Thought immersions; My non-daily journal.

[Nightwise]

Saturday April 4th, 15:05

I've been thinking a bit about my financial habits.

More specifically: i've been thinking about how I tend to very greedy and that I always tend to look for the cheapest product in the same category.

This comes back too when I searched on aliexpress for these silicone lovedolls. I really put a lot of emphasis on trying to find the cheapest product available. In the end, I bought a semi-inflatable silicone doll for 80€ on amazon (the dutch version of amazon launched fairly recently, actually), and what is great about this purchase is that it's both very cheap, but the delivery also seems to be relatively fast compared to other delivery times I've seen (the product comes between April 9th and April 16th).

But just now I thought about what exactly I am encouraging when I always tend to want to buy products for the cheapest price. What effects does this have on society? Also, how trustworthy are products that are being sold for very cheap?

Let's address the first question first. The reason Jeff bezos (CEO of amazon) is now the richest man on the planet, is not so much because individual people give a lot of revenue to amazon per se, but it is in fact the sheer volume and quantity of products that are being sold that make amazon such an incredibly succesful and influential company.

But what does this mean for other businesses?

The fact that you have some of these giant corporations that sell a lot of stuff that is cheaper than you can find anywhere else, is actualy a huge problem for smaller businesses that are trying to get their feet off the ground. Because why buy something from a smaller company when you can get the same (type of) product for cheaper on amazon?

This is the big headlock that giant corporations have over smaller businesses. There really isn't any chance for smaller businesses to grow much unless they either sell their company off to a big corporation, or if they try really hard in playing the same game as the big corporations do, thereby most likely forsaking their integrity. And even if they try to play the same game as the big corporations with every ounce of energy they got, the big corporations simply have a big headstart so it's almost impossible to really compete with them.

Smaller businesses simply can't lower their price to the same amount as giant corporations like amazon do. Amazon relies on sheer quantity and volume of sells for their profit. They are able to afford to go that low in their prices simply because when you buy and sell items in bulk, it becomes a lot cheaper. Smaller companies don't have the luxury to buy that much in bulk, because they can't sell their products off in bulk. So they are basically forced to upscale their prices, because with much lower selling prices they barely won't make any profit at all.

Therefore, it's probably better for smaller businesses to put their energy and focus in creating a lot of quality and value and therefore a loyal customer base which they have good relationships with instead of competing for the lower prices.

And if these smaller businesses, where often there's people working there who put their fullest passion and enthousiasm in their jobs, if they want to have any chance of surviving at all, it all comes back to customers like myself who are willing to not always go with the cheapest price possible out there on the market.

And this is why I am now considering perhaps spending a little bit more money from now on just to support smaller businesses to flourish a little bit more.

It's also an issue of reliability. When I then go to aliexpress and search for the cheapest products within their category, there are some signs that there are fishy things going on.

Because when i look at the reviews, there are a lot of 5-star reviews but actualy no 4,3 or 2-star reviews, and there was one 1-start review saying it was a scam. additionally, on the right there was an option that said: "did you find this review helpful?", with the button "yes" and the button "no". And interestingly enough, there were many, many people there who said "no", and not a single person who said "yes".

So I don't really know what to trust there anymore. According to the internet, aliexpress is supposed to be fairly reliable, but I understand that aliexpress can't do a background check on all of their sellers. I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but the situation simply seems fishy. I doubt if I actually were to order that product for the price of like 250 USD that I would actually get the product that was showcased in the pictures.

So reliability and quality of the product are also a serious consideration here when you want to buy for cheap. Will you actually get what was told and shown that you would get? I think that generally, vendors who sell products that are somewhat or even far above what is the absolute minimum price for that category, will probably be a lot more reliable than products that go for very, very cheap. I think the reason why people are able to sell for so cheap is probably because it isn't an actual high-quality product, and perhaps their profit tactic is just by downright scamming people, which is possibly why they can afford selling products for that cheap.

On the other hand, there is no way I'm going to get one of these love dolls for 3000€ when I could get one for about 600€ (provided those offers are reliable). I still want to support smaller businesses that serve higher quality products and better customer service, but I can't afford to be paying 3000 freaking euros for such a thing when it is possible to get the same thing for 5x less the price.

Actually, I am not paying for one of these type of love dolls anyway. The reason they are the price they are is because they are human-like size. You also have them in much smaller sizes such as 90cm, 100cm, 110cm (2'11", 3'3", 3'7"). Those dolls generally aren't really children dolls, both rather miniature women dolls, although some do tend to look a bit more like little girls instead of women. Sometimes a bit like little girls with breasts. It honestly doesn't concern me so much irregardless. The price of those smaller dolls is understandably a lot cheaper, because there is a lot less costs in materials. The cheapest versions of like 90 centimeters come in the price range of just over 200 USD (somehow the prices of this site are in USD)

Despite of me wanting to support smaller businesses, if you actually go to one of these websites that is not a wholesale website but actually a website specialized in either sex toys or love dolls, the cheapest price of really any category of these love dolls is at least twice more expensive than the cheapest version than you can get on such a wholesale website like amazon or aliexpress. And I'm saying at least twice more expensive, but usually it's more like 3 or 4 times expensive, sometimes 5 times. And I'm talking pretty much the exact same (type of) product here.

I'm willing to support smaller businesses, but there is no way I'm actually going to pay hundreds of euros more for the same product. Well... okay, I have to grant that those cheaper products on aliexpress probably aren't as reliable and possibly much worse quality (as it probably often isn't as it seems), but still the price difference just doesn't make such a difference worth it.

What I'd rather do than go to an official love doll selling website, is just to buy a bit of a more expensive version of the same product on aliexpress. Why would I do that if I can get it for cheaper? Well the first thing is reliability. Often times, the reason I think some vendors have such incredibly low prices is because the product isn't what it seems to be, and it may be a (partial) scam. That's why if I buy a product that is a bit more expensive (like 20-30% more expensive), it is probably more reliable.

And the other reason, once again, it discourages cutthroat competition between different sellers by just a little bit, and it may give some smaller companies who are selling through a website like aliexpress to flourish a little bit more.

But I have to end it now, because I'm about to go hop in a car and drive with my mother to our second house in the country to deliver a chair.

 

 

[Nightwise]

Monday April 6th, 12:43

Something that has been surprisingly helpful to me is just to remind myself that whenever some idea gets in my head of what I could or should do, some form of plan, that at the moment that plan gets into my head, I have to stop myself and say "This plan might not pan out. I might not follow through on this. I might not want to do it (planned time period). It might not happen (for the time I planned or imagined about doing it).

Why am I saying this to myself, and why does it seem to be so helpful for me?

Well because for whatever reason, I tend to make any sort of plan almost a requirement for myself whenever I come up with one. It almost becomes a 'should'. There is no real need for this to happen, but for whatever reason whenever I come up with a plan, it feels like I have failed when I don't follow-up on it, or at least not for the time that I had planned to do it.

To really get it into my head that these plans are optional and merely suggestions, and not requirements to myself, it for some reason seems to work very well to me if I just remind myself at the moment I am making a plan to do something, that both circumstances, feelings and thoughts in regard to the situation may change, and that therefore I really have to remind myself at the moment I come up with the plan that: "This may change. This plan may not go through. Something else may happen and the plans may therefore change". And just reminding myself like that actually seems to work really well for me.

Also, I have been struggling lately with really the sake of self-discipline and self-control. 

I have also been thinking really hard about the question: "From a higher perspective, from the viewpoint of the absolute, is discipline really necessary? Would an enlightened person need discipline? Or would everything just happen on its own accord for him?"

I know I'm not enlightened and I know it's not necessary or possibly even harmful to only act the same as my concept of an enlightened person would act like. But still this question of whether I need discipline or not has been really bothering me. Especially last saturday evening.

Basically the situation that triggered this question is that for so many times after having experienced that same thing, I once again found myself in bed struggling to deal with this kind of addictive quality that my phone seemed to have over me. I didn't really want to use the phone or have a specific intention to use it, but yet trying to prevent myself from reaching to the phone seemed to imply this great struggle in me, yet reaching for my phone to try to scratch the itch, seemed to create this feeling of guilt and depletion, as if I'm a cocaine addict trying to recover who is relapsing on his old habits again, minus the satisfaction you get from actually taking cocaine. In fact, using the phone at such a point whilst not having a specific intention with it and only wanting to use it for distraction, is in itself already very unsatisfying, but it seems to be better still than trying to struggle to prevent myself from reaching.

And it got me very confused. I then just think that how does it happen that almost every time that I lay in bed for some time with the intention to rest a bit (not to sleep pe se), I start creating this inner battle in me about whether I should use my phone or not. It seems like a totally unnecessary struggle, yet why can't I let go of it no matter how hard I try to let it go?

As if the only two choices are either to struggle whilst trying to fight against, or to give up and try to escape from this uncomfortable state of mind by distracting yourself in your phone. Not that the phone usage is very satisfying at such a point, but at least you don't have to deal with all this pressure and confusion in your head in that moment.

So one thing I came thinking about was that I was always trying to "let go" of it, of this struggle, yet I wasn't succeeding. But I came to think what "letting go" really was implying to me. The idea of what "letting go" means to me seems to have a far more stronger association with being totally chill and almost hippy-like about the situation. The idea of peace, acceptance, "you can do whatever you want", going with the flow, those sort of ideas.

But really, what I come to think about it now (I'm still always open for my ideas to change on this) what this association I have with the idea of "letting go" then does in actuality for me, is that I allow myself to get distracted very easily and to then follow certain addictive and compulsive patterns, and then trying to reason away the guilt and feeling of depletion that I get for doing so.

So really, perhaps "letting go" as I've been handling it isn't really letting go, but is much more following a certain idea or interpretation I have about what letting go would mean, instead of actually letting go. You are kind of just choosing a position about what your idea of being carefree and light would mean instead of actually being carefree and light. It is once again a form of duality. The tricky thing about trying to implement the teachings of non-duality is that as a strategy or concept, it can never be satisfying because at the moment you think you should be living in a non-dual way, once again you create a duality of "non-duality" as opposed to "duality". I don't even really know for sure if there is a conceptual strategy, any idea or moral guideline, that never has the possibility to turn into something that at some point becomes more of a hindrance than a form of help. I don't think there is.

So what does it actually mean to let go, not in concept, but in reality?

What I found what actually helped, was just to be really, really keen at observing any way in which your mind tries to make a strategy out of something, or just whenever your mind tries to come up with basically any sort of strategy for life.

For instance, when I say to myself "Whatever I do, it's fine. just follow your spontaneity". What then happens is that that idea then becomes the intellectual ground of which my actions become based on at the moment this thought happens. It becomes for instance an excuse for me to distract myself with my phone. I'm not even saying that it's necessarily bad to distract myself with my phone, I'm just saying that having this thought turns into a form of a subtle belief about how I should act and behave.

And that's what I became aware off. How my thoughts are affecting my behaviour without me even really realizing that my actions are based on thoughts rather than on what I call "spontaneity". Because really, how do I even know that acting based on spontaneity and feelings is even the best way to go about things?

But, if you keep being keen on staying aware, what you will then quickly notice is another thought coming in from the backdoor: "Oh so I see how that thought makes an unconscious belief. So if that doesn't work, then I should discipline myself and find ways to resist the urge or prevent myself from doing it!", or some other thought that basically has the same basic message, or really, I remarkably enough don't really even notice a narrative, like a full articulate sentence fully playing in my head, but rather the entire idea is almost packed in just a glimpse or wave of a feeling, yet at the same time that even though it's just a short wave of a feeling, I still happen to know the entire construct or narrative of what that feeling is about, without that narrative displaying itself in my head as a full, articulate sentence.

Irregardless, when this thought or feeling occurs that "oh then I should discipline myself", instead of identifying with that thought, you once again just notice it for what it is, and you see that it is simply what I call "a thing". A thing basically means that it's an unconscious belief structure, but to make it easy on myself I call it "a thing". "oh, that's just another thing", I may say to myself when I notice this thought.

But you may think: "Well it's good that you are able to notice both of these belief structures for what they are and not get identified with it, but how do you still make decisions about what to do and what not to do?".

First off, when I notice the thought "oh so then I have to resist or put up a fight", I've come to realize that you don't need to struggle and become really tense just because you want to discipline yourself. When I notice that thought, I remind myself that there is no need to belief that there needs to be a struggle or a fight. There is no need to belief that it causes any form of deeper tension or anxiety. The whole notion that it needs to be a miserable struggle needs to be dropped. Perhaps, discipline can also be very light, careless, free and peaceful. And part of what helps for this realization to kick in, is simultaneously also seeing that the whole idea that 'letting go' as far as I've come to conceptualize it so far, isn't actually letting go. Otherwise you just get stuck on that idea and you won't even take discipline in serious consideration.

How about how to act in general? With a healthy and conscious attitude, is discipline necessary or helpful to begin with at certain times? With a healthy and concious attitude, is indulging necessary or helpful to begin with at times? Or does a perfect balance always need to be struck my thoughts about this still have to form themselves a little bit (and I have to be careful to not get too identified with my 'final conclusion' (if there is going to be any), as that becomes then another possible belief structure), but how I see it now is that there indeed times where indulging and 'letting go' is a bit more appropriate, as long as you don't get too identified and attached to it as a mental position, and really, the same goes for discipline. I do have the feeling that life alternates between sometimes a bit more discipline and sometimes a bit more indulgence whether you go about it consciously or not.

I don't know for sure if the same counts for a fully enlightened person (if there is such a person as 'a fully enlightened person' as if it were an endpoint), but I actually imagine it would. Irregardless, I am not enlightened, and I doubt that trying to act as if I were an enlightened person would actually be intelligent to do.

Edited April 6, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Wednesday April 8th, 22:34

lately I've been categorizing my youtube music playlist in subcategories playlistsof how much I like certain songs I am sorting it in 9 different categories: Category 1 to 5, but you also have category 1,5 and 2,5 and 3,5 and 4,5, so really 9 categories in total. Initially when I started this, I only wanted to do category 1 to 5, but I realized this simply had too little nuance, so I felt almost forced to make these additional intermediary categories for songs that fell right in between two of those categories.

The intent of these 9 new playlists is to be able to listen to music or to choose certain songs without really having to skip over any others songs. I don't really have to waste energy now assessing how good these songs are or whether I should skip a song or not when I'm using my playlist, because now I know exactly what the bottom line is of how good I can expect the songs to be.

And I should also note that I have made these new playlists with the idea that I use a sort of pyramid form. This means that a song that would end up in category 5 will also be in ALL other of the 9 playlists, but none of the songs/videos that have a maximum of category 4,5 or lower would be in the category 5 playlist. So basically it's a pyramid form. I right now (I'm far from done, though)have for instance 99 videos in category 3,5, 50 videos in category 4, 7 videos in category 4,5, and just 1 video in category 5. Considering that there are 99 videos in category 3,5 and 51 in category 4, this means there are 49 videos that end at category 3,5 (and 42 videos end in category 4, 7 videos end in category 4,5, and 1 video ends in category 5)

You get the idea? Basically all videos in my default youtube music playlist will also be in category 1, although that'd be rather purposeless though as there would be 2 duplicate playlists basically, so I might delete category 1, or otherwise even delete the videos that end at category 1 and 1,5 to begin with, as I wouldn't really care for them anyway.

