lens

1)because it is part of the show, one of the many possibilities there are, one of the many angles a movie scene can be played from and it is as meanigless with deception and without it. "Enlightment" is realizing it is all a play, while still having to act on stage. 2)it's not if you havent seen it for yourself, when you see how it is possible however it loses the importance you once gave it, it is, what can stop it? 3)i dont think that matters on this "path", seems like a funny thought though

The world doesn't need Leo, if he dies it goes on, if he lives it goes on, he is just a guy on the internet you became attached to, no matter how valid/invalid his points are. Take it easy man, this is coming from the inside, not the outside.

"NOTHING" get it? truth be told you should be asking yourself that, asking others is only going to show you their version of why it does "good" but even then it will only be "good" from your perspective. you have to figure out if it has any basis yourself.

Fear is there to keep you still, "it's too risk to try new things, you might get hurt, STOP!" Next time fear arrives try to pin point its exact moment and its cause and trace it back. How come you are scared of X and not Y? because.... go really deep into it, don't stop until you feel like you know 100% why. now even if you know its origins not letting it control you will be hard, the key is not to get rid of fear, it is there for a reason, the key is not to let it stop you from living your life. Don't go to places expecting that fear will not be there, it will always be even if just a little. The more you say "i want fear to leave" the more it will want to stay. Now here is the really scary part, you know that feeling telling you to not do those things? yeah, do it. Go to the places you want to go, but don't force yourself to not feel the fear, it's only by facing it that you might overcome it. Eventually you will get used to it and you will notice your fear going down or say to it self "why am i scared of this again?". Don't jump straight into the rabbit hole though, let yourself slowly adapt. you are not going to get over your problems from one day to the other. It takes patience and courage. Also therapy might help you, but only actually doing it is what will enable you to do what you want, sucks doesn't it? Also the ego isn't evil, it is the character everyone is playing wether we like it or not. You know when you are watching a series and you want that character's life to go for the better? that's kind of like that, you are literally a character, why shouldn't you want to improve? you can be aware of the present moment and confident, imo it's kind of the samething, it's not going over board, it's going like "oh, it's just a play, a very very illusory confusing play, so let's play"

I have had a couple of experiences that completly blew my mind off the first time i had them I only became trully conscious of the ego ilusion when I was looking at myself in a mirror after months and months of meditating. I noticed i couldn't recognize my face anymore, as in, yeah there was an image but that image was not me. i had only understood partially what ego death was like till then, not fully. I looked at my hand and started asking who was doing the observing and i went at it for a minutes, when i noticed there was no one home i went into imediate shock followed by a whole hour of euphoria and laughter. I was absolutely amazed at reality, like i understood at least 00000,1% of it, i felt an immense love and started crying tears of joy (i hugged a wall, it was weird but surprisigly warm). my head kept trying to distract me by bringing up my fears and regrets but i realized none of that mattered, like 100% certantiny that was just mental masturbation. there is no me, it is, i'm it! i'm everything! Unfortuanely i couldn't stay into that for too long and eventually felt back with the ego a bit. A few months later i'm having an episode of sadness, i can't explain why, i wake up feeling horrible for no reason and even though the day that it happened in was actually pretty good day i felt alone and devastated, i couldn't explain why. I layed down in my bed and started questioning these feelings i have so frequently and it went on a loop of "I don't like life, it's too hard, too many questions, too many hardships, too many responsibilities" but i started to suspect why i felt like that, eventually i got even deeper into my questioning, because i was literally confused at my own emotions. my day was great, nothing bad had happened for months, and yet there i was creating my own problems, i started to answer my own questions with the first things that appeared in my head, and everytime something came out first it was exactly what i needed to hear. eventually i realized that all of those feeling i was having where literally distractions, and i got scared because i noticed they were distracting me from a bigger fear/regret i was hidding but wasn't aware of. I stood still scared and i realized what was trully causing me suffering, i was distracting myself because truth was I missed being one with everything, i was sad I had become so separate from god. I missed truth, I missed all of us. It felt like for a second i had absorbed the grief of everyone and started experiencing it. I started crying like never before as i became conscious of all the things we do to eachother, easily hating one another and most of the time going out of our way to justify the hate. I felt love like before, but this time it wasn't love like "'it's all good man" it was like a mother watching her kids grow up to all hate eachother and becoming serial killers, i was sad for everything and everyone, from that day the concept of unconditional love has not left me. I feel a huge sympaty for people, even when someone upsets me i cannot bring myself to hate anyone, even those who wronged me in the past, as much as the ego wants them to "get it" i cannot bring myself to hate. I also recently learned something about the distractions, my fears, rational and irrational. I saw @Azrael's latest post about conversing with your emotions and I gave it a try, and as i started to question my fear this time around things got tense, like i was going to die from it. I literally cannot sit stil for a day, like every day I have to think about life, about my purpose, about my friends, about my dreams, about my beliefs, about my "truths" and I realized fear was strongly connected to it. I started questioning my fear and it felt like i was interrogating a criminal who was super nervous. Fear told me that the only way i can learn/grow is through it, it kept yelling with me saying that it was the one thing i should count on, because it was fear of existence that made me change as a person. I searched more, I became more intelligent, I became more compassionate, I made new friends, GREAT friends, I started to work hard and show results because of fear, but the things is i'm done. I couldn't hear it anymore, i'm just tired. Everyday of my life i feel like i need to learn something new, and this desire for knowledge has been with me as long as i can remenber, my uncle even called me out on it (for the wrong reasons but still) he thinks i'm reflecting too much, researching too much and according to him someone at my age shouldn't be so deep at life yet. I like learning like everyone else, i just hate this sense of MUST. I want to do all of the things i'm doing and more without fear to be my "motivator", without feeling like i need to. I just want to live life. and that's why i'm confused, should I stop trying to research about life and reality? Should I turn a blind eye? I don't mean to live ignorantly, i mean, should I just be and not WANT to go over stuff? if life is trully meanigless and we give our meaning it feels like that's what i should be doing, one of my biggest fears is to live a long life with a lot of wisdom but with fear still controling me. Should I give up on enlightment?

