Leo Gura

@Socrates I said what I said because I'm reading between the lines of what you're writing. The very fact that you're writing it and thinking in this way reveals a lot. You're underestimating how powerful these "mere words" and "mere paradigms" are for you. They shape your reality utterly. This is no mere philosophy. Your very life is wed to these worldviews, words, and paradigms. So watch out. Your actions and emotions stem from your worldview. So saying the Buddhist worldview doesn't matter, what matters is their actions, is a big trap. Worldview matters way more than actions. Because it creations all actions. Your reasoning here keeps taking many things for granted. You use concepts like "right/wrong", "good/evil", "creating an ideal world", "problems", etc. The reason you're struggling here is because you're still looking at life from the perspective of how it can best serve you. So you're pursuing self-agenda, not Truth. Which is the root of all the "evil" you're trying to eradicate. In trying to eradicate it, you create it. "How am I going to make accurate decisions" << Just as a thought exercise, imagine for a moment that you're NOT. Imagine that the Truth will kill you. And yet you pursue it happily any way, just because. Also, just for a moment, imagine that the world is perfect exactly as it is. So what now? What do you do in a perfect world? Who says the world is imperfect? Could it be just your monkey mind? For whom is the world imperfect? For YOU? And what if there is no you? After all, try as you might, you are unable to find what you are.

@Revolutionary Think I have no idea. You're asking a question about social science. But all of this is a distraction. See? Seek out consciousness and Truth for yourself. Forget about trying to manipulate reality for now. You've been manipulating your whole life and look where it's gotten you. The whole trick here is STOP focusing on agenda and manipulation. You're not going to solve your life problems through more manipulation. It's like you keep pouring gasoline on a small kitchen fire by telling yourself, "But we really need to put out this fire, it's so bad!" And then you wonder, "Why is whole world on fire?" Take your own psychology, multiply it by 7 billion, and now you see where the evil came from.

@Revolutionary Think You need to clearly distinguish here between what's reality, and what's agenda. The entire first half of your comment is concerned with agenda. In other words: how do we manipulate reality to function in ways that are favorable to humans at large. This is has nothing to do with reality or Truth. In fact, the situation you've set up is going to lead to the following: Let's invention bunch of bullshit which will allow us to manipulate reality into behaving the way we want. And so we do. We create inventions like morality, ethics, philosophy, justice, liberty, government, taxation, law, money, science, language, etc. All good stuff. But it has nothing to do with Truth, and is in fact the OPPOSITE of Truth. All this because you set up the whole issue in a way where you're asking how to manipulate ourselves away from reality. Now you might say, "Ah, but Leo, isn't what's most important is to create a good life for human beings? So what's wrong with manipulation?" But there's the rub. In manipulating reality, you broke the cardinal spiritual law. You've abandoned Truth. So now you have no compass. So now what's to stop you from constructing whatever the hell you want to manipulate reality to serve your ego? Well... nothing. And so what results in practice is a conceptually constructed playground of the ego. And to top it all off -- to secure this house of cards -- the final master stroke is to conveniently forget that you constructed the whole damn thing. "But Leo! I didn't construct it!!! This is just how reality is." And now you're fucked. Now you've created all the evil in the world which you wanted to avoid with your manipulations. Now you have become the slave of your own entangled mind. And you don't even know it yet. Notice how easily your manipulations backfire and produce the VERY thing you were using them to avoid. What is keeping a dog from biting through your throat? By your logic, we need to teach all dogs a moral code, otherwise they might hurt somebody. Yes, if your top priority is your self-agenda, then you will do all sorts of silly things to manipulate Truth. You will lie, cheat, steal, kill, and confabulate. When you really dedicate yourself to Truth, the problem of morality and ethics is instantly solved. Nothing wrong with having a justice system. So long as you understand it's a set of rules created by humans to preserve order. The rules are neither good nor bad, neither just nor unjust. They are rules. Like rules in a game of Monopoly. What stops the powerful from abusing the weak? Nothing. Just thousands of years of war and the fruits of those wars which have resulted in relative peace. All the morals and rules you think are holding back the barbarians at the gates where actually settled years ago through bloody hand to hand combat. The Barbarians have already sacked Rome. Those rules are simply the current evolutionary point of the powerful. The powerful set the rules. But power is a tricky thing. Power isn't just military power. The "weak" are often more powerful than the powerful. Tens of millions of African Americans lobbying for civil liberties is more powerful than generations of Southern racism and segregation. Power is whatever prevails. And consciousness always prevails in the long term. Consciousness is the key to everything. Because it is everything.