So basically the main thing you want to look at videos is not in which playlist(s) they are, but at which playlist it ends, because a video that is of category 5 will also be in all the other playlists below it, just as 4,5 will also be in all playlists below it (but not in 5), and 4 will be also in the playlists below it (but not in 4,5 and 5), and so forth.

I feel like I've just been overly verbose with explaining my system whilst it is probably actually very easy to understand and doesn't require that much explanation, haha. I tend to be that way, to be too verbose or lengthy, or explicit.

So let me define or name the different categories:

Category 1: "Meh". Video's/songs that end here I don't like

Category 1,5: "Disappointing". These are slightly better than bad, yet they still disappoint and don't make me feel good.

Category 2: "Neutral". These songs I don't feel really anything with. They don't make me feel very bad, but not really any good either.

Category 2,5: "Doable". These songs are like: "I can't say I'm thrilled by listening to you, but you may bring some moments of slight enjoyment"

Category 3: "Fairly alright". These songs are decent, and can be sometimes a bit fun to listen to, but they don't really tend to grip me.

Category 3,5: "Good". This is the point where we can say that we really start to get enjoyment. These songs sometimes have elements to them that arouse my emotions adequately

Category 4: "Very Good". These are songs I can really get a kick from. I love these songs and I often find myself singing them or moving to them.

Category 4,5: "Fantastic/Amazing". These are masterpieces which can and have at times really heavily emotionally gripped me and left me inspired and amazed

Category 5: "Phenomenal/Astounding" These are the masterpieces of the masterpieces. These songs have a sense of grandiosity and magic to them. This is where it music reaches the divine and transcendental dimensions of existence. These songs can just leave you stunned over and over again.

I'm going to leave a link to category 3 and up to my youtube playlists for you readers if happen to be interested, and I'm also just going to share my general youtube playlist, and I'm also going to give commentary on the category 4,5 songs and category 5 song.

Keep in mind, I'm not even at a quarter of the entire sorting process of the playlist. I must admit that I was very surprised that there were so many songs of category 3,5+ in just the first 134 songs of my entire  music playlist that I went through. The majority is 3,5+. The songs that I still have to go through are also a bit more songs that I used to like when I was a bit younger, but my music taste has slightly changed over the course of time so I reckon in the upcoming songs that I still have to sort I generally expect a lower density of songs that are cat 3,5 and higher. I also expect that I will make a lot of adjustments where some video's will end at a higher category, and some I will put in a lower category. I for instance right have a couple of videos from category 4,5 which I am hesitating about whether I should kepe them there or whether I should move them to category 4.

Seems now that there are more category 2 songs than category 1,5 songs, and I see other disrepancies as well in my playlist. Seems like I have been making some mistakes. Yikes. I have keeped a log on a word-document to keep track at which category each song ends, though.

Without further a due, here is my general music playlist and the music playlists from category 3 up. Once again, songs/videos are going to be added here in the future, and some category adjustments with certain videos are also going to happen. Also, I might continue with adding to these playlists tomorrow or I might happen to do that in a month time from now. it's always very unpredictable with me. I think that when I have completely finished my playlists, I am also going to review the new songs that I have added to category 4,5 (and 5).

I am also going to discuss what my top 5 favorite artists are and why in a bit (actually I will do this in the next post probably, but not now)

And I might also in the future here in this journal note down what the songs of category 4,5 and 5 are, and discuss them here and explain why they are so great.

Here we go

General youtube music playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG16T6B6DQtgUahra_8drIGXBo_H7XP3W

Category 3

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG16T6B6DQthBSaKMkcr7Ycjp0wmATAvP

Category 3,5

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG16T6B6DQtht7JtK0pXImGwXplNDtyXN

Category 4

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG16T6B6DQti6AE9KQ2uBUCyw5_95mxHi

Category 4,5

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG16T6B6DQtj6_DD_70x806XRGncDFeYS

Category 5

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG16T6B6DQtgEUUePCv0gDLRnhf9zSbua

Edited April 9, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Saturday April 18th, 20:20

I've just watched (a good part of) the banned interview with David Icke on the London Real website. David icke is a so-called conspiracy theorist. I prior to the banning of the episode on youtube didn't feel so much for watching him, thought he was a bit too outlandish with his theories of 'reptilian controlled world domination' and such, but the banning of the episode on youtube got my interest to him. I didn't watch him yet, but then I also saw Leo locking threads here on actualized.org that were about David icke and his theories, and Leo (assuming it was actually him and he didn't get hacked or something) seemed to get pretty hard on tackling these conspiracy theories, also stating that he thought that conspiracy theories was nonsense.

This surprised me a bit because I had always known Leo to be very open-minded and always willing to consider alternative viewpoints. This harsh tackling of these so-called conspiracy theories seemed almost "non-Leonian". This isn't really how I knew Leo to be. That's why I'm almost fearing that Leo's account may have gotten hacked, especially now after having watched that David Icke episode on London Real. I still think it's probably the actual Leo using that account, and that he's just human and still has some blindspots and kneejerk reactions to certain things.

So I made a topic about how we even get to decide what is a conspiracy theory and what not. And just because something is called a conspiracy theory, does that mean it's automatically nonsense? I made a topic about that. Some of the arguments that I made was that for instance much of the content that Leo puts out is seen by the mainstream as very whacky and absurd, especially the mystical oneness stuff. I think many people may consider Leo to have many conspiracy theories.

Another argument was that in the medieval times, if someone would have said that the authorities were using christianity as an excuse to dominate and repress people, that person would also have been called a conspiracy theorist, but now we know better. Then how do we know that the conspiracy theories that are circling around now may in the future actually turn out to be true? There is so much ignorance in the world today that in the future will become obvious was all delusion, but yet now we believe in it.

Another argument that I made was the fact that the term "conspiracy theorist/theory" has become so loaded, and we have been conditioned to believe that it's automatically nonsense, that people often aren't even willing to consider any of the points that a so-called conspiracy theorist makes and they automaticaly dismiss him/her. Labeling someone as a conspiracy theorist is a very good strategy to rob someone of their credibility and their reputation, even if they may be making some very compelling points. There's a conditioned association with the term "conspiracy", which people are often very unaware of.

So yeah, I watched part of the episode that was banned on youtube with the interview with David Icke, and I do think the guy makes some good arguments. And although his ideas may be unconventional, what he says and brings forth certainly is indeed possible and worthy of consideration. 

And that got me thinking even deeper about one of the fundemental questions of existence: What do I really know for certain? Can I really even know anything with absolute certainty?

There are so many theories out there, so many possibilities. You may think you know how the world, or yourself, or existence as a whole works and operates one moment, and the next moment something comes along that makes you doubt all of that, and all of your hopes and beliefs that you had build up now seem insignificant and seriously questionable.

Taking psychedelics in that sense is the ultimate mindf*ck, because it gets you to question your beliefs far more deeply than you otherwise would in your normal state of consciousness. And it certainly isn't always pleasant. It gets you confronted with some really frightening possibilities or realities. In the moment they even seem like realities. In hindsight it's really hard to say whether what you came to envision for yourself was true or not. On one hand you tend to think that: "I'm in a higher state of consciousness so what I'm seeing here must be true!". On the other hand I can also see how you can get identified with that thought and therefore it will make you believe as if what you're seeing is true, whilst it is also entirely possible that in that moment it isn't necessarily that you get a deeper and more profound insight downloaded from the beyond, but it could also be that you simply get confronted with your deepest fears and that is then what you are experiencing. Perhaps it's true that you become more conscious during such a trip, but that doesn't mean that what is being seen in that state of higher consciousness is the unquestionable, absolute truth.

Ultimately, I really just don't know. Perhaps what you see there is an absolute truth, or perhaps it isn't and what you see is only a reflection of your own deepest fears or beliefs. It's not right for me to say I know what I saw was absolutely true, nor is it right for me to say that I know that what I saw was only a reflection of my deeper unconcious fears, or whether it was something in between or whatever.

But during such a psychedelic trip I do know that you (or at least I) get crazy and whacky ideas that undermine the entire foundation of your reality, making you become really disoriented and afraid. Disorientation is the best word actually. You just become incredibly disoriented and you have no means of telling what's up or down, back or forth, left or right. Any idea that comes into your mind in such a moment could be true, and you have no idea where to find your bearing anymore. You basically have nothing to hold onto. And pretty much literally anything, any suggestions or thought, seems to be seriously possible and real at such a moment. It's kind of what I would imagine a state of psychosis to be like. But psychosis seems to imply as if something has gone wrong and you are 'below' the normal state. That's why I don't want to necessarily describe it as psychosis, because for all I know I would be 'above' normal, or perhaps both at the same time. 

But to be in a state of absolute not-knowing that goes so deeply that you have no bearing anymore whatsoever, is in some way the exact thing that spiritual seekers are looking for, and it is for many people the ultimate ideal of the enlightened state. To be in a complete state of not-knowing that goes to your very marrow and bones can either be incredibly terrifying, or it can be tremendously peaceful. The difference is whether you care or not that you have no orientation whatsoever.

I for instance during this trip got the idea in my head that I was the only consciousness that existed, the only perspective, and that all other people are actually just a sort of robots. They don't have a consciousness or point of view like I do, they just seem to be. I am the only point of view or 'camera' in the entire universe that exists, and all other people just appear to be 'real' but aren't actually real but jsut appear to be over there having their own consciousness. And I am not even talking about that everything is one. No, I am saying that I would literally be the only one, and that everything around me is lifeless or "consciousnessless".

That's was one of the ideas that I got in my head during the last trip, which really frightened me. One thing I took away from that trip was that I wanted to do the very best that I could to never again start believing that the opposite was the truth, that there were other people 'out there', even though I knew it would automatically happen again to some degree or another.

I also hadn't said to myself that I would from now on always try to remember that "I am the only one that exists". I had also not said to myself that I would only believe that from now on. It's just that I wanted to say to myself to be very wary of the fact that I will encounter the reflex to assume that there are indeed other people out there with their own consciousness and point of view; just to be very aware that such an assumption, although unconsciously, will very quickly be made. And now I still have to stop myself from assuming anything at all. I need to remind myself that "This seriously has the potential to be true. I need to seriously stay conscious of the fact that it could ndeed be true", and not jsut say it so myself yet unconciously believe otherwise.

And this attitude of taking everything into serious consideration that nothing I could ever assume has to ultimately be true, is something I really want to be practicing. I want to go to a state where I have questioned everything in reality so deeply, that no shift in perspective or reality will ever shock me or frighten me anymore. But to allow this to happen, I must be okay with being completely disoriented yet being totally relaxed in this state of absolute and total disorientation and not-knowing. This realization of that "I know nothing" must go to my very core, far and far beyond any intellectual agreement about the idea that you couldn't know anything for certain.

And that will certainly not happen overnight.

[Nightwise]

Thursday April 23rd 2020, 09:31

Again there are many, many other things I could talk about that happened the past couple of days that had more urgency at the moment I experienced it, in fact yesterday was quite an intense and rough day, but I just want to go with what’s the most pressing and actual in my mind right now.

And that is about this tic that I sometimes have with my eyes. Interestingly enough, this tic usually doesn’t bother me really that much unless I’m in a social situation where others can see me.

The tic is that I roll with my eyes upward whilst keeping my eyes open and also contracting the muscles around my eyes a little bit, because there then happens to be a lot of tension in my eye region and that kind of movement seems to temporarily alleviate the pressure and tension. Yet… It also makes me feel quite uncomfortable and awkward whilst doing it when there are other people there, which happens to be exactly the time when I feel that tension the most. And that’s just because I know other people are aware of me.

And honestly, I’m getting pretty tired of it. I’m getting pretty tired of the fact that I can’t just seem to be able to have a normal conversation with other people without having these moments in which I get tense and then consequently feel awkward after having expressed my tic.

I think I’ve written about this before, and I certainly have tried to deal with this issue before, but it didn’t happen to be of any real avail so far, but I feel like now I have found a way to be getting a grip on this situation.

It is this real subtle difference, but the difference is that I now seem to have some space and watchfulness around the mental/energetical pattern that seems to be wanting to tell me that expressing this tic is a necessity for me in order to alleviate the pressure, and that if I were to not do it and try to hold it back, that then I would start creating even more tension and stress by fighting it, so the idea is that I just do it almost as quickly as possible as I feel this tension “just to get it over with”. The idea of trying to stop myself and by doing so creating an ever greater internal struggle visible for all to see (by perhaps my lack of focus and long pauses after I’m being asked something, after which I still do the tic in the end), is a prospect that seems even more uncomfortable.

Yet, being aware of all this narrative I have in my head about why I should express the tic, and all the excuses and rationalization that come along with it, being aware of that, being able to create some space around the mental/emotional/energetical pattern, I feel is really helping me no only to stop the tic, but also just to let go of the entire tension around the issue.

The strange thing is, to say that “It isn’t about the action, but it’s about the attitude”, to say that doesn’t even feel entirely correct. Because honestly, I’m kind of sick of the very action as well, although I‘m of course more sick of the entire struggle around it.

But this is what I’ve come to realize some 2 weeks ago. That is that the idea of “Oh it doesn’t matter what I do as long as I’m perfectly okay with it” is a strategy from my ego-mind to prevent actually from changing a certain behaviour whilst at the same time also not truly accepting it. The acceptance that comes from that thought now usually just happens to be a phony kind of acceptance. More like a resignation. Just out of sheer frustration I try to find ways to forget the whole issue so I can keep my life somewhat manageable.

And part of this was of course because I didn’t know how otherwise. I didn’t have any other entry point, so making myself try to forget the issue by saying something like “ah it’s not that important” seemed for me the best way to deal with it, as I didn’t seem to have any other strategy or way to go about it that seemed to be any more effective.

But just by being aware that ‘trying to accept’ something is a strategy of my ego-mind to remain its identification with something, instead of truly accepting and letting go of something, just by being able to see that it has been quite a big revelation to me. Just by being aware of that (plus simultaneously also being aware of any narrative that says I should fight and struggle), just by being aware of that it creates a certain space in me which actually allows me to actually disidentify with the entire struggle around not only this issue with this tic, but in the past 2 weeks or so it has also aided in (truly) letting go the addictive/compulsory behaviour of reaching to my phone for distraction or to walk to the kitchen to take a snack or sandwich just out of the need for distraction and diversion, without me actually feeling truly attracted to that snack or sandwich or whatever it is that I then happen to be eating.

So by having become aware of that (or at least more deeply than I have ever before), of the fact that the idea of ‘letting go’ can actually be a strategy of the mind, I have been able to paradoxically actually indeed let go of the whole (or good parts of) the identification and struggle of certain issues that have been bothering me for... actually sometimes quite a number of years. It did require a somewhat painful and dark moment to get to that point of realization and insight, but that’s how it often goes.

I’m not saying that these tendencies won’t return or re-intensify, in fact they already have to some degree since that realization 2 or 3 weeks ago, but I do see that I’m yet always still learning and evolving.

