LordFall

I think what you're looking for is self-esteem. You should not worry about people judging you as long as it does not lead to you judging yourself as a result. Six pillars of self-esteem by Nathaniel Branden is a gem on that topic. If you had rock solid self-esteem and people were looking at you strangely on the street or even worse if random people started laughing at you, you wouldn't judge yourself for 1 second. You would either think they are stupid, be really confused or laugh along with them because fuck it life can be funny why not laugh randomly.

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I appreciate you saying that, Joseph. Leo’s emphasis on deep structural thinking and first-principles deconstruction definitely aligns with how my mind approaches reality. Enjoy the stream, curious to hear your takeaways once you finish it!

If this general sentiment was true we would've never had limits on working hours and other regulation for humane and safe working conditions that we have at least here in the west. I do get your point that we should not give them the benefit of the doubt and ensure it's at the core of AI based policy. Our man Bernie along those lines is working to setup a sovereign wealth fund that would make the public own 50% of US AI companies in order to fund services for the masses. I haven't looked precisely into what the bill entails but it's encouraging to see it already being discussed in policy circles. I agree with the general sentiment of your comment but I'll address this specific part. Do you think most humans are capable of striving for agency and ownership? AI tools are out now, how many people do you know that are up to date with them and using agentic solutions now to secure themselves and their communities against this techno-feudalist dystopia? Your concerns are valid but I want to make sure we avoid this communist pitfall that a lot of people fall into when talking about economic egalitarianism. We need to develop a basic safety net to ensure the survival of the general population but from there competent and already rich people will indeed use AI tools to further enrich themselves. I think that's completely fine and should actually be encouraged. We have tools at our disposal to regulate the inequality that will keep existing as a result; wealth taxes are amongst the simplest and most powerful effective measures for that.

That's fair, I'll work on more pleasant delivery. @JoshB I feel like you are still running away from the point I'm making though. Do you really experience your current reality as fully self-defined? Have you managed to set your own rent? If you own your own property then I guess so. What about your relationship to your local government? Do you define its policies or are you still working towards that and just choosing to ignore it at the moment? I find it easy to use the concept of non-duality to soothe our existential angst but lose in the process our relationship to responsibility. When life doesn't go our way which it's not for me all the time, I also find it soothing to remember spiritual principles to ground myself but I also fear it leads me towards complacency and I also see other forum users go towards that path so I find it valuable to point it out to them.

@Natasha Tori Maru That's right. We could call how one feels about their inherent value 'Self-esteem' which is worth studying and I think ideally should love yourself unconditionally but still push yourself to reach your goals to enhance your own quality of life. Where I don't agree with your earlier point on me invalidating people's life choice is that I don't shame people for wanting a life style that differs from mine. I tend to ask difficult questions that sometimes I think hints at people's blindspots but I don't think that constitutes a pathology. For example in the spirituality section I was asking @Cathal how he feels about his sense of responsibility towards mankind while living as a monk. He answered the first one then seemed to avoid the subsequent questions. It could be because I've touched on deep points about life that he's trying his best to avoid or I could've asked my questions in an uncouth manner that he felt didn't warrant a response. Either way I don't think tiptoeing around sensitive issues is an effective way to live one's life so especially on a forum about self-development and deep truth I tend to err towards the side of uncouthness rather than polite pleasantries. My aim in life is finding the best goals to have and the best way to achieve them. I engage on this forum with that core quest in mind.

It's not a personal attack, it's the easiest way to make the point. An ad hominem bypasses the substance of someone's points to attack their character; I specifically attacked his point. If there is no shared reality then there is nothing that can be good or bad, just what is. If someone can be offended by me saying they make bad points then by itself that proves their point wrong. The consequence for living under false coping premises is low life results as reality doesn't seem to reward surface untested opinions compared to things like deep competence and a deep bullet proof understanding of reality.

Good question, it is the fundamental axiom to base a conversation on value around. I think people have some inherent value by virtue of being a life form but not much. For example if we snapped our finger and doubled the world population, our species wouldn't have double the life quality. It would probably plummet as a matter of fact. Also it seems to be a function of marginal utility where if you don't know many people then each new person that you meet has a lot of value but when you have a wide social circle you can now afford to have more qualifications on who you spend your time with. As for being "worthy"—worthy of what? We can simply talk about the limited time and energy we have in investing in others. We're each gonna have a moderately different standard for who qualifies but we can look at trends to see how we should build our life in order to attract the right people into it. Most of the conversations we have on this dating section are about single men wanting to attract women. A simple principle I share often on this forum is that to become more attractive to women you must offer more value. It's a question that invites further questioning but a lot of times people fight me on this very idea which I find quite funny because it's a pretty easy position to defend. Individual women are gonna have their individual criteria as to what type of man they like to hang around but generally being a guy that's financially independent, can communicate well, has a rich social life, is fun to be around and takes care of his appearance is gonna be a mold that fits what most women want. Then the common objections are usually based in pointing out outliers "But Kyle I know a coke dealer in massive debt that's a dickhead that fucks a bunch of chicks, what you're saying is wrong!