I haven't made any videos in a few days and my iphone was getting pretty full so I was downloading some of the videos from iCloud unto a unto an external hard drive and when I was trying to confirm which ones I could delete from my phone because they were officially on the external hard drive some of them were really old and I was just a bit surprised with the way I talked and even the sound of my voice it feels like it's changed and I've been doing this self dialogue for about six months it'll be six months in like a week or something and the first couple months I only did a few videos but then lately I've been doing more and more so I've probably been doing it more intensely for say three months and part of what I possibly intend to do is when the date hits the one year mark from a video is to watch it and to sort of do a video from the present moment but also talk about the year before so it's possible if I do it that way that it won't be a while until I actually release stuff the other thing I might do is just be like wow that early stuff is really bad release it at all but I think part of this process for me is just showing that self dialogue can be helpful we usually assume that we need to talk to somebody else to help us and this might be a different form of self help in that I'm helping myself by expressing my own thoughts and unfolding my own learning so not relying on looking at a book and looking at other people for the answers and I'm finding that more and more of the supposed answers are within me and it's not that I haven't been influenced by anybody in terms of reading and things but the thing would be that in my own process of exploration if there is anything that was from somebody else that I realized in the moment it rises in the right moment versus just always reading books and really I feel like it's restoring me to learning for myself from myself by myself with myself and in that I'm actually learning from other people too because my own process of learning one with myself is the same that happens when I'm out and about so i can have sort of realizations and aha moments all the time like yesterday I looked at a picture of my baby niece and she was sucking on her clothing and was all wet and I just thought of an idea that certain time period of clothing could actually have like a teething toy in the clothing because the baby is not yet quite able to really hold on to a toy for very long and put it in their mouth but they could probably grab the collar and put it in their mouth whereas if it's like a toy and it falls over to the side they're not going to reach out and grab it so that was an idea I had and that I had another idea that one day a person will be able to pay for an item in the store with their fun and not have to line up at the till so right now it's Christmas shopping time there's big lineups people could have like a square reader and and the store knows that you're in the store and scan the item and off you go and I had another idea too but I forget what it was but these are just ideas and and those happen on time for me and I get tons of them and that'll really have the time or energy to pursue them nor do I really want to but it can be fun to have those types of ideas and I feel like people who have access to this inside consciousness are creative with ideas even though they may not have the means or want to carry it out because if a person has a thousand decent ideas in a given year they're not really going to carry them all out it's impossible whereas there's other people out there who have the capacity to carry out a good idea but don't really have any good ideas so I think that's something that could be explored as well well let's see if that stopped so another thing is that sort of unrelated but I met up with a new friend recently and what was interesting was that I didn't have this urge to out myself as being diagnosed with bipolar disorder it was almost like all of this talking I've done with myself with all this different context was actually protection against me talking about it in a way that is not the way that I've been unfolding the context about so usually if I meet somebody new I feel compelled to tell them that I have this diagnosis mainly because I'm not ashamed of it or anything because mostly because I don't actually believe it in my heart and being it's a construct that I've been given to describe different experiences that I've had but I don't see it as true so usually me saying that to somebody I don't even know why i would say it i guess i would say it because there's certain factors in my life that's sort of like oh why aren't you working full time at of whatever or whatever so by saying that it sort of explains those other factors and and so maybe it's useful to that extent but in terms of actually describing my experience it's not very useful but it might be useful to describe how certain things in my external life are structured for out somebody else to understand it I could say man if I spend too much time and consensus reality I get overloaded it's like information overload and because jobs are in society can be information overload blah blah blah so I don't know what I'm sayin with that exactly but what I'm trying to say is it just felt different in my being and normally I don't feel afraid that someone will judge me for saying oh I have bipolar disorder because if they do whatever like see you later because regardless of what it's labeled it makes life very interesting and then with this person we got into conversations about like I told them about my universe flipping the coin thing which I don't remember if I talked about before but they were open to that because they had some different experiences about stuff so just by having more conversation I was able to discover that this person is open to those sorts of other energy so i can always talk about