[Nightwise]

By the way, also an interesting thought I have about the post I made before the last one (of April 18th), is that my idea (not assumption) of that I would be the only point of awareness of conciousness in the entire universe and that the entire universe is created for me can either be an indication for you (the reader) that it is indeed very possible to get lost in certain ideas during psychedelic trips, thinking it's the ultimate truth, or you are indeed robotic so there is not even an idea you can have about it as you're just a program.

So if you are indeed another conscious human being out there, then you will know that what I have written is bullshit and this then will be a good indication to you that it is very possible to get lost in certain ideas that are just figments of imagination during a psychedelic trip, or you are robot-like and programmed, so it wouldn't matter.

Either way, there is no way of convincing me whether you are indeed conscious or not, as robots might just as easily say they are conscious whilst they are not. But it will be indeed absolutely clear to you that what I had written was nonsense, if you indeed do happen to be conscious. But there is no way of being able to convince me about it, as you might just say that you have consciousness and awareness whilst you don't.

Or am i just the program and robot and that you are the only point of conciousness and is this entire universe including me and everything you've ever read about me just an entire scheme set up in order to trick you? YOU DON'T KNOW! MWAHAHAHA

Edited April 23, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

I've been trying to figure out how to avoid frustration.

But why should I?

Whatever peace I desire will come once I'm dead.

For a dead man knows no frustration.

If I had chosen to be here, I had chosen, in part, to suffer.

I cannot say but that much of suffering is inavoidable, if any. I cannot contradict my life experience.

But if I had chosen to be here, then I must have accepted these terms of life willingly.

And then there must be a good reason for all of this.

If I'm in control, or if I was in control the moment I chose to be here, then I must have wanted this.

Then why do I live my life not wanting the frustrations I come to experience? Why do i try to cleverly avoid them?

 

Yesterday, I read someone saying this statement that once we're dead, we'll have all the peace we ever want. This struck a chord in me.

I basically just though to myself: "Why not suffer? Why not even allow myself to suffer the rest of my life? Why care if I suffer?".

If it is indeed true that I'm in (or was) in control of the circumstances I have created in this life, and that I have chosen to be here, then if I die, I can also choose to not incarnate and therefore to not suffer if I don't choose so.

Of course, there are a couple of assumptions in that statement. I am aware of that

But regardless, if I had chosen to be here, then all must be fine because I must have chosen it because I wanted to, for reasons I may now not be perfectly aware of.

And if I had not chosen to be here then... All will be well in some 60 years or so, maybe less if I die before old age due to an accident or whatever.

 

But to not suffer seems so important sometimes. My whole mind is invested in trying to plan my way out of suffering, finding the way of least resistance.

But if I really think about it: Do I really have a good reason to avoid suffering? Like if I ACTUALLY take that question seriously?

 

I've been rather afraid of life's challenges the last 2 years or so. I've lived carefully.

But this peace I'm afraid on missing out on

I won't miss out on.

So relax.

[Nightwise]

Also

You don't really suffer as much as you think you do.

In fact, the greatest forms of suffering are in the exact moments WHEN you think you suffer.

In a strange way of putting it, you suffer only as much AS you think you do. I don't mean to say that your estimations are completely correct, or even to speak in terms of self-fulfilling prophecies, but literally that at the very moment you self-reflect upon your situation and then judge it, that's the moment when it hurts the most.

 

I've noticed many times laying in bed, or anywhere else for that matter, that there perhaps may be some tension or a dull mood, but other than that there happens to be no problem at the moment, but then a self-reflective thought comes in.

This thought is often not even fully verbally expressed. Often its nature is already recognized pretty much instantly, and when I then get identified with it, those then happen to be the most miserable moments in my life, I sense.

It's honestly hard to say even how we can define "suffering". I may be having a day in which I feel very dull, or very tense, or very emotionally congested, but even going through my day with that kind of mood, it isn't so much an issue if I don't start anxiously thinking and reflecting upon it. It isn't even so much related to the concept of accepting it, but just not being occupied with the fact that the feeling is there, and creating all kinds of stories about it about what this means for the future.

I can be awake for 5 hours during a certain day having a perfectly fine day, and then a thought comes that seems to be wanting to tell me that I should be really concerned and anxious about my life situation and the future it is projected upon, and then it will not only seem as if the past 5 hours were problematic, but that the rest of my life is potentially problematic and something to be anxious and hopeless about.

But all it really was was just one thought.

That's why I say that people don't generally suffer as much as they believe they do (not talking "at the moment when" now). People suffer the most in moments they are anxiously anticipating the future. But the reality is that those thoughts are only spikes of adrenaline and fear and very short-lived. Yes, those thoughts may have quite a severe impact on the emotional and energetical system, but even with those systems being... less than optimal, even then, the only real suffering comes at the exact moment you're having an anxious or hopeless thought you become identified with. But these thoughts and their impact can be very subtle.

I quite honestly have to do a bit more self-observation to see what exactly the moments are when we (I) suffer the most and what caused it. Also, it's hard to define what the difference between sufffering and pain really is. I have always defined it as the difference between a direct experience and a mental reaction to it.  But it does raise some questions. Is there really a qualitative difference and not merely a quantative difference between suffering and pain? Physiologically, a fearful thought we get identified with appears to be just a greater spike of cortisol and adrenaline that we may have already been experiencing on the background. So from that viewpoint, it appears then to be a quantative difference and not a qualitative difference. Can we say at any moment at all we're suffering when we're not thinking? Or are we just in some form of emotional pain? Can we suffer from mental patterns that run so deep that we can't even with our conscious attempts detect them as verbalized thoughts, or even to become aware of anything at all when we try to?

So there's still many questions, but irregardless I do notice that thoughts have the potential to magnify the suffering in our life to such an extent that it appears as if suffering is the totality, when in reality it's just relatively a very small part. One thought and now your whole life and all of your life that is yet to come seems terrible, whilst you may been having a great day.

As if a thousand magnifying glasses are put on a tiny, tiny stain on a beautiful white dress.

Edited April 28, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Wednesday April 29th, 22:10

So today I've received my long-awaited package that I ordered about a month ago or so. This was in fact such an inflatable sex doll. At first, the prospect was that it would be delivered between April 9th and April 16th. When it then still wasn't in on April 17th, it said it now was expected between April 17th and April 20th.

But even on April 21nd, there was still nothing there.

I had contacted the sender 4-5 days ago to ask if he perhaps knew what was going on with the package. I was aware that there were severe delays due to the fact that the pandemic was delaying everything, but I had no indications that anything was still going to come at all.

The sender told me yesterday that the package was on its way and showed me proof of the tracking details that he had.

Now I got it today. It turned out to be just a miserable scam. The product does not remotely look like the picture. It is inflatable, but it is a thin plastic layer except for the hands, feet and head, whch is indeed a thicker form of silicone material. I expected the material for everything to be a ot thicker, even though it would remain inflatable; The pictures would have suggested that.

And you know what the worst part is? IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A FUCKING HOLE!

It's funny how "A fucking hole" is both an expression of anger and a truth in literal sense

So yeah. It was basically a scam. Totally not the kind of product that the pictures were suggesting. This is what you get when you buy a (relatively) cheap product from amazon that has a chinese external seller. I can blame nobody but myself. But I at least found out how reliable such a purchase actually was having only spent 80€ on it. I will see if it's possible to get a refund. I have no idea how easy it is to get a refund, actually. 

I was going to use this product as a means to measure how much I would like it, and if therefore by my 'testing' I would come to the conclusion that it would be worth spending a whole lot more money on a much more expensive non-inflatable and lifelike doll.

Now that the situation has changed, I have done some thinking. Even though it will be an expensive purchase, I think it's going to be worth the buy. (we're looking at around 1000€ or a bit less, if I don't buy it for cheaper from the dutch version of amazon (not amazon.nl but another website), we'll get to that topic later)

Why is it going to be worth the buy? Well, I really don't feel like I'm ready an actual relationship in which sex will happen. I don't feel like I'm really ready for a relationship to begin with, but as far as the sexual act is concerned, I also lack sexual maturity. I don't really want to make any girlfriend an object for my desire for training.

To be confronting another human being in the sexual act is way too overwhelming in some way to stay not only grounded and relaxed, but also connected. I feel way too awkward, I don't want to make eye contact, I tend to ejaculate rather quickly or otherwise not be able to get it fully erect. It feels way too intimidating.

I had thought about prostitutes and I have had experience with a few prostitutes before, but there I generally encounter the same problem as just described. Some idea I did have was to perhaps request to a prostitute to make love in the dark. In that way, the idea is that it gets much more sensual and instinctive. It would make it easier for me I reckon because I don't have to make eye contact, which I still always find quite awkward and uncomfortable (not only in the sexual act but in general).

I have also been going to a couple of sex clubs, as I imagined that the impersonal nature of those clubs would make it easier to "just bust a nut". of course, I am not merely interested in the point of ejaculation itself, but I simply am curious about sexuality and I want to grow in this area and explore it, to explore myself sexually. But to be really making a deep connection with someone feels as of right now too intense for me which I why I seek a more impersonal atmosphere which is more based on instincts and desire rather than actual connection. Yes I know that may be superficial, but to be getting that connection is simply too much for me to handle as of right now. I don't really mind exploring superficially so much, as long as I simply get to explore and by exploring get to grow.

And now especially that this sexual coaching therapy or whatever it may called doesn't really seem to be working out so well (I'll possibly talk more about this a later time), and now that any group courses on sexuality also are not continuing, the best idea I have right now that provides me with the best opportunity to grow sexually is to indeed buy such a lifelike love doll, in which I can practice in many ways what it would be like to have sex with another woman, without actually feeling a responsibility towards her to be a good sexual partner, or to not ejaculate too quickly or whatever.

On the very long term, it might actually save me money if I become rather satisfied with it. Because therefore, I don't expect that I won't visit prostitutes/sex clubs that often anymore, which of course will cost you a bit (not that I now visit them often. We're talking about 3 times a year or so).

By the way, sex clubs are also usually unsatisfying because I always find it uncomfortable to approach and there is always such a weird, lustful energy around there where guys are checking the different rooms to see if any action is going on. And when I find myself doing that aswell, I have to stop myself and literally find a place to sit somewhere and meditate in the middle of the club in order to ground myself (well actually somewhere on a bench somewhere on the side but still). It has happened like that multiple times

I wish it would just be a lot easier for me to connect with other people, talking about women in a sexual relationship in particular, but I just don't seem to be able to that. I've tried many things over the years. This seems to be one of my most deep-rooted issues.

A sex doll in that regard seems perfect. The best thing is that I neither have to pay money for every time that I want to practice or explore sexually, nor I have to face the discomfort of facing another human being. I want to be able to explore myself sexually, but I don't want all the awkwardness, the sense of responsibility towards her to be a good sexual partner, and for her to feel that my primary interest isn't so much for her but for her body. I'm not indifferent towards her, but the being that she is is just not what I'm there for, you see?

With a sex doll I can quite literally make someone/something an "object of desire" without feeling ashamed for the fact that my primary intent is not so much for her as a being, but her as an object. Still, as an object there can be a lot of play and exploration, I so reckon. An object can be very attractive and desired. I don't feel ashamed for the fact that I sometimes seek out only objects in my sexual desire, as I feel that that's part of life too. but in an actual encounter with a human being, I don't want to be that person who only/primarily cares about that.

With a sex doll I can play, learn different positions, pretend like I'm dealing with an actual person, talk like her/it like it's an actual person. I can see that working out really well for me. I can see it having potential for a lot of pleasure and practice.

With situations like this there is often this feeling of... pity for the fact that I did not arrange for me to have a sex doll much earlier. Now it's not so bad anymore, but in the past it was quite often that I felt remorse or sadness for 'what could have been'. I never really felt so bad of what could have been for anything that happened to me that was based on chance or circumstances I had little to no control over. but in situations like this, where I could have had a sex doll for many years now, there is this feeling of pity and perhaps a little bit of guilt of 'what I could have done' and therefore 'what could have been'.

Because it seems like that if I had this sex doll much earlier, I would have been able to start practicing a lot much earlier, explore a lot a lot earlier, grow myself sexually a lot earlier, have a lot of enjoyment from it a lot earlier, and that I now would be much further on my progression of sexual healing. That is what it seems like. I don't like that kind of logic because it makes me feel uncomfortable, but it does appear to be true.

But when I say that it appears to be true, it's not to say that it's actually true. I also know that reality is very complex, and that beyond the complexity we can come to comprehend with our minds, there is always still potential for things to be even more complex which our minds can not (yet) comprehend. I know there's always counterarguments to be found in everything.

But whatever the case may be, even if this situation happened to be 'disadvantegeous' to my growth process, even if I have actually missed out, encountered more frustration than necessary, screwed up, encountered a situation that was more "bad" than "good", even with all of that, I know that there is simply no point in holding onto the past, feeling all this regret and sorrow for what could have been, what I could have done differently, what could have been differently.

And actually, I have gotten a lot better at letting that go. In the past, not so much. Things like these could really bother me and I would try to logically convince myself that there are counterarguments and other perspectives as to why something doesn't necessarily have to be a bad situation, or that I would have made bad decisions which would have slowed down both my growth and diminished the enjoyment in my life.

But now, I am simply able to let go of all of that much more easily. Don't ask me why; I just am able to. I just can't be bothered anymore, I guess that's what it is. I just can't be bothered anymore blaming myself or feeling guilty or feeling sorrow for what I could have done or what could have been. Whether something was good or bad, or whether in reality there is no such thing as good and bad and that every bad has its good inherentely in it, whatever may be the case, I just can't be asked to think about it anymore and I just move on with my life. I honestly just can not be asked.

 

Right, so I a couple of options. I could buy a relatively cheap yet seemingly tall doll of decent quality from the #1 national merching platform (I don't know what the official name of such a thing is) here in the Netherland, which will cost me 550€. The sketchy thing however is that the company that is selling these products have literally 0 reviews, which is very suspicious. 

I'm actually thinking about buying from a website specialized in these sex dolls. It will be a bit more expensive (800 - 1000€), but there a couple of reasons why I think that is a good idea.

1. Shipping times for the orders I would buy from the merching platform would due to the pandemic probably be very delayed. The package deliverers are probably already very busy, so it wouldn't help them either. Buying from a specialized company wll probably make this a lot quicker
2. Not only will it make it quicker, I will potentially also have the option to personally come collect my product instead of this big, heavy thing being delivered to my front door where also my parents happen to live (to be fair there's going to be a package around it so the contents will not be seen directly, but still)
3. Actually, shipping costs from specialized sites are also often very minimal if not free as opposed to merching platforms (whether I pick it up or get it delivered, I save myself the shipping costs either way)
4. It's much easier for me to check whether I'm going to get a reliable product. With specialized sites and companies, you can do some checks on the website through formal means (you can check the url, you can look up how long the website has been around for, you can see if they have been reported to authorities as scam etc...), with an external seller through a merching platform, you can't really do that effectively and reliably. These external sellers on these big platforms aren't as reliable, I have discovered today. If it seems to be too good to be true, it often is.
5. It's important to me to stimulate smaller companies and give all my money to the big guys who already earn enough money, making the world even more imbalanced. It's economically and morally a better decision (I'd say this and the reason for reliability are the most important reasons)
6. I have the money right now. I have been receiving a lot of overdue social welfare benefits some time ago, and I also will keep on receiving money from it in the months to come. i don't really have to worry about getting into financial trouble anytime soon

I honestly don't deserve to get as much money as I do, especially in these times. I can however morally justify it by the argument that I'm not wasting it on nonsense and superficiality such as alcohol, drugs, partying, and so forth... (no I don't think this sex doll is superficial. I think it's actually quite important to my growth (well, might be)). I'm also investing it a lot on my personal growth, and I'm making very conscious decisions to which (small) businesses and companies I am going to give it, stimulating the economies I deem to be most benificial to the growth and awakening of humanity.

