their own perception by bias.

the more I think about it, the more I realise that all senses are just the same "concept sense" the knowing - the thinking - the consciousness. maybe there is something in being which I am missing that makes it so different. but maybe there is something in sensing that I am not missing which makes me see how it is no different at all. I wish I was more experienced in this regard than I am, more hours contemplating, experiencing, testing, exploring. but even then would I be certain except as a fool!

a wise clan takes the child's most prized possession away from them at a young age, to teach them how to avoid falling for the trap of overvaluing loss.

maybe complacency creates heroes lol.

nothing is certain. maybe there is pain and suffering in the world. maybe there is none of it. there is often a trend for the idea to share, human condition is suffering. but I don't see it that way.

I have found that, my empathy is very much a projection of my bias onto others. and often I notice people claiming to understand me or act with my best interest in mind, only to completely be off the mark of what I want and who I am.

well there are several members on this forum, and there is teal swan and the diamond net and - oh no I can't find the other one I saw some vids of. on youtube. and there's a few ted talks I've seen from women sages. and to be frank - it's kind of silly to label some people as enlightened and other people as unenlightened. I have noticed how enlightened everyone is! some sure, have found more paradigm shifts than others, have transcended more pains than others. but we all naturally stumble upon some of them in life. some of us just realize the strength in growth we get when we focus effort on that self-actualizing path

it is mysterious to me! I wonder though. I see how people get confused when I try to tell them about my senses. and how leo has said that being is no sense. and how you have some sense I have never heard of. and in the reality of how deeply entwined senses can be, how difficult it is to seperate them apart. I wonder -if there is really such difference at all! maybe all senses are the fake sense as you mention. the pseudo senses I get when driving and other endeavurs. We think that because we open our eyes and light pours in, that that sense is authentic, and the sense of memory is created. but really, both are created. and I wonder - in noticing how this "sense of understanding" or "information sense" or "sense of concept" or whatever it is is in anything, and how it feels so close to awareness too but somehow different, I am starting to wonder if all senses are not so different at all. in some video it was said, that reality is nothing more than our senses, and the belief that there is anything there is false. but - we do not know for sure that that would be true either. maybe our senses are what is false, and there is some physical reality behind them. maybe both are false! or both true! maybe there is some shadowy reality completely unrecognizable to the tools we have - and both the physical expectation and the sensational experience are both just shoddy, weak attempts to understand the absurdity that we cannot fathom enough to even just observe.

@Revolutionary Think I guess in a way I am lucky - I have felt trapped by my parents too. but for me, it was obvious by watching them, that they were trying to help, they gave me shelter for free and gave me money to buy food at let me hide in my room as I recovered from losing my job. and they went to an adviser to learn about autism. so even though the things they'd do made me feel so trapped in my room, and so worthless, and I felt gaslighted and manipulated by them... I knew in my heart that they were trying to help. and at this time too was when I found Leo and his words of - it's you who changes your life, and I believed him. I wanted to be self-sufficient, and so hearing him tell me I could be self-reliant was inspiring. And so despite feeling trapped, I saw that I could work to figure out how to get out. and so I kept pushing and kept going. The things which trapped me in my youth were not the same as things which trapped me as a young adult. and so I was not tricked by the dog cage nearly as effectively as many people are - because there Was change already, and change which I had enacted. I had taught myself how to communicate with others. and also, with bullying - I had watched as it turned from me getting bullied by the words of others, to me using those same words - no harsher words - to bully myself. So I had direct experience with how I do affect my own self - and in my learned helplessness, I still had the seed of hope in enacting change through my own work. it's surprising to realize this - how lucky I have been to see this insight on my own, that when mentors like ted talks and leo came along, I believed in them and was inspired to try.

