Removing Should-statements And Eventually Reaching Enlightenment

[JKG]

Since yesterdays video about "How To Stop Moralizing" I feel so different, so relieved. I feel like this could really change my life a lot. So I want to document my experiences with letting go of should-statements here.

So in the morning I went jogging at 6 am before school and I felt great, so alive. I really like being active in the morning. Then I had an four hour chemistry exam. It was fine, but all the time before the exam I felt no nervousness at all. I just thought: "I don't care about the actual results, and if the result isn't a A like normally, its totally fine to. That's the way it should be." I had no expectations on me at all, and I think that made me perform better in the exam.

Normally after school I feel a little bit stressed by myself. I almost make myself to do all those habits: sports, meditation, stretching, reading, learning... I always have something to do. And in the evening when I eventually have done all my habits, I feel so relieved and free. This feeling I had today all day. I had no expectations on myself to do any of those habits.

I naturally wanted to do meditation, but this time without a timer. I 'did nothing', tried a bit mindfulness but the monkey mind came back everytime, but this is how it should be. Then I really contemplated about this letting go of should statements.

The rest of the afternoon I spent in the garden with my sister. I was in this calm state of mind the rest of the day. It feels so nice. And again I am not nervous at all about the next four hour maths exam tomorrow.

The only 'negative' thing I see is that I overeat a lot. I overeat in more healthy things like raisins, oats, chashew or brazil nuts. I don't eat junkfood, but the healthy stuff has also many calories... I'll see how this will turn out in a few weeks.

[JKG]

I eat so much when I don't try to suppress this eating-more-urge. I am used to eat a lot of healthy stuff. Even though I am full, I still eat more. Normally I would make myself down because of that. Now... I just think that I could gain weight. But I don't really care about that. With the time I think I will eat more raw stuff and less grain, nuts and dried fruit. Then I will be at the place I think is really healthy.

I meditate less and as a consequence I recognized that my tics become more. While the meditation my monkey mind thinks about stuff that I could do after the meditation. And a few minutes later I simply stop the meditation.

I watch way more YouTube videos about travelling. A few days ago I learned about 'wwoof'. Now I am so excited about the opportunity that I could take a year of to travell with little money around the world in a year's time. Every morning I think about that and become so happy. I'd get so drastically out of my comfort zone. I could learn so much about other people, cultures, working on farms, green stuff, social skills... The only obstacles will be my relatives. They will tell me that a young 18 year old girl will be kidnaped, raped...

[99th_monkey]

you're searching for happiness. its plain and simple.  we all are. think about what it is you'll "attain" by doing all these things your monkey mind thinks about. 

as far as your relatives all i can say is:

 

[JKG]

In the last days I started to drink a green (but not so tasty) smoothie in the morning. I feel much better with just a light raw breakfast, instead of with a huge bowl of oats. And in general I eat more raw food. This gives me more energy

Yesterday I meditated for 109 minutes because I wanted to. 41min in the morning and 68min in the afternoon. It is much better for me to meditate without a timer. With the timer it feels like I have to meditate and in the end it feels horrible. Now I just stop as soon as I have reached that what I wanted or just when I want to stop.

I feel like enjoy working out more and more. I like my routines and I like it to do my strength training barefoot in the garden. I also do some lets call it coordination exercises like the handstand, rolls, headstand...

And if I don't want to do any of these habits, its OK

 

@99th_monkey The Crabs are exactly what I thought about If they would just be a bit more open-minded.

Edited June 15, 2016 by quantum

[charlie2dogs]

On 6/9/2016 at 0:33 PM, quantum said:

I eat so much when I don't try to suppress this eating-more-urge. I am used to eat a lot of healthy stuff. Even though I am full, I still eat more. Normally I would make myself down because of that. Now... I just think that I could gain weight. But I don't really care about that. With the time I think I will eat more raw stuff and less grain, nuts and dried fruit. Then I will be at the place I think is really healthy.

I meditate less and as a consequence I recognized that my tics become more. While the meditation my monkey mind thinks about stuff that I could do after the meditation. And a few minutes later I simply stop the meditation.

