Christos

@sleeperstakes Journaling is great, but even just writing down the thoughts that come up when you ask yourself "Why can't I hold a long term relationship" and, the golden follow-up question, "Where did I learn this behavior" is more than sufficient, and it is what I personally do too. The reason you want to write things down is that your mind isn't a place for serious thinking, as funny as that sounds. You wouldn't attempt to solve a hard calculus problem in your head without writing it down, and in the same fashion, you cannot uproot deep childhood conditioning just by thinking in your head. Once you write things down, you're able to reread them and move around them in a sense, you become your own guru. The technique is simple: Sit down, shut up, write what's up with you until you know. Wish you the best.

Pickup is an external solution to an internal problem. It's like going on a diet when you know you have a problem with emotional eating: sure, you will lose some pounds with a lot of work. You will take them all back and more at the first slipup because the real problem hasn't yet been fixed. Ask yourself why you cannot hold a long term relationship. Once you find out what behaviors cause this (eg clinginess), ask yourself where you learned them. They will stem from your childhood. Pinpoint where they are from as much as you can. They will stem from the places you least want to look, most likely. It will not be fun, and society condemns looking inwards for some reason, but if you want to solve your problems and be a grounded adult there is no other way except making peace with all the ways in which you are messed up. It is not a pretty process, but be a man and sort yourself out.

@Moreira People seem to be criticizing you quite a bit but don't lose heart, I understand where you're coming from. The complete loss of touch with nature is one of the 21st century's greatest tragedies and if you wish to permanently reconnect with it, it's a very noble goal. And in my opinion, far nobler than achieving success as defined by our postmodern capitalistic society, which prompts people to be workaholics/good consumers in order to stay on its feet. Look into off grid self-sufficient communities, there are a lot of people already doing what you want to do and they would welcome you now, for free, if you're willing to take the leap.

@NickG This reply will be a little long but I doubt you will regret reading it. Video games are like innocent looking crack cocaine. I know a lot more people that have fucked their lives up completely because of MMORPGs than by any illegal drug. As with all addictions, pretending you're not addicted and forcing yourself to quit cold turkey is a surefire way to relapse. You need to look within as to why you like video games so much and the reason will not be pretty. Here are a couple of ones I've seen, some in myself, some in others: -Life is hard and stressful and you don't like feeling pain. Thus, you use video games to stop feeling pain (or anything at all really) and try to get yourself back together. -You are looking for a sense of connection or identity in virtual social circles, which you lack in real life. I see this a lot with people hooked to online MMORPGs and generally games that have a "community": It's not the game itself that is making them come back to it, it's that they are good at it and people in the game recognize it and give them praise, while in real life the addicts feel like unloveable failures. The addicts are so starved of affection and of a feeling of connection that they steep as low as they have to to get it; like a starving man will eat worms and grass. -You feel powerless to your circumstances in real life (if you are being really honest with yourself) and in video games, you get to be powerful. Sounds simplistic but people will do anything to stop themselves from feeling like helpless prey. -Your soul (or more accurately, your primal drives instilled in you by evolution, which are still firing regardless of how domesticated you got in the 21st century) needs adventure, needs difficulty, needs exploration, needs to be directly facing the unknown with no mediators. That's the feeling that you get when you explore a new area in an open world game. The unknown isn't scary when you know that you can probably deal with it; it's exciting and unbelievably fun. If you are lacking that feeling in real life (eg. your life is mostly routine and grind and you are afraid to step outside those confines), you will be tempted to get it in the largest doses you can find elsewhere (in games). See if you can relate with any of those, I think they are pretty common. If not, still, you get the idea: drill into your mind and find out why you play. It's not fun, but it's hopefully preferable to the constant suffering caused by the addiction.

@egoless I won't resort to optical illusions to convince you of the nature of "you", the answer is simple. So, changing it to the first person, your question is: "Am I reborn as another ego or do I become absolute infinity aka nothingness" What you perceive of as "I" is your ego. So your question becomes: "Is my ego reborn as another ego or does it become absolute infinity aka nothingness" Your ego dies with your physical death as your neurons stop firing. That's the answer to your question.

@Voyager The price of truth is everything but it's hard to understand what "everything" means unless you're paying it. At some point abandoning the path becomes impossible and you can only temporarily stray from it. Believe me, I've tried, but the question of "What the fuck is the truth?" becomes a parasite in your head and does not let you resume your normal life, making ego destruction a matter of time.Regardless of what you choose now, you have already drilled deep enough (to be even considering going all in) that permanently returning to absolute delusion is impossible. You will see soon enough that the fast lane is the only lane there is and the only lane that matters. Don't worry, you are already too deep to back out. And for the record, you don't need a guru. You are more than enough.

@Afonso Ι know exactly what you're talking about. Here is what Jed McKenna has to say on this: "If you take your hand off the tiller, the boat will steer itself and do a vastly better job of it than you ever could." "Fear and ego—in other words, ignorance—are keeping your hand on the tiller. Release the tiller for whatever reason, and the steering takes care of itself." "To explain this I have to say something about the way my mind works—the way I view and move through life. Simply put, I don't think. I don't make choices or decisions. I don't weigh possibilities and select one over others. Instead, I observe patterns and move with them. I have a refined sense of tightness and not-rightness that guides me in all things. No decision in my life is made through ratiocination. I wait for unfolding. I sense currents and I flow with them. You don't have to be enlightened to operate this way; you just have to release the tiller. Once you do, an entirely new way of flowing through life opens to you—a way that is based on tightness and sensitive to not-rightness. So when I look at my own life, my own story, I look for the pattern, the unifying theme, the sum of the parts that explains my existence." "I've watched much smarter people than myself, much braver people than myself, break their ships fatally on the rocks because they were too full of themselves to release control. This stuff isn't about brains and balls, it's about desire and flow and purity of intent." Take some time to contemplate the above. Letting go is fucking scary and takes time, not for any other reason, but because you're used to the opposite and you have identified with thinking and being in control. Not only is it possible to live your entire life like that, that's the only way to live. When you are caught in thought stories, you are not in the present moment but in your own imagined fairytales.

Just curious. Is it real? Does it work? Or is it just new-age bs?

I find that the inability to be spontaneous and simply act when there is no time to come up with a proper plan is a major handbrake when it comes to personal development. Sure, taking a detailed approach to your major endeavors is great, but life tends to always catch you off-guard at something. How many times do you catch yourself needing to make some decision on the spot and you end up doing nothing or taking the path of least resistance? (eg. whether to take a conflict to your boss or let it slide) And to those that say "Do the most emotionally demanding thing either way and you will get used to it" or "Fake it till you make it", I don't think that you can become something (a grounded spontaneous person) by imitating it (always forcing yourself to do the thing that you have the most resistance to) because that starts a spiral of neuroticism that will, at some point, get the best of you. The change that needs to happen is internal, but I'm not sure what it is. So, how do you take your hands off the tiller and not get in your own way in situations that call for quick action?