Erlend K

This was a very honest and well artiulated post. Even tho you are anonymous it takes a lot of courage to open up like this. I can recognize a lot of the hopelessness and obsessions I had in my twenties myself. There are hope tho. Today I am a very happy person. Unfortunaely no one on this forum can give you a quick fix for this. Fixing these kinds of problems will likely take a lot of hard work and dedication. If you are not seeing a therapist already, finding one would be an obvious first step. For serous mental problems medication can be a part of a larger package of solutions. For me Nardil worked wonders for my social anxiety, and gave me the push I needed to start working seriously on fixing my issues. The most effective things you can do on your own do deal with anxiety are physical exersise, progressive muscle relaxation (you can find guided prm on youtube), cbt exercises and visualisation based progressive exposure followed by in vivo exposure. The most effective happiness boosters are gratidute exersises like keeping a gratitude journal or writing letters of gratitude, physical exersise and helping others who suffer more than you. I recently started voluntering as a listener at "7 cups", where I listen to- and try to give advice based on my own experience to others going through similar problems to the ones I went through when I was younger. I notice helping out others make me feel a lot better about my self. Mindfulness meditation helps for some, but not for everyone. If it dosnt seem to be working for you, you might consider replacing the practice with yoga or self-compassion meditation, both of wich are well documented to help with anxiety and depression.

Best of luck on your journey. Your insightfull, provocative posts will be missed.

There are numerous studies showing that a healthy, active sexlife is associated with higher happiness. The data also seem to indicate that the primary causality is more sex => higher life satisfaction, and not the other way around. Google sex+happiness if you are interessted in checking out these studies. You likely only have about a decade left with a super high sexdrive and super strong interesst in sex. As you get into your thirties it start becoming less exciting, but still a great way to bond with someone you care about. Not having more sex or more sexpartners in their youth is typically one of the things old people report regretting about how they lived their lives. As a 20 year old you dont need to dedicate 100% of your time to some life project. You should spend your 20 balancing your time between building a foundation for some life project, having fun and gaining novel, memorable experiences.

This post is really vague. What kind of doubt are you talking about? Could you expand on what you mean?

This is probably not the advice you want, but it is the advice you need to follow. Sitting at home "doing self-development" can become an unhealthy addiction and form of procrastination in it self. My advice is to just get any job to become independent, or at least able to help your mom pay the bills. You are an adult, and shouldn't be leeching off your family. Any job can be performed in a high or low consciousness way, depending on your attitude. Čiksentmihai describes factory workers he met who were able to get into a flow state while working at an assembly line. My second advice is to try to treat your family with kindness, compassion and gratitude. You can view this as a valuable chance to develop these all-important pro-social traits. Cultivating kindness, compassion and gratitude has been a cornerstone of nearly every major spiritual tradition in history, and has been recommended by pretty much all the wisest people who ever lived, and all the modern positive psychologists. It's a more foundational part of spirituality and self-development than anything you sit alone in your room doing.

It dosn't take hard work declaring than anyone who disagree with your views, and yes they are views even if you experience them as undeniable facts, per definition has to be speaking from their ego. It's a lot easier to dismiss than to actualy try to understand another persons perspective. You seem to be confirming what I suggested. Your view seems to be that what I'm saying 100% sertainly comes from ego and must be false, while what you are saying 100% sertainly dosn't come from ego and have to be true. The foundation of wisdom is to know that you don't know anything. Any idea we hold true is an assumption/view. Nomatter how true this feels for you it remains nothing but a view. To paraphraze the condesending line you used in your post "one day (when you are as wise and insightful as the Oh so great me) you will realize this.