I watch way more YouTube videos about travelling. A few days ago I learned about 'wwoof'. Now I am so excited about the opportunity that I could take a year of to travell with little money around the world in a year's time. Every morning I think about that and become so happy. I'd get so drastically out of my comfort zone. I could learn so much about other people, cultures, working on farms, green stuff, social skills... The only obstacles will be my relatives. They will tell me that a young 18 year old girl will be kidnaped, raped...

and in this world today, the way it is moving, your relatives may be right, often young people are very naive about things, they think things wont affect them,  older people have already traveled the road you will have to tread, and it is far more dangerous today than it ever has been at least here in this country for young women and even boys,  and even older people,  a lot of young people think they know, and haven't even begun to learn.  many young people could have saved themselves a lot of pain by listening to those who endured the pain before them, but it doesn't mean a lot until you touch that hot stove, then you understand.

[JKG]

On 15.6.2016 at 1:09 PM, charlie2dogs said:

and in this world today, the way it is moving, your relatives may be right, often young people are very naive about things, they think things wont affect them,  older people have already traveled the road you will have to tread, and it is far more dangerous today than it ever has been at least here in this country for young women and even boys,  and even older people,  a lot of young people think they know, and haven't even begun to learn.  many young people could have saved themselves a lot of pain by listening to those who endured the pain before them, but it doesn't mean a lot until you touch that hot stove, then you understand.

Yeah, you might be right. I 'should' act careful in the future. But the main thing that I wanted to tell is that I don't want to be held back by my parents. Almost everything that I want to do in the future (like eventually not going to university, or not getting an average job) will be highly criticized by them. So if I am not careful I will hear to everything they say and live a average shitty life. 

[JKG]

On Thursday I purchased the life purpose course. It already has been worth it. But although I was happy that I got the course, Thursday itself was really shitty. My tics are becoming stronger again and they are nerve-wracking. This tension in the back of my head is so aargh... I can't even describe it. The noisy sound of my computer, school, my parents, everybody and all the useless stuff inside my room is perturbing me. I want to break out of this, be free, be in nature. Somewhen that day I started to clean up and rearrange my room. I'd like to be minimalistically but I cannot. 
Only in meditation the tics get less. I'd like to meditate the whole day but my parents are complaining that I would meditate too much. If they knew what effects meditation could have on their life.

Friday I had school all day. The tics were annoying and somehow embarrassing when people see how I move my eyebrow and ears in a strange way. A good thing was that I didn't had to hold a presentation about a scientific project of mine.

Today was a rainy day. I meditated altogether for 91 minutes. That made me feel better. At 10am I went outside in the pouring rain barefoot and did my strength training in the garden. Being outside in the rain was so joyful, I felt so alive. I cannot understand why all the 'grown up' adults hate rain.
The rest of the day I spend continuing to clean up my room and throw a bunch of useless crap out, while I heard the life purpose course. I am already at video 30. I plan to watch the course through the next week, just because I am curious. After that I will watch it several times more and make careful notes to learn as much as possible.

I have a vague idea of what my life purpose could be about. I want to make people more conscious and open-minded but I have no idea how I could do that, especially because I am really bad with handling people and explaining concepts. On the other hand I am really good at maths, physics or programming, but what could I do with that? I don't want to invent something, or work in those typical jobs. Working with those technical skills is not in integrity with my values.

[charlie2dogs]

give it some time, dont rush, do what gives you peace

[JKG]

Somehow I didn't write here anything for more than a month now. It isn't hat I didn't had anything to write, a lot of stuff has happened. I just procrastinated...

One of the things that happened to meis  that I purchased the life purpose course. And that was probably one of the best decisions of my life I think. I went through the course in less than two weeks. That was quite fast, but at the moment I am rewatching a lot and making notes. Here is the mission statement / me sheet that I came up with:

Impact Statement: I spread consciousness.
Everyday I see how unconscious and unaware people are about their behaviour, their diet, their motivations, or simply about their whole lives. I want to help those people to develop at least a little bit more awareness. This will not just help those people, but humanity and the environment.