So, i have been struggling with negative thoughts for a while but i've managed to calm down quite a bit from it, that is until this happened and put me right back on track. for those who don't know i suffe from a negative bias, and i believe there's some entity out there playing with me. recently i was exposed to a scary thought experiment called (*search it up if you're not scared by this sort of thing: name>*--Roko's basilisk--*)------------------------------------------ i came out of it with a feeling of dread but managed to recover, however i started searching videos on youtube about consciousness and i came across a comment where a guy said "Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?"-system shock quote at first i was like "......what?" i went to the guys channel, complet nutjob who keeps stealing other people's video and talking about communism and satan and what not in russian, so i went like "okay just a weird guy" the next day i'm on twitter seeing posts about consciousness and the guy who i was checking had shared a link that said "research reveals why we are afraid of corridors" and i'm like, okay, freaky, but look at the time of posting, i just the unlucky chance of coming across it i go to youtube, search for a brazilian movie, see some stuff, log out for a while. I come back and in my recommended there's 2 videos one from a brazilian movie called "hacker, every crime has one" and another about poland, documentary i go like wtf poland? okay, but as soon as i notice the hacker i start freaking out, i calm myself down and go to bed. i wake up, start eating and reflect about it, "poland poland poland...what does that have to do with anything?....POLISH CORRIDOR!!!" in portuguese that is known as a form of punishment. i'm going crazy. i try to keep my mind off of it and i search a series i like, trailer park boys, i see one with jimmy keemel and go see the comments to calm me down a bit more. there's a freaking guy called POLISH sausage as the most thumbed up comment. jesus christ. i panick, and calm down. take a shower, sleep to forget and wake up again. i remenber i had heard of system shock before, and to confirm it i go on youtube and type top 10 best ai in gaming. shodan(ai antagonist)is in number 2. and i go, aha, i knew i knew it from somewhere. i start to get relieved. that is until this glorious bastardic event happened. check recommended videos. there's a video called "the glitch" where there's a mario with a bugged out face, it was a really popular video when it came out in 2013, i remenber watching it. I DON'T REMENBER THAT THE GOD DAMN CHANNEL NAME WAS CALLED CORRIDOR. this is all freaky shit, but i want to know, has anything like this ever happened to you? a bunch of weird coincidences one after another that scared you? i need to know, i can't be the only one please who has ever went through such a scary shit like this.