There is nothing that "needs" to be discussed. We don't discuss because we "need" to. The whole point of this forum is to have discussions about our ideas. We do this partly for fun/intellectual stimulation, partly to boost our own egos by trying to sound clever and insightful, but also partly to have our our ideas challenged, so that we can identify and weed out the weak parts. We do that be being asked to justify our established views. Everytime we realize that we lack a solid justification for one of our views we (ideally) get that aha!-moment where we realize we have just gotten used to labeling something as true/false on insufficient grounds. What are you doing on a discussion forum if you don't want to articulate and have your views challenged? Did you feel like you pointed out something I was not conscious about? Instead if trying to articulate your views and engage in a meaningful discussion, you just give me these generic, reductive, spiritualish phrases. It is just a way to shut down conversations and dosn't benefit anyone Your view: "if you speak based on what you think it is the EGO who is speaking" I have the opposite point of view. You never know for sure if what you say is true. At best you only state what you think is true. Accepting this and admitting that your ideas is just something you think is true seems to me like a sign of a healthy ego. Blindness to this and belief that you know something to be true just because it feels true seems like a sign of an unhealthy ego. If you want to discuss this, that's cool. If not, that's cool too. Whatever.

Ok, whatever then. I though you were interested in a discussion about this. I really hope this is a weird attempt at being funny, and that you are not really as pretentious as you present yourself to be.

Yea, no kidding.. I know which post you quoted. I was asking what made you think this was my ego speaking. Was this some general idea that everything spoken or written in words per definition has to be ego based, since use of language requires thought? Or was there something specific about my post you interpreted as ego based?

What do you mean by this statement? And what are you basing it on?

@John Iverson Would you care to elaborate on that?

@Max_VI think you are just playing word games with yourself. The concept of property/belongings is a purely legal concept not a metaphysical one. I think it's true that you don't exist as a Self: a coherent, indivisible, stable (It feels like it's the same "Self" today as it were 10 years ago) "core of who you are" who observes of the stream of consciousness and make decisions or set intentions based on free will: The "Unified owner of experience and agent of action" as Rick Hanson puts it. You most certainly exist as a "person" tho: An agent in the physical world impacting other agents and objects in the physical world, and who has legal and moral rights and obligations. I know that some members of this forum like hold up some arbitrary definitions of "reality" or "existence" where the physical world per definition dosn't "exist", but that is just more pointless word games. In every pratical sense you exist as a person, and your body belongs to you, as a person (not a Self).

This sound really painfull. I don't know if this helps, but heartbreaks is something all of us have to go through. I don't know of any quick fix for hearthbreaks, I think you just have to let it take the time it takes. Always remember th these feelings dosn't mean there is something wrong with you. They mean that you are normal (don't know if this is an issue for you, but I mention it just incase). When it comes to comparing yourself to others, we all do that to some degree. Even tho you have heard that "you should not compare yourself to others", and have internalized this idea, there is no need to judge yourself when you inevitavly do it. The mind is not a single, coherent thing, but a society of fairly independent subminds. The submind that thinks you shouldn't compare yourself to others is a completely different one than the submind that is producing thought of comparison. The first dosn't dictate what the second does. If you become aware of thoughts of social comparison it is not "You", who are comparing yourself. It is a mental subsystem outside of your conscious control, thats sending these thoughts of comparison into your field of awareness. The short term goal is just being mindful of these thoughts as they pass through your field of awareness. The long term solution is to work on developing better self esteem. Do you have anyone in real life you can talk to about these feelings? Having someone who listens and understand you makes it a lot easier to deal with these kinds of feelings.

Consciousness may or may not be produced by the brain. No one knows yet. Consciousness is still one of the great mysteries of the universe. If consciousness exists independent of the brain, then at least the content of consciousness (Information from sense organs, thoughts, feelings, the sense of there being a "Self" in control etc.) is either produced or at least strongly affected by changes in the brain. I think that's the best answer to this question. Consciousness and the content of Consciousness (or said differently: awareness and that which awareness is aware of) are two fundamentally different things. One seems to be clearly a product of the mind, the other we can only speculate about what is.