I actually always take care whatever I put my money into. I'm actually an extremely frugal person. i quite honestly think buying overpriced commercialized products such as Apple is ridiculous. I have hole in my shoes and they are very worn out but they still walk fine so I use them. I never really want to throw anything away that I perhaps still might need. I like to buy many, many things second-hand. I always seek out the cheapest places to stay with airbnb and such, sometimes staying for a week because there's a slight weekly discount. I look for the cheapest flights. One time last summer I even put on all the clothes I had in my bag (many layers) whilst in the waiting line to get in the airplane so I could meet the criteria of only being able to take one bag/suitcase of such and such size. Some time ago I spent almost like an hour searching the best kind of internet cable I wanted for the cheapest price possible, literally taking an hour or so comparing all the options that were available, even though we're only talking about price differences of a couple of euros at most.

I'm one of the most frugal, prudent, economical, meticulous people you'll ever come to meet. I'm not joking about that . It's funny how I notice a strange kind of pleasure and satisfaction by identifying myself as this kind of person, this frugal, meticulous person. I know it isn't very spiritual to get this sense of egoic pleasure out of this, but I am just gonna go ahead and not give a crap right now and just enjoy the egoic high . Proabbly gonna have to pay for this later, though. My feeling is that sometimes you just want to allow yourself to enjoy yourself with things that are 'unspiritual' or 'impure' because life is about living and enjoying these things too.

I always look for actions and discounts wherever I go. I have multiple times picked up something from the street because I thought it might come in handy. I will very often argue with my mother or parents to not throw something away (being it food or items) that might still be used in the future. I tend to have a tendency for hoarding (although I am capable of throwing something away if I must), I tend to mourn very quickly about items that I've come to lose that still were perfectly good to use, I secretly think people who buy unnecessary, commercialized products like coca-cola instead of its cheap imitator or a brand new bike instead of a perfectly good one from a second-hand marketplace, or products from Apple whilst there are companies that sell products for half the price that do the same things, I think that people who buy things like that, are absolute idiots.

Sorry if I offended you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think even if I would win the lottery right now of 100 million euros I would still not buy anything that is more expensive than its cheaper counterpart with the same functionality. I would still not buy ever, EVER, EVER, EVER the official coca-cola brand bottle but always its cheaper imitating counterpart brand, because in my experience, the taste is the same (but maybe I don't have a good tongue idk. Even then the difference in price is too big of an hurdle for me to buy the actual coca-cola)

The exceptions that I'm from now on going to make however is that by the knowlegde that I am part of a larger whole and that its not always about me and my finances, I am also going to look out for ways I can use my money to stimulate people, companies and economies which I want to invest in and of which I feel that they really contribute to the conscious evolution of humanity at large. in that case, I am willing to spend a little bit more money from now on. And actually, as far as it comes to investing in my personal growth is concerned, I am actually not that frugal. I actually can and have spent quite a lot on many different courses and workshops that I found important. 

Actually, I wouldn't say so much that I necessarily am a stingy and miserly. I just use my money very thoughtfully and meticulously. I don't want to spend a single more euro on things I don't find that important so that I will have more money to spend on things I do find important.

I'm just very thoughtful and cautious. But at the same time you can't stop me from spending a lot of money on a certain course or workshop that I personally find really important.

I also like how I was able to write for 2 hours this time without at some point feeling like I got energetically congested and therefore needed to retreat. That normally doesn't happen. And I still feel like I could write some more, were it not for the fact that I'm now out of things to say for the moment.

I do know that even though I may like this, that there is a danger in getting too happy about the fact that I was able to do this, because this will create attachment, and this attachment will create suffering whenever I come to another point where once again I am not able to finish all that I wanted to write about because I get too energetically congested. So even though I want to be happy about the fact that I have written so long (and I have quite enjoyed it. I really did enjoy all this writing for quite a lot ), I still will just forget about it and move on.

Edited April 29, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Thursday April 30th, 20:52

I have this inner critic, this inner judge within me.

This inner judge creates a whole lot of "shoulds".

It says I should do this, I should do that, I shouldn't allow that anymore, I should do this and that today, I should exercise more often, I should meditate more often, I should practice singing more often, I should do chores in the house more often. In fact, this inner judge even turns things that don't even have to do with 'right' or 'wrong' into a should, like me having the desire to make a puzzle. Pretty much any plan that comes into my mind, it will create pressure and denseness around it. Both things I logically think I should be doing, and things I would normally enjoy doing as a hobby.

Interestingly enough, the exact opposite outcome is achieved. Because of the fact that it makes everything so dense, so heavy, so chore-like, and in addition to the fact that I tend to make decisions more on feelings than on logic (or that I have enough awareness to not fully trust any narrative that I "should", yet not enough awareness to completely disidentify from the narrative into a detached, nondual state), it simply paralyzes me and the result it is that I end up almost not doing anything at all, as I'm simply paralyzed.

Even just getting in front of my PC here and writing here, which I feel I would've normally enjoyed doing in this moment, it also creates this pressure and tension around it.

It's really difficult to live with. It constantly judges my eating habits, my mindfulness habits, my habits of tending to get distracted. Everything becomes super serious, super difficult, and pretty much always whatever I'm doing is "not good enough" when this voice is here. Or when it's good enough for the moment, it will create attachment around the notion of what this situation that is "good enough" looks like, and then in the future pain will be created because I will fail to live up to this self-expectation I've created at least at some point.

Yet, it's just really hard to let go of.

I reckon it's really hard to let go of because I've gotten past the phases both were I saw what it said as being completely true, and also past the phase where I've considered the voice of this critic to be completely irrelevant, where as a reaction to it I decided to often try to do the exact opposite of what I thought it wanted to demand me to do. Or maybe in better words: I wanted to experience as little inner pressure and guilt as possible, resulting in a lifestyle that was extremely lazy and totally careless and indifferent from perceived demands and feelings of responsibility from both the outer and the inner world.

Now I'm at a point where I've come to see that both the lifestyle of militant self-discipline and the lifestyle of extreme laziness are both limited and both extremes will create suffering.

The lifestyle of militant self-discipline didn't work because... well... You just make it really f*cking hard on yourself by creating all this pressure in yourself to achieve, to discipline, to control yourself. It will create a lot of tension; At least, If you try to discipline yourself from the perspective of the ego-mind, that is. You may seem to be getting somewhere with all this effort, but that is in large part only a fallacy, as the the roots of one's sense of incompleteness have been left untouched, and thus one will continue to feel this sense of lack until the point one goes deeply enough within oneself to uproot the deepest layers of trauma and ego-identification.

The lifestyle of extreme laziness also in the end didn't work out because even though it may appear to one as if one is completely letting go of all things and therefore falling in a state of relaxation and detachment, in reality it's more of a state of apathy where one is forsaking one's own natural innate sense of direction and responsibility. On top of that, there is no actual "letting go" as the attempt to live a lifestyle with as little effort and demands on oneself as possible, is in its own an ideal and therefore a demand in itself. In other words, one can actually try very hard to 'not try', and therefore it is simply a more subtle form of the ego to keep you identified and to keep its dominance over the Being.

In other words: Letting go isn't actually letting go if one only chases the idea of what one thinks letting go means. In that way, one will forsake its sense of purpose and direction, and one will feel hollow and unfulfilled, even though one may think the way to feel with that sense of emptiness is to even moreso 'let go' of that, which digs the hole even deeper.

I've come to acknowledge the fact that some sense of direction, some effort, some discipline is indeed required for a fulfilling life. However, it turns out to be very difficult at times to start becoming active and engaging with life again without falling back into the perspective of the ego-mind, where everything becomes a heavy struggle in order to get somewhere or achieve something. Yet, at the same time I know that staying stuck in the perspective of "All is alright, no need to do anything, you can be perfectly happy with you are and all is peaceful", I know that staying stuck in that perspective too long as an ideal, as a worldview, will in its own turn also create its own suffering because one is coming not from a place of God-consciousness, but rather a place of egoic idealization.

Hence, I am aware that staying stuck in one particular perspective will not do. I know that there are certain goals and visions to be worked towards, yet to work towards those goals whilst being in alignment with Spirit as opposed to the ego-mind turns out to be not always such an easy task.

When this inner judge and therefore this inner pressure is there, I tend to more often revert to apathy and paralysis whilst trying to follow my notion of what letting go would mean rather than to actually do the thing my mind tells me I should do. There is a good reason I have that tendency.

It also comes down to feeling over thought. Why do I prefer following feeling over thought? Much of it has to do that the realm of thoughts, beliefs, ideals, goals and so forth is extremely multi-faceted and complex, whereas the realm of feelings is in that sense much simpler. The realm of feelings does not require any contemplation, it simply requires an awareness of what one intuitively desires.

However, given the fact that even those feelings are often not easy to interpret, and that mind also often comes in between giving a lot more date and trying to further evaluate, it creates a confusion. And confusion creates paralysis, where I then often interpret that feeling of feeling paralyzed as an intuitive sign that it is perhaps best for me to detach and try to do nothing at all. In reality, when I say I try to follow feeling, I must admit that it's a weird mixture of feelings and thought forms both, although I may believe that I am following feelings primarily.

I still rather find myself in a state of this kind of paralyzed confusion than the confusion that comes about when I actually try to discard feelings altogether and try to use logic alone. Oh boy, does that become a hassle.

Over the past couple of years I've questioned everything deeply. There is so much uncertainty, so much counterarguments to everything, so much hidden ways in which something that seems unquestionably good can turn out to be harmful. If one is trying to find an orientation through life whilst using thought and logic alone whilst also being very genuine about it, one will find nothing but a big complex system of many, many uncertainties and confusion.

I cannot just say "Oh I'll just use logic alone", as the realm of logic is so complex and multi-faceted, that one cannot come to a single conclusion if one is very honest.

Still I struggle to find orientation through logic and only relatively recently did I come to make more and more decisions that were primarily logical which were in discordance with an intuitive, feeling-based sense of the situation. One example would be brushing my teeth. I never liked brushing my teeth over the past couple of years as I always questioned how I could come to know whether the theory of society that brushing your teeth will protect you from tooth decay was actually true or not? It may have seemed like something that was likely to be so, but how could I be so certain about it? Because of the fact that I was (and still am to a large extent) so identified with my notion of someone that likes to take an intuitive, feeling-based approach to everything, then how could I be okay with the fact that I was performing a repetitive action that was based on primarily logic, based on very little personal insight and experience?

I simply tend to be extremely skeptical and rebellious about pretty much anything and any way someone tells me I should think if it does not correlate to my own personal insight and experience. I don't care if the message comes from the most enlightened guru or even God himself; If I can't find a correlation of what is being told in my own personal experience and insight, it simply won't do anything for me. Well, maybe now there are starting te get some exceptions to this rule, but especially in the past this used to be the case very much. I just can not be told to blindly believe something just because someone tells me to; It doesn't matter who the authority in question is.

That's why it is so difficult for me to activate myself, to get myself going to the gym or to start jogging, even though I want to start doing that because I want to get stronger physically so I can be a better singer with more power and stamina.

That is at least the logic that would seem to make sense, but still I keep on questioning: "How do i know for certain that going to the gym is going to make me a better singer. It does seem to make some logical sense that having a stronger body with more stamina would correlate to being able to sing with more power and for longer, but how do I know for sure that that is actually true?" The problem here once again is the fact that I lack an intuitive, feeling-based connection with the experience that would then intuitively convince me to go after it. or maybe just in simpler words: I don't find myself doing it automatically, and because I am so prone to both being attached to my ideal of "going by feelings" and the fact that I so easily doubt anything and everything, it is very difficult to convince myself to get started with it and to commit to it.

That is basically my trouble with structure and commitment. I am very attached to my notion of 'being an intuitive person', and I tend to question everything so deeply that it is always very difficult to be sure that whatever i want to go and commit myself to do would actually be the right thing do be doing and to commit to. Because there are so many arguments to be found all around the spectrum that would either argue for it or argue against it.

Both attachment to my self-image of being an intuitive person, and the relentless habit (compulsion almost) to literally question everything which undermines my certainty are the reasons I find it so difficult to commit. Attachment to feelings leads to lack of willpower, attachment/habit of deep questioning/inquiry leads to lack of certainty. And the combination of a lack of willpower and certainty both will lead to laziness, confusion and paralysis.

One thing I've found that helped in the past is just "doing the damn thing even if you're not sure about it". You can question yourself why you should do something, but in the same way you can also question why you shouldn't do it. I went jogging 2 times last week, which is something I haven't done in ages actually, except a couple of times at the threadmill at the gym, but now I've gone and done it outside, which somehow was even less tempting.

Some things in life, you basically have to start acting upon it based common sense and based on the best information you got at the time, even though there's always a risk of being wrong. To start working out to get a body that is more capable of singing in a more powerful style for a longer style, seems to be common sense. However, there are counterarguments because I do know some really powerful singers that don't seem to be very strong who despite of that have very impressive powerful voices (Chester Bennington from Linkin Park being an example). One could also argue that the practice of singing itself and exposing yourself by doing concerts and such already gives you enough training for the muscles you need in order to sing for longer with more power and stamina. Perhaps the muscles don't need to be trained through external means of going to the gym. Perhaps all the muscles that you need to train and all the stamina that you need to get will be achieved through means of just singing and practicing a lot, and that unto its own would already be enough. However, even if that were true, if I were not to get a body that's in good shape it would not correlate to the image and the vision of myself of how I would like to see myself as a singer in the future. But does that mean I should go to the gym? Perhaps this vision of how I would like to see myself is subject to change.

Do you see why I suffer from lack of certainty, and as a result of that find it difficult to commit (along with being feeling-identified)?

I think I'll leave it with this for now.

[Nightwise]

Friday May 1st, 16:01

One thing I want to write a little bit about after I broke the screen of my phone today.

Here's the story. I went jogging today, and during the warm-up my phone fell out of my pocket on the pavement. However, despite it taking a hit on hard surface, the screen was still fine and the phone in working order. I blamed the phone falling out of my pocket due to the weird positions I was making with my legs.

After that I went jogging for real, and at some point the phone fell out of my pocket on pavement again, and this time there was a big crack which the primary impact was on the top-left side of my screen, and the mutliple cracks extended further from that point where there were a lot of cracks that were a couple of centimeters long primarily over the top-left side of my phone, but also quite a bit over the top-right side and the left side in general.

As far as the way the phone functions it's still quite fine, no problem with that, but as I thought about how I was going to deal with this situation I noticed such a resistance coming up when I thought about repairing the screen myself buy buying a new screen and using a guide.