things in those terms because it's a shared understanding anyway so that was cool because I've met somebody before who I told about it and then they were just the type person that wasn't really open to anything other than consensus frameworks of thinking and experiencing things so if I would have said something about an experience that was kind of out there whether just slightly out there or like whatever they wouldn't have been open to it so to me it's not about whether somebody is able to accept mental illness it's whether somebody is open to exploring that context and the fact that people who never get diagnosed with something have other conscious experiences all the time it's actually quite normal when it gets to a certain point then it's labeled as an illness but that's perhaps because we're not having these types of conversations that normalizes people's perceptions and then if it's not normalized than a person can get afraid and when one's afraid of one's own experience it's going to create more fearful experience so it could just be the fear of going crazy when it gets a little bit too outside one's comfort zone that causes it to spiral into that it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy I remember thinking during my very first experience like am I going crazy and lo and behold I did end up in the psych ward going crazy and another thing that I discovered I haven't really read books lately but I picked up a book that I have on my kindle by ug Krishnamurti and he was talking about how when all the old structures are dying in oneself one becomes like a corpse like it actually well he explains it in the book and I think it happened to him on more than one occasion but basically it's almost like the body's almost dead and then it comes alive again and he talks about how it's part of this process of the universe and that's what happened to him and I remember the first time I had an experience of this consciousness I thought I was being crushed by the universe and dying in like basically going down to barely breathing not moving quite catatonic and I had that on more than one occasion and so it makes me think well wow that's sort of a process that we go through but it's just not really understood so he is a really good explanation of that and it's a pretty frightening process I've had that happen pretty much every time I've gone into so-called psychosis and the other thing that was interesting was i went to value village and i thought to check out the books before I shop for some clothes and and the first book i looked at picked up was this book called The Little Book of clarity and I was flipping through it and I don't really buy books so much lately but this one called to me in a way because it's actually a book about not thinking and and Krishnamurti talks about this J Krishnamurti all he really points to is all of the machinery of thought and how it's not the same as in sight lovebeauty truth blah blah blah and then Eckhart Tolle is the one who also talks about it in a way he talks about watching the thinker and then over time the thoughts lose their hold and they disappear and it's not about changing one's thoughts it's about seeing that one is beyond thought and then when one sees that the thoughts lose their power and they start to dwindle and wither away and I first read that book years ago and when I first realized that I wasn't my thoughts I was like whoa that is huge and then I practice the power of now for however long and then all of those thoughts went away so my brain doesn't have any thoughts in it in terms of me hearing my own voice whether there's subtle thoughts that operate below the surface without my own voice happening that is a different story perhaps that I don't know about because I can't hear anything happening but I don't hear what I'm going to say before I'm going to say it I don't hear myself talking my head when other people are speaking I don't talk myself to sleep I don't hear my own voice things arise and I've talked about this before but it's not really an interesting topic of conversation because most people their brain operates with thoughts happening all the time and I can sort of remember what that was like but i don't i don't think that process could turn on again if i tried though it does turn on again with the process of so-called psychosis and so this book was really interesting and I actually sat down on Monday after I got home and I read the entire book in one sitting and I just got up to use washroom and I don't think my mind wandered once because my mind doesn't wander was thinking is the wandering thing 190 pages is a small book and it's not super dense in terms of the words on the page and everything but I did get a few things out of the book and it made some notes on it so I did stop to make a note when I read something that I wanted to expand upon and the person who wrote the book Jamie smart has a program of coaching for clarity coaches which is to help people declutter their minds and he does talk about what I've been talking about somewhat I think how when the mind is silent something else is operating and it's actually more clear because there's none of this abstracting going on which is often a movement away from the present moment so and he does a good job of pointing this out and illustrating that and a few things that he said we're good even for my own brain to hear and to sort of break apart other subtle structures that are probably there and there's there's possibly lots of them I mean he talks about how when we see something for ourselves and we understand it we don't need to have a how-to or something like that because it's getting rid of the false stuff that's in the way so what's really needed is clear seeing and understanding and learning not trying to grasp on to a concept and then move towards that abstract concept it's more about