Personly I'm sceptical about researching too much theory early on. There are a lot of traps this can lead to. For atleast the first couple of months my advice would be to read just 1 sd book or do 1 course, and then focus on finding ways to implement what I learned, to avoid getting bogged down in theory. A typical beginner trap is that studying sd can give you a feeling that you are allready doing something constructive, wich makes it easier to rationalize not taking action in the real world. You feel like you are spending your time constructivly, wich lessens the guilt you feel about not taking constructive action. The intelectual stimulation and temperary feelings of ephipanies and almost "having it all figured out now" can become very adictive, and you can end up spending too much of your time satisfying your craving for these. It can also lead to paralisis of analysis, as you end up making things much more complicated than they really are. You will also find tonns of conflicting advice wich can be confusing. I think its better to start training yourself to take action on the fundamentals - the things that will be a part of whatever life-purpose/big picture goal you eventually develop along your path. Many of these are obvious (require no study of theory) and includes physical exercise, eating healthy, doing something like meditation/yoga/progressive muscle relaxation, getting used to writing down goals and to do list, cultivating prosocial traits like kindness and compassion, journaling, developing your will power/work ethic by pushing yourself. As you advance: study more and more, to refine your goals and optimize your methods. As a beginner: the most thing is to start taking real-life action.

You just have to pick one short to mid term goal you want to start with. It dosnt matter much wich goal you pick, it's just about training yourself to take action. What you do is simply to list all the tasks required to acchieve the goal, then divide the tasks into the smallest possible subtasks. Then whenevet you can muster enough motivation pick one subtask, perform it and then reward yourself. The reward can be simply something like sitting 5 min and congratulate and praise yourself, and let yourself feel good. This way you will train your mind, through classical conditioning, to have more positive associations to taking action towards your goals. If you keep using rewards to reinforce this assiciation, it will grow stronger over time, and taking action will become more and more natural to you.

This is technicaly not a 'vision board', but a collage I have over my desk at my home office. It's a combination of images of people I care about, pictures and quotes that inspire me and make me feel good and notes with practical insights I want to stay reminded of.

I think it's a pointless question. The truth is that we have no idea wether free will exists or not. The universe seems to be non-deterministic on the quantum level, but it might very well be turn out to be deterministic when physics advances further. For all we know consciousness might be a fundamental part of the fabric of the universe, existing outside of/in parallell with the physical universe. Or it might simply arise from the feedbackloops of the brain. It's all just speculation. In real life however we have to live as if we had free will.

I know people who got hooked on conspiracy theories. It didnt benefit them at all, and just gave them a more negative, paranoid outlook on the world. The attraction to these theories seem very ego based. "I have understood this important truth that the naive, brainwashed masses hasn't. This makes me supperior to them". There is also a lot of confirmation bias involved. F.i a lot of people hated the Bush government. Becourse of this, the idea that they were responible for 911 just kinda felt right for a lot of these people. It reinforced and justified their existing belief that Bush was evil, making them feel that they got it right, and had been right all along. The way this manifest itself in conciousness is simply the intuition that the theory "make sense" and seems plausable, combined with a subtle good feeling.

"The key to happiness" is positive, authentic relationships with other people, built on mutual love, trust and respect. That combined with decent physical health and gratitude for the relationships and health you have. Continous progress is a great bonus to have on top of that.

Physical exersise and diet has a major impact on your mood, mental energy and and cogintive abilities. Almost no mater what your purpose is, a healthy lifestyle is in alignment with it.

I do the three good things exersice everyday. I do it in googledocs tho, not a notebook.

What makes you think you need to live in a cave? I thing most highly self-realized people never lived in a cave.

I think the two most important criteria for evaluating spiritual teachers are 1: how many people they have inspired to take up a serious spiritual practice, and 2: The degree to wich their insights and methods have helped students make spiritual progress. For both these criteria I think the Buddha has to be unrivaled.

Fun read?! I used to love infinite series in college, but its been a few years, so Im not 100% sure I got this correctly. What I think is correct: 1-1+1-1+... = sum(-1)^n, from n=0 to i. This series is equal to 1 for all even numbers, and 0 for all odd numbers. For lim i->inf (the Grandis series), the sum is 1/2, and not 0. Im not sure if it is possible to break the brackets like you do for an infinite series, but if you can, the aritmetic would be 1-1+1-1+... = 1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+... = 1+ lim i->inf sum(-1)^(n-1), for n=0 to i, = 1 + the inverse of the Grandis series = 1 + (-1/2) = 1/2. So the sum dosnt change.