Indisguise

Maybe there's something in your life that can be described the same way? Events that are beyond your control that can hit you any time? Events that you want to hide from but which you know you must face or you know you just can't avoid?

but it sure does seem that way!😄

First thoughts I wonder if I'm going to pull this through. Pull what exactly through? Not like there's an end goal or something. But I guess the path is indeed the goal, so - what is that path? Guess I'll find out as I'm walking it lol. How else would you find out? Been lurking, kinda. Never really had any strong diesire to journal, but I definitely do have a strong desire to share, and so mabye this is one way of doing iut. Albeit a somewhat clumsy way, as the bandwith between "my thoughts" and "the keyboard" with which I'm typing is somewhat narrow. But let's see how this goes. Don't know if anyone is ever going to read this, I guess I'd be kinda happy about that becaues I want to share, but if not, I suppose that's fine too. There's just tons and tons and tons of stuff that I want to explicate, to myself, mostly. But also to others, sort of as a projection I suppose to let it bounce back off of them to me, show me what I'm thinking. I guess part of this is going to end up in a book. Already have a title. It's going to be a synthesis from everything I know and learned, philosophy, religions, psychology, natural science, anthropology, social sciences, literautre, etc. I'm still fairly young and I feel so priviledged and lucky to be in my position, I'm still a fool but I'm also not. What I know, I need to share. Share, not force upon. I sometimes feel very insipred by those who came before me. I'm very well aware that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and the only reason why I can look so (comparatively) far is because of them, I owe them. And who are "they"? Well of course, they're: culture. We owe culture its betterment. Whenever there's a person who is priviledged by their culture, it is their responsibility, and noble duty to pay the culture back in the form of wisdom, love and understanding. Anything else would be a waste of potential. You are a force for good and it's your responsibility to act on that force, otherwise you are passively contributing to the baseline existential condition that is decay and chaos, speaking of course from the perspective of culture which is defined by a certain set of boundaries and which needs to maintain these boundaries. You are not here to maintain the boundaries of culture. You are not here to tear down the boundaries either. You are here to be the transforming force that tears down and then rebuilds, in a better way. Balance the forces of good and evil in your own heart, act upon the best of your abilities and accordsing to your conscience and don't beat yourself up when you fail, which you will, but don't blind yourself from failing when you do either. You aren not here to be the recluse Buddha, the Pratyekabuddha who upon his enlightenment vanishes into Nirvana, never to be seen or heard of again. You are here to be the Bodhisattva, the Christ. who upon his enlightenment returns from the mountain top into the village and shares the gospel, the good news. Unite the forces of nature and culture in yourself. Unite the absolute and the relative, play the game and get involved in everyday life in full consciousness of the divine, the shared knowing heart of every man, woman, child, animal and plant, the Lila, the play of God. However, you'll also forget. Like, everything. But: that's fine. You'll forget, because you are love. And to love yourself so deeply is to let yourself forget completely. It's perfect, there's no flaw in this whatsoever. And you know/are it, hence you are where you are. Go on my child, and play. Forget yourself and when you've played enough, come back home. There you'll be greeted by the love that sent you out the house, the door of which was always open kept for you to love yourself anew. (I just made this up on the spot, hope you can appreciate it 😁❤😂) We could use so much more wisdom in our culture. So much more awareness. So much more love. Who's gonna do it? Who, if not you?

Didn't say that it is. But you're afraid of something that was there all your life and that will be there all your life. And how exactly is "unconsciousness" the root of all problems? Seems kinda overkill to me to attribute any suffering to unconsciousness. As if there's something inherently wrong with you, i.e. you "being unconscious" that caused your suffering.

Why be afraid of something that is inevitable?

Is it just me or does it kinda feel passive agressive when people talk about some spiritual topic / nondualism or whatever, and then someone comes along and goes "there is no XXX" (Leonism or whatever)". Like... yeah, true. So what?😂 seems like an attempt to dismiss the whole argument by "using nondualism". I'd say you could very well make out a type of philosophy that is observable on Actualized. Why not call that Leonism? Damn, it really does make a huge difference to be here after a long break. For the better though, definitely.

Woweee. Great report, love the way you turned the trip around from calling your mom in anxiety to scurrying around in a wizard robe, haha😂😂 Maybe one more thing; wouldn't take mushrooms that often, maybe. People can come apart when taking medium/high doses too frequently.

