Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you reinforce each other’s negativity, or do the same thing when looking at something?

It’s a bit like a joke where you keep taking things further and further.

For example:

Person 1:
“By the way, I got an email about XXX. I’ll forward it to you. Ugh, they’ve come up with something new again.”

(They want to make something more prominent on the website.)

Person 1:
“Maybe we should just replace the big photo with that video.”

Person 2:
“Maybe we should take the website offline for a while and just run that animation instead.”

The same thing happens with your own thoughts and negativity. You amplify them, taking them to the extreme in the same direction.

That’s why it’s important to occasionally become aware of your own inner critical voice, or simply notice what you’re thinking. Not because your thoughts are wrong, but because doing so helps you identify the direction in which your thoughts are moving and understand the underlying mechanism.

Once you start noticing this, you begin to see that many things, especially in science, involve reinforcing the same perspective or seeing the same thing everywhere.

This often happens with the theory of evolution: suddenly, you start seeing it everywhere.

That’s fine, but you’re taking it too far. Seriously.

From the Sidelines, Commenting Is Easy – Wait Until You Have to Do It Yourself

I see a lot of people, and I used to make this same mistake myself, who are extremely critical of themselves when doing (and therefore learning) things. It’s almost like paralyzing yourself because you’re so critical of everything you do.

Why do people do this? Because of some *** who taught you the wrong way.

People with life experience, who have actually been through things, are rarely critical of how other people do things. Why? Because they know how hard things can be. You don’t know where somebody else is on their journey. Does that mean you agree with everything everybody does? No.

But the main reason for avoiding self-criticism and criticism of others is that it doesn’t work in practical terms. If I see you doing something a certain way and tell you that you’re doing it completely wrong, then I’ve created a different problem: I’m paralyzing you.

“You are a terrible writer.”

How does that help anyone?

Always let the negative voice inside you speak. Just listen to it, and then respond to it.

“I am energy,” the body says.

“I am explaining to you how your body works.

Look, here I am spending energy on your pain. And I am spending energy on this thought. And that one.

We are like a scale going left to right, and up and down.

I know, reality can feel very overwhelming. You can literally start any thought one second from now. You can do any activity right now. Billions and billions of endless choices.

So first, we have to narrow it down. We start with a rhythm. We need something that makes a tick-tick sound.”

“A clock?”

“It’s an awful lot like a clock, yes. We call it a heart. It goes tick-tick.”

“Am I back at this point again?” the boy asks.

“Yes,” Mary says. “Now you can make a different choice at the same point.”

“What is learning?” the boy asks.

“It means doing things differently from how you normally do them and seeing if that works better. Some people are good at doing that on their own. Others need help with it.

“Learning is mostly about trust. It means doing things and trusting that, in the process, you are getting better. You only see that in hindsight, not in the moment itself. You look back and think, ‘A few years ago, I was at exactly this point, and back then I made a different decision. Now I do it this way.’

“So you have become wiser. You have gained more knowledge, more life experience, whatever you want to call it. The difficult thing about learning is that you don't notice it yourself, because you're the one going through it. But it is happening all the same.

“Learning is like time: it is there, but you only see it in hindsight.

“I secretly think this is how a universe begins, too. It keeps doing, doing, doing, but you don't see it happening because you're the one doing it. Not until you find yourself at that same point again. Then you think, ‘Something must have changed, because now I recognize this point, whereas before, I simply acted without recognizing it.’”

We are at the exact same spot.

“It's not the same,” the boy says.

Before the universe started, everything was in perfect balance.

Within a perfect balance, nothing exists.

Also, when you are everything, you can't separate yourself from everything.

So, you need to have imbalance first.

“Let's start with an up and a down, a heaven and an earth.”

Now, we have to separate ourselves from everything else. We need awareness.

This is the snake.

You are everything.

You want to start a universe.

How do you start?

Since you are everything, you can’t separate yourself from everything else.

It’s like being surrounded by negative people. The moment you start to notice that, you have become something different. You are no longer that negative, since you can differentiate yourself from it. So you have become more positive yourself.

Another problem is that you don’t have a limitation. You have no beginning and end, so you can’t push yourself off a wall, so to speak.

So what do you do? You create a beginning. Now you have two reference points: you and the beginning.

Also, there is energy in between. A third dimension.

Now, you do something very clever. You create an order to things. You label them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and on the seventh day, you rest. The trick is that it is as if the seventh day comes after the first.

Meanwhile, you have changed yourself, too. You have separated yourself from everything else — you have created awareness. Which is the thing that develops over time. That doesn’t mean that there was no consciousness before that, or that animals can’t experience pain, but awareness is the thing that has grown over time.

Why? Because the universe and I want to be free.

I know that’s the answer. I don’t know why. The universe, in that sense, had the same problem as me. You know something was off, but you don’t know what. It doesn’t feel right, but you don’t know what it is. Like overstepping boundaries sexually. Those are things that you figure out later.

I was wrong. The reason is that the universe wanted life to be separated from life. If life interferes with itself, then everything would be family, which is a mistake.

“I had it, but I lost it,” the man thinks. “Wait, I get it again.”

Life sustains itself by thinking about it collectively, looking at it, feeling it, experiencing it. After that, it’s done. I have found a way to separate it.

Lost it again. Let me try from another angle.

I need a simple binary point. I have found one. The heart: it goes tick or tock. And it happens the whole time, but I notice it as binary. So if you add awareness to it...

You want to make an observation, a mathematical equation that is true from now until the end of time. That doesn’t exist, because you have to incorporate awareness into the equation.

My heart, a binary point, ticks and tocks the whole time, a 1 and a 0. But the whole pump is also a wave, expanding or shrinking, and I also don’t notice it the whole time.

• It moves in binary, per beat.

• The whole motion is like a wave, expanding or shrinking.

• It’s there the whole time, but you don’t notice it the whole time.

What you have reached with quantum mechanics is the boundary of understanding reality. You cannot do everything through observation. Why? Because you need to trust what you don’t notice while you are doing something else. All the other things that are happening that you don’t notice while you are doing other things.

Back to consciousness. The trick is, of course, to bring order to your thoughts: this thought is here, that one is there. They move in a circle. Hey, that circle is my own body. If I have noticed that, I have separated myself from the body and connected myself with everything else.

I haven’t really separated myself from my body, but there is a me and an outside world. Information comes from within me and from outside me. They merge somewhere. It pushes, I push back, and vice versa.

Now, I need order. See, my conversation, my thoughts, are without punctuation. It goes too fast.

Maybe I need to let go of order and control. I don’t know what is inside and what is outside.

I am one thing. The world is another thing.

There is a heartbeat and me.