Laputan Machine

For about half a year, i've been doing a fairly steady job at improving myself in various ways: i meditated, i went to the gym, i did good at my school but about a month ago it just all crashed and i haven't been able to reassemble myself ever since. I started playing a lot of video games and my porn addiction began to seep in again. Anyone have an advice on how to start over?

@Cjaryo thank you. how should i implement that? just straight up stop playing and meditate on the spot or be more subtle about it and just put meditation somewhere in my schedule and inflate how much time that takes so as to kill my gaming habit? @Self-Mastery that is a worrying proposition but i thank you for the book, i'll try to find an audiobook somewhere. I think it's fair to assume that if i cant get off my ass and do the simple things i am supposed to be doing then i can't just read a book that is about a subject outside of my comfort zone

I have no medical background so I wouldn't dare declare that tourette's syndrome is what I have but ever since I began meditating and self-actualizing, I've started having these moments where I just say absolutely random shit that I have no control over. This used to be a problem in the past but I never payed much mind to it and now it begins to really bug me because lately, the things that have been coming out of my mouth have been really offensive and grim, to the point of legitimately stressing me out and making me feel very demoralized. Very often it's been something about suicide and I've never had the urge or impulse to kill myself, at least I don't think I did. Another weird factor is that this never happens around other people, only when I think I'm alone. It's like a rising urge that I can control around other people without effort but when I'm alone, it's absolutely undetectable. Is this a normal thing to experience and if so, how do I deal with that?

@Cudin yup, he's great. there's a similar youtuber that i like, check him out

@Girzo yeah, no point asking people around here. i guess all i needed is a call to action, will try to figure out what's what in the near future

So I've already made a post about me feeling insecure about my looks and I feel like I've managed to get over that fairly well but I feel like I still need to do something about my sexuality not really finding a vessel. I've been neglecting it for a pretty long time and, despite already being in a few relationships, I never really learned important skills, such as how to approach a girl or how to be presentable to women, girls were just something that happened to me. Anyone got any sound advice for coming out of the shell? I am not afraid of experimenting all that much, maybe one of y'all will give me a winning idea.

@Hafiz i like that idea, might do that. strangers where i live tend to not like being approached but there might be an occasional odd person that will respond to you. @SFRL online dating is definitely not something i'd like to get back into. not that it's not possible to get a partner there, i just see no reason to get back into that. it feels very lacking to me and, on top of that, i am not really the type of guy that gets more than one like a month

@Telepresent been there. you should definitely try to let go of your core beliefs just to see what will happen, probably not much, at least externally. internally you'll begin to realize just how rigid ideology makes you. personally, i haven't managed to really let go of a core belief but merely move it waaay into the background, but even that allowed me to see the biases that i've got going and now i can catch myself being fallacious to preserve my precious preconceptions about reality

About a month ago i decided that I needed a diary. Got myself a lil' notepad with a couple of pages and decided that it'll be good enough for a diary and, surprisingly, it was a very good idea. I was only a starting diary-ist, diare... Diarrheaist. Whatever. It was my first time writing in a diary and so, I had little experience in actually writing about myself for myself so what I did is I wrote very brief and to the point sentences, often outright ignoring grammar so as to make everything fit inside a notebook that was smaller than my palm. Reason why it was a good idea is that I was able to sorta distill the thought or emotion to a level where it was just that and no external parts, which is a very useful thing to have if you're trying to structure a diary like I did. What I did is make every sentence a sort of snapshot of whatever was brewing inside of me. Helps with self-expression, that. After I was done with that notepad I moved on to a notebook which, obviously, can hold much more sentences and information. My briefness found the size of the pages quite pleasing, now I could fill a whole page worth of important thoughts and feelings! It was excellent. Today I decided to scroll through my notepad and I realized just how true the idea of every page being a snapshot of your state of mind is. I didn't remember, I experienced the feelings and the reasons why I wrote each and every sentence. It was a much stronger sensation than when you look at a photo of yourself or a place you've been to. That was a fairly interesting feeling that I decided to write in my diary about and then thought about making a topic on the forum. Everything I just said might seem obvious to y'all and I might even look like a caveman that just discovered the TV but I want to ask those of you that do write diaries, how has it, if at all, affected your journey to enlightenment? Replace enlightenment with whatever goal you have in mind, if you wish : ^ )

So as the title suggests, i have severe body image issues. I don't feel like, nor have i ever felt like i am physically attractive. i've been told that i am pretty or have nice features by my exes and some other people but i honestly consider myself at best below average. i don't even care if i am the most beautiful person in the world because i realize that this is something that is coming in from the inside and if i were to have sixpacks on my triceps and be 6'13(way above 2 meters for my euro friends), i'd still feel insecure about my looks so how can i possibly deal with that? as of right now, the only thing that i can say i'm doing to deal with that is going to the gym

@SFRL i don't really like pure boxing, can't explain it but i am simply biased towards other MAs the thing about most MAs is that they actually are a lot of hocus pocus in terms of self defense. when you learn aikido you also learn how to defend yourself from a katana and how practical is that gonna be in the real world? the only bladed weapon you're likely to encounter is a knife. krav maga isn't bullshit though, at least as far as i can tell. it's more like a martial art that is based solely around you not getting your ass kicked. SAS are very no-nonsense and they teach their guys krav maga over any other MA so i think that's enough proof of it's usefulness. will check him out, thanks! pretty sure i wouldn't want to meet someone who's like the guy from my avatar though, i chose him specifically because he's someone i wouldnt want to be like. i have a sphynx cat, they look more gremlin-y than any other animal! @smd not really. i don't expect the whole world to like me because i know that no matter how much attention i get, it's the internal workings of the process that i need to look into and not how the outside world reacts to me.