I am basically quite the opposite of a "Do it yourself (DIY)" kind of guy. I don't like having to figure out new things at all, unless it's something I'm naturally interested in.

I can remember some 10 years ago when I was a teenager that I was trying to repair a controller for the Playstation 3 that If i remember correctly had a malfunction with one of its joysticks. I tried to repair it myself, but instead of fixing it, I made the controller from a semi-malfunctioning controller into a controller that didn't respond at all anymore, because I got very confused in which order I disassembled it and I couldn't figure out how to put it back together. When I did eventually put it back together (in I reckon a completely wrong order), it didn't respond at all anymore.

I reckon this was a situation that really undermined my confidence as far as DIY-stuff is concerned. I really don't like to try to figure something like that out, even with a good guide.

I did repair and replace the gear mechanism in my bicycle some months ago, which I also believe I noted down in my journal. I'm quite proud of that, because it really isn't like me to be trying to accomplish such a feat

I really like to be able to figure more stuff out myself. It will also save me a lot of money because I then don't have to replace every kind of item or product that is broken or malfunctioning, or pay a lot of money to have it being repaired by someone else.

I'll just see how I will go about trying todeal with this phone situation. I am actually also accepting the possibility of not repairing the screen and perhaps using alternative solutions because forcing yself to be trying to repair it myself in the official manner could simply be too much of a sacrifice of my mental state. It really may not seem like such a big deal to an outsider to just get on with it and repair it, but I know that it doesn't help comparing myself to other people who are wired way differenly than me. I am me and I have to be making choices based not on how others would do it, but what's possible for me based on all the different factors that come into play when considering my situation.

Edited May 2, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Monday May 4th, 15:55

Something a bit scary happened this morning. 

I was singing a song I hadn't sung before in which I have exert myself quite a bit. Just after I had sung the entire song, when my heartbeat was still high, I once again tried one of the difficult notes, and after I had done that I suddenly noticed that my heart was beating incredibly fast, much faster than I can remember having it ever experienced before, whilst at the same time I was feeling quite fine and breathing fairly normally.

Also a strange thing was that it ended as quickly as it started. After 10 seconds or so, my heartrate became a lot slower. Still fast actually, but relatively a lot slower.

I found this quite freaky. i'm not sure what happened there. I am not even sure if I imagined that it happened. I think I was kind of hearing the pulse beating around my ear, which made me put a hand on my chest to feel that, and it could have been that because of the fact that the heartbeat in my ear wasn't registering at the same time making the combination of both beats seem as a single pulse, but honestly I really question if that's what really happened.

Internet does give you terms like Tachycardia, where having a high pulse by default is a certain medical condition, but I don't have much of a high pulse in resting state, so I doubt it's really that.

Singing with intensity does require you to really tense up your body in order to be belt out some of those difficult notes. I enjoy it, but it is a heavy exercise which I can very well imagine temporarily heightens your blood pressure, and you tense your muscles quite a bit when you try to belt some really high notes, or if you're singing in a heavy style. The song that I sang (or sung? Idk) was/is also quite a fast song so you don't tend to get much time to catch some breath, making you out of breath pretty quickly.

Over the past couple of weeks I've just been excessively concerned with the health of my body an particularly the health of my heart. As I think 've expained some time ago in my journal, some week ago back in March, I had called to the local physician because I felt really strange things in my chest area. I was told that this may very well be the corona-virus, and that you don't necessarily need to have symptoms like coughing or fever in order to have the virus. There was over the phone no real serious signs that would've been an indication to the physician that there would have been something seriously wrong with me. And granted, whilst there was also some pains in the area where I would imagine my heart is at, I also did feel just pains in the lung area in general and as far as know, the lungs are kind of around or behind the heart also so it could also have been some pain of the lungs.

All the little things that I have been feeling over the last couple of weeks could be side/after-effects of the virus, but still I don't feel completely safe. I don't have complete trust in that everything would be alright with me. I still get scared when I feel things that "seem off".

There is however not really a good explanation why there would be something dangerously wrong with my heart. There isn't really a family history in neither my father's or my mother's side of people with heart problems (I had asked), I to my knowledge don't eat anything that is particulary bad for your heart. Cheese maybe? Idk. But there are so many other people eating plenty of cheese who are absolutely fine. Yes, I don't exercise a lot, but I am not/barely overweight, I don't smoke nor drink, so how many logical reasons do I have to really be concerned about my heart? What kind of background indications are there that it would be realistic?

But still I am afraid. I've noticed actually that I just tend to be very much grasping on to the safety of my body the past couple of weeks. I find it hard, much harder than before, to let go of my physical body. I tend to be so much worried about every little pain, every strange sensation, every little thing that seems to justify even a little bit of suspicion, every little thing that seems to even so slightly deviate from what my idea of "healthy" is (and certainly there are a lot of things that may not appear as "normal" at first but are actually very common or even standard)

Why do I find it so hard to let go? Why am I so afraid and anxious as far as my physical body is concerned? I honestly feel like I am more concerned with the fact that I find it so hard to relax and let go of my physical body sometimes, than I am concerned about what I'm noticing to begin with. Why do I find it so difficult to let go, to relax, to have some trust in existence or God that I'm being guided, shielded and protected. That doesn't even mean that trusting and surrendering would mean that I believe that I am completely physically invulnerable, but just that I am guided and that I can trust that everything goes according to plan, and that I can let go because the true "I" can't die.

Maybe I find it hard to let go because that's more of an assumption than a lived experience.

How do I let go of my physical body? That is my primary question. My secondary question is how to deal with and regard the things that I'm feeling and have felt and experienced in my body, such as the freakishly high heartbeat I seemed to have for just a second of 10 or 15 earlier this morning.

I want to address both questions, and maybe I will make a call or pay a visit to the local physician again, but the primary question is just: how do I let go? Why am I so damn anxious and concerned all the time about my physical body? Why can't I just rest with whatever is the case what I happen to be sensing within my body like I used to be able to do (except maybe extreme things, but still)?

Why is it so hard to let go? How do I let go? And also, what do I do from here? To me, discarding the question of action and primarily focusing on attachment or attitude is not the right take on it, and neither is only trying to ask how to 'fix yourself' and ignoring the level of attitude and how to let go.

Part of me just wants to call the physician already, but I'm afraid I don't have enough legitimate excuses to justify such a call, as also based on the last call, there appears to be nothing serious enough going on. But I don't really want to wait to that point where it could get really serious. Hopefully that never happens.

I consider what I'm gonna do from here on. I also think I'm gonna exercise more. This is also coupled with the fact that my singing teacher confirmed that it will indeed help for the stamina and strength of your singing to be exercising. Basically she took away my last doubt about whether exercise is really that benificial to singing or not. I suppose I will get back onto this topic some later time.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Tuesday May 5th, 15:32

Yesterday, when intending to jog, not long after I had written the last entry in my journal, I instead found myself in a headspace where I really wanted to contemplate upon the situation in regards to the worries about my heart condition.

So I sat down on a bench somewhere, and started to think why I was so much in conflict about this.

One thing I then realized was the fact that I associated "letting go" with not taking action, and therefore unconsciously I was in my mind not really willing to let go, because it didn't feel right to forsake the idea of me taking any positive action towards this situation.

But what I then realized was that there was in fact no contradiction. I realized that letting go is not the same as not acting or not taking responsibility to change an unwanted situation. I repeated this mantra in myself for the next couple of minutes: "Letting go is not doing nothing, letting go is not doing nothing, letting go is not doing nothing".

It is indeed an error to think that letting go means the same as forsaking every sort of action and just doing nothing, sitting there and just being an indifferent enlightened sage chanting "ohmmmm". That's completely the wrong idea.

People, including myself, tend to (either consciously or unconsciously) assume that either you let go, or either you take a lot of action to change a situation, and that the two contradict each other, that you can't have both. But in reality, they don't conflict.

They are simply two different dimensions. One dimension is the inner dimension of detachment, Being and witnessing, the other dimension is the dimension of action, change and development. They can co-exist at the same time.

But yes, there is a certain paradox, because to say to yourself that everything is okay and to come to accept everything that already is or even that could come to be, seems to appear as if that would mean that you would end up doing nothing. Because if you say: "Everything is okay", then what is your incentive to change?

This is the miracle. Even though you may say to yourself that "Everything is okay", you still will feel in yourself a pull to change a certain situation into another situation that is more desired, yet at the same time you can simultaneously also stay in that space where everything is fine and there's nothing to worry about, whilst you are taking positive action towards something.

The key here is that you don't believe that these two dimensions have to contradict. If you do believe they have to contradict, then you will believe that you can only choose one or the other, and in this way you get stuck in the world of dualities (even if you try to choose non-duality over duality, it is still part of a duality as you're saying "this" (non-duality) as opposed to "that" (duality). Basically without choosing anything over another thing, only then you can know true non-duality, even though you may "happen to" choose things, but it is not based on attachment to a belief structure).

The interesting thing is that staying in this state of conflict and confusion actually neither causes me to actually let go, or to take positive action. That's the irony of it. When I think I have to make a choice between letting go or taking action, actually neither of them tends to happen.

So realizing that letting go and taking positive action are only contradictory in concept but not in reality, that is the first doorway for me to deal with this anxious and conflicted situation.

With that apparent confusion within me resolved, I then get both access to letting go and to taking action. So the second doorway is indeed just emphasizing letting go. Before this confusion was resolved, I couldn't really let go as I was unsure as to that would allow me to still take any action upon trying to change the situation, which I didn't want to forsake as a possibility. Now I can indeed let go much better as I don't encounter any hesitation or confusion anymore.

The third doorway is then, obviously, actually seeing if a can change the situation. I Intend to start exercising and jogging more often (without doing it with too much intensity (at least as of yet) because I think that could actually have risks involved with my heart or blood pressure). I have also bought some Omega-3 fish oil today, which is meant to be good for your heart.

So the first step is to see through the contradiction and see that in reality, there is no contradiction. The second step is to actually let go, and the third step is to then start taking action to change the situation. I suppose step 2 and 3 can be done in alternating fashion so there is no need for one of them to come before the other per se, I would say.

Also one thing I've noticed is that I sometimes get stressed quite a bit when things don't seem to be working properly. When for instance my internet fails, I mutter in myself "Oh for fuck sake" and get irritated and frustrated. I have always allowed myself to get irritated by many things because I felt that just expressing the irritation and frustration that comes in the moment seemed like less effort and trouble than trying to control your feelings and discipline yourself to be non-reactive. I never cared so much for the fact that I vented some frustration. In my mind, it seemed lke a god way to get the pressure out.

But, I question now that even though I may seem to be "getting it out of my system", whether I am actually really getting it out of my system. Even though I may appear to 'get it out of me', I at the same time feel like I am also creating this irritation within me that keeps on lingering in my system. i'd say it's better than bottling your emotions up and keeping it all inside (or, perhaps better), but I feel like there is another option.

That third option is to simply recognize that this stress is not something you want to have and accept for yourself anymore, also for the fact that it could be causing some higher blood pressure, and therefore you simply decide to drop it. It is interesting, because it is not a decision where you decide to fight with whatever you happen to feel, but is simply an easy decision to not participate in this kind of sentiment; not to repress it, and not to express it.

Someone who is only used to either controlling their emotions or someone who constantly lets it out without any filter is not going to understand what I just have said. That person is not going to understand what it means to truly just drop it. I wouldn't have understood it or have had any experience of it a couple of years ago either. But as you keep frowing in your consciousness, at some point you'll start coming to a point where you can actually genuinly let go of something without even trying hard to let go. You simply decide for yourself that you don't want to get involved with it, and you instantly move on. It's kind of miraculous, really, which is why it will confuse people who haven't come to that point in their evolution yet where they can understand from their own experience that this is a possibility, to just drop something immediately once it's recognized and then immediately move on, without even leaving a trace of the original sentiment in your system.

But once you start to grow more and more in your conscious evolution, you'll start to understand from own experience that this is possible, without even knowing exactly how it is possible. It just is.

That's why the word "accepting" or "letting go" are words that are so difficult for me to use because they can mean either one's "trying to let go" where it is an egoic attempt in which a duality is chosen, rather than an actual letting go where... You actually let go.

So yeah, as far as things I am going to actually do about this situation, is to be aware at moments once I am unnecessarily stressing over something, and then just to drop it, and to start exercising more often, and to start taking omega-3 supplements.

If I start getting serious signs that there would indeed be something wrong with my heart, then I indeed could also call the physician. For now, I don't think that is necessary as I now have other pathways to both reduce stress and to increase cardiovascular and physiological health through means of diet and exercise, which I suppose will be more than enough unto itself (provided I have some issues with my heart or cholesterol or blood pressure to begin with, haha, even that is not entirely sure).

So apart from the fact that there are already a bunch of means to begin with that will increase cardiovascular health, I also don't want to call a physician because as of so far I haven't had any serious signs that there is/was actually a situation which is more dangerous or concerning. The fact that my heartbeat appeared to be extremely high for 10/15 seconds or so yesterday was concerning, but not concerning enough because my breathing was fine, I wasn't dizzy, there was no pain, and it was only for 10/15 seconds or so. Even if I wasn't going to now take action to reduce stress and improve diet and exercise, if such a thing happened again with an extremely high pulse the chance that it would cause any very dangerous complication where you would suffer permanent damage or worse would be something like 5%, probably less.

And considering the fact that I am indeed taking measures to improve my my health and stress levels, there is even less to be worried about.

But if such an extremely high heart rate happens (again) and I am sure it actually happened and I didn't imagine it, then I will call my physician; Certainly if it happens for longer this time with potential other symptoms.

But now, I don't think I have enough reasons to make that call. Although calling and just getting some information wouldn't be a bad thing per se, but I just don't want to call if I am not really even sure that what I thought happened yesterday actually happened to begin with.

Edited May 5, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Thursday May 7th, 20:48

After continuing to watch the episode with Brian Rose and David Ike (for some reason suspicious uttering his full actual name, haha. There's supposed to be an extra C between the I and the K) once again on London Real, it inspires me to address a topic which has lingered in my mind before. I might actually have covered this in the past a little bit also, but nothing is really complete repetition as it in a way new to me.

When hearing Ike speak out his many so-called conspiracy theories, and he actually thinks that there is no Covid-19, I must admit that he is good at creating a compelling story with arguments that appear to be strong and with a sense of conviction. This however doesn't mean that it's true.

But it doesn't mean the opposite has to be true.

This is what so much frustrates me about... people in general. People can seem to be so damn certain about a position knowing for sure that the beliefs they have about this or that or about reality is undoubtedly true. Yet, there are always people from the other side of the spectrum who have equally or even more compelling theories that sound just as true.

And in reality, who really knows what is actually going on or how things actually are?

Here's a quote from Lao Tzu that I got from an excerpt from Osho, which I feels applies very well to my situation: “Everybody seems to be so clear about everything, except me. I am so confused, I am so muddle-headed, that I don’t know what is what. Everybody walks with such certainty, and I hesitate at each step. Everybody goes so straight, without looking sideways. And I walk like a man in winter crossing a cold, icy-cold stream.”