@Revolutionary Think I am sorry for your troubles. me when I was young in grade school I was bullied all the time. I never had any friends, except the occasional one the teacher convinced to look out for me. When I was in high school I was intelligent. I understood things quick. I was estranged from my peers though. and I was not really academic, just clever on tests and in following what teachers said. I just went along with what I was told. in college it all was a crash. so many social opportunities but I kept failing at them. so much rich knowledge but I could not keep up. I didn't know how to study, and I didn't know how to keep friends. I graduated and found a job. lost it. found another job. lost it too. moved home, unemployed, depressed, too anxious to leave my room for 95% of the time. But I found out that I could find inspirational videos on Youtube, especially with Ted Talk. and I found inspirational twitch streamers, who taught a competitive game but not only that, I noticed their advice was generally applicable. and then I found leo's work too, on youtube. And a lot of the things I was exposing myself to - I noticed how they were associated with, or derivative of, thoughts I'd work with before. see, being without social, I turned inward to my mind. being without studying, I turned to games for the emotional journey fantasy brings. and these introspections and explorations set me up powerfully to work on self actualization. many ideas from my past started to cascade into eachother, fitting together in brilliant ways. there are many pains in my life, mostly social pains, angers at other people, disappointment, enemies and bullies and negligence. but now I look back and think how wonderful it was to have learned from my past, to have been able to understand myself better and empathize with others through contemplation. Any cages I've been under where cages I created - even if I was unaware and blameless for it. in fact I was unaware, and it does not make sense to blame me or anyone. In a way, I wonder if this is what is meant by your idea of de-actualization. traps that we fall into, unknowingly and unaware. walls that spring up, with a hidden ladder behind a secret door. or maybe it is a dirt wall and we haven't figured out we can just pile the dirt until we're out. And when we do get free of our cages - we have learns something more deeply than people who get it by advice, or people who never need to learn that lesson just because they're lucky. and like you mention we are not alone. everyone one of us has some thing which has held us back, and something which still holds us back. and we'll all encounter down turns in our growth in the future too. It is true that the mystic tells us to look within. and I agree with the power there is in that - it is almost as if we are asleep without it. but it is also true that we can look outward too. I am noticing a lot lately how common it is for people who have success or enlightenment to refer to mentors, teachers, advisers of some kind. someone who has been places and comes with wisdom to share from it. in a way we are too. we all are a wise human as well as a foolish one - and we grow the fastest when we grow together. lately I have heard someone recommend that if you cannot find a job, volunteer. so I am looking to volunteer now. well, really I have held myself back due to a circumstance in life, I am waiting to resolve first. I shouldn't have to wait to get out there and look for opportunities, but sometimes we are too stuck in our self-created mirages to make such a leap, and that is perfectly fine. A mentor I follow says often, some people do it fast and others take longer and that's OK.

@Leo Gura sorry for the double mention but I am a person who has a lot of inherent sensitivity to my... idk what to say, senses, body, existence... a highly sensitive person... if you are interested I can say tons and tons thereof. we could have a conversation about it. it is possible to diagnose me with autism but I do not really see diagnosis as anything more than a symbolism of patterns lol. so I do not claim to be autistic - that is a red herring really. I am a human, and I find it more meaningful to claim that I am more sensitive, or more aware, as a natural state, compared to most other humans. in a certain way I have been aware all my life because of my sensativity, but naturally in many other ways I was completely unaware before my recent work within the past three years. or ten if you count the work I started doing in college due to the realization I fucked myself in high school by not practicing studying. edit - i realize I've said a ton in the past hour on here so I am now logging off for the day. I am working on improving my strategic approach to responding. I will respond to all notifications and posts thereof sometime later - possibly tomorrow - hopefully not sooner or later.

@electroBeam my stating of the seven senses includes the overlapping thereof. most people, when they think they have language, and/or imagery. but my thinking started out for a long time in my youth without either. I had to train myself over about 7 years in order to effectively and functionally think using language. and even so it is so very apparent to me that there is this direct conceptual sense in my head - that I can imagine a cat. and pretty quickly that thought I notice it has a "image sense" even tho I do not experience "inner sight" there is an internal version thereof which is tactile - my thoughts have always been tactile (and concept-sense). but when I strip away that tactile sensation from the thought, I still sense that I am "pondering a cat" (though without any words, or tactile, or any other sense) there is the knowledge of a cat in my mind being senses in some strange way. this is what I claim as the sense of concept. in my findings over the past 10 years, I currently draw the conclusion that all or at least most thoughts intrinsically have this sense of concept, or maybe sense of knowledge, or maybe sense of understanding, or maybe sense of thought. IDK which phrase is best and it's really immaterial what label. but there is that sense. and you can strip away the other sensations until only that sense remains. and while for me it is currently kinda hard to strip away all the other senses - it is possible to strip away the sense of concept to, and remain present without even that sensation - and yet I still observe that there is some way in which I "sense" my existence, and this is why I say there is then the seventh (or primary) layer of "Sense of being" where would you say the crystal sense is? if it is an aura then let me explain. when I am driving down the road I literally feel the cars in my mind as if somehow I have a nerve that reaches out to the car and touches it. except that is misleading because it implies there is a sensation of tendrils. when I touch my skin I can often sense the nerve response shooting up towards my brain under my skin - it is so brief it is difficult to notice the full extent of it tho. but I don't have this with the cars - instead it is as if I have this floating nerve that teleports the info. directly to my brain - well not so directly because it has a double "vision" so to speak. triple. there is a physical sensation inside my head that I feel. and a weak but present sense where I assume the car currently is, but then the strongest sense is something inside what I claim is my "mind space" which reaches about an arms length around my body, where anything that I am holding onto in consciousness I feel it in that space physically. and it is 3 and a half dimensions - I can sesne it moving in a fourth dimension but it is a weak sense so I say it is half a sense. it has physical location and texture fully in three dimensions, but the fourth dimension is weak and hard to hold onto in a continuous reach. anyway long story short. This is not true sensation but aura sensation instead. it is my mind creating its own sensation as a model of the world. this is what thinking is. the primary aspect of thought in my findings is what I claim is the "Sense of concept" but usually there are additional layers to that sensation. what can you say to claim that your crystal sense is not a derivative of the other senses in this way? there is the sense of time for example. but upon contemplation one finds this is a derivative of at least the sense of "concept" as I name it here.