I highly reccomend you don't just skip this post, but listen to the podcasts with Yeonmi Park and to her talks. She is a North Korean defector and humans rights activist. And she is one of, if not the bravest and most inspiring women I have ever listened to, She manages without difficulty to shock me, to make me stare in utter disbelief, to bring tears to my eyes and to be hopeful despite the horrors of her stories, and this is why I thought I'd share this with you. I hope you are able to appreciate her wisdom. Her life experience and her perspective shook me up, comparing my life and what I take for granted, what I consider to be "problems". Maybe you take your life and your freedoms for granted too and need a reality check. She has a YouTube channel

Intuition is always there, but often overridden by thought. It's a holistic way of understanding (a situation) and knowing how to act, without the "normal" way of discursive, linear, reductionistic, pointalistic thought getting in the way. In vernacular terms, it's your gut feeling, It's something you can't explain because it is beyond the rational explanatory frame that we usually use to asses situations: We think about a situation, about the many many factors that we believe need to be considered to make the decision of how to act, and then, based on this (alledgedly) rational evaluation of the situation, we act - at least that's the way we (think we) act when we really have lots of time to unpack a situation, but most of the time we absolutely do not think and act this way. But even in rational thought, intuition comes into play, as we cannot possibly decide rationally 1.) how many factors need to be considerd 2.) which factors need to be considered before we say "okay, now I've got an understanding comprehensive enough to be confident to act." It's our intuition that tells us at the end of any rational evaluation "enough thought, now act!", and so there must come a point at which we trust. Intuition is the thing that tells you when you have considerd a situation long enough. It is the leap of faith that we all take when we act without knowing, since no situation can be known fully. It's direct guidance.

In terms of: time managment, managing psychological stress levels, separating work from play (in the sense of "not thinking about all the stuff you still have left to do while going out with friends"), staying healthy despite stress & little time, etc. Very standard kind of question, I could've probably just googled it. But I didn't, because there's more wisdom gathered here than on google 😝 thanks in advance!

How do you prepare for a mushroom trip? I'm planning on doing one in the near future, I got a whooole bag of lovely shit to work out and would like to do it right. Just dipping my toes into the water, I'd like to stay mentally coherent during the trip so it won't be a high dose, but still. Does it depend on what your intention is that you adapt the way you prepare? Having a trip for fun and going out in the woods VS working on your emotional wounds requires diferent things, no? As always, all advice is appreciated 🙂

Maybe just ask her to leave you alone in the morning or in the evening? Tell her you need some time for yourself, communicate. No "subtle queues", just tell her to give you some private time. Doesn't seem healthy to constantly want to talk with your children anyway. Put your phone in airplane mode if you don't want to get called. Or better still, just leave the house and go somewhere in nature, meditate there. No people, no phones, nothing.

Maybe this is just the biologist in me speaking, but I'd love to see the neurological correlate to that. And why psychedelics, being serotonergic substances, have such an incredible effect on it. They reliably dissolve beliefs about oneself and life, but how?

Read that paper when Nature reported on it, couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it even though the science behind it looks valid, I'm just waiting for the next paper or some kind of push back to this. Because serotonergic antidepressants or serotonergic agents in general (like the tryptophan psychedelics) have a positive effect on depression and it's just not so easy to argue against that. But it really looks like depression is MUCH more complicated than we thought it was. It's not just a chemical imbalance. People suffer from depression because their lives are just so godawful complicated, or they are utterly out of touch with their emotions, or they repress all kinds of other things, or all of it at once, etc. There's just so much.

At what ungodly hour do you have to get up in order to have 2 hours left over in the morning?😂

That's life. A zig-zag of constant aiming and overshooting - because you don't know anything, and then you learn along the way and discover that you went too far into one direction. So you aim at the other direction, hoping to get closer to your goal, but you're still ignorant and bound and limited in your knowledge and capabilities. And so you overshoot once again, but not quite as much. And again, you hit a wall, you've gone too far. Take aim once more, but this time, know that you can overshoot, and make your way through the unknown, colonize it with what you do know, find out that your map is off, adapt, learn, change, die, replace, grow. Overshoot. Re-aim. Overshoot. Re-aim. Etc. I've observed this pattern in my life, and I believe that this only works properly when you do it consicously. Otherwise you're not aiming, but stumbling through the darkness, bumping your head against the walls that were errected by your own ignorance. I'm still overshooting. Still missing the mark, still "sinning" (Hamartia, ἁμαρτία). Trying to find my way, trying to find the way, trying to accord with that, with which one cannot accord, for one has never deviated. Ever noticed this?

It's just about beauty - and love. Staring at a painting for 20 minutes or listening to the same song 10 times in a row, reading the same poetry, whatever. It's about loving beauty. Beauty is love, we say "YES!! That's what existance is all about! That's it!!" That's what love and beauty are. To utterly embrace and appreciate what is. A child will pick up a pebble laying at the side of a river and stare at it, carry it around for hours and when you try to take it away and say "throw that thing away, stop collecting nonsense!", the child will be upset because it loves the stone. Because the child, unlike you, hasn't yet forgotten the beauty and weirdness of existence. The funny shape, lines, dots and marks on a pebble.

