Do you like yourself? If not, why? If yes, why?

[Moonbeam]

you know, Moonbeam's posts always take an extra reading or two for me. and sometimes i still don't understand. but i don't think being so dismissive of someone else who makes you think more than others might, is the answer.
i may not understand a lot of Moonbeam's thoughts, and those that i do, i do not always agree with, but i appreciate the mental challenge and journey.

I like the fact that I hear kindness in your words. But imagine if there is such a thing that we could call the joy of being and that for you to find it would mean for you to need to stop thinking. Could it possibly be that the reason, then, that it is hard to understand my thinking is that I don’t want you to think? What if the whole point of the difficulty you are having is to suggest the hopelessness of searching for truth via thought? Words about the moon are not the moon. Truth is not to be found where thought imagins it is being pointed to. How does one end thought? Thought is fear. Thought is time. Thought is language we hear in our heads, words whose meaning and emotional triggering were learned and repressed in the distant past. When we think we are not here. Once, for all of us, there was a timeless time when everything was perfect. To awaken is to enter that place again, the place from which we were told to think words that make entering there again forbidden. Perhaps an analogy would be to say that the joy of being is the blackboard on which thoughts are written. Stop thinking and what is left? Don’t answer, stop thinking. Well it isn’t so easy and I have no idea how to make it stop. But a long time ago for a moment it did. All I know is the inputs that I was driven by hopelessness to seek and found in Zen things that shook up my assumptions about my prison.

All I know is that if you suffer you do so because you hold assumptions about reality that are unconscious and unexamined and they are a prison. One of the things about thinking is thinking we know. Real knowing is knowing that knowing isn’t thinking.

I think therefore I am, yes, the wrong I, the one that is a prison.

 

[JulesMaximus]

If I’m feeling down on myself I go hang out in P&N for a while and read through some of the threads there. Bunch of angry assholes over there that make me glad I’m not one of them.

 

[Red Squirrel]

If I’m feeling down on myself I go hang out in P&N for a while and read through some of the threads there. Bunch of angry assholes over there that make me glad I’m not one of them.

I make that mistake once in a while too. lol.

 

[Moonbeam]

If I’m feeling down on myself I go hang out in P&N for a while and read through some of the threads there. Bunch of angry assholes over there that make me glad I’m not one of them.

As an example of the truth being 180 degrees from where we look, what if we get down on ourselves because we are unaware we too feel like assholes and feel a need to point to others to hate because they seem to be bigger assholes than we are? "Thank God I'm better than that." But what if all the while how we see them is really how we unconsciously feel about ourselves.

That would mean a search to find in those assholes the truth we feel about ourselves as something to pity rather than despise might set us on a road to recovery. All those assholes over there, if I could find a way to love them would mean I could find a way to love myself.

One thing about the truth that may go unrecognized is that it just isn't really all that easy to face, in fact the last thing we may actually want to know.

When opposite things are identical I believe the truth in near. Thinking, programming from the past, creates the world we see. The world we see is not the world that exists. The world that exists is perfection. We were programmed not to feel worthy of it. We hate ourselves but the reasons we do are a lie. We do not feel worthy to know that.