why are you so sure? why do you call "being" "not sense". why is it that you know that "being" exists outside of your sense thereof? there is no surety that being even exists. all we have is our senses. I heard it said recently that it was said there are two things - senses, and though. and then the speaker then proposed there is a nother thing - my memory is faded but I think that third thing was "being". but - why do we claim that those things - thought and being - are not senses too? the nature of the five senses is that they deceptively make us believe that the other two things are not a sense. because the five senses can be stripped away. but thought can be stripped away, and being can be stripped away. the are really conceptualized to begin with. we only know that we be because - we know and/or sense that we be! observation is directly, sensing. so we only believe that we be without senses. but we can never know it! edite - in fact, even if there IS being without sensation. there is still a sensation of being this is all that I really state. that we have a sense of being. maybe there is something in being beyond that sense. but I certainly claim to sense my being directly (directly in this context, meaning not-touch, and not-concept, and etc. ) edit more - note that I am unsure where to claim "awareness" and "thinking" lie most strongly. I feel that "thinking" is a direct derivative of both "concept" and the original five senses. memory in a way. I find these are all aspects of "concept" like red and magenta are aspects of "seeing" (just, with a different dimensional space, the specturm of "seeing" is two dimensional but the spectrum of "concept" is at least three dimensional but I think it is actually at least four dimensional even but I am not sure thereof. and it has been claimed that existence could be thought of in 10 or even 11 dimensions - tho all these claims of course, are conceptual claims, and I find that concepts/ideas are an easy (or not-so-easy) path to discovering what I mean by "a sense of concept") how do you mean? is vibration in crystals somehow not a derivitive of touch, or perhaps sight? or perhaps concept?

but it isn't all I have to choose from. I didn't vote at all! I could've even not posted, or not bothered to open the thread. I could've lied. you think you have limited what can be done. but there is never a limit to what can be done - that is the key. there is never black and white. lol even when it is black and white, it is in reality not so. imagine how yin and yang are - if you remove one of them, it will still remain! the contrast is what creates the other one! this is the same of all things. I mean imagine all the things that are nothing to do with yin and yang - and yet the contrast of yin and yang reveal understanding about those things too! or scratch the example of yin and yang and imagine cats and oranges. contemplate how cats and oranges reveal perspectives about your question of hedons and ascetics! you are curious what I would say if I must choose between hedonists or ascetics. and you have directly witnessed what I would say if I was l imited to such things! I would not allow you to limit me that way! this is my answer

