Sonder

[Anna Konstantaki]

understanding us (young people)

I wish I had more time to analyze this one... 

So, my peers and I have the job to make technology from master to servant again? 

Okay...  It can´t be much harder than doing the "dropping the roles you play-Worksheet"... Right?...

Maybe I should start a new topic titled: What´s easy? Or no... What is not complex? Or how about: Why? Do I care. So much. Questionmark.

-Uh... You just spent all day in symbolic reality Anna... That´s why you feel this way.  Just take a break...  

[Anna Konstantaki]

4 different investments

Wisdom, cognition, sense of self and the life purpose that suits it. These are hard to loose or loose track of once you have figured them out... I can finally work through a day knowing that my time is not wasted. Now it´s just all about balancing these out. In the beginning I  had no clue how some things should fit together with each other but now I see that this whole balancing act is very related to a flexibility of motivations that come with the deep understanding of how these make you functional on all levels that life in the first world allows you to play in.

Building infrastructure

I like it how actualized.org provides the vocabulary to talk about what we are doing... "Infrastructure" sounds neat I have to say. I don´t think that the infrastructure was ever my weakness point. My weakness was all those psychological burdens I had. And some big lack of the right  information to solve problems or help myself. Of course he´s right about getting lost in building that and the danger of making your emotions depend on the outcome of what you´ve built. I am glad to have been warned...

the search

I felt encouraged to look at who I was before I conformed to culture, before I bended for a state, a friend, morals, beliefs and my family. So... What kind of child was I? Well, going back into childhood I found many, many crazy memories. "Anna ist frech= Anna is naughty", that is something I remember my mother saying a lot. Of course I denied that but now I look back and... It´s the truth. Here is a story I keep on laughing my ass off about...

I must have been six or seven years old when my godfather gave me one of those cabbage dolls with the big cheeks that have a plastic head with wool hair and a soft body as a gift on easter. Lea was her name. She looked a little like this:

just even  funnier...

These dolls they have the cabbage doll tattoo on one of their butcheeks so that you know they are the original (who would fake that thing?). But the front of the doll I had was even better... It had a big belly button, standing away from the body, sort of like a pimple which would divide the rest of the down part in two halves... Long story short, it looked like a micropenis. Production has changed that by now so that it looks more like a belly button... One day my mother and I were driving away from schoolyard (that is before we moved to town so she had to drive us to a nearby village to school). I see my doll next to me, I see my teacher standing in front of the building watching us... I am just trying to imagine this from the teachers perspective.  That  little, nice and usually rather quiet and respectful 6 or 7 year old girl, opening the window, pulling that strange looking dolls dress up-underwear down  and driving away, obviously highly amused. TWhat a troll I was. I don´t think my mother noticed me doing that. Oh and I think that after the exposure I had one hand free to wave him goodbye.

 

 

 

Edited February 22, 2017 by Anna Konstantaki
I wrote "orals" instead of "morals"? :S I had to fix it...

[Anna Konstantaki]

Enlightenment and dealing with it

As far as I understood  Jeffery Martin there are 2  ways people react to the permanent non symbolic experience or enlightenment...( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azYF3EFpZ4g). 1. There are those who feel free and at the peak of pleasant and 2. Those who feel desperate, fall into deep depression and maybe even commit suicide. I guess that is why Leo once said something like: If you want to get enlightened and then kill yourself, then fine.

We can´t know in which category we´ll fall, or do we?

Edited February 25, 2017 by Anna Konstantaki

[Anna Konstantaki]

yes, give us poor monkeys some love, truth and light, hahaha

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

And the snail/me is like: Holy cow...

+strategic thinking, money psychology, success etc...

Edited February 25, 2017 by Anna Konstantaki

[Anna Konstantaki]

"luck symmetry"

Ever been triggered into PTSD, had to resolve it with a lot of emotional labour, see how it´s attached to ego, sedona to release etc...?

Ever shortly after felt like testing your luck for some reason? Wanted to take a risk as if you had this deep inner desire for luck symmetry in life (trauma=bad luck, winning sth, money for example= good luck). Ever felt like gambling?