Zone of Genius: collecting, combining and finding wisdom
I always was interested in the main wisdoms of people and groups like the Age of Enlighenment, Romanticism, Baroque and so on. There are some truths hidden. I also like some of the ancient and a few modern philosophers very much like Socrates or the Stoics.

Life Purpose: I spread consciousness through sharing wisdom.

Domain of Mastery: Spirituality, Consciousness, Philosophy, Wisdom?
I am not quite sure about this yet. Can Wisdom be a domain? Philosophy and spirituality can entail some wisdoms that I am interested in but I am certainly not interested in all of philosophy or spirituality. My subconscious mind will sooner or later come up with an answer.

Ideal Medium:
Here I am also not sure yet. I consider writing books. The problem though is that I never liked writing stuff in school, although I like writing this entry right now. And then I also have to look whether I want to write in German or English. I like English more but my grammar is probably not the best. I'll see in the future.

Top 10 Values:

1. Consciousness - Tranquillity - Peace of Mind
2. Health - Energy - Vigor
3. Open-mindedness - Understanding - Wisdom
4. Independence - Freedom
5. Appreciation - Gratitude
6. Nature
7. Purpose - Clarity - Vision - Order
8. Productivity
9. Community - Connection

These are only nine because I couldn't decide on the tenth one.

Top 5 Strengths:

1. Critical Thinking / Openmindedness
2. Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
3. Curiosity and Interest in the World
4. Love of Learning
5. Wisdom / Perspective

Top 5 Goals:

1. Enlightenment
2. A permaculture garden
3. writing a book

I am not sure about the next ones.

This is not the me sheet that I came up with immediately with making the assessments. I already made a lot of changes. My subconscious mind came up with good ideas.

Today was the first actual day I worked on my life purpose. I made research on Stoicism and came up with a few little insights in my meditation. That was really cool, but I am not sure about how to articulate those insights properly so that other people will understand my thoughts.

I am excited for the next days of hard studying and meditation. Until the 23th of August I have a lot of free time. Then my last year of school will begin. And from the 15th on my parents are on holiday for a couple of days. That will be exciting because I can meditate as long as I want to. No distractions, no limitations... I will use my time now very efficiently.

[JKG]

Today I want to talk about my experiences crossing the Alps (on the E5). That was from the 14.07 to the 22.07 and with a group of 14 people with a guide. The people in the group were a lot older than me. Each day we hiked about 15 to 20km with 1000 to 2000 meters of ups and downs. On my back I had to carry a backpack with 10kg of all the stuff that I needed.

I thought that it would be much harder. I had probably the most endurance and strength of the group, except of the guide. For example at the end of the hardest day I still had a lot of power left to hike a few hours more. Everybody else was exhausted.

The nights we spent on huts with hundreds of other people. Sometimes we had to sleep with 10 to 20 other people in a room next to strangers in one bed. And still I slept pretty well. It just was a bit noisy and smelly.

What I absolutely disliked was the food there. It was so unhealthy and fatty, totally different from my mostly plant-based diet. So in the first days I had a few digestive problems.

What I liked the most was the beautiful nature and the mountains. As soon as we came back into a little village I wanted to be back in the silent nature. This showed me how much I love nature and silence. On the other hand I really dislike cities.

I really liked the group. I didn't talk much to them because we had almost nothing in common. Normally I also don't speak much. I mostly I just listened to their conversations. And from those conversations I learned that I never want to have a normal job. That seems so boring and terrible.

And while hiking the whole day I have let my mind wander around, let the monkey mind do whatever it wanted to. Sometimes it thought about my life purpose and came up with advancements for my mission statement. And I thought more about my vision.

Here are a few impressions of the incredible view there:

[JKG]

Yesterday the whole time I had a very nice spiritual feeling. It was like the centre of the feeling was somewhere inside my chest and my trachea. And from there unconditional love and peace was radiated into my whole body and into the world. Writing this out and reading it seems very weird and esoteric, but it was really this way . This feeling became stronger and stronger while I was meditating for 85 minutes.

