Leo Gura

Maybe Nonduality also includes ego, anger, and suffering. You can be enlightened and still be angry, or act egotistically, or suffer. What changes is your awareness of these things. Suffering ends when you are willing to suffer anything. That doesn't necessarily mean the feeling of suffering goes away. You just stop resisting, stop wanting to change it. The difference is this: Person A is suffering and wants to stop the suffering. Which in a paradoxical way prolongs the suffering. Person B is suffering and doesn't care. Which in a paradoxical way ends the suffering. Happiness is just total acceptance of whatever is happening NOW, no matter how terrible is it. Imagine that someone is sawing off your leg, and you are like, "Okay, cool. So be it. I will enjoy this." << That is true happiness. You don't resist it. Lol, sure. It even includes the giraffe you have in your head

Of course Infinity has ego and it is embodied. That's what you are! Otherwise, how could these things appear? Whatever is appearing, that's what Infinity is manifesting as. The turd in your toilet is Infinity. Infinity is YOU! Not just the divine you, but all the stupid, unconscious you. Hitler was Infinity Trump is Infinity Infinity is embodied as every possible thing. And it is identical to ego. Ego vs non-ego is just another duality! Embodied vs disembodied is just another duality!

The book explains all this.

If you're still confused about all this, I would refer you to the work of David Loy. He reconciles all the apparant differences between Buddhism and Vedanta, etc. in his books and papers in a rigorous scholarly manner. See my book list for specific recommendations.

Hehehe... It's not clear to you because you haven't experienced the Absolute. No-self is just one facet of the Absolute. No-self is identical to Absolute Infinity and Emptiness. Infinity and Nothingness are identical. And of course there is no self, there is only the Infinite Self, which is Nothing, and Everything. You are God. God is Nothing. The end. There's no confusion here at all if you actually experience the Absolute fully. Buddhism = Vedanta = Yoga = Christianity = Islam = Judaism = Quantum Mechanics There is nothing to reconcile when your understanding is totally holistic and inclusive.

You are the one arguing semantics. It's perfectly clear that the Buddha was teaching Absolute Infinity. That's all there is. Absolute Infinity is Brahman. Atman = Brahman. Form is emptiness, Emptiness is identical to form. The reason you're getting confused is because total nonduality is unspeakable, unthinking, and incommunicable. To talk about it, you have to make distinctions like dual vs nondual, atman vs brahman, consciousness vs unconsciousness, form vs emptiness, self vs no-self, x vs y, this vs that, right vs wrong, true vs false, etc. But all of that is duality! You are getting tangled up in relative distinctions and stylistic differences between different mystical schools. Drop that and see the commonality, not the petty differences.

Actually, no. In that video the word "consciousness" is being used slightly differently. You have to understand that the word "consciousness" is a very loaded word. Sort of like the word "God". It can mean different things in different contexts to different people. Your understanding of this word will evolve and deepen significantly over time. Eventually you will come to realize that consciousness is Nothing. In my video about High Consciousness Vs Low Consciousness, I didn't go so deep. There I was using the word in a more conventional sense. I wasn't talking about Absolute Consciousness there.

People generally misunderstand what the word "consciousness" means. Consciousness is not mental activity. Consciousness is Nothingness. It is the "substance" of everything. This confusion happens because of the subtle assumptions of the materialist paradigm. Absolute Consciousness is what Buddha taught. It does not depend on the sense organs. The stuff that depends on the sense organs would best be called perception or experience. Yes, perception and experience is impermanent. Don't confuse consciousness with thinking or experiencing.

@Samra God YES! We need education reform so bad. These test-based systems are terrible. It's like a form of child abuse.

Name one perspective which is complete, encompassing everything there is? Other than the Absolute (which is a non-perspective). You will notice, there is truth to be found in almost every perspective. It will be a partial truth, but some truth nonetheless. For example, look at the world from Hitler's perspective and see what truth you can find there. There will be some. Don't think of perspective as an individual belief like, "The sky is red." Perspective is much bigger than one true/false belief. Perspective is more like a worldview or a philosophy. Stage Blue is like typical conservative American thinking: clear right/wrong, absolute good/bad, Christian morality, Bible is true, God is an authoritarian father figure, society has rigid rules an hierarchy which must be obeyed rather than innovated upon. Go to church, pray, serve in the military, defend the Constitution, be nice to your parents, don't have sex before marriage, gays are going to hell, Islam is wrong, never do drugs, never question your elders, never break the rules, rise up the power hierarchy by following the rules, respect your superiors, know your place in the social order, sacrifice for your tribe, be loyal, be a patriot, salute the flag, etc.