@SFRL that's exactly why i said that it's a different thing from what i want to do. there are, of course, weight categories in aikido and wushu for obvious reasons but swordfighting based MAs throw the notion out of the window. in those, being tall is absolutely an advantage because you gain reach without any real disadvantage. hell, i've even read what some medieval fencing masters had to say on the matter and the agree that being tall is an advantage in fencing. i weigh around 50 kilos and my height is 1.65 meters, so ~100 pounds and ~5'4. however i am very strong for my build so that's something that i should probably take pride in. i was born there i don't live there anymore, it's too much of a poophole. i currently reside in the heart of the jewish empire, israel, so i am kind of considering adding krav maga to the list because i like it for it's practicality and it's much-much easier to find a good instructor here because most are ex-IDF thank you all for the thread, it really helped me deal with my burst of insecurity

@Yogi0 let jesus into your life. on a more serious note, i've noticed that simply refusing the desire to fap makes it go away. that won't make the horny go away but it will at least reduce the fap rate from 1/day to 1/week or 1/month.

@The Monk that's MMA, no? different from what i wanna do. i'm more interested aikido, HEMA, maybe do kendo and wushu at some point in the distant future if my MA career gets going.

@The Monk danke schon <3 i'm still worried about other aspects of life in which i know that my height will be a much more noticeable disadvantage. for example, i want to get back into martial arts(used to do aikido when i was a kid, was good at it) and it's a noticeable disadvantage to be short in MA. all that stuff about tall people being slower is bullshit, they're just as fast as you are but have more reach. that said, i don't think i should worry about that right now, i'll worry about my height making me a shit martial artist when i'll start grinding for the black belt.

as a russian, i view putin as simply a puppet of the money that the oligarchs own. he has his views and policies and might be proposing a nationalistic state but overall, it's up to people like abramovich which laws come to pass and what's the most beneficial cuz he's got the real power in his swiss bank accounts

the only place in which murder is almost universally wrong is the law, as it should be. in real life it's something that we should, generally speaking, avoid and leave for law enforcement and military to do.

i don't know about the rest of the people on this forum but i personally begin to feel as if i get some sort of meditation-like effect after doing math. it's probably the intense concentration that you need to do precise calculations. anyone else have that?

@Joseph Maynori am not in a position to get a degree in math but i really do enjoy doing it when i am not busy with something else

because a)science gets results b)the existence of the universe is either assumed to be true or not discussed due to it being impossible to prove true or false. sure, everyone's perception of reality is different but a 2 is a 2 for most people and that's what science uses as a starting point, that we can agree that some things are true, exist, can be proven and are universal.

racism is a very wide topic but i'd say that boiling it down to us-vs-them is, most of the time, acceptable. however, that's when the racist isn't someone thoughtful. if a racist is actually quite intelligent and well read(acceptance of others is a mark of compassion not intelligence) he might come up with reasons that might actually sound, in a perverted sense, reasonable. for example: migrants from the ME have caused a spike in rape in europe>arabs are bad. another thing you have to understand is that a racist quite often thinks in groups and not individuals. they might claim that they're for individual rights but then they'll spew stuff like average IQ statistics at you to prove that black people are dumb, for example. or maybe they'll try to prove to you that white people are all racist because of slavery and police being aggressive towards minorities. and lastly, you have to understand that not all self-proclaimed racists are actually racists. sometimes, they're just very-very dumb people that hang out with very-very dumb people. i'm a jew and i've been called the "good kind of jew" by actual fascists because i actually treated them with some level of respect. i suggest you find out why people are racist by doing your own research. talk to reactionaries and realize that they're all extremists but with different coat of paint(geddit? cuz skin color?)

@Nahm yes, its kinda like someone has put a shitty instagram filter over my eyes. it's not a bad feeling or sensation per se, i just wanted to know if anyone else has that and possibly know the exact mechanical reason for why that happens. i don't experience such desaturation after sleeping, for example. @Max_V you're misinterpreting this as me being worried i'm asking if i should be, i'm not necessarily worried right now

I've been meditating for about 3 weeks now and i've noticed that whenever i feel like i've successfully meditated on top of feeling more peaceful and clear minded, i have a sort of visual cue where everything just kind of loses saturation for me. it's not because i've been resting with my eyes closed, i can attest to this happening to me even when i've tried meditating with eyes wide open. is this a common thing and should i be worried?