Well, the real "luck symmetry" is in our hands. YOU create it.

VICTIMS RISE!

What trauma and even PTSD can teach

• the limits of our minds/bodies at different ages, circumstances and stages of development
• prevention of new trauma
• deeply understanding human behaviour in different contexts
• consciously "altering" a memory by adding information and perspectives to it
• drawing knowledge from memory without feeling that it predicts how the world or our sense of self has to be like
• conscious construction/deconstruction/reconstruction of meaning around events
• kindness and compassion towards our and that of other (once) ignorant parts
• understanding (amongst other) the sense of self as an accumulation of pleasant and unpleasant experiences
• understanding the world as an incredibly diverse place where the feeling of safety is something YOU construct and give to yourself
• how to regain trust in the world/yourself
• understanding the value of trust and well being
• how to seek trust and well being
• how to handle a situation by having subsequently learned how to process and mindfully re-experience a dissected by thoughts and senses version of an experience that at the moment perceived you could not deal with
• how much time healing takes
• how much healing pays out
• how our psychology rules our lives and how we can rule our psychology
• how humans and the world can change if they want to
• how to eventually help others

That´s how shit becomes gold. Amen.

(it is at least the perspective one can take on good days and I know... I know it´s so, so hard. So feel free to feel whatever. I am just trying to make the best out of life. Much love, A.S.K.)

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

This is part of how my school desk looked like when I graduated:

I am familiar with this feeling... This feeling of  insanity. When you´ve lost it. When you´re like: Oh, I don´t believe any of this. Oh, this is all crazy and how the hell does or did A and B or C happen? And why? And you know what? I am just happy to be alive somehow. You tell me how the world is like and what I should be doing? And thinking? This is all crazy. You´re all sick. Me too. But at least I know it. I don´t know what is right but I know what is wrong. I have stuff. So much stuff. Stuff in my  head. I don´t know where it comes from. I want to follow it. It´s telling me stuff I have to do and you, you rob all my time. And I can´t do it. I can´t be "myself". You can´t tell anyone though. There are things that make perfect sense when you have gotten lost in the details of insanity. Your intuition makes you continue along the smaller parts of something that grows so big and complex that when you step back and look at it you think: Oh, that escalated quickly.

Speaking of school... I have had this secret desire to write finals again. I did not do so bad (for someone with my background in that  fucked up, greek school system and infrastructure ). I know that school and examination in Germany, where I am now aren´t exactly paradise either but... I feel like fighting for a second chance... It won´t just be handed to me. That´s for sure...

Oh and... Not all cartoons suck. I was... Dating? Dating a guy and he showed me this cartoon called Avatar, master of the elements. There is this scene where the character Zuko is trying to help himself in a situation by asking "What would uncle Iroh say? (Uncle Iroh is a wise old man). He comes up with this:

Hahaha... Sounds a little crazy but it´s pretty accurate, isn´t it?

[Anna Konstantaki]

oh and... Leo mentioned Escher... I ran across his work in 2014... This one was of my favourites... Don´t get me started talking about it...  

He also (finally?) mentioned Carlos Castaneda... I started reading some in summer but gave it up. I am taking it up again... It is so strange how on some days everything somehow fits in together with itself. It is so strange how life (or however you want to call this mystery) gives us puzzle pieces here and there and we can put them together and form a picture. I always complain about life not giving me direction, not knowing where to go but that is not true. It is revealing ways to walk all the time, it´s just that at the moment it happens I am blind to it.

Oh, Leo doesn´t drink coffee? Me neither. Even though I am developing a tea addiction lately...  

I think the last video was a bomb dropping. I have already planed the study of psychedelics into my life but now I am thinking that there is much, much more to do here. MUCH, much more.

Also... That placebo affect, that self fulfilling prophecy... Reminded me of something. Once my best friend lent me a book. If you translate the title it was called "Mum´s marihuana is the sweetest". The entire story was based on the placebo effect. In the story some people were falsely made to believe that getting stung by a scorpion makes you get super high or something like that... Downfall was that homeopathic medicine hasn´t worked once in my life since hearing more and more about the placebo.

