Who are you living for?

Ok so i've been thinking about this a lot for the past few days, in the sense of why do so many people struggle to manifest their desires, move past their limiting beliefs and maybe not be getting to where they want to be.


Then i started to think about my own value and beliefs and conversations i've had with others, and i wonder how many of us are actually living for ourselves? living in congruence with our real true selves, our own personal values and beliefs?

When do we ever sit down and just think.... What do I believe in, whats important to ME? What do I really want?

Throughout our lives we are taught how to act how to behave, what to believe in, be it from Parents, Peers, Teachers, all significant people in our lives, its instilled in us these values and wants and needs, we spend our lives pleasing others and living to someone else's value and beliefs

To do well you must get a great education, be really academic, get a fabulous job, work hard, put others first, have an amazeballs relationship, get married have kids etc or run the risk of being a disappointment or a failure be it by family or society

Now there's nothing wrong with having those things, of course there's not, but there's a bucket load of pressure attached to how to conform and how you behave and how you get those things.

Anyways what i'm trying to say is.... do you want that education because you want it or someone else is telling you that you should want it?

Do you want that job as a rocket scientist? or is it someone else telling you thats what you want? maybe you'd be just as happy doing something else.

Do you want that Guy/Girl.. because he ticks your boxes or do you want them because they're someone elses ideal.

When you take a step back and really think about what you want.... what is it? maybe then the limiting beliefs will drop, the decisions will be easier to make and the manifestations will start rolling in.

You want to know what your values are? look at what you're asking for then Socratic question yourself about it, if i get this, i will be.....(e.g excited) then ask yourself .. then what? (e.g i'll be happy).. then again and again until you uncover the value beneath it all.

I think I've actually been pretty unconventional and selfish lol and followed my own path regardless of what others did or thought
In Estonia it's extremely expected of you to go to university after high school. You'd never even get a job if you didn't, everyone will look at you like a retard and what's wrong with you. But I didn't know what I wanted to study. I did know that I wanted to travel, so I went against all the odds and traveled around instead until when I was 25 I finally decided that I now know what I want to study.
Ehemm I also blew a great deal of money on traveling all my life and always had others shaking their head saying I should do better things with my money, buy a house and all that I have no regrets at all, the best memories I have are from traveling.

I always did think though that what if I was 90 years old and looking back to my life, then what would I wish I had done more, what would I regret doing? I think there would be nothing worse than looking back and realizing you have lived your life doing something you hate every day, spending days staring at the clock wishing it to be end of workday and then just go home watch tv and go to sleep, just to make the ends meet and pay the bills and taxes.
Unfortunately I still haven't figured out what it would be that I could do and not wish it was the end of work day already lol.

Awwww Luney, you must be a Natural.... there's nothing selfish about living for yourself

Love you Nighty This is an important topic. Though complicated - where do "my" values and beliefs begin and "their" values and beliefs end? We're all quite inseparable from our own societies... both from the conditioning of our parents and that of our close peers, etc.

I think I remember Alan Watts once saying that we believe so strongly in our "selves" in the notion of our individual "self", "personality"...  and yet we don't really truly have a good idea of what/who we really are.


this isn't the lecture I was after, but still...

As to "me" "personally"...  I've definitely always been very, VERY stubborn and have always chased my own dreams... of course I'm lucky to have parents who encourage that, but I do exactly what I want to do, which is I think very important since - unless you believe in reincarnation, or are a cat - you do only live once.

But societal expectations are of course constantly a huge influence, on everyone, at the conscious and subconscious levels. I think a lot of what we believe we want is instilled in us by others. What we believe is "me" is actually inextricable from all our influences growing up. Say you like Spiderman. Why do you like Spiderman? You wouldn't like him if you hadn't seen those Spiderman movies, and you probably wouldn't have seen those movies if your parents hadn't bought them or you hadn't had friends who wanted to see them in the cinema.

I could be coming at it from the wrong angle, of course. It's a fascinating, deep topic.