(A link from the article): https://www.osho.com/osho-online-library/osho-talks/lao-tzu-j.-krishnamurti-mencius-609ec56d-101?p=c6a4a35f4b03740618b2890ebcbd0fad

This is my problem. Whether it's about people being certain that the Covid-19 Pandemic exists, or whether they are certain that it doesn't exist, it always frustrates me because most of these people who feel so damn certain about it have no actual empirical evidence for themselves. They just repeat what they have chosen they wanted to believe and then what for kind of arguments and 'evidence' they have gathered from simply the media and the internet. But the media and internet can literally make everything appear as true, but in the end you just assume what you have been told. And this too counts for conspiracy-theories by the way, and theories that don't fit the mainstream. Whether it's mainstream or not, in the end it will simply remain "what you have been told". Literally so.

If things do happen to be a conspiracy, there are some groups of people who have a bit more... justification for thinking that something might not be so right. Those groups can for instance be hospital workers and people who can test for themselves whether there this virus is there. Or people from other groups who discover that because of the areas they work in certain things that the media is telling the population is in fact not true. Those kind of people have more justification to say that certain things aren't the way they seem. But if we as outsiders who consume information on the internet look at a video of someone who is supposed to be working somewhere in the medical system or other areas that are more intricately involved in the apparent Covid-19 outbreak would speak out about things not being as they seem, we as outsiders don't know if that person that is telling that story is a legitimate doctor or researcher or whatever they are. We as outsiders simply don't know the validity of such a story that a person may tell, unless perhaps we personally know such a person and we know them to be as reliable, in which case the story for you personally gets a bit more validity.

But as outsiders, knowing nothing but the things we hear from the media and the internet, we know literally nothing and all that we hear or even the things we specifically search for including conspiracy theories, all those things have a good chance of information that is being put out not to share the truth, but to push certain agenda's. Or, it might even be that the people who put out those theories may believe it's true, but that in fact they themselves have been mislead too.

And even if you do happen to be working as an independent researcher and find indications that the Covid-19 pandemic does not exist, then how certain can you be that your research is not colored by your either conscious or unconscious unquestioned assumptions and interpretations about it?

This is my problem with assertions and beliefs, that we don't know how we can really know anything for certain. It is a deep epistemological issue. Even people who I respect a lot I see also start making a lot of assumptions and form a lot of beliefs which in my understanding they aren't really able to know for sure.

This constant debate about "I am right and you're wrong and here's why", no matter what your arguments are, is in a way so sickening, because all we really are doing is choosing a position, and then finding all the reasons and logic that would support our position, and then finding all the reasons and logic to criticize the contrasting perspective, and we either discard arguments that go against our own perspective, or we find clever ways to argue against it.

It is all confirmation bias. Choose a belief, ANY belief, and you will be able to come up with plenty of reasons why you are correct and why someone who thinks differently is wrong. It is not a matter of Truth; It is a matter of simply seeking out that which you like to believe in and defending yourself against that which threaten those beliefs. Believing in something has nothing to do with Truth. And Truth, as far as I have come to experience, has nothing to do with certainty but in fact has everything to do with uncertainty. The inquiry for Truth is simply dismantling everything you thought you knew for certain, at which you get to the point where you know less and less and less for certain. And if you still cling to wanting to have certainty, you will get confused. If you don't cling to wanting to find certainty, you still won't find that certainty, but you will not be confused, because confusion is wanting to have orientation where there is none. And this is lack of certainty is threatening to people, which is why people are so adamant about defending their beliefs.

Some things, I feel, seem to be more commonsensical to believe and assume than others. I for instance assume that my key will unlock my door, or that the sun is going to rise the next morning, or that my drink I have in front of me which came out of a soda bottle does not actually contain bleach.

But also things that you come to see as you become more conscious seem futile to question because you see it so clearly, such as the way other people are having certain beliefs they are defending, about the way ignorance and attachment manifests itself in other people and society as a whole. Many of these things are just clear as daylight, partially because many of these things you also went through yourself and eventually raised yourself out of and let go of these beliefs and there attachments, so it's clear to you when you see other people still being at that space you used to be at. But even if you yourself didn't used to have those kind of attachments it is often still clear. Again you can still intellectually question it and still find that in that way you don't know for certain, but it's useless, just as questioning whether the sun is going to rise the next morning.

We are always going to have assumptions, which is fine. We really can't function without some assumptions. How can you for instance function if you question so deeply if your memories are actually reliable, that you therefore discard the past entirely to such an extent that you refuse to put on your clothes when going out the door because you see the memory that says that the social rule of wearing clothes outside the door is an unreliable memory, and you therefore go outside the door without clothes.

Or the memory that tells you how to move your arm. Yes, you may have moved your arm two seconds ago, but how can you trust that that memory of two seconds ago did actually happen and is not actually an illusion?

You need certain assumptions to function. You can paralyze yourself by questioning thousands of things that really have no need to be questioned so deeply. Perhaps, at one point it's good to do just out of an interest for inquiry and truth. But just imagine living your life that way when you're so deep in questioning everything that you literally just can't function anymore and you just lay in bed all day totally confused and paralyzed. I actually went there. I didn't go as deeply as to seriously question whether the physical sun was going to rise the next morning or things like that (except maybe as a fun philosophical game, but that's it), but I did question about everything as far as it came to finding orientation and any form of certainty as to where to go with life and what to do with my life.

I can't say I now have definitive answers, but I did find that at some point you just have to start acting and functioning again despite you not knowing for certain what to do. This sort of attitude started in the spiritual dark night in the summer of 2017, when the pressure of suffering forced me to take action despite not knowing what to do. Over the last three years, I can't necessarily say that I have found any form of intellectual certainty since then, but what I did start to experience was that certain questions and hesitations just started to drop because they started seeming futile, and that certain things or certain modes of being and/or acting starting becoming more natural to me because either I enjoyed it or it was something I felt like I really wanted to do, and any attempt to question whether those kind of habits were good or not just started to seem like a meaningless endeavor.

That's kind of what happened with many things over the past 3 years. I can't say that I have gotten certainty, but I have started to act despite not having absolute certainty and becoming okay with that. I suppose the things I have started to form more of a habit or started to act upon since 2017 started with things I naturally feel more intuitively attracted to, such as a gym class or things with music, or doing certain forms of work or day activities because I felt like keeping myself a little bit more busy (as opposed to asking "should I?"), but since some time there are also more and more things happening like brushing my teeth, or since fairly recently, starting to work out and jogging and stuff, and starting to pay more attention to my diet.

The diet thing is also quite a big change for me, because for the past couple of years I have always been extremely skeptical towards the narrative that society has of what is healthy and what is not healthy to eat. I'm a die-hard empiricist. I don't like to be told that eating a certain thing is unhealthy if it feels really good to eat it and if I have not obvious signs that it does bad things to my body. I have always gone with the attitude that my body knows best what it needs. I don't need to think about what is healthy and what is not healthy, because my body knows exactly what is needed. Even things like pizza's and sugary drinks and all that kind of stuff, I genuinely was convinced or at least I felt quite sure that it was healthy for me because my body desired it, and I didn't really feel bad afterwards. I genuinely believed for so long that much of the narrative that society had about what was healthy food and what not was complete bullshit.

The way I could also justify this attitude for myself was the fact that I would also have bouts where I would be interested in eating what people would normally call 'healthy', such as carrots or cucumbers or fruits or whatever. I would naturally feel inclined to eat a varied diet, which contained some foods that people would generally deem as unhealthy, but also some foods that people would generally deem as healthy. I also through the course of time became less interested in things like potato chips, or cocktail nuts, or certain types of cookies. I did however really like pizzas and cheese and other kinds of cookies and snacks, and chocolate and all that good stuff. But this variation was for me was an indication that my body knew very well what it needed, and I only needed to follow my instincts or intuition as far as food was concerned. There was no need to struggle, there was no to eat anything other than I desired to eat in that very moment. Yes, I got a bit chubby perhaps, but I didn't see that chubbiness as something that was bad because I thought this was just natural and that the ideals that society had about a healthy body was simply a conditioned idea that had no true roots in reality. Being a little bit chubby in my situation I didn't really see as any disadvantage.

And part of all of this was also just because I was so keen on living my life in an empirical fashion. I wanted to discover what it was like to live by my own rules, by my own discoveries, by my own insights, by my own experiences. I was, and really still am, very hard-headed and keen in that way not to allow my habits and worldview to get corrupted by any form of social conditioning. I wanted to find out for myself what was true and what was not true by experiencing it instead of being told that it was so.

This is also why I have such a great difficulty accepting anything from science. I am not so much against the method or intention of science as a concept, but for me science is very much an epistemological issue, as how am I able to confirm that something some scientists out there say is true does actually happen to be true? How am I actually supposed to know as an outsider that they are not publishing certain scientific reports because some people up-top want certain agendas to be pushed? Despite me perhaps being a little bit biased to be critical towards science, I do think that's a very significant question for anyone to ask.

But lately, after fearing that I may have some problems with my heart, I have started to buy some omega-3 capsules. I have also checked yesterday the food that I was eating, and I realized I have been taking in a lot of saturated fats in my regular diet. I like to eat for instance greek yoghurt, cheese, croissants... All of these things happen to contain quite a lot of saturated fats. I just very recently even became aware of that. I have decided to buy yoghurt and cheese with less fat, but to give up on croissants... goddammit. 

I'm not going to entirely give up on croissants.I am just going to eat less per day. a maximum of 1 per day is the idea now, very maybe 2 per day. I just feel like giving up on them entirely is just too much too ask, because I absolutely adore croissants. But I can lessen how much I eat per day. If I'm gonna take this really seriously, I feel like I should stick with 1 per day at maximum. But that's difficult. I still suffer under the tendency to make many acts of discipline into a fight and a very uncomfortable struggle.

But as you can see, an opening is starting to occur to actually start taking my health seriously. I suppose it's doubt too that has prevented me from making these changes earlier, but I'd say it's too easy to blame it all on doubt. I think even moreso it was an unwillingness to step out of my attachment of being an empirical person.

I still don't know with absolute certainty that saturated fats are indeed giving me heart issues, provided I actually have heart or artery problems to begin with. I still am a bit conflicted about the possibility that something so incredibly delicious like croissants, that something so good can at the same time be harmful. That's something that's hard for me to digest. If it is indeed harmful, then it basically means I simply have to trust the narrative that society tells you that saturated fats are causes of heart problems and in that way unhealthy. I don't like to "just go with what I'm being told", but what I am willing to do is sometimes make a bet and go with the decision of the best I know how at the moment even though I don't know it for certain.

That's much of my way forward I suppose. Same with exercise. I don't know how beneficial my diet and exercise changes are really going to be, but I am starting to learn that you don't have to be absolutely certain that what you're doing is right in order to still be acting upon it. It is not necessary to have certainty before you act. Not that I always acted with certainty in the past about the things I did, but in the past I still had an orientation point of feeling and doing what I liked to do. I wasn't absolutely sure that it was the right thing to do, but I at least had the orientation point of feeling. But if you drop the orientation point of feeling altogether or at least for the most part and you go and make a decision based on something that is purely or mostly logical, like brushing your teeth or adjusting your diet and exercise routine, that is scary because that means you will have to accept an orientation point that may be different than your own personal experience and insight and you're going to for a good extent have to accept a orientation point that is based on external knowledge (what other people tell you), which I find very, very hard to trust. On top of that, there is just such a wide array of information out there where there are conflicting theories and arguments as to why you should and shouldn't be doing something, that it can get confusing really, really fast.

But still I'm gonna take the gamble and indeed put trust (but not blind faith. It is not "believing" but allowing yourself to surrender to it) in the notion that changing your diet and exercise would be a good idea.

Edited May 7, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Saturday May 9th, 15:29

Been struggling a bit lately. Particularly yesterday and today. Just a lot of heaviness, a lot of dark and negative thoughts which I have difficulty with to not identify with them.

And it's so hard to point out why exactly this is happening. Even more difficult than that is trying to figure out what to do with this situation. None of the ideas I can come up with in my head seem to be... sufficient. 

I don't even know what I'm supposed to be resolving. Trying to make myself feel better? It seems sensible but it can quickly become a cycle where you just try to fight whatever you're feeling. I can also say that I am supposed to accept, but that's in the end the same agenda of trying to feel better but just with a different vocabulary. In the end, I feel that even trying to accept is just...

I don't really quite know what to do, and I don't really quite know why I am feeling and thinking what I am feeling and thinking in the first place. That's the thing about it though. Whatever I am experiencing could just as well have been some good feelings and positivity, with again no apparent reason for them to be there. I am really not sure if there is any particular cause or reason why I am feeling the way I do. Maybe there's a reason, but that doesn't mean there instantly is also a solution.

[Nightwise]

Monday May 11th, 07:54

Right.

One of these ideas which I —as of right now— just can't seem to get rid of which I feel is quite fundamental to all the darkness I am experiencing, is this sense of impending doom.

I am prone to being quite... I don't know if superstitious is the right word, but I think very much in patterns and cycles. On top of that, my fearful self seems to be using these kind of thought patterns as a way to justify being afraid. 

I for instance find it difficult to have a good moment because my mind will think "after something good something bad must come". Yet interestingly enough, whenever I am feeling bad I am not getting near as much satisfaction from the idea that after this valley a peak must come, as I am getting fear and hopelessness by thinking that after this peak a valley must come. It is in that way not very balanced.

One of these ideas I got in my head is that my life goes in cycles of summers and winters. One winter was in its peak in early 2013, and one winter was in its peak in the summer of 2017. The idea I then get into my head is that "Oh, that must mean that every 4/4,5 years a cycle completes itself. That means I'm past my peak of a summer in my life, which its peak happened in late 2019, which means now I have started to enter the fall and will continue to 'fall' until another winter that is predicted to happen in late 2021/early 2022".

These are the kinds of thoughts that I am having. I know there are some loopholes to this logic. If I for instance think back to 4/4,5 years before 2013 (I suppose somewhere 2008), I can't remember having encountered any specific "dark night of the soul" in that year or around that time that really stood out. If it stood out, I would have remembered it. I do think there were some difficulties during that time, but really there were difficulties during the entire period of my high school years, and I can't remember anything to be specifically worse that was from that time. Likewise, I can't remember there being a "summer" period in my life in the later part of 2010.

Is existence cyclical? Are there summers and winters during one's life? I reckon so. But it doesn't appear that that is going to be in such a way as my mind likes to think or likes to fear like it is going to be, which is in a cyclical manner in which each cycle happens equally as long. And neither can there much be said as to how these winters will manifest itself, and what one's reaction to such a phase will be.

What doesn't help with this idea of "oh it's all going downhill from here", is the fact that I had an image in my mind that this was going to happen during my latest psychedelic trip. I know very well what I may have seen there was simply a projection of my fearful mind which was exaggerated due to the chemical substance in my body, but at the same time there is this thought of "what if" it is going to happen and what I saw there was actually an accurate prediction of the future? It also appeared to be as if it was clear and obvious, although I know that this apparent clarity and sense of certainty can also be taken into question.

I can't really seem to get rid of this feeling of impending doom, but what I just so thought of some minutes ago before I started writing, is that even though I may not —as of right now— be able to get rid of this sense of impending doom, I perhaps can simply allow it to be there and just see it for what it is at its core: A fearful feeling that produces fearful thoughts (or fearful thoughts that produce fearful feelings, whatever way).