God they're cute 🙂@Faith you intentionally feed the racoons around your house?😂

You're not "conscious of". That's just a linguistic description. Consciousness is being. Being is consciousness. You got it perfectly right, there is no see-er and nothing seen. There's just the experience - seeing - but no separation between experience and experiencer. Consicousness can hold everything "within itself" because consciousness is nothing. Nothing is everything, that's the key to why you seem to be "conscious of" and yet be one with whatever you're conscious of. Just like a mirror that has no color and can therefore contain all color. The colorful reflection in the mirror IS the colorless mirror.

As far as I can see, the primary issue is lack of humility - and instead of it, there are conviction, belief and ignorance. The problem is not that people disagree on the question of whether abortion should be allowed or not, the real problem is that people haven't even begun to think about, let alone formulate a (even partially) coherent, sophisticated and, most importantly, agreed upon problem. Just to ask "is abortion good / bad and ought it to be allowed / prohibited?", which is how most people do it in their minds, is a formulation that is way too low in resolution for a question with that much social explosivity. That's like trying to build a functional aircraft carrier from the drawings of a 10 year old as a construction plan. It's simply too low in resolution to even begin working on it, that way you don't even know where to start. The other big, and perhaps even the primary issue here is that you can't solve a (or any, for that matter) philosophical problem, especially not one of such immense gravitas, if you don't inspect the assumptions and beliefs that you hold and use to build the question and subsequently construct an answer to that question. In other words, you have to ask, before you proceed with anything: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? What are your assumptions, beliefs, convictions, perspectives about/on: individuality rights religious conviction (--> think of the islamic/judaic aspect of abortion rights) what is life what is death responsibility freedom gender roles .... Imagine asking a philosopher "is this table real?" Well, if she's worth her salt she'll tell you "you can't just ask me something like that! I don't even know what you mean by 'real'?!" But if you're not a pihilosopher, you don't think like that. You are not aware of these utterly viscious problems in epistemology and metaphysics, instead, you just jump right to the next thing you know, cherish and cling to, which are your assumptions, beliefs and convictions. Now, obviously, this is a highly philosophical approach that I present to you here and I'm biased in "favor" of philosphy and inspecting thoughts. We can't expect this from the majority of the population, at least not too much of it. All we can hope for is at least a bit of humility and that people don't immediately jump to ideological conclusions. The way I see it, a woman should be allowed to have an abortion. Bodily autonomy and sovereignty is something we grant to all human beings and it musn't be any other way here too (that's not my full argumentation, there are dozens of other points to be considered). The only thing I don't want to conclude is at what point during pregnancy the abortion shouldn't be allowed any longer. I think that if one thinks about having an aborting, one has the responsibility to do it early enough. And the last point; if a woman can abort her pregnancy and "get rid" of her child, a man shouldn't be forced to pay for it.

Memory may be nothing, but everything is memory. No memory = blank. @Phil Wanna share your take on your own question?😄

Wow, wow, wow. What a beautiful soul. Holy sh*t you guys. watch it. Incredibly insightful and this man is full of wisdom and love. "That's what it's all about, love, isn't it? Everything."

Memory is more of what is, not of what ever "was". Reproduction? Or just production? Attatching images and thoughts about oneself and life to oneself and life, yet none of it actually exists. "Did" it ever exist? Well no. Nothing ever "did" exist. Conceiving of oneself as a continuous, permanent thing/stream that goes from "the past" through "the present" and into "the future" is dragging images and thoughts about oneself along. Although it's not really "dragging things along", just burdening yourself now. No memory means no future, because the future is a projection created by the illusion of continuity. The past is birth, the future is death.

I'm poor as 💩 and pretty happy, so I'd say "no". And believe me, I know what poverty is, at least from the numerically financial perspective. Being rich has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you have. I have enough money to buy fresh food and pay my rent, occasionally go out with my friends and enjoy life. What the hell is more money even supposed to do for you? A fast car? A big house? A swiss watch? Brand clothes? Well, some of that might be fun but it certainly ain't no happiness. In fact, it might only get you deeper into the rat race of materialism, consumerism and object fetishism, all driven by the unquenchable thirst for more, better, bigger. You wann know what that is? That's a recipe for a miserable, highly conditional life. And furthermore, once you have aquired all these things, you realize, perhaps a few months or even years later, depending on how well you manage to numb yourself to the truth you're about to find out, that they didn't bring you the happiness you so desperately sought in them. And then what are you going to do? Well, so many celebrities who have more money than they can spend fall into a hedonic lifestyle, filled with drug abuse and frustrated attempts of finding happiness and lasting fullfilment in consumerism. In what money was supposed to provide. But it's the wrong cure!!! A spiritual hole cannot be filled with material goods. I wonder why the begging monk is happier than Johnny Depp and Amber Heard? Does money bring happiness? Does it? Can it?

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