Speaking of scorpions, those creatures taught me a lesson from early on. You would expect that a house built in the middle of a field surrounded by the gardening of a woman´s dedicated green finger would be rather safe, right? You would expect your children to be more safe inside the house rather than outside? Well, think twice... I was around 6 years old when I was playing with my brother in our bedroom. At some point we were laughing and chasing each other around and he chased me I was sort of falling backwards but he stopped me and said: Anna, don´t lean against that wall, there is a strange looking animal. Let´s go ask mum... Mum tried not to show panic... A nice, I think around 11 or 12 cm long scorpion was silently coexisting with her kids (god knows for how long, maybe it grew up with us...) in not just any room but their goddamn bedroom. Dad had to come and kill it of course... So that is life´s lesson on safety... Exactly: What safety? Take some risk. If you die, you die and if you are lucky nasty nature or nasty human ignorance will spare your life.

[askdfjnak]

On 01/03/2017 at 1:08 AM, Anna Konstantaki said:

Oh and... Not all cartoons suck. I was... Dating? Dating a guy and he showed me this cartoon called Avatar, master of the elements. There is this scene where the character Zuko is trying to help himself in a situation by asking "What would uncle Iroh say? (Uncle Iroh is a wise old man). He comes up with this:

Hahaha... Sounds a little crazy but it´s pretty accurate, isn´t it?

I watch this annually. It is probably my favorite TV show.

So many scenes in it speak directly to my soul, especially the exchanges between Iroh and Zuko. I noticed that Zuko and Aang both evolve together and their development is mirrored throughout the seasons. In the end I think Zuko grows much more than Aang which is why he is my favorite character.

I remember this scene hitting me like a freight train a few years ago:
 

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

@Marc Schinkel I get a little upset when even people who like this cartoon or any other good story don´t get the higher messages embedded in it or don´t try to use the information in their own lives...

As for what you said about Zuko... His growth is definitely of the most depicted and visible ones. I don´t think he surpasses the others but I agree that he is emotionally of the most if not the most challenged one since he  is both psychologically and physically left with a big scar. It is not just that  he decides to help the avatar save the world in the end but that he  saves the world from the development of his own psychopathy first. All main characters face their shadow sides and grow from that but he doesn´t even know anything else rather than his shadow, his identification with what he falsely believes to be his destiny is all he has. He is a good symbol for all the suffering one causes to oneself but also to people who could be allies by operating from a place of ignorance. Still, it is easy to relate to him because all of us are ignorant and many of us start from a place where we thought we are justified to act and feel like we did because it was all we had learned nearby surviving.

But I can relate to Aang as well because he procrastinated his Avatar duties out of fear and because of his playful and childish approach towards the world. Plus, having to be the bridge between worlds is like self actualization after all. You have to balance and lead and decide what suits every situation... You have a spirit world and the world you where born into....

I find it interesting that he decides not to become a yogi master and sacrafice his own spiritual needs in order to save the world and to... Find love. Human love with Katara. (I was actually disappointed about that because I´d rather be alone forever -hehe).

Then there is Toph Beifong... I like Toph because she has this problem with the strong, unshakable girl identification and I suffer(ed?) from that too. She loves being autonomous and finds relationships challenging because her parents showed their love in the wrong way. Also... She is fucking beautiful and does not know because she is blind. But even though she is blind she sees and understands more than most. Her bending abilities are of the strongest and coolest and her teachers were animals, instinct and nature. People underestimate her because she is small and cute. Used to happen to me when I was younger... She is definitely of my favourite characters.

Sokka. Goofy... Yeah I can be goofy. I think his role is a bit that of the outcast. He can´t even bend. He has to keep up by facing his weaknesses with Humor and creativity. In the beginning I was wondering why he is even part of the story but then I tried to imagine the story without him and I think he is a nice symbol for the fact that we need everyone in this world. Everyone contributes what they can. We can´t all be benders but that doesn´t mean we can´t work along with amazing people on amazing goals.

