Carl-Richard

1. You're describing having a moral perspective on pedophilia, not merely being sexually attracted to children. Most pedophilies don't act it out because they know it's not morally or socially acceptable. 2. You're describing being in a relationship with a child, not merely being attracted to them sexually. This is like saying you're gay if you want to marry men but not sleep with them on a one night stand. In other words, most pedophiles are not amoral sociopaths, and most pedophiles are not in a relationship with a child (i.e. child molesters). You had bad luck running into this forum with all the (ex-) Mr. Girl fans. We know pedophilia inside and out 🙂 (but we're not pedophiles 🙂 ... but it's a spectrum anyway 🙂). You would actually benefit from watching Mr. Girl's discussions with Destiny from back in the day where they discuss psychology, relationships, mental illnesses, etc. I think it would get you to question your DSM-5-heavy framework. Mr. Girl is actually a genius (or that was at least my impression 5 or so years ago, and granted he has a mountainous "self", which is subtle but still massive when you spot it).

Perseverance is the #1 Stage Red virtue (probably hyperbole, but it could be true).

Yes please. That's unironically my kind of music (depending slightly on the style of monkey scream).

I was more referring to the Tool part :,) Sorri, deuronivergent here :,)

Fawk me, I mean, yeah.

@Sincerity Then, with all due respect, I want you to contemplate this seeming discrepancy: And then I'm maybe done being a nasty boy.

😂😂😂 I wrote that while listening to music btw 😁

I can't really use music while doing anything that requires serious thinking. I must be deuronivergent or something.

Wut There are people who think it's neutral, there are people who think it's the devil, and then there are people who think it depends. I don't think it's merely neutral, neither that it's the devil, but that it depends. Does doing drugs make you a useless, criminal tumor on society? It depends. Does making a lot of money make you a spiritually dead capitalist drone? It depends. Does doing psychedelics make you have insightful and true insights into reality? It depends.

That's not what was said. Those were particularly pertinent examples. And the definition involves where you put your attention. That is why I concluded porn can be that wedge for some people. It just depends on strong the effect is. And you can't necessarily put a strong dichotomy there whether it's a definite wedge that would be detrimental or if it's simply a way of using one's time. That's why you have a problem definitely defining it as cheating.

I literally do not see the point of this. "You were 'soft imposing', therefore it was not the 'highest form of love' in my definition". Ok, I mean, sure. Or just state it as it is: I was saying what I think Leo should do in a situation, I was not saying I know for absolute certainty that this is the best thing to do, and I was doing that from a state of caring and identifying with Leo as I've been a follower and consumer of his content for many years (although less lately, perhaps for the aforementioned reasons). I know it comes off as confrontational, I know you as a follower want to defend him, I know I was challenging the status quo of letting certain behaviors fly past as normal, but clearly I was doing something meaningful as a large percentage of people agreed about what I was pointing out. That's as plain-cut as you can get it.

Wut

My view is cheating is doing something that would likely create a wedge between you and your partner (it's not an exclusive definition, but it works for the phenomena of cheating in my opinion). Seeing another person might likely do that, having sex with another person might do that. These examples are particularly pertinent because they involve another person, someone who could replace your partner in full (given we treat partners as fungible items, which we can do here for the sake of it). Now, does watching porn do that? What about watching porn in a magazine? What about masturbating to a movie scene? What about simply masturbating? Maybe it depends on the person. If you are that consumed by masturbating to things that your relationship with your partner suffers greatly, perhaps that could be called cheating.