No i think its very important, we do have a lot of things presented and pushed onto us by the media, so it can be confusing to work out what we 'really' like or want, it could even be taken as far as our gender roles in society or our identity.

we're constantly being told what we want or whats best for us, it can make us miserable.

how many times do we go to make a decision, and then spend time wondering how others will react to it, rather than focusing on how we will, or what it will do for us.

Ah. This still isn't it, but it's closer to the one I wanted:



(and I think you'll like it!)

[I think PR will like the image at 3:05, though I have NO idea how it got there. ]

I didnt listen to it all as the background noise was irritating, but yes i get what he's saying

we want to be loved, but we usually only receive conditional love, we're only loved if we do this or we do that, be a certain way, study hard, be helpful, brave etc

so we just end up making choices and decisions that will please others more than they please ourselves

we get that certain job, or into that certain Uni because it makes someone important to us happy

we stay away from that guy/girl, because it would upset others and they know whats best for us

we agree and placate to win approval.

so it gets confusing, because when we stop and think about what we want or where we want to go in life, its like there's a load of other voices in our heads so to speak.

dont get me wrong, its fine to be considerate of others, and not deliberately hurt them etc, but should we really shape our lives around other peoples wants?

And the funny thing is, are they really the other people's wants in the first place? You get a Droste effect happening... your parents may want you to do X or Y or Z because they themselves have been programmed by their parents to think X and Y and Z are useful, and *their* parents in their own time had programmed *them* to believe this... and so on.



I've found you a transcript of relevant Alan Watts, so no noise (actually unfortunately it isn't as relevant to what you're saying as the second video, but it's still about our image about ourselves)

******

Now is far as I can see, the basic mistake is that we’ve invented this wonderful system of language and calculation and that it is at once too simple to deal with the complexity of the world, and also we are liable to confuse that system of symbols with the world itself, just as say we confuse money with wealth. A lot of people are in business to make money itself, when they make the money they don’t know what to do with it. And so in the same way, we confuse happiness with status, and we confuse ourselves as living organisms, which are one with this whole universe, with something we call our personality. Now what is our personality? Our personality is what we call our image. Our image of ourselves, and also our thought of ourselves, our idea of ourselves. This is the person. In order words, what people meet and understand, and what I understand as Alan Watts is a big act, which is not really me. Because in the image of Alan Watts, there are not all my unconscious processes, both psychological and physical, The construction of my brain is not contained in the concept Alan Watts. And the concept Alan Watts does not contain the inseparable relationship with all the rest of the universe. And therefore that concept is a fraud!

When it’s mistaken for the real me, there’s a confusion because if someone says Alan Watts, do something about it! The concept Alan Watts can’t do anything! In other words, because it’s only a concept, you can’t make it lift a weight. Just as three is a concept, you can’t make plain three do anything. Just as you can’t wrap up all parcels with the equator – it’s a useful imaginary line but it can’t do anything. Personality or ego to really do something. WE think it really exists, and I’ll tell you why we think it exists. What happens if I were to say to you, now look hard at the television screen, really look at it! What do you do instead of watching it in the ordinary way. What do you do? Notice that you tighten muscles all around here, that you frown a little, you clench your teeth perhaps. What has that got to do with seeing anything clearly? Absolutely nothing to do with it. Same thing when you listen, Catch everything that’s said, and you start tightening up around your ears. That has nothing to do with hearing clearly.

From the moment when we were little children, teachers in class screamed at us, Pay Attention! Either to see or hear more clearly, to concentrate, or to will something, which is supposed to be difficult to do. And that constitutes a habitual tension over the whole body, which is .. That feeling of unnecessary tension is at it were the material on which we fashion this concept of I. We hang it on to that feeling. That concept is not us, the feeling of tension completely phony. It has nothing to do with success, or seeing, or hearing, or acting. So we get the marriage of an illusion with a falsehood, and that which we call ourselves. No wonder we feel cut off from everything, alienated, frightened of death. What has to happen is that we have to come back to a saying, view of our own life, which is the way we really are: an organism functioning in terms of the whole environment, with the whole environment, instead of this whole separate personality. You can’t change human nature over night. You’re asking us to give up the ego, and that’s the most difficult of all things to do. Actually, it isn’t, because the ego doesn’t exist. But of course if you try to give up your ego with your ego, then it will take you to the end of time. Because this is the point: you can’t transform yourself. You can’t make yourself sane, you can’t make yourself loving, you can’t make yourself unselfish. And yet it’s absolutely necessary that we be that way. It’s absolutely necessary if we are going to hand over the direction of nature to nature, which is what it comes to. It’s absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves, and it can’t be done. Not by anything that we call doing it, acting it, willing, or even just accepting things. You can’t do it. Why? Because you don’t really exist as that separate ego or personality. It’s just an idea, based on a phony feeling.