Yesterday I also felt like I have grown a lot inside and somehow spiritually. It seemed to me like I am in comparison to the average people so much more advanced. I can understand their problems and how insignificantly those are. I saw that life is really meaningless, but that isn't a problem but rather a relief. I saw paradoxes, understood them and dealt with them. I saw how open-minded I became over the time and how much this open-mindedness has helped me to become this advanced. Leo's latest video about the three levels of personal development helped me with seeing that. There I saw that I absolutely am no newbie anymore. But I am still this open-minded that all these assumptions about my growth could be soo wrong. I could still be the newbiest newbie because I don't see how newbie-like I still am. But this advancement was 'just' internally. Since I know personal development I have not achieved much externally like going out of my comfort zone. I still developed some skills but that I think is normal in the teenage years.

 

I hoped that this feeling of love and spirituality would carry on until today but sadly it didn't. Well, this isn't sad, that is just the way it is.

This morning at 7'o clock I began with working on my life purpose. I wanted to structure my thoughts, insights and philosophical notes about happiness. But I quickly realised how hard this is. It is real emotional labour. Then somewhen around 8'o clock I thought that I should go running now because it could rain later. Then after my workout I sat down again to work. I avoided to structure all my notes by summing up an article about Epicurus. After that I wanted to structure my notes again, but then I thought I should help my sister learning orthography. Then I meditated for an hour. Then it was time for lunch. And after lunch I read in a few books. Then I called a friend. Then I ate dinner. And now I am writing this.

So what do I want to achieve with listing all my activities? I simply avoided the whole day doing my important life purpose work by distracting myself with other seemingly important tasks. But the one thing that I should be focussing on (right now bringing structure into all my notes) I simply didn't do.

I already recognized this at lunch. Then I looked at the life purpose course and rewatched the video about resistance. And resistance is exactly the thing that I am dealing with here. And having to deal with it in the present moment is soo much harder than just hearing Leo talking about all these nice concepts. Because of that I began reading this afternoon the book 'The War of Art', which is addressing exactly this theme of resistance. I hope it will help me.

 

In the last days I watched different videos on YouTube about some esoteric topics like chakras, the third eye or kundalini awakening. At first I did this just because of fun. In the past I thought about it as total nonsense. I still am sceptic, but through the concept of open-mindedness I am now drawn towards at least considering such things as possibilities. How can I possibly know that it is nonsense? Our human perception is so limited, how can we know that the isn't something like 'kundalini energy' as well as that there are electromagnetic waves?

For the rest of the evening I will be watching such esoteric videos and trying out weird exercises. Just because of fun (and because of resisting my life purpose work)

[JKG]

Saturday, 16/07/30 - Enjoying time with my family

I decided to give my journal entries a structure. So if I don't have the time to write here, I can at least make a quick update on my day.

Meditation:

Only one hour. I haven't did self inquiry for a while, but today I did it. I tried so separate the sensations of seeing and hearing. How says that seeing and hearing play together? Why should the seeing of the leaves moving correlate with the sound of wind?

 

Life Purpose Work:

I bet my resistance in the morning. I worked from 6:30 to 8:00 very focusses with binaural beats. And I am very happy with the results that I got.

 

Personal Development Work:

I continued reading 'The War of Art'. I get a good sense of what resistance really is and how all the people are affected by it.

 

Things I am grateful for:

• spending time with my uncle
• the happiness of my little cousins
• the sun
• that I have found my life purpose
• 'The War of Art'

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• eating less in the evening
• working on my life purpose in the afternoon

 

I think of making a little meditation retreat next week. Now I have a lot of time which I won't have anymore when school begins again in three weeks. I need to make the most of my time.

 

[JKG]

Sunday, 16/07/31 - Resistance, fear and motivation

Meditation:

I meditated for 68 minutes after I was really motivated by the new psychedelics video. It was a mix of 'do nothing' and self inquiry. Through self inquiry I didn't get any new insights but that's ok. What I really enjoyed was 'do nothing'. I always have enjoyed that and today I got into a really deep relaxed state. I didn't really felt the lower part of my body anymore because I didn't move a lot, it was almost like strong determination sitting. I didn't cared about the slight pain in my knees and the hour didn't feel like an hour.