If I just allow it to be there in that sense, let's just do that and then we'll just see what happens.

[Nightwise]

Sunday May 17th, 02:05

Although it's late and I generally try to not mess up my sleep schedule anymore, I reckon that now it doesn't matter so much anymore as there isn't that much to be getting up early in the morning for anyway and these days until the next 3 months or so there's a lot of sunlight each day, so therefore I don't think there needs to be much of a fear of not getting enough sunlight

There are a whole range of topics that I could be addressing here that are actually very important that have happened over the past week or so, but right now I want to do something else.

I tend to be so preoccupied with negativity and things that aren't working out very well for me, and problems that I'm having, and things I want to do differently.

I was thinking... How about I simply make a list of things that are going well and things that have gone well over the past 2,5 years or so, and also things I can be proud of that I at least tried them.

I generally for some reason don't like the mindset of positivity so much. Perhaps it's because I got too stuck with the notion of non-duality, where I indroctinated myself that thinking positively is an illusion or whatever. Or perhaps it's more of a reaction against western society where people like to pretend to be so positive and happy all the time, always smiling painted smiles in pictures and in interactions, and seeing how this sort of mask of positivity keeps people in delusion and prevents them from confronting some of their fears and taking necessary action.

Nevertheless, I think there is a time and place for everything. What one of the most important goals for me is currently, is to experiment with as many different perspectives, approaches and viewpoints as possible. I like to try or approach a lot of things that I have never done before, or not done them I haven't ever done before (or perhaps in a long, looong time).

So that's why to give some contrast to all this worry, self-doubt, self-confidence issues and what not, I thought it'd be a good idea to just make a list of things that over the past 2,5/3 years since rising out of that dark phase of my life in 2017, to just note down the things that have gone well or things generally that I can be proud of.

So let's go

Over the past 3 years or so, I have/am:

• Really developed my singing capacities by quite a lot. I used to start from pretty much 0 and now I can do a lot with my voice.
• Also became slowly more confident with singing. I used to be very afraid of anyone to hear me, now I much more comfortable with other people hearing me (although not completely confident)
• I have tried to join bands multiple times. I feel like I can be proud of it even though it failed because it was really a big challenge
• I have started singing lessons with different teachers
• I went to a course in Switzerland with Teal swan in November 2018
• I went to multiple courses featuring RSD (Real social dynamics) teachers during late 2017, early 2018 and also one in early 2019. One was in fact in Paris.
• Back in late 2017 I was very dedicated to completing a Taoist course which lasted many weeks which I thought really wasn't that interesting, but I was really dedicated to simply committing myself to the end of it, which I did.
• I also did an talent orientation course in late 2017/early 2018 which I also pushed some boundaries for
• I did a program which lasted 9 months from spring 2018 to december 2018 for people with autism, in which I tried a lot of new things and showed up on pretty much every day I had to be there for almost every class I had to be at. To be very devoted to going there was very important to me, and I managed to do so indeed.
• I worked my ass off (for my standards) in early 2019 to try and earn money for a trip to the United States. The trip may have failed (not to any of my blame), but the level of devotion and work ethic I put into the work of earning the money to go there, was for my standards very great and I had never done that before. In fact, I have barely worked at all. And when I had worked, way back when I was still a teenager, I didn't care much for it and was a very lousy employee.
• I went on a Interrail trip through europe in 2019 (as a replacement for the failed USA trip which also put me with a lot of challenges, and I also attempted a vision quest. The vision quest didn't bear much fruits, but nevertheless the attempt is worth something in itself.
• I have also multiple times visited a woman that lives in a city quite some distance away from mine just to be guided by her (story is a bit too long to explain why it had to be exactly her)
• I tried a study last year and really tried hard to commit myself to it and do what I could to make it work, until I found that I at one point when I had given it all was simply exhausted and could go on no more.
• I have opened myself up to a lot of new teachers and sources during the past couple of years.
• I have joined a music group at our local culture center and there took band practice classes, in which many of these classes were really confrontational and really difficult for me, yet I never missed a single class (until corona hit and it had to be done online, haha, but that just feels way different to me). Over time, I noticed that I got a lot more comfortable with expressing myself there in that group.
• I am also currently doing another singing course that my current singing teacher organizes.
• I have made a habit of brushing my teeth (almost) every single day. This is actualy really big for me because to do something structurally that is not imposed from the outside is actually something that I haven't done in years.
• I also since very recently started doing 10 minutes of meditation a day every morning. I have to be honest though when I say that I'm not sure if this will last very long. But, nevertheless the fact that I have been doing this for 4 days straight or something is also something new.
• I made a very deliberate attempt yesterday to listen through a full album of one of my favorite bands. Normally I'd get distracted listening to that, but this time I listened to the full album in one go.
• Today I also made a very deliberate attempt to learn a song out of my head. It actually didn't go very well, but I tried ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• That gets me thinking that in the 1/2 months after my study had ended last year I also did something very new in that I tried to really organize my life by making many lists and maps in how to do things and making to-do lists and contemplation lists and suggestions lists and trying to keep myself to it, and trying to get my life very structured. That went relatively well for some time, until I got at a point where I simply felt fed up with all this structure and discipline. I'm only now (about 6 months later) slowly seeming to pick it back up again.
• I also left a very nice review about my singing teacher lately  
• Did I mention already I take singing lessons now once every two weeks, possibly scaling it up to once every week?
• I also since the end of last year have a spirituality coach (or however you want to call him) in which I have conversations about philosophy, meaning and life. He's a really wise, silent and sensitive person.
• I also gave myself up at the municipality to receive a subsidy (probably not the right word, whatever) so I can start a program which helps people with ADD and autism to better organize and structure their life, which should start rather soon
• I also showed (in my view) a lot of loyalty and compassion to an old friend who had contacted me some time ago. We have been hanging out a couple of times
• I also began volunteering at a place for people with psychological issues since begin this year (of course now it is cancelled for the time being)

I could go on, but honestly, I am a bit tired now and I want to rest. Perhaps I'll edit this later tomorrow and put more stuff in here.

[Nightwise]

Monday May 18th, 21:41

I really feel like writing right now.

It's hard to say where to even start. 

I've been through some challenging times last week and the weekend prior to last week.

I don't really feel so much like writing in chronological order for some reason. I want to start out with the fact that I've been struggling a bit with things that aren't suposed to matter too much. Like feeling a great amount of struggle and tension just because I ate a cookie, stuff like that, or feeling very conflicted about whether I should or should not keep my phone next to me.

Past 10 days I've gone through several occassion where I've just felt fed up with some old patterns that seem to get to me again and again, no matter how I try to approach it. I noticed that at several tmes it invoked a kind of anger and determination in me; A willingness to fight or to sharpen and intensify my efforts. It's not a continuous feeling, I don't feel it so much right now anymore, but it does nevertheless encourage me to change some things around.

One thing I've started doing is to do 10 minutes of meditation and prayer afterwards each morning after waking up. I go to a seperate room to do that, do only 10 minutes of breath meditation, and then I bow down and pray. I don't pray for anything specifically most of the time; in fact normally I don't even express a wish. For me, it's primarily a moment to open myself up to be silent and to practice being receptive to connecting to a higher power.

Doing something structurally like that, even if it's just a small part of the day, feels really important to me right now. I just want to create a habit right now that is a much more tangible change as opposed to making single actions that is derived much more from the sentiment of the moment. I really quite hope I will be able to keep this habit of doing 10 minutes of meditation and prayer up from now on because I really just want to have something that I do structurally every day, so I can feel like there's actually I change. I'm sure some things are changing. I mean, just look at the list I made above here. Yes, I can see that things are changing, but somehow almost none of it feels like a tangible, thorough change. Almost as if I'm just changing things on the periphery. With doing a meditation structurally every single day, it is very new for me to do something on a daily basis in a structural matter, so this feels like a much more important and tangible change than changing anything in my activities or whatever. I also now I have been making walks more often in which I walk mindfully and keep some focus in my body, but even though I'm doing that for quite a larger portion on time on average (even regarding the fact that I don't do it every day), I still feel like doing these 10 minutes of meditation a day is more important to me, because it's structural and routine-like, which is something very important to me because I haven't been able to do something in a routine-like way except from brushing my teeth for a long, long time. At least not when it's not incentiviced from the outside.

I don't know for sure if I will be able to keep that up. It's very important to me that I don't overextend myself and try to do more and more now that this seems to be working, and then push too far beyond my current comfort zone and then have my resistance patterns act up so strongly that I then want to quit everything and break the routine like that.

Doubt is really the way in which my resistance will manifest itself. The tricky thing about doubt it that it undermines your willpower and your sense of commitment and certainty about things. Once you start to doubt, you really can't commit yourself to things because you start doubting whether you should be doing it in the first place.

I don't know if doubt or whatever other form of resistance pattern will undermine my wish to do 10 minutes of meditation daily. If it eventually will, I will have to suck it up and move on. Or perhaps, if appropriate, see if I can back to it. One thing I also noticed is that I have the tendency to think that if a meditation session is not going well and I'm getting distracted very often, that then I might aswell quit because 'it's not working anyway'.

But if I remind myself that the point of meditation is not to be good at it or to find yourself accomplishing certain goals, but rather that meditation is simply reminding yourself to bring back your attention to the meditation whenever you had noticed that your attention had wandered off, if you realize that that is the point of meditation, then there is no reason to be 'good at it', and then there is CERTAINLY no reason to actually stop if it doesn't seem to be going well.

The very essence about meditation should be intention-oriented, not result-oriented. That's a shift I want to be making with meditation, or with many other things in general. If you simply keep your intention as strong as possible, then the very intention and the very attempt is good enough unto itself and every result that comes out of it is the best you could have done for that moment. Of course, I don't have to be going in with a warrior-like intent every single time. When I take a walk I do want to practice some mindfulness, but I want to keep some relaxation and easeness with it which I suppose means that my intent is not maximum intensity, which is fine. I don't think it always needs to be that way. I noticed that if I try to do things with maximum intensity and focus, its contrast of then feeling lazy  and energetically depleted will almost always a bit later afterwards. Actually, I feel like it's okay to be less careful with that statement. Its contrast will not "almost always" manifest some time afterwards, but literally always. I don't think I've ever noticed it to be any other way. Sometimes I have been able to keep that discipline and focus up for longer like 2013 to later 2014, but then it was contrasted by an even much longer period of apathy, laziness, fatigue... Which these sentiments are even still present fairly often these days (not to say that it was only because of that period in 2013 and 2014 that i now often still feel fatigue. Perhaps it's not even related at all anymore)

But yeah, I just feel more and more fed up with all these goddamn old patterns that seem to be acting up again and again, of which there seems to be no lasting breakthrough so far. I feel a growing desire start to arise to intensify my efforts every time I'm struggling again. That's what this feeling of being fed up with it all leads to. I'm not so much fed up with life in general, don't get me wrong. I'm fed up with these patterns in me that seem to be acting up again and again and which I can't seem to break through, to let go of or to overcome; Not indefinitely.

One thing I thought of when for instance I get stressed out over eating habits again or the fact that I ate a cookie, or whether I not I should keep my phone next to me, is to remind myself that struggle is either an incentive to let go and a practice of accepting, or it is an incentive and motivator for change. That last one I have certainly noticed, because every time I start to struggle with something again, I get more and more of a burning desire to actually either discipline myself, focus a lot and get the distracting thoughts under control, or to understand it and contemplate upon it as deeply as possible (not necessarily think or philosophize about it so much anymore, but to sort of focus on the longing to understand, to truly want to know. It is asking "why?" or "how?" but with a very strong and keen intent and a strong longing; it's not curiousity philosophy).

I don't know how the way forward is going to be like in detail, but I do know that every time I start to struggle again I seem to get more and more fed up with struggling itself, and I then feel the desire to double-up my efforts and my intent, even if it's just for that moment. My level of tolerance for my own bullshit seems to grow thinner and thinner. I used to be able to tolerate much more of my own suffering and my own bullshit, but I feel that that tolerance is just getting less and less. I feel an intensification of my wish and my desire to actually let go of my dysfunctional habits in the deepest meaning of the word.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Tuesday May 19th, 16:37

I want to share you my perspective on the whole corona-virus pandemic, and what I think needs to be done about it. I know that everybody seems to be an expert these days, and therefore I want to acknowledge that I'm not an actual expert and that there are certainly possibilities for me to have some oversights or forms of ignorance on this matter, but nevertheless I am a deep and independent thinker and I think that even if I do happen to have some oversights (and admittedly I sometimes do spot the oversights and intentionally do not address them to keep a more coherent story), I still think I make a good point with many of the arguments I'm about to make. My intention is never to be right, but to simply get people thinking in a different way.

I've watched people that have some different perspectives during the past couple of months. I've also for instance watched someone like David Ike, who claims that the corona-virus pandemic is a hoax and a conspiracy, and that the illnesses are caused by 5G.

Although I think Ike has some interesting perspectives and has some good arguments, I can't say that I really buy into every argument that he's making. For all I know he might actually be right, but I doubt it. He seems to be taking things a bit too far for me to take him very seriously. I'm however ready to be open-minded to what he says and I won't say that I know for sure that he is wrong, but I'm just saying I ought it to be unlikely in regards to the points that he is making.

I'd say we probably do have a real virus going around the world, and I'd say the virus probably can be very dangerous to some people.

But as far as the way react to the virus, I generally don't agree with the approach of most countries so much.

What I see a lot is that people focus too much on anecdotal notions. People allow themselves to be scared by headlines that say "30-year old patient with no background of illnesses died of coronavirus!".

Such a story is not representative of the actual bigger picture. Yes, it may indeed be true that some 30-year old patient has died with no know previous immunological disorders or whatever, but such a case is extremely rare, and probably has to do with some kind of rare difference in genetics.

It's always imporant to focus on the bigger picture and not get stuck on small anecdotes, little stories that scare one but in reality doesn't have much significance in the bigger picture.

This is actually one of the points that frustrate me the most about the media and the way western society tends to react to it. People read about crimes and terrorist attacks and get really scared and think that the world is going downhill, but the reality is that in such a big world with 7 billion people, or such a big country with 17 million people like the Netherlands, there is always something scary going on. But people have to see things into perspective, and realize that for instance the one terrorist attack that happened in Utrecht in our country last year does not justify mass panic and paranoia. Irregardless of the fact that paranoia and mass panic has not positive effect whatsoever pretty much, the actual act of one person committing a terrorist attack with a span of many years of which nothing happened in a country that has 17 million people, is actually astoundingly low if you really think about. 

Do you realize how many people 17 million people actually is? If every person got allocated one square meter, then 3400 football (soccer) fields could be filled with just people, or 17 square kilometers of just people, people, people, about 4 kilometers in length and width.

Actually, I don't think working with surface are actually gives a good enough picture. Let's say you put everyone in a line with one meter in between. That would be a line of 17 million meters, or 17000 kilometers. This would be almost enough to go in a straight line to the other end of the world,  and then you would keep on meeting people every single meter almost all along the way! 