Aaand... Katara. I know this care-bear motherly drive one can have. She is fully feminine and very mature. She reminds me of a part of myself I have tried to kill.  Because I thought it was weak. Maybe I am jealous that she gets Aang in the end... Who knows... Gotta think of that...

 

 

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

the WORLD is full of MAGIC  (caution cute content)

If it falls, let it fall. If it dies, let it die.
Whatever we do, won't matter that much.
Puzzles and Wonders. Mysteries and such.

Yesterday, I had the longest ever dream,
That the world was endless with possibilities.
It had me thinking, one should never forget
That there are wonders, we haven't seen yet.

Seize a chance, follow a dream.
Be yourself, don't plan and scheme.
For what we do, won't matter that much.
Puzzles and wonders, mysteries and such.

So calculate and analyse.
My head is spinning from all of those lies.
It had me fooled, a logical mess.
In a time of facts, figures and distress.

Seize a chance, follow a dream.
Be yourself, don't plan and scheme.

For what we do, won't matter that much.
Puzzles and wonders, mysteries and such.

The W.O.R.L.D. is full of M.A.G.I.C.
The W.O.R.L.D. is full of M.A.G.I.C.
The W.O.R.L.D. is full of M.A.G.I.C.
The W.O.R.L.D. is full of M.A.G.I.C.
M.A.G.I.C. M.A.G.I.C. M.A.G.I.C. M.A.G.I.C.

If it falls, let it fall. If it dies, let it die.
Whatever we do, won't matter that much.
Puzzles and Wonders. Mysteries and such.

(...)     

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

Some criticism for myself

I should really stop waiting for people like Leo to come around the corner and tell me things I already know in order to give myself the permission to fully take on a perspective in front of others. After all, it is all just a perspectival game. After all we´re just jumping from paradigm bubble to paradigm bubble... Trying to find some Truth. In whatever form, or taste, or whatever ways consciousness makes it possible...  Always been a fan of bubbles... Always keep some bubbles at home. They always look so nice... Until they make a silent *plop* and it seems as if they never existed.

 

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

Journey towards the unknown

People have problems dealing with altered states of consciousness, especially when they came up randomly. Getting a hallucination by taking drugs is one thing but getting them just like that is another.  How many people end up stamped by themselves and/or others as mentally ill because they saw or heard something unexplainable? How likely is it that they scared themselves and stopped trusting themselves because of what they thought their experience says about them or about reality? Okay, there are some who don´t get scared, they just think they are Jesus or somethin´but you get the point... How did they interprete what happened?

For some it all came out of the blue. For others it seems like a response to not being able to handle the reality they were in. Emotionally. Hell got constructed, hell got altered by them in order to become somewhat homeostatic but hell never became bliss. Of course we can´t blame people for not knowing how to deal with certain circumstances... But it is strange to discover emotional self creation and look at psychology.

Mental illness is a journey towards the unknown. It is a challenge for our logic because it points so obviously to its limits. Anyone has the potential to go insane, no matter the background. Physical or psychological. It´s just about how people deal with those things and carry on. Real is for everyone what they can experience. If it is madness, madness is real. It could be a near death experience, angels, monsters, aliens, ghosts, verbal hallucinations, other visions etc but whatever it is, it gives them one thing to understand and that is that you can´t tell what´s real. Who are you going to trust? People around or what you perceive? Even when you perceive things that you know others don´t then why is this happening? And how? Why is it possible? No matter if real or not. It is possible for people who believe in brains and matter and for people who believe in.... I don´t know...  witchcraft. Yes, okay... The neurochemistry of our brain... Our diets, our traumas, our fears, all kinds of beliefs seem to play in. Play in on how often, the form, the kind of paranormal activity one might register but why is it possible and when does it become a problem? Is it a problem? What if we just accept the weird shit we can´t explain? Can we use it? What is it? What is it really?

I guess there is this shocking realization waiting to be made about our existential nature, one good step to tasting the infinite, to reach enlightenment. We just don´t know and that is why we should make ourselves emotionally independent from all we knew and let it go. It´s not just a Kugelblitz, the paranoia of being stalked or observed, it´s about everything, even that for which nobody would declare you insane for. That tree, your house, your mum... Your hands... Yourself.