Right after I am ready writing this I will meditate until I am too sleepy to continue.
EDIT: 48 minutes

 

Life Purpose Work:

I worked in the morning for 2.5 hours. I wouldn't really call it work. I pretty soon was distracted by resistance and fear. So I stopped doing my real important work and looked on how to write non fiction books and blog posts, but without real results.

Then because of resistance I rewatched the life purpose course video on the importance of research. I wonder whether I should first do a lot of research, reading books and developing skills, or do all this stuff next do doing my important work of finding and sharing real wisdom. Here the problem though would be that I don't have a lot of quality wisdom do share. Well, I could sum up Leo's videos and write the information into an article, but that would be nonsense . I cannot share his wisdom in such a brilliant way.

 

Personal Development Work:

I continued reading 'The War of Art' and am now 60% through of the book. I get a better and better idea of what resistance really is. And I am scared...

 

Things I am grateful for:

• the hard run with my uncle
• the psychedelic video and my new motivation for harder and harder meditation and emotional labour
• experience

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• more concentrated work
• starting to practice writing

 

First I thought that the new video isn't something for me, because I am not really interested in drugs and sceptic about psychedelics. I am not informed about them at all. But I got soo much motivation and inspiration out of this video. It taught me about how little I know and how much potential lies in Enlightenment and all the hard work.

This morning right after breakfast my uncle went running with me. He is about 20 years older than me, taller than me and male, so he is much faster than a 17 year old female. He pushed me a lot and after 4km I was running almost at my upper limit. He even pushed me to to sprints. This is all hard mental work. At the end I ran 9.3km in 54 minutes, which is a really good time for me. But I know that if I want to, I could even push me harder. I think I will do such hard workouts more often, to challenge me and to get mentally stronger. I need this mental strength to do all the emotional labour regarding life purpose and enlightenment work. Hard workouts could even be a form of meditation if I would concentrate more.

Edited August 1, 2016 by quantum

[JKG]

Monday, 16/08/01 - 4h Meditation Retreat Day 1

Yesterday I spontaneously decided that I will make this week a 4h Meditation Retreat. This means that I will meditate from Monday to Friday each day at least 4 hours.

Meditation:

I meditated in the morning 1h and right before lunch another hour. This way really relaxing like yesterday. I once got into a state where I looked at the light switch and just saw the visual sensation of it, nothing else.
Then I meditated right after lunch for almost two hours. First I did 35 minutes, switched positions and started the guided Neti Neti meditation by Leo. This took about 50 minutes and at the end I got a little little sense of my true nature, of nothingness. I wanted to stop the mp3 on my handy, so I had to move and open my eyes. I lost the sense of nothingness and meditated for another 20 minutes.

 

Life Purpose Work:

I started writing a little bit about happiness. I felt a lot of resistance and stopped after one hour. I am asking myself whether this is really my life purpose, writing blog post like stuff about some philosophical/spiritual topic. It probably is something like this. The problem though at the moment is that I do not have a lot of wisdom. I need to investigate a lot of time in research and personal spiritual growth before I am able to share something. Who would want to read something by a 17 year old inexperienced one?
Maybe I should first do a lot of research, study and spiritual development first. This means a lot of meditation, reading books, hearing spiritual teachings on YouTube and going out of my comfort zone like hard intense exercise. I consider becoming a none after finishing school.

 

Personal Development Work:

Nothing really. I could have read a little bit, but I rather wanted to think about my meditation experiences and life.

 

Things I am grateful for:

• the time to meditate a lot
• nothingness
• music

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• longer meditations to feel and surrender with the pain in my legs

 

Edited August 1, 2016 by quantum

[JKG]

Monday, 16/08/02 - 4h Meditation Retreat Day 2

Meditation:

I twice tried to apply the Neti Neti Method myself. It kind of worked but kind of it didn't. The monkey mind often interrupts me and I forget about what I wanted to do. Then I have to start all over again and never truly reach the state where I can glance at Nothingness itself.
I watched the Radical Open-mindedness video and did the meditation there too. The rest of the day I was much more open-minded, although I would consider myself a pretty open-minded person normally. I was much more open to the content I consumed.