And out of all these people, just one needs to get it in his or her head to commit a terrorist act and follow through on it. It's not astounding that the terrorist act has been committed, but it's astounding that not more have been committed!

We're actually very lucky that it has only been one terrorist attack so far in some number of years, but people react as if it's the beginning of the apocolypse.

People tend to think a lot about small isolated events that are very rare yet very frightening and base their reaction on that. They tend to disregard the total picture.

So how does this correlate to the coronavius pandemic?

I admit that it's somewhat a serious virus, and that it indeed has the potential to really disrupt the medical system for some time and have killed possibly even over 1% of the total population of a country after the pandemic is over, and made about 5 and maybe up to 10% of the population seriously ill, if I remember the statistics correctly and if we can trust these statistics. 1% may not sound like that much, but it is 1 out of a 100 which would mean that many if not most people would know someone directly who has passed away from the virus.

But something people always want to seem themselves ignorant of is the fact that 100% of us will die eventually. It maybe due to the coronavirus, or it may be in 50 years, but all of us will die eventually.

Interestingly enough, compared to other deadly pandemics the Covid-19 is so far quite mild as far as death rate concerned, if you compare it for instance with the spanish flu or the asian flu, or especially the plague. 

Is death something we want to prevent if possible? Well, yes I'd say that is in most cases preferable.

But if our main focus is going to be preventing as many deaths as possible at the cost of people's personal and economical freedom, we have a different situation on our hands.

One of the arguments that always irritates me is if people bring up an argument that goes something like: "You can't put people's lives at risk; That's completely unethical".

Well let me just ask this question. If at the end of our lives we look back, is the most important thing the quality of our lives or our actual lifespan, how long we lived?

So if we're talking about lives, we should also consider the lives of the people of society going forward into the future.

And bringing the economy to a halt and putting the jobs and companies of many people at risk by introducing a lockdown may just not be the right thing to do.

The attitude towards this pandemic I've noticed has shifted from the idea of herd/group immunity towards the hope that a vaccin will be developed as quickly as possible, and that until that point we have to live in a limited or even very limited way, impacting the economy to a great deal making both the entire nation and the people of it suffer under the consequences.

And we don't even know how long it will take until such a vaccin will be developed. I've heard experts say it will take a minimum time of one year, probably more towards two years.

And if you ask me, putting society to a halt for that long is just too much of a risk to be taking; Especially if the lockdown version is one that is more of a severe kind.

 

So what would be my proposal? What would be the vision I would have for this situation?

Well, I simply don't want to gamble on just waiting until at some point a vaccin is developed, if some experts say it will probably take more than a year. Perhaps there's other people or even experts that say it will take less time, maybe even 6 months, but even 6 months of having the economy functioning at a low grade is already a huge, huge impact as far as I've come to understand it.

Yes, I do like the idea of herd/group immunity better. So I would be wanting to work towards that.

This is my idea:

My idea would be that indeed first we introduce measures to control the virus and limit its spread so that it will not have an explosive growth. We indeed would want to be working to a point where one person infects on average less than 1 other person.

In this time that we get the situation under control, we organize speed courses which will in one month time give you a medical speed training which will train you basically to be a nurse and how to take care of people who have been infected with the virus. This can become both applicable in a formal medical setting, or it can become applicable with relatives in a home setting, which is a point I will get to in a bit.

In this 1/2 month time period, we also build tents and get a lot of beds, we upscale the production of breathing machines and other medical equipment to its maximum, and we basically do everything we can to maximize our focus on equipping the medical system with as much supplies and labour force as possible. We will also encourage people to boost their immune system by eating a healthy diet and exercising a lot, and perhaps taking in certain vitamins and minerals that also helps to boost the immune system a lot.

And after this 1/2 month time period, we will, you guessed it, release all the brakes and let the virus spread unrestrained.

But in this 1/2 month time period there's also another focus we will have which I didn't mention yet. And that is to educate people and make people aware about the fact that death and sickness and an inevitable part of life.

We will make campaigns that will make people more aware of their own inevitable mortality. Although we may be doing much to prevent the spread of the virus in the first 1 or 2 months, it will also become clear that this is a preparation phase for the great peak that is going to happen.

We will invite people to deeply contemplate their own mortality, and we will suggest to people with a weaker immune system but especially the elderly that it is a possibility to die at home and allow themselves to die with loved ones around them instead of going to the hospital, which will release the pressure on the hospitals and medical system for when the peak is going to come.

But we will not enforce death upon other people, so therefore even though we will be releasing the brakes for the majority of the population, we will give people the option to isolate themselves if they are fearful that they belong to the risk group and don't want to die, or for the people that are afraid to infect elderly people or immunocompromised people because they see them often; especially people that work in areas that are intimately involved in working with people with a higher risk profile, like employees in nursing homes.

Nursing homes are a bit of a complicated situation, because you got many people with a high risk profile packed up together. Something has to be thought out for that, and I don't know what exactly as of right now, but certainly some kind of solution could be found for that.

But for the most of society it will just be a deal of 'get it over with'. I can't remember exactly how long the peak will last, but from the very beginning that the peak starts to rise to the very end where there's almost nobody infected anymore I can't imagine it will take longer than a few months. This I reckon will be much, much shorter than waiting for a vaccin and even during the full-force outbreak the society will for a good part still be functioning as normal (except the medical system) and the economy will keep on running and people won't get fired or go bankrupt.

So people with a higher risk profile basically simply have the choice: Either I do isolate myself during this time period that the breaks are released and wait it out until there's a group immunity in the population and the chance of me becoming infected will be very, very low, or I simply take the risk and allow the great possibility of becoming infected and accept even the risk of me getting seriously ill from it or worse.

People will have to —whether from a high risk profile or not— have to respect the decision that some other people may decide to isolate themselves and not get infected for whatever reason they may have for it. Although the advice and incentive will be to let as many people get infected with it as possible, anyone who does not want to get infected either for reasons for themselves or others will have the freedom to do so and his/her choice will have to be respected.

People who do not want to get infected can also wear something like a bright red bracelet around their upper arm to indicate to other people in that way that they do not wish to get infected and that therefore other people should keep their distance from them.

So in this way, there's only a 1 to 2 month time period in which there will be a shutdown and in which people will suffer financial and emotional consequences of it. After that, the breaks will be released and society will go back to normal as far as that's possible (with some exceptions like nursing homes and hospitals), and during the peak society will still be functioning at like 70-80%. 

Yes, hospitals and the medical system in general will get very overwhelmed for some time, and this will be indeed very difficult for the workers there, but there will be some relief because of the fact that in the preperation period new labour force was trained and recruited, for the fact that many new medical equipment was made, for the fact that tents were set up to increase the amount of patients that can be accepted, and for the fact that many of the elderly and those with a weakened immune system have made the decision to allow themselves to be fully sick from the virus and possibly even die from it without going to the hospital and dying in their own bed with loved ones around them.

And of course, one has to keep in mind that even during the time that the breaks are released and the virus is going full force, still more workers are being recruited, more tents are being set up, more equipment is made...

And after 6 to 8 weeks (Im just guessing), the amount of people infected will start to go down, and after another 6 to 8 weeks things will be once again completely back to normal and it will all be over with, whilst other countries all around the world are keeping everything still one (semi-)lockdown and suffer greatly under those consequences, whilst the countries with this strategy will once again be operating on full force.

 

If you are not going to gamble on a vaccin (which I think is a bad idea), it is either a situation of jumping in the cold water all at once, or going in slowly first with your toe, then your foot, then your leg, and only then your entire body. Yes, jumping in at once may be a lot more intense, but you'll get it over with a lot quicker as well.

This very emphasis on not getting the medical system overwhelmed at all costs I think is a bad idea. It is shutting down almost the entirety of society just because a small part of it gets overwhelmed. Yes, I know that everything is to some degree interconnected, but still preventing the hospitals to be overwhelmed at all costs I don't think is a very good idea.

I understand that it will be a very difficult situation for the hospital workers and that they will be very stressed out, and certainly afterwards and to whatever extent it's possible during the outbreak they should be compensated for it and something should be done to support the medical system more in the future, but there is one bright side which perhaps may seem very cold and heartless from me to express it, but nevertheless it's true.

The bright side is that many people who die from the viral infection were on average the people who already visited the hospital a lot more often, and therefore if they pass away they won't be of any more burden to the medical system in the future. On average, our society will turn out to be healthier after the pandemic is over (not even to mention measures people themselves will take to improve their immune system)

It may seem pretty callous to say that, but nevertheless it's true. However, given the fact that most people in the hospital do survive the infection, I don't think that in the total picture the medical system will still not be benefited by the pandemic; neither in the long run (if you count the pandemic as being part of but not excluded to the "long run").

Yes, certainly the medical system does need to receive extra investment in the future, I certainly think that's true. But there should also be a lot of emphasis on people to change their lifestyle in general so that in general people will have a stronger immune system and less people will get sick, like for instance diet and exercise, but also a stronger attitude towards life and means to live a happier life (as the mind/emotions affects the state of the body)

That's it for now  

 

Edited May 19, 2020 by Nightwise

[Nightwise]

Here's an article I wrote on facebook. I translated this from dutch using google translate. I did make some adjustments to the translation to make it grammarly a bit more correct and to make it sound more fluent in general, but still know that it is a translation so it is not f the quality it would be would I have written the entire article in english from the very start

Quote

 

The word "discrimination" is an interesting word, because it is automatically associated with a negative association, while in the most basic sense of the word it literally means: "To distinguish."

In Dutch we use the word "discriminate" mainly in a way that automatically establishes a negative association. We automatically associate elements of injustice, of disrespect, of shortsightedness.

Dutch dictionaries do not seem to be very unambiguous when it comes to describing whether “discriminating” is really about distinguishing, or distinguishing between groups that have elements of condemnation, disrespect and even hate.

But when we look at English we see that the verb "to discriminate" is not only used with a negative meaning of disrespect or unequal treatment, but it is also used literally to simply indicate that A is not B.

I would rather bring the word "discriminate" back to its roots, which means that it is just a word used to indicate that two different things are not the same.

So when I hear someone say on TV or read in the newspaper that someone is being discriminated against, I find it funny to hear or read that because in the most basic sense of the word it means nothing more than that a distinction is being made, and that actually the negative association with that word is automatically included.

So in the most basic sense of the word, "discrimination" is not good or bad, it is simply factual.

To say that a rose is not a tulip, is also discrimination

To say that a cat is not a dog, is also discrimination

And to say that a cat should be treated in exactly the same way as a dog is absurd. Everyone agrees with that. You give a cat other food than a dog. You let a dog out, but you don’t do that with a cat. A cat has a different character than a dog.

Likewise, people of a different gender, race, orientation, religion all have their own customs, their own culture, their own beliefs, their own traits ...

To simply state that someone of a different race, orientation, religion, gender or anything else is also discrimination..

But just because this is discrimination doesn't mean it's bad.

Because all we do is simply say that A is not B. That is what discrimination is: Making a distinction.

So what's my point now?

People confuse acknowledging the facts and reacting to them rationally with a basic attitude of respect and compassion —or the lack of it.

For example: If it turns out that people with a certain profile such as race, certain external characteristics and the fact that they travel alone in general are the most characteristic profile for a drug smuggler, then there is a certain logic behind checking people more often that match that specific profile.

And of course you are going to say that this is discrimination. That's right. That is EXACTLY what it is. Namely: making a distinction.

The question may still be raised as to whether it is ethical to emphasize checking people who fit a particular profile more often, but let's at least acknowledge what the facts are, and the fact here is that if we actually were to treat people equally it would mean that drug smuggling would become more effective as those who match a particular profile that best suits a drug smuggler would be allowed to pass more often because they are no longer specifically focused on, meaning more drugs would enter the country.

And if you ask me, it is perfectly okay to discriminate — to make a distinction — if you have justified and rational support for this. Namely: the facts.

So yes, I agree with the logic in this regard that people of a particular race who more often meet a particular drug smuggler profile should be able to be monitored more often, because this is based on a factual and objective interpretation of reality.

But where many people get confused is that they cannot distinguish the action from the attitude. One can check someone who fits a certain profile more often and thoroughly and just remain very calm and respectful and say that this is just part of a routine check based on certain risk profiles that person meets themselves, or one can adopt an attitude where there is a undercurrent of contempt, of judgment, of bluntness, of disrespect.

If this contempt, this disrespect in the action is expressed as an undercurrent in the attitude, then one has failed to discern the factualities from the emotion. The facts have been twisted in such a way that it has now become a prejudice in which one projects feelings of fear and hatred onto the other. In other words, people have lost their sense of reality and now see the group to which the exceptions belonged to as the entirety of the problem. People have lost the sense that a few individuals do not define the entire group.

But just as putting a whole group in a box by the actions of only a few individuals of that group, the reverse can also be a problem. Namely: refusing to recognize that different races, ethnicities, cultures, sexes, beliefs, etc., should also receive different treatment.

In our culture, for example, I see this a lot when we look at the situation in which we try to equate men and women and try to treat them equally in as many ways as possible. I have even heard some say that the only reason that there is a difference between the ways in which men and women behave is the fact that we were brought up. This is absurd.

Men and women are indeed different. Not only in physical appearance, but also in respect to hormones and their intrinsic desires. Indeed, it is possible that some men may engage in more naturally feminine matters in their lives and vice versa, and for some people this is fine and suits them well, or at least for some phase in their lives, but for most men it is simply much more appropriate to engage with much more masculine values and for most women to engage with feminine values. And for many of them, if they deviate from their intrinsic desires that suit their gender and instead do what contrasts with them (i.e. when masculine oriented man pursues female values and vice versa), this results in confusion and mental issues.

Trying to equate everything and everyone, while ignoring the actual differences that people have, will lead to treatment for people that do not suit them well. It is important to be able to recognize the position people are in and what is required in their situation.

So if you ask if I am for equality then I say no. If you ask if I discriminate, I say yes. But if you ask me if I am in favor of equivalency, I will say yes.

Equivalency is not the same as equality, because in equality you hold the illusion that two things are the same when in reality it is not. Equivalency on the other hand, means that two (or more) things may not be the same, but they nevertheless have equal value.

For example, husband and wife are not equal. Yet they are equivalent. Who says recognizing the fact that men and women are not equal should mean that they are not of equal value? That is simply an interpretation based on an association that has never been investigated.

Equivalency has a foundation of compassion and respect. It is to recognize that the world and the people who inhabit it in all their different elements and properties have a core of beauty and depth that is immense but at the same time nobody has anything more or less than another.

I fully support recognizing and respecting diversity. I am also for different treatment of different groups. But I am also sure of an equal treatment for everything and everyone. Equivalency is a basic attitude you have. You develop it with the ability to see more depth in everything and everyone. If you can see more depth in others, then differences on the surface that you first tried to equalize in a silly semi-unconscious attempt will simply no longer be as relevant, because now you can see something much more essential in which everyone actually is equal

But until you can see this deeper dimension of depth, the surface of others will always be what will come to your consciousness, and so you will always judge and compare people on the surface by differences. Even in your denial and your attempts to equalize everything and everything, you will continue to do this unconsciously. To see the depth in others, you need depth in yourself. So to create this depth in yourself, you will have to focus on what is deeper than the surface that you normally deal with in your day to day life.