@Socrates The difficulty you're facing with this whole good vs evil topic is that you're still stuck at the level of believing in good and evil. As if these things were real. You call my explanations and Buddhist positions arm chair philosophy, but that's not the case at all. It's actually the opposite. Our positions are very pragmatic. The problem is that you're not taking them seriously. You don't yet have sufficient experience with them, or sufficiently high awareness, to feel the profound effect of walking through the world and seeing no good and no evil. What we're talking about here is not merely ignoring evil. We're talking about realizing that evil is something YOUR mind is constructing, and it's causing you suffering. You have to become conscious of this. ACTUALLY conscious of it, not hear me say it. You have to see HOW your mind is creating it. Your worries about Buddhists tolerating "evil" is still coming from the good vs evil paradigm, do you see? They don't tolerate evil, they don't do nothing about evil, rather they see that evil is unreal. Now, you might say, "But that means bad people will do bad things. What about the kids in Africa?!" Well, we're directly addressing that issue here. We're not ignoring it. The "evil" in Africa is the result of minds not being conscious of how they construct notions like good vs evil. The most important solution there is not to lock up criminals, but to make people more conscious. And that starts with yourself. Once you get your own mind sorted out, many other things get automatically fixed. And those things which require some external action, there's no problem. When you are fully conscious of how your mind works, helping the world in external ways will be easy and natural. Notice that your current paradigm of good vs evil is NOT helping kids in Africa. It's just riling your emotions up. Judgment is a very deep soft addiction which saps you of energy you could be using to help the world in a loving way. And being loving does not mean you cannot kill thieves, rapists, and war criminals. Notice a lion kills a gazelle without calling it evil. No problem. Believe it or not, the reason all this sounds impractical is simply because it's an advance teaching which requires much consciousness to grasp. It's not an intellectual teaching the way you're currently holding it. You are actually the one who's making it into armchair philosophy. And I agree, if you hold it like that, it is just wishful thinking. But if you keep practicing consciousness work, and have some deep existential-level insights, you'll start to see just how practical this teaching was all along. Yeah, from an ordinary, mainstream level of consciousness is sounds like armchair philosophy. But try actually not judging people for 1 week and feel the profound difference it makes to your life. Or try to become directly conscious that all language is a construction. Oh man! Once you get a taste of that, it will totally change how you see life

@Dan Arnautu Why do you need a degree at all? If your LP is music and nonduality, why waste time? Maybe your higher self is telling you all this philosophy business isn't worth your time.

Technically yes. But once you have some direct experiences of non-conceptualized consciousness, you'll get it. Human babies do not have concepts such as good/evil. At all! They must learn it. They don't even have a concept of self/other until about age 2.5 Try thinking back to when you were a baby. When you start to a hit on how the mind constructs all these things, then you see the world in a whole new light. And moralistic speeches like Gary's look as absurd as the meat-eater's he's criticizing. Both militant vegans and meat-eaters are using their minds to rationalize their positions without being conscious of what they're really doing. Yes, the vegans are more ecological and kill less animals. The argument for veganism shouldn't be: killing animals is evil, you are a Nazi murderer. It should be: in most cases eating animals is unecological, lazy, selfish, and unconscious.

@Dan Arnautu Yes, good... you've discovered that 95% of Western philosophy is a circle jerk. Most people studying philosophy never realize that, so consider yourself lucky. You've dodged a huge bullet. You could change majors, or be more selective about the classes you take. There are some good philosophy teachers and classes. You could also still pass all the test and essays by playing the skeptic philosophy. Take all your know about how conceptualizing works, and apply it to your critiques of all those European philosophers. Tear them a new corn hole Philosophy is one of the easiest majors and it's not at all difficult to ace all the classes. Logic is trickier. Less room for bullshitting your way out of logic. But also don't loose sight of the big picture! Your main objective is not to get a college degree. Your main objective is to pursue Truth, to self-actualize, to grow your consciousness. Since philosophy is such an easy major, you should be acing all the tests and investing your free time in self-education, pursuing non-duality, etc.