 

Life Purpose Work:

I read a few chapters in my book "A little history of philosophy". Some chapters I like, some I am absolutely not interested in, e.g. when the author talks about much to logical concepts.

When I was taking a walk in the rain I came up with the idea that my domain of mastery could be consciousness. I was really sceptical about consciousness being a domain of mastery. But now that makes sense to me because it is related to Enlightenment as well as discovering new wisdom.

 

Things I am grateful for:

• coconut oil
• all the high quality food I am allowed to eat
• my best friend

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• reading "The War of Art"
• spending less time on the internet

[JKG]

Wednesday, 16/08/03 - 4h Meditation Retreat Day 3

Meditation:

65min + 75min + the rest before I go to bed

I felt nothing special today. I just did a guided meditation by Rupert Spira, but I couldn’t really grasp what he was saying.
I recognized that it is 'hard' for me to sit much longer than 90 minutes. I have to overcome that.

 

Life Purpose Work:

I continued reading 'A little history of philosophy' and I will finish 'The War of Art' after writing this. Maybe I will start reading 'Psycho cybernetics' later.

 

Things I am grateful for:

• the rain
• my kindle
• living in the 21st century

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• longer sits
• spending less time on the internet

 

I see how I use less Should Statements over the time. My eating habit became better now and I don't judge myself anymore because of eating too much.

[JKG]

Thursday, 16/08/04 - 4h Meditation Retreat - Day 4 - A day with my best friend

Meditation:

Yesterday I had the great idea of waking up early and meditating from 5am on for two hours. When I woke up at 4:40 I just thought 'Oh shit, I have to meditate, I don't want to.' I just did it and it was horrible. It was boring and not enjoyable at all. I couldn't do self inquiry, mindfullness or anything else. I was so unconcentrated and soo bored. The pain in the knees and feet was ok, but at the end really horrible, especially in my feet. I was so attempet to quit, that would have been so easy, but I forced myself for the most of the time. Then 15 minutes before the end I began to feel very sick. Then something inside my head just quit without my permission. I still got 110 minutes done. 

I won’t be able to do the whole 4 hours. I need my sleep. I know that this is just an excuse, an rationalization, but...

 

Life Purpose Work:

I wrote a summary of 'The War of Art'. Then I began to read the first chapter of 'Psycho-cybernetics'. This was just brilliant.

 

Things I am grateful for:

• my best friend
• so tasty and healthy food
• all those great books

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• meditating for the whole 4 hours

 

I met my best friend in the city at 11am this morning and we spent almost the whole day together. We were walking, eating great food, waking in nature with her little brother, and getting a lot of books. I have so many books now about philosophy, history and Zen. This is so amazing. The problem though is that I have now way to many books to decide which I should read first.

[JKG]

Friday, 16/08/05 - 4h Meditation Retreat - Day 5

Meditation:

Until now I only meditated in the morning for 60 minutes and in the afternoon for 75 minutes. That means that I still have to meditate for 105 minutes. I already considered not doing it today. This is just an excuse and today I really want to make it.

 

Life Purpose Work:

I have been reading a lot today. I started reading a book about Zen. While reading it I felt very spiritual and wise. I understood the wisdom which has been explained there, but I am aware of the fact that I don't practice it in the normal life yet. And practising spirituality in the normal every day life will be a challenge, especially when school begins again in two weeks.

A few hours ago I continued reading Psycho-cybernetics. I learned that having a good self image is very important. Now I will implement next to the 10min life purpose visualization also a self image visualization. I don't know what I will do there exactly yet, but I will figure that out tomorrow.