seeing through abstract concepts and then really being in touch with the moment and then always having the sense that one can respond adequately to what is in the moment because one isn't somewhere else in their mind and i came across somewhere else to focus on learning rather than helping that makes a lot of sense because I could think I'm trying to fix myself I'm trying to help myself but really I'm just learning with myself and that doesn't even require trying learning is learning is it's an innate capacity that we have back to this book on clarity the little book of clarity I made a couple of notes of pages that were super relevant and page 83 says your mind is a self-correcting system its set point is clarity resilience and well-being the benefits of allowing the mind to find its own way back to clarity vastly outweigh the benefits of external intervention why because external intervention stops the self-correcting system doing its job clarity is what a person psychology is always endeavoring to return to and that really resonated with me because I see distress and what's labeled as psychosis as also a self-correcting system a very very powerful one and it has a lot of fear in it and it can be very scary and it definitely needs support through the process but the process is externally intervened with through chemical means which stops it from completing and then because it's stuff from completing a person is turned into a chronic mental patient that would be like stopping a caterpillar in the chrysalis stage and then thinking all the caterpillars completely non-functional so now we have to take care of it when it was supposed to transform into something else into a completely different function into a butterfly that's flying through the air and we don't even know what this phase what this process is trying to self-correct I think it's trying to self-correct a lot more than just personal anguish if it was just personal anguish a person would feel the personal anguish but it wouldn't be to the extreme where it makes the whole person completely non-functional and needing protection it's a person needs support and protection through that like they are in a chrysalis if you expected a caterpillar to start walking around in the chrysalis phase it wouldn't be able to see it might walk off the branch of a tree it doesn't know where it's going it doesn't have its proper nervous system or perceptual apparatus to even know what is what so the external intervention stops the self-correcting mechanism from happening and so I feel my process will always be going back towards this self correction because it's trying to correct something I feel like it tries to correct my path and I'm on to get more in alignment with the universe it's sort of like if a butterfly wanted to remain a caterpillar after it being turned into a butterfly just wanted to act like a caterpillar that's sort of the equivalent of what's happening is that people are trying to go from caterpillar to butterfly but the system comes along and says you have to stay a caterpillar and so the caterpillars like in this chrysalis and people in the system are like holding its hand trying to walk it along and everything because it's having trouble functioning because it's not a caterpillar anymore and it hasn't yet turned into a butterfly and he talks about on page 86 Jamie smart talks about the known versus the unknown so he's talking about where new ideas come from he says the known is the database of thoughts you've already thought including your habitual ways of thinking about yourself your life and your world the unknown is the source of all fresh new thoughts the formless power of thought when we have clarity our minds are free from contaminated thinking and we create space for new thinking to flow in I feel like that is a good distinction between how it works when a person is able to see through the veil of thought and and operate from a position of clarity ideas come from the unknown and there is that space for those ideas to arise in consciousness they can't arise in consciousness when we're always associating about the past and on page 92 he's talking about how when we're born we don't realize we have a nose we don't realize we have eyes or face or anything like that we didn't know our hands were our hands and then eventually we started to make a map of ourselves and a map of our environment and I extend this idea to how in trans consciousness and map consciousness and that other experience is trying to help us to map those other parts that we don't take to be ourselves but our part of ourselves sometimes things will happen in the other state of consciousness that seem like leaps in the laws of physics or that seem like magic but when we were babies it might seem like magic that all of a sudden we have a toy in our hand but then we realized when we get older somebody brought the toy so certain things that happen in map consciousness and trans consciousness might seem like magic or odd but it's just because we haven't figured out what is bringing that to us or how it works and I've also gotten to the point in that state of consciousness where I figured out exactly how it works and when that happens is like game over and that's when I actually go down to the bottom of the scale of consciousness and have to work my way back obvious like wow I see like it's all XYZ I see that and it's just it feels very dejected because there's nothing to do like if you understand how it all works there's no surprises anymore so so we actually don't want to figure it all out and so he says we've created a map of who we are a map we keep updating and math consciousness helps us update the map of ourselves we're not who we think we are we're something totally different than that and map consciousness is trying to show us that

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