So when it comes down to it, it’s shocking news for us, for the human race, for our pride. You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world, and no wonder you’re in trouble. So you can’t do anything, so you can’t transform yourself. And what can you do? What happens then, if you actually realize you’ve come to a dead end? And the human race has come to a dead end, in my opinion. What then? Commit suicide? Or is there something else? What happens when you just wait, there’s nothing you can do. You watch. And all you see is what goes on that is happening of itself. You’re breathing, the wind is blowing, the trees are waving, your blood is circulating, your nerves are tingling. It’s all going on by itself.

That’s you, that’s the real you! The you that goes on itself. It’s not the symbol, it’s not the person. It’s you that’s happening, as when you breathe. Yes, you can get the feeling by shoving your breath, but your breath goes on, day in, day out without you even thinking about it. The same way your brain is functioning, without you forcing it. So when you come to a dead end, and we are individually, socially now, in 1971, at a dead end. This is the moment in which it is said man’s extremity God’s opportunity. We have to stop, we find a world that is happening rather than being done, being shoved. And that happening, as distinct from doing, is our fundamental self. And our fundamental self is not something just inside the skin, it’s everything around us with which we connect. When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there, you’re looking at you. I’m not going to say what we should do from then on, but simply that before we think of doing anything in this critical situation, we realize the completely illusory nature of the beings that we think we are, and get back again to the beings that we really are, which includes all this. Outside world, no longer left outside.

Great Transcript thank you

Yes the chances are our parents teachers, any significant others arent really passing on their own beliefs and values, just re-cycled ones from their own signficant others and so on

it reminds me of a film i watched last night Mona Lisa Smile, Julia Roberts played a teacher in the 1950s at a finishing school disguised as a college, and it just portrayed her struggle with the female students to reach their own full potential and go out into the world and do what they wanted to do, to challenge their way of thinking.... which was hard as their belief was they were born to do be housewives and carry on the tradition of being the best housewife. She was very unpopular throughout the film right until the end.

I saw that movie when it came out.

I'm very much that sort of person, I've always been the odd one out. Wandering around and stubbornly (also placidly) sticking to my own beliefs and interests, no matter how different they were to those of others.

Mind you, on this forum I do tend to "adapt" a bit to others... I may have posted at least one music video of music I don't actually like. But then I believe it will entertain others, and at some level it entertains me too...

lol

are you adapting or just being 'open to experience'?

Hm, I'm not adapting essentially, though I've come a long way from the little girl who used to wait for her mum outside shops because of the pop music inside (I really, truly couldn't bear pop music as a kid... it was a horror for me to listen to Elvis singing "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas" every year because my dad likes it )...  but I am "playing with" different ways of expressing myself, even if it's through the lyrics of a music video. I don't "like" any of this stuff, but I can now, on some level at least appreciate it...*some* of it.

Though 60s pop I actually am starting to like, in a sort of way. Which from me is very very high praise for pop music.



I think we tend to learn to "hone in" on other people's wavelengths; not simply in order to please them (though that too of course), but in order to be able to communicate better.

Unrelated, but this cracked me up: Alan Watts, in a lecture he gave in the '60s or '70s:

"What is wrong with our culture: You rush home to get to...an electronic reproduction of life. You can’t touch it, it doesn’t smell, and it has no taste."

And that was long before Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube...

Alan Watts makes a very good point!

He is a man of many good points.

This is one of my favourite quotes.