 

Things that I am grateful for:

• the Zen book
• having discovered personal development and spiritual enlightenment
• the sun

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• spending less time on the internet

 

I think it became a habit that in the middle of the day I start my computer and spend there an hour which useless stuff. In that time I could have been reading, meditating or visualizing stuff. From tomorrow on I will only be on my computer for an hour in the evening. The exception is on Sunday at lunchtime for Leo's new video.

In the Zen book I read that the mind should be detached from every external experience and stay in the same mood all the time. I already knew that, but I understand this now more clearly. A good exercise for this will be surrendering with pain.
I just had a terrifying idea. I could wake up very early at like 4am and go on the cross trainer for a few hours and then meditate for a few hours. This could even be a possibility in the school time. But tomorrow the weather will be nice. It would be better to go for a 10km run and to do this as hard as possible. Yeah, I will do this.

[JKG]

Saturday - 16/07/06 - An Average day

Meditation:

In the morning 64 minutes and in the afternoon 48 minutes. I tried the lotus posture and it worked for maybe 5 minutes. The pain wasn't that bad, but my upper feet slide down from my upper leg. I also tried zazen, I read somewhere that you should breathe in and out and then count up until 10. Almost every time I lost track of the counting.

 

Life Purpose Work:

I am almost done with the Zen book and started a book about the German history of Europe.

 

Things that I am grateful for:

• apricots
• a lot of free time
• my life

 

Ways I could have made today better:

• reading a bit more

 

In the morning I ran 6,64km in 35:42 minutes. This is probably one of my fastest times. I did the 5km in 26:47 minutes. The first 20 minutes were ok, but then it became may more challenging. I tried to connect with spiritual stuff and ended up thinking about Leo hugging the toilet and telling "love, love, love". This kind of worked and I ran the last uphill faster

[JKG]

Sunday, 16/08/07 - Life Purpose Insight

Meditation:

In the morning I did 1h of strong determination sitting, which I have not done in a long time. This time I did it at a wall, so that my back couldn't curve. It worked, just my saliva annoyed me a lot, but hey that's what sds is for.
In the afternoon I again did 1h of sds, then a 5 minute brake, and 50 minutes of self inquiry. It also has been a while since I did proper self inquiry. All the other times I was really unconcentrated.

This time it worked and I got a few insights about my ego: When I am drifting away with my thoughts, the ego is not there anymore. My ego is only there when I am 'consciously' thinking about something, it only exists in my thoughts, it is a belief.

While I was drifting away from self inquiry, my monkey mind began thinking about mathematical and programming things, maybe because of the patterns at my wall. This remembered me about how much I love mathematics and programming stuff, which I have not done at all in the last month. And then my mind came up with an interesting idea about my life purpose.

 

Life Purpose Work:

I finished the Zen book, continued reading the history book, as well as psycho-cybernetics and wrote a summary of the first chapters of this book.

The insight I got while my meditation: While doing the life purpose course I assumed that my zone of genius is something about finding wisdom... And my zone of excellence is programming, mathematical stuff, which I am good at in school. But how can I really know that this is only my zone of excellence. In the last years I really have been fascinated about mathematics, computer science, physics, astronomy... and I love programming and solving mathematical problems. Mathematics is so beautiful. So this could be my zone of genius.

With the mathematical zone of genius I could study computer science or something like that, and it would make sense to me. I could start a business and earn money...

I didn't saw me doing such things with my 'old' life purpose. The problem with this one was that I didn't knew how to share the wisdom that I would get. And also I do not have important wisdom to share yet.

So I could be doing my 'new' life purpose, develop my skills, earn money... and in the mean time learn still through meditation, retreats and consciousness in the every day life, and eventually reach Enlightenment. Then I could switch my life purposes and teach spiritual stuff. I still have plenty of time in my life left to master different things.

 

Things that I am grateful for:

• this forum
• a broccoli
• knowing about strong determination sitting

Ways I could have made today better:

• not eating oat meal
• criticizing less

 

At the moment I am really annoyed by my father. I am judging and criticizing him a lot in my mind, and the doesn't know how to life a better life... This is only my problem, not his. I need to practice more self love

Edited August 7, 2016 by quantum