Everyone is shaping society towards more unity, basically. Even those who fight against unity, end up creating more unity. Like Trump for example. His attempts will fail and more unity will result in the long-run. Hitler ended up unifying Europe. The opposite of what his ego wanted. All boundaries are ultimately unsustainable. You cannot create a tribe and have it survive. That is ego. It will eventually die. What globalism is showing is the unsustainability of artificial tribal boundaries. And nationalism is the ego's reaction against that. It works just like Spiral Dynamics. The pendulum swings from ego to the collective, and back and forth as it moves up the spiral towards greater unity. What is Stage Turquoise? Global, universal consciousness. That is where we are headed in the very long run. In the short run, there will be ups and downs and ego backlashes. Trump is a collective ego backlash, trying to maintain the homeostasis of the status quo. The reason Trump voters are nostalgic for the past is because they are not evolving fast enough with the rapidly accelerating change of society. But evolution must proceed. You cannot stop evolution from happening. Rather than cling to the past, you've got to evolve. But ego hates to evolve, so it does the backlash. But in the end the ego always loses and evolution always wins. Selflessness triumphs over selfishness. Because the truth is on selflessness' side.

@StephenK The point is, nobody controls these systems. You could be the richest most powerful dictator on the planet, and you will still not succeed in controlling society. It is totally beyond you. In fact, the more you try to control it, the more likely the system is to slap you upside the head. Dictators don't live very long. Just look at what happens to people like Hitler. Emperors have been trying to control society for thousands of years, and it never really works. All attempts to control it fail. It controls you more than you control it. The water molecule does not control the flow of the river. The river is shaped by a much higher intelligence. Life is constantly moving in the direction of tighter integration, higher organization, and greater unity at the cost of individuality. Unity is bootstrapping itself. You are but a pawn in its game.

Memory is irrelevant at that point. You become it.. It feels like your mind just melts into the universe. The coolest feeling.

@starsofclay You're experiencing it as God right now. Sadly, you just don't recognize it because you take your present experience totally for granted. God is not somewhere else. The one looking through your eyes, is God, not you. The ego has co-opted what has always belonged to God. So it's looking for God somewhere else, when really God is right there if ego would just stop being ego. How to get rid of ego? Very intense spiritual practice: meditation, self-inquiry, yoga, concentration, etc. Or psychedelics for a fast glimpse.

You don't need to cross your eyes, lol.

Almost as silly as spending $1000 on a TV

You were free to dream up ice cream in your dreams last night. Why didn't you?

Societies are NOT man-made systems. They are self-driving, self-evolving organisms. You could not stop globalism with World War III. Higher levels of organization are going to happen whether you like it or not.

Some Stephen Hawking quotes to ponder:

Truth is an acquired taste

No! What you're failing to understand is this: If everything were possible right now, that would entail the possibilty that you are sitting in a specific room, reading this specific sentence, only holding your specific beliefs, on the planet Earth, in your specific city, in this specific universe, with these specific physical laws, where you cannot read people's minds, nor jump through walls, nor are you Stephen Hawking, and your iPad is square rather than triangular, and the sky is blue but not red or any other color. Infinity does NOT mean that the sky will be rainbow colored! Infinity means it will be blue for you right now. Unlimited means: every limit possible! Infinity includes every single individual number: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Infinity is not a blurring together of all the numbers into a muddled mess, as you imagine. Infinity even includes the case of you sitting here and misunderstanding infinity and arguing nonsense.

Of course concepts are things. A photo of Santa Claus is a real object. It's just not Santa Claus. The map is not the territory, but a map is still part of the territory. What you are talking about here is becoming conscious of what a symbol is. I have an important video about this topic: Grasping The Illusory Nature Of Thought.

Now I feel bad for ripping on materialists Let's hope he realized Infinity in the very end.

@Greatnestwithin I don't use any bench. I showed you on my blog what I use.

There are also high-tech options like this: https://throneofzen.com/products/alexia-meditation-seat-fabric-sand