recently I heard a deeply inspiring anecdote from a person's life. they talked about how they went to work in a farm in some country I forget which. but they would need to sheer sheep or maybe it was something similar animal. but they said it was the most hardest work they ever did. it just left them exhausted. there was nothing to compare to the labor and precision needed to do that. and when they complained of the stress, the effort, the pain, the discomfort, of any sort of dissatisfaction with the moment at hand. the experienced farmer they were there to work for to learn from - they'd just say, "harden up" "toughen up" - get stronger. in the OP it is mentioned "anyone traumatic or less than average childhood" and I wonder about that statement. it is misleading. I have not had a traumatic childhood. I had good parents good influences good people in my life. I got things I wanted I got time I was allowed to think and imagine and create. I was taught things and my life was carried. but was it easy? was growing up an easy thing? do I "not relate" to what is said in the OP? no I definitely relate. in many ways I know that my life has been painful and traumatizing and hurtful and depressing and de-actualizing and destructive and distracting and etc. is there anyway to compare my life to someone else's I challenge that belief. there is no way to compare two people's experiences in life. the same concepts are true for all things in life - they are easy and they are hard. what even do those words mean really - a wise woman once told me, I asked her. "what is easy how can I make things easy" and she said. "easy is whatever you make it through" and now I realize - all is just a matter of picking up my feet. moving around in the world. laying my hands upon objects. manipulating them. and repeating. and when I do that, it is easy. (note this still has meaning when it is only metaphoric) strategies of coping with X - yes, there are many many strategies that do so. if you use one strategy and it'll work fine. so look for strategies. try them out. reuse the ones that succeed. keep in mind that sometimes it's worth it to try things twice. I've offered some strats in this post if you noticed them. off the top of my head some more strats to cope include yes, drink, yes, this can be dangerous. for me, it has been effective at times, tho I knew I wanted to find better strats. it was good enough in the mean time. videogames; books; tv; friends; eating; walks; music; ranting to self; physical outbursts; purposeful exuberance; positive thinking; negative thinking; belief in realism; identities; denial of identity; friends; bullies; being a bully; being a friend; trusting in others; avoiding others; sleeping; embracing anxiety; avoidance; spirituality; hedonism; useless debate; critical debate; being humble; being arrogant; practicing; washing dishes; sports; karate; classes; art; reminiscing; fantasizing; imagination; play-acting; doing nothing. some of these I have changed to do less of in recent years compared to youthful years. others I do more now than before. it has been advised that it is smart to just experiment with different things in life. cling to what you find to succeed and work towards removing what you find to be ineffective or toxic or etc. and lastly a Really Important thing I've noticed within the last year that changed a Lot of my understanding regarding advice-seeking. is that there are things that when I was younger I would go "ugh what is that advice what an idiot and asshole they don't understand!" and then lateron in life just completely flip-turned and said the exact same words to someone else with utmost earnest intention of helping and being kind and understanding. And so I realized - words just do not carry meaning at all. they are only symbolic. when another person uses a word, they have some symbol that, for them, carries nice positive things in some way. generally speaking I mean, sometimes yeah people do be mean on purpose with understanding of delivering destruction. but - if someone appears to be thinking they are giving good advice, they probably are - and if you can't see it as good advice, no need to worry over it. but if you do want to figure out how they could be meaning in good intention, experiment, contemplate it, ask questions, etc. explore things. the most dangerous thing in the world really IMO is learned helplessness - believing that you are not in control of your experiences. I mean sure sometimes you cannot - you are a dog locked in a cage and random shocks are hurting you and there's nothing you can do but wait it out. and sometimes you do get fooled into thinking the cage is still locked the next day when secretly it was unlocked, and you are too defeated to try the lock to open it... so sad story. so this is why you always try. chance is a real factor in life, and the way to defeat it is persistence, constant vigilance.

@username what I mean when I say there is nothing black in whiet. is that you ask me to declare some kind of deep desire or wanting. I do not have such things! it is make believe! I say this from a long life of direct experience by the way - I have always struggled to answer when someone asks me these things "do you want chinese or pizza" - I want everything! there are times when I am a mystic. and times when I am a hedonist. times when I am both. and times when I am neither. and all the mixtures thereof, in between, thos poles. and these times can be as long as many years or as short as a split second! I do not answer "both ways" not because I am somehow trying to be clever or behind the question or better-than or smart or whatever. I answer "there is no black and white" because that is the most simple, most direct answer I came up with to explain my "preference" that you ask for. it might sound as if I claim that I have no preference but while I might literally same that sometimes it isn't what is true. there are merits to both and flaws to both, and I just find it too precise to answer either way because it never is that precise. there is always aspects of either, even when there is not-one, even when there is neither. even when I am fully conscious and even when I am fully unconscious. and when I am asked these kinds of questions, I recognize these (idk what to say "facts?") when I am asked such questions and reflect upon my answer, like I have done with this thread. I cannot trully say "hedonist" and cannot truly say "ascetic" because neither and yet both are true. and either, and that fourth thing that is neither neither nor either nor both but I don't have a word for it at the moment... "mixture" or "gradient" just doesn't truly capture the meaning accurately but they could do...

@username nothing is black and white and no, your question isn't stupid and I'm not saying neither. it's a very insightful question and I gave my best response that I had in the moment. I am sorry if it is not to your liking. just ignore me and move on

ego is a threat to society! ego drives society! ego doesn't exist! ego is society exactly! ego is nothingness! ego is everything! ego is a powerful tool! ego is just some symbol that means nothing! ego is hell itself! ego is heavenly! ego is definitely different than consciousness! ego is consciousness exactly in essence - they are one and the same! you are ego but I am not! I am ego but you are not! you don't exist (but I definitely do - trust me you are just a figment of my imagination) ego will systematically dismantle all existence from the world!

the world isn't black and white

"truth replaces ego" - a ego statement