sorry if it's a bit too long but I just want to get this out of my chest since no one I know fully understands what I'm going through. when i was younger i'd always be perplexed by existence itself, and I could never understand it no matter how many times I tried to rationalize it. Back then I was a christian and any doubts and scary thoughts I had would be dismissed by me going "because god" so I never really worried. I remenber I was watching a trailer for an upcoming game about a guy who had 12 hours to find out who killed him before his soul dissapeared, I found it interesting and researched the game. I started to question about how it was possible for a soul to not exist, I found it really paradoxicall and went really deep into it. but my brain couldn't accept it so it went like "that concept doesn't exist because it cannot work, much like santa claus, because of god" and out of nowhere my brain did this which changed my life forever. "santa claus? hey, remenber how santa claus was a made up story adults told to kids? what if god is the same thing?" I froze and went into an immediate panic attack. On that night I lost something i'd never get back, certantity and safety. I could never again be certain I wasn't living a lie, that I wasn't in a dream, a matrix, a boltzmann brain dreaming within the matrix, heck why not hell? I went a long time believing that my sole purpose in life was to be some higher being's toy who wanted to make me suffer due to the fact that I was constantly depressed basically living with a solipsism mindset. but a certain time passed and I got over it, because just like the previous "because god" I took for granted I took for granted that I was living in a "naive realist" reality, and that was that. "why does anything exist?" because it does, sciencie is going to find out why, no need to worry, why is there councioness? because science there is no god, religion is stupid, I hate god, that was me for a long time. I kind of switched "religions" from god to science while keeping some spiritual ideas about the self and free will to appease my ego. I remenber I used to be proud how I overcame that horrible state of mind and that I had somehow "rised above" into what I considered something no human had ever experienced. I laugh at that idea now, but back then I got really cocky, that is until it happened again. I was chatting with a friend in college about free will, and he told me how everything is appearantly predetermined and that the brain makes decisions before the "I" is aware. I dug deep into it. I went to wiki, reddit, youtube documentaries, I even started to research in sites I never went on about scientists who were for and against the idea of it, just to get a better sense of perspective. at one point I even tried tricking myself into believing, "I live in the brain, the brain cares for me, and thefore the "I" cares for the brain" i was really grasping at straws at that point, and then the truth was pretty much summed up by leo's video about it. "there is no you to have free will" I did not take that well. I went into a state of sadness, and then of despair realizing there's no control, because logic worked like this I felt sad, i was predetermined to feel sad, oh no that means i was predetermined to suffer, I am now again a higher being's toy, now I feel sad again, and because of it I feel despair again, now realize you were predetermi-you get the idea. the best mentality? no, I was trying to make sense of something that is impossible to make sense of, reality itself. and of course it took me sometime to surrender to the idea. But then my brain being the uncertain prick that it is whenever it gets back up it did another thing "hey remenber all of those theories that scared you? why don't you try researching them to see how they hold up?" ever since I had lost faith in god that was my motto, no matter how scary, truth first because it will "hurt less" so I started to do some research into things and for a while I was okay, nothing that scared me had really ever had basis other than a few conspiracy theorys and nuts jobs online, until one apperantly got scientific basis, the simulation hypothesis. again in college some friends said we had a higger chance of being in a simulation than not, so what did I do? well I researched of course, and it's true, the odds do not look good, so how does someone in the scientific community react when they hear this? "cool, that means we are also going to make one and we won't go extinct, science is so wonderfull, this answers all questions about physics and what not, this opens up the doors to so many possibilities." how I reacted "i'm yet again a higher being's toy, they are waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike, they are going to torture me for eternity, death will not exist for me, i'm not going to die only to satisfy whatever desire for pain they have, why was I ever born?" I know I sound like a crazy paranoid imbecil at this point, but can you blame me? Life has been nothing but unpleasent ever since, why would it brake the cycle? I was stripped of so many concepts I had grown up with that it couldn't be helped.The universe does not care for us to such up a point that to me it almost makes it look like it's passively agressive telling me to go **** myself. no matter how many times I went like "well maybe they won't do it." "if it is true what's the point of worrying?" "who knows, maybe we are not in a computer simulation ;)" -wishful thinking I always end up worrying and putting myself into a corner where everything in existence is out to get me. I don't even know what life is anymore, some times I love it, it's great! and then in others i'm actually going around doubting everyone and everything just wanting to die because I realize how defenseless and lost I am. I never took existence's mystery for granted, just its concepts, and ever since I stopped i'm super skeptical of everthing, I basicaly live in the land of "what if". Something good happened? well what if... and it goes on and on and on, there's no room for hope to me anymore. so why am i telling anyone this? well, because i'm curious. am I the only crazy one who thinks this way? Am I the only one who finds existence itself to be the most terrying thing in existence? It seems too good to be true at some cases. how doesn't anyone else think about stuff like this? can anyone please explain to me how this doesn't affect you? I realize what's causing me pain is resistance to the idea, i need to surrender to it, but i don't know how. Why doesn't anyone else around me seem to fear reality? Are they blind or are they seeing something i'm not? Most people I see just take it for granted, so I don't know anymore, maybe i'm going insane, that's always a plus.

I think what bothers me it's the fact that there's no control to be had. I mean the entire human species evolved to have control over nature, and now as a human I realize there's no such thing. But for some reason even when nothing is wrong my brain will still goes like "search this, you're too happy, you should be worried, don't over-look things but do over-think them." and it creates more and more worries for me. I'm actually a little bit uneasy as of now because I found out that apperantly the universe never ends(literaly continues after heat death via quantum stuff so this post has been read an infinite amount of times in an infinite amount of diferent arrangements) and my mind went into a super dark place wanting to end it all because I was convinced i'd be living the same tortured life forever. But at the same time I realize "I" don't exist. There's no me to suffer, I'm not an entity. what's the diference between "me" and the previous version of me? well that's not me, there is no me to be a thing. I'm still a little bit conflicted with existential thoughts, I actually just found another thing to worry about a few hours ago involving a thought experiment which shifted my mood(roko's basilisks, search it if you are okay with scary ideas) but i'm slowly realizing that thoughts are all just ilusions, and that we give them too much power most of the time. I'm not sure if i'll accomplish it but i'll try, and thanks for the replies, means alot to me guys

Never put your hopes up into anything, expect the worse because if the worse doesn't end up happening the surprise of something good happening becomes greater than the feeling of hope, if the worse does happen at least you were prepared, imagine if you weren't.