The difference, colloquially, is in the degree. Love is fundamentally inclusiveness of identity. That which you include, accept, embrace, you love; that which you exclude, reject, deny, you don't. Colloquially, weaker identification might register as "care", stronger identification might register as "love". Whatever you choose to do as a human is less than God's love. And that includes refusing to do something. If you refuse to do what you think and feel to shield somebody else from yourself, you lack love for the impulse to do that thing. But yes, that's besides the point in a discussion about human love. Is this not what I'm actually saying though by saying "I can't know whether you actually need therapy, it's my guess, my feeling"? See how you're gotten caught up in a word game? This is what is called equivocating, @zurew will attest to this, he is a master at pointing it out. I have already said I don't know what is best for Leo. To then conflate this with what I "think" I know is best for Leo, that is equivocating. Yes, I will say what I think is best for Leo, but I will also say I don't know what is best, so I'm having a "honest masculine feedback" like with your friend. I don't see how in the discussion about therapy, I lacked respect for Leo. Maybe in the original topic and leading up to the therapy discussion, "exposing" his faults, it had a definite element of harshness and "lack of respect", but that I was fully aware of, the Machiavellian that I was in that moment. But then let me also not draw your attention back to why I thought that was a good idea and what the content of the post contains.

Tough love? I think love is when you care and identify with someone. How you choose to express that love is up to you. Carefree love, passive love, unimposing love, unresponsive love, is only one way to express love. If somebody you love is being bitten by a snake, or is stuck in a bear trap, you removing that from them might hurt them and they might scream to stop in the short term, but it might ultimately help them and that's your goal. Love in a relationship does without a doubt benefit from valuing what the person you love thinks and feels is right to do. That's why I suggest and don't impose. Although that also depends on the situation.

Brings me back to when I studied biology for a year. Botany is such a wacky field, nobody besides you knows what you're talking about.

When walking outside in the early spring, even in the evening when it's a bit darker (same light levels as mid winter later in the day), you can feel a slight difference in the environment, like there is energy saved up from the increased sun exposure throughout the day, perhaps stored as heat in the ground, perhaps stored as photosynthetic energy (or other energy) in the trees, perhaps as pollen processes start up and change the smell, perhaps as the dried up ground as asphalt changes the smell and moisture levels drop in the air. Generally, things look and feel more energetic. You feel it charging you up through the eyes and the ambiance. The sunset colors can also be a factor. I just learned this (I didn't understand quite why in the winter, it seems like sunsets are generally less colorful than in summer and spring where I live): in the string and summer (except at the equator), the sun spends more time in that range of proximity to the horizon due to the longer daylight hours, so you'll be more likely to see sunset colors than in winter; the air is also filled with maybe more (or different) stuff, e.g. dust, pollen, than in the winter which can affect the colors.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

Not the identification with that aspect? Perhaps a useful distinction is the body-mind complex and the identification with it (ego). You can identify with things outside your body-mind complex, and their state will change your sense of self (e.g. you see somebody you love in an attachment-kind-of love get hurt, it's as if you get hurt yourself). But you could also extend the body-mind complex concept to include those "outside of the immediate body" attachments (but then it also includes identification so we've eliminated the prior distinction).

😅?

When you're on the train, "awakening experiences" and "practices" and "spiritual work" and "progression" can apply. When you're off the train, Neo-Advaita language applies ("you're already there", "there was nowhere to go", "it's not an experience, "it's simply what is and what always was"). This is what @UnbornTao and perhaps @James123 seem to disagree about with many on the forum. They want you to jump off the train and see what happens.

I say "probably" because there are of course many other teachers that have had a profound effect on me (actually Martin Ball comes to mind). Even Leo, despite me claiming him moving away from "enlightenment" as a pursuit, has given me one of the most profound pointers of all time: "you are creating everything". It doesn't just put everything in reality inside the confines of your identity, but also the live unfolding dynamic creative aspect of it, which has a palpable and powerful effect when grasped intuitively. Sometimes what you can call "higher states of consciousness" are just better ways of grasping a concept (or generally naming) that creates a resonance intuitively.

You are the body and the mind as much as the chair you're looking at across the room. I.e. there is no distinction (that your identity relies on). Any form appears as just form. Previously some forms were taken as self and others as not-self. That vanishes.

In the moment, the intention was to focus on the lecture, and ironically, I noticed a tension while focusing on the lecture and having that intention, and when I dropped that tension, the awakening happened. So it was a dropping of intention on many layers simultaneously, but of course riding on top of a momentum of having had those intentions for a while. That is why spiritual practice is like a train and you want to find out when to jump off to get to the right station. That's why Jan Esmann is (probably) my favorite teacher of all time