Leo Gura

All a hero really is, is someone who, when faced with the choice between ego and Truth, chooses Truth, breaking loyalty with ego. The hero annihilates himself, recognizing that he is the only evil there is. All external battles are just metaphors for enlightenment. In conquering himself, the hero has conquered all evil and its at peace. Now he is the wise old man guiding others in the same process he underwent. This, in a nutshell, is all of human life. Except most people never even begin the journey. The reason hero's are admired, is because they give us a glimpse of how great we ourselves could be if we would only muster the courage to choose Truth over ego. The reason we like to celebrate hero's is because it gives us a false hope that they can do it for us.

@Staples Right, because the true Self is omnipresent. There is no gap between Nothingness and perception. They are infinitely close. Which is why it's so challenging to discriminate the Nothingness from perception.

Good, make it fuel towards liberation.

@Loreena When you cease playing games yourself, you will -- at that very moment -- understand why others prefer to keep playing.

You're being complacent. Sounds like you have an expectation that following your passion will be effortless. Like some sort of fairytale adventure. It won't! Nope, nope, nope. You'll have to work yourself to the bone for it. Blood, tears, and thousands of hours of grueling labor are the cover charge for passionate conscious living. While all your friends are off partying, having sex, doing drugs, watching Netflix, playing video games, Twittering away, etc. -- You will have to be down in the dungeon working, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. You have been so intoxicated by society you don't even know it yet. The escape velocity for mediocrity is very high. What did you think all that intoxication would do to you? You're a junkie plain and simple. All you know how to do is score junk. If you want to turn the situation around, that's no small feat. It will take everything you've got.

Where did you get this silly idea? YOU project that Hitler was evil. YOU! YOU! YOU! It's all you buddy. Objectively speaking, Hitler was no more evil than a daffodil standing in a meadow. The only difference is that your mind happens to prefer one over the other. And how fickle the mind is. It could have easily settled on the opposite side of that issue, as it did in tens of millions of cases. Watch out for your judgments and projections. God did not disagree with Hitler. God WAS Hitler! God agrees with everything 100%. That's is God's infinite love. BTW, you are Hitler. The only hatred there is, is self-hatred. The only love there is, is self-love. Hatred is just unconscious love.

How can you ever not be touching base with consciousness? It's all there ever is! Depending on what you mean by "mind", mind can be thought of as a structure found within conscious, or mind could just be a concept and not exist at all. The question of past lives is complicated. Best to directly experience it rather than theorize about it.

The appearance of divisions is the Creation. Creation is an illusion of distinctions. Without distinction, there cannot be any form. If everything is indistinct it is formless or non-existent in your eyes, because you hold the distinction of existence/non-existent as important. We could say that you both create and fill your own demand. Notice how a zip file is both is ONE and MANY files simultaneously. Now imagine if you stopped making the distinction -- or attaching any importance -- between existence and non-existence....

It would be no different than regular people. Some would care about it a lot and want to save, others would not. It's not going to be of the kind of black-and-white importance that it is for regular folks who like to get morally outraged. Although, keep in mind, that regular folks -- the ones who like to get morally outraged -- are the ones who stood by and watched concentration camps happen. So make sure you're keeping it in perspective. An enlightened person knows it's not up to them what happens. You have no personal say in how the universe unfolds. It's not even up to you to decide if you will care or not. Let alone control how mass social systems function to commit atrocities. And in fighting the atrocity, you commit more atrocity. So who's to say... The whole thing is a game.

A) Because you're not bothering to study the matter closely. There are tons of famous disciples from even more famous sages. B) Because most disciples don't have the celebrity status of the sages, so of course you won't hear about them as much. C) Why would a disciple who's not interested in teaching on a mass scale become well-known? D) Most disciples are followers, not leaders, and are not as hardcore, passionate, talented, or experienced as their leaders. You're really talking about a marketing issue.

That's right. Which is why Jesus was willing to get nailed to a cross. You're still thinking about this from a position of ego and self-survival. Unconditional love means you don't care if you die for it. It's not going to make sense until you actually experience unconditional love.

That's what enlightenment means: you were never born, and you can never die.

@TeamBills Death is an illusion. Your job is to understand that.

@jse You just need a sled and you're ready to ride

Pretty obvious that that's karma from that last 50 years of unconscious actions and ideologies of the USA and the Arab world. When people behave in egotistical ways, they get egotistical results. It would be silly to kick a hornets nest and then exclaim in surprise, "Why, why, oh why???!!!" when you get stung.

@EmilyCook26 You're addicted to WAY more than just those things. Those are super-obvious addictions. All your characteristic ways of thinking, believing, doing, and emoting are basically addictions. Not to even mention other obvious addictions like: sugar, fat, salt, alcohol, caffeine, sex, gossip, news, entertainment, phone, internet, multitasking, etc, etc.

Please refrain from topics about political events on this forum. We're here to focus on SELF-growth.

Locking this thread because of the recent up-tick in politically-related outrage threads on here. Please keep this forum focused on self-actualization, not gossip about politics or terrorism.

Consciousness and a well-rounded education into the key humanistic fields solves the problem. You don't need to be an expert in every science. But you do need to be an expert in being human, and you need to be conscious.

One of the problems with science is it's hyper-compartmentalization. When you put the blinders on and only focus on one narrow thing you lose sight of the larger picture, which leads to disaster. It is not safe to make assumptions such as, "Oh well... I'll just focus on making this one scientific breakthrough to win my Nobel prize and if someone ends up using it to destroy the world, that's not my problem. As a scientist, my only duty is making valid discoveries." That is the way of unconsciousness.

@Lenny The inquiry creates openmindedness. Just do it. There is no shortcut for the work. You can't will your way into the truth. You have do the deconstruction work.

@Will Bigger There's a bigger picture at work though. Science is not merely a human invention for our own happiness and gratification. Science is an outgrowth of the evolution of the universe. So you're not going to stop it. It needs to continue to evolve. The universe is seeking to understand itself through humans, through science, and other means. The only way to put this genie back in the bottle would be to wipe the entire human species. If, 100 years from now, science develops a foolproof technology for enlightenment, it could redeem itself big-time. Science will have to drop the naive realist paradigm pretty soon, so it will start to converge with spirituality at some point. If we can just keep our shit together for a few hundred more years and not melt down the planet or let corporations take everything over, things should look very promising.

Depends on your point of view. Primates have been evolving for over 5 million years. Does that mean Homo Sapiens are "better than" Neanderthals? What is better, a chicken or a pterodactyl? Both are highly optimized forms. Is Windows 10 better than Windows '95? Not in any absolute sense. Both are perfect at the being level. But there are differences in optimization at the relative level.

You're holding perfection as in opposition to evolution. But that's a false choice. It's both. A jagged rock is as perfect as a smooth pebble. But there is also optimization happening.