What's interesting about Gary Yourofsky's reasoning in that video is that it's false. Animals don't conceptualize. So they do NOT see humans as devils or evil. That's his projection onto animals. Such notions do not exist at all for animal minds. Of course that doesn't mean humans are behaving properly. But the problem with his approach is that it then breeds dogma and crusading against evil, which is the classic trap of trying to fight evil with evil, which doesn't work. It creates its own problems. Loving the evil to death is the better option. If a position one holds makes one angry, then that right there is all the proof one needs that it's spiritually backwards. Wishing evil things to happen to evil people is part of the deeper problem. So he undermines his own message. But good for him that he's raising awareness around the issue. Sometimes you gotta use low consciousness to change even lower consciousness. And that's all reality is doing in the end, bootstrapping higher levels of consciousness. It's often an ugly process.

Could you list which topics and grey areas you mean? That would be very helpful.

That's generally right, although there's no point really in achieving anything or solving any "problems". Those mostly stem from lack of awareness that this is a game.

What's the difference? If you've got big problems and fears, hopefully you're making an effort to actualize out of them. And then you get stuck. And then you post your problem here.

Trump is at stage Neon Safety Cone

That's basically it. Although there is God, and then there is OH MY FUCKING GOD! And then there is...

@Key Elements If the Truth is what you seek, you don't even need a life purpose. The Truth is ever-present. It's right there. Strictly-speaking it requires nothing. In practice though, it helps to have a sense of focus and direction, so you're not going in circles.

How you gonna do that at gun point? And of course stage Blue must pass through stage Orange. So it was inevitable. That's what the terrorists fail to understand. The Middle East has to pass through stage Orange before it can return to true spirituality. Fundamentalist militant Islam is not sustainable in the long run because people need to go from Blue to Orange.

@jse No can do, due to it's legal status and short supply. The closest thing to that you'll find is Yopo snuffing in South America or Dr. Octavio Rettig in Mexico.

@Barna Is that a real concern for you, or merely a theoretical one?

@Annetta Good, but please elaborate a bit more on each point.

@Russell Parr No

@Revolutionary Think I doubt you even need an offiline portfolio these days. I'd put all my energy into a short but polished and powerful online portfolio. Go quality over quantity. And have a target audience in mind.

@LifeLife Take ownership of the problem and commit to solving it without even knowing how you'll do it yet. That's step #1. I guess step #0 is convincing yourself that you can change. And step #2 would be doing lots of deep research on your specific issue to brainstorm possible lines of solution. You don't need a fancy expensive shrink. All psychological problems you can fix yourself. In fact, it's the best and fastest way. With contemplation, journaling, reading, meditation, self-inquiry, and a plan for increased exposure to social situations, you should be able to cure yourself of that completely with time. Start with contemplating: Why do I feel a need to create society anxiety? No bullshit... what's the bottom line? Why are you doing it?

Where is it written that aspiring actors must work minimum wage jobs, for ten years? What nonsense! Arnold Schwarzenegger was a millionaire before he got his first acting job. So yeah... find better role-models. Stop thinking inside the box. Be much more creative.

Great! Sounds just like how it's supposed to. Keep staying true to that muse and working your butt off.

@carlos flores They kept bad neighbors America's principle export is materialism. The USA is like a drunk uncle who keeps coming around to lure you into drinking with him. If you don't find a way to block him out, eventually he will convince you to have just one drink. Then just one more. Just one more. Just one more. Just one more... What's really interesting is that Japan and China were forced to open their boarders for international trade at gun point, by military occupation. The biggest thing the USA wanted from Japan upon invading was to infect them with materialism. Same thing with the Middle East, which is why many terrorists are pissed off at us. We've committed cultural genocide. Debauchery at gunpoint. Materialism must Trump all! Damn the consequences.

@JustinS Lol, that's badass. But don't do that at home. Yopo snuff is very weak compared to pure 5-meo so they need to blast grams of that stuff up there. Thank God for modern chemistry.