In a sense what we are all doing is resisting insanity, resisting the truth because it shakes our beliefs too much. What people need is someone to tell them that all the assumptions they make about their illness are nothing better or worse than the assumption "normal" people make about their lives. Insane people have the most evidence that it is us, fooling us. We don´t need to suffer insanity, just like we don´t need to suffer health, in fact we don´t need to suffer anything in this game (okay, I admit, that´s easier said than done), we just need to transcend it.

 

[askdfjnak]

22 hours ago, Anna Konstantaki said:

I find it interesting that he decides not to become a yogi master and sacrafice his own spiritual needs in order to save the world and to... Find love. Human love with Katara. (I was actually disappointed about that because I´d rather be alone forever -hehe).

I KNOW RIGHT!?

Why would you give up the cosmos for a bossy girlfriend?

c'est la vie.
 

 

edit: 

the show wouldn't be half as good without sokka  
 

Edited March 8, 2017 by Marc Schinkel

[Anna Konstantaki]

4 hours ago, Marc Schinkel said:

 

the show wouldn't be half as good without sokka  
 

hehehe  ...that´s right...

[Anna Konstantaki]

@Marc Schinkel I guess we forgot that Aang is the last airbender and needs to repopulate the airbending nation. I guess it´s better if he does that with a bossy girlfriend of his choice... And after all... When I look at Tenzin and his siblings the outcome from this naturally supported type of love (damn  hormones ...) was not that bad after all...  

[Anna Konstantaki]

Understanding Anna Part 1

I think today I´ll write about how I became passionate about ecology. It´s a topic extremely close to my heart because pollution changed my life. First of all I want to ask anyone who reads this: Would you bliss out in the middle of corpses? That doesn´t feel quite right, does it?

I know that nature is both a beautiful monster and a beautiful mother but I also know that it is different if a volcano erupts and different if the force of destruction is one that only brings more destruction (because lava does at least turn into fertile ground for example...). Let me explain...

Some temporary anomalies like that one-two years we had a jellyfish plague because of the change in water temperature... Okay... That cockroach plague when they changed the wastewater channel system... I did not die from that either and I knew that eventually it would have an end but... As I grew up with beaches and some of them were clear, pure and just magnificent, there were/are also those where streams wash out all human sins and THAT never took it´s end.

minor findings

I grew up finding shoes. Tons of shoes of all kinds and all sizes on the beach. Some were like new so I always calmed myself down by saying that people loose shoes in the water sometimes... I found many fridge fluid bars, sometimes batteries... Toys. Turkish sunscreen and other plastic products probably washed over from ships traveling between Greece and Turkey, ropes... Fishing nets... But the dead animals. That was the worst. I found a piece that looked like part of the belly of some big furry mammal (probably horse or cow). On a different beach I found a dead bird that drowned because somebody had attached a string with a stick to its leg. Bycatch. Horror. Sometimes the stream would wash out the thrown away bycatch from the fishers from the port. How about poisoned sea gulls?

worst

A sea turtle. A really big sea turtle. With no head!!! Some weeks later we found the head... Probably got cut off by some marine screw propeller. I have pictures of the skull of a cow (that even used to be my cellphonebackground in my numb phazes)... The by far worst and traumatic thing we ever found was a dead dolphin. That was deeply disturbing. We were so young, figuring out life, dealing with our own neurosis and confusion, pressures from the system and all the other problems and stress, trying to find some release by a walk on the shore. Now we had to deal with the truth that the world in which we were trying to build a future was already... Dying.

feelings I had on this

I felt very betrayed by my own species when I was younger. It just felt malicious. That nobody cared about these beings and nobody cared about what the death of these beings means for us. I wondered: Is that what the world has for me? A rotting, stinking graveyard? Would you throw a party in a graveyard? Maybe you would. Would you throw a party in a hospital with people suffering and dying around you? If you are a psychopath maybe but not if you have some compassion inside you.

In the local radio they said that the dolphin died by a rare disease but we were there and saw it with our own eyes. It was so filled with coal tar that it had changed Color and actually couldn´t even rot properly. And they buried it with stones that got washed away by the next storm...

I know how asphyxia feels like and this creature didn´t deserve this. No creature disserves this. It was as big as me. Dolphin... Human where is the difference? I felt this huge problem of responsibility in the world. So much bigger than me. Those who never experience this first hand  with all senses involved don´t feel how real it is. But the denial. The denial pissed me off. To be lied to and to be treated like you are dumm and like that you can´t speak up and say: I might be 16 but you know what? THIS, is not right. Then I thought... How sick and distracted and careless must people be to allow this? How depressed are they so that they have lost track of beauty and sustaining it? What on earth steals their attention and time to not try to fix this full speed? What is more important than this?

Is my life worthless too? Just because most adults have decided that theirs is? That they can live however they like to ignore their problems and pains in cost of other beings?

It´s not sad if not everyone survives, that´s part of how nature works but it´s sad if those masses of beings who didn´t make it suffered their guts out to death.

.......................................................................................................

So... I guess this was my therapy for today...  As self actualizing people we can´t allow more spacial trauma by/in very places that should be a Refugium and shelter (shouldn´t nature be a place to heal? If can´t go there anymore where will we?) and we can´t allow more suffering for all those creatures with whom we share the world arising and all those that are still to come after us...

I know that this is all obvious...  I am just communicating my experience and I might be able to contribute my part on ecology but deep down I know that it´s something that needs to be sparked in everyone and everywhere and okay... I just found a excuse to use this picture. hehe

Edited March 8, 2017 by Anna Konstantaki

[Anna Konstantaki]

Jamie Wheal and life never was the same again...

I just watched this interview. I find a lot great life changing information but this is the best I have had in a long time by far... I don´t even know in which thread I should share this first so I decided to just post it in my journal.

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

playing with homophones

Eyes are deaf and ears are blind. But when we write things down we can make them see... More meanings and more possibilities and maybe... Question tense and time a little deeper...

Was geschehen ist, ist geschehen.                                        What happened, happened.

Was Geschehen ist, ist geschehen.                                       What (the) happening is, has happened.

Was geschehen ist, ist Geschehen.                                       What happened is (the) happening.

Was Geschehen ist, ist Geschehen.                                      What (the) happening is, is (the) happening.

All different interpretations of one sound chain.  One sound chain, one sentence that as we play with it transcends past and present. What happens, happens. We don´t know when. The "when" isn´t important because we made time up. We made it all up. The words for sun and moon, day and night, hours and minutes, clocks... Yesterday, Today, Wednesday... Time. Sometimes we only pay attention to meaning when it is unclear, when it all sounds the same... But when we dig into that we find how different our understanding of a single thing can be but in the end... The very end it´s nothing. It means absolutely nothing. It´s a confusion to go through to realise that we don´t know. Everything I try to understand takes language and all the words, all notions like time, for granted. To step outside of this and see things for what they are I need to understand without words, without rules, without grammar, I need the possibilities for interpretation with thought to become zero and those interpretations in any other way infinite. And finally, finally I have to let go of trying to understand anything at all.

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

I had a little daydream... For the Heros...

What is even more awesome than a superhero?! ... Of course! ... An ENLIGHTENED superhero!! ... Imagine:

Enlightened master: To be entirely free Mr. Kent you have to drop all those roles you play in your life...

Clark Kent (terrified) : ALL of them?

Enlightened master: Yes, Sir. All those roles you have identified with... What deep psychological needs do they serve? Look inside and find... Their source of adaptation... And let them go.

Clark Kent (problematized): As you wish, my master...

*Clark spends years on dropping his roles (including that of superman), finally breaks through and dissolves the ego of Clark Kent with great effort and patience... He never looses his superpowers though... Now he is... SUPERYOGIIII!! ...Soon his teachings started spreading and people started calling him SUPERYOGIGURU!!! *

Same destinies are behind spideryogi, ironyogi, yogibat, yogiflash and many more... (and no, captainamericanyogi doesn´t count-he was too identified with patriotism...)

Superhero+ yogi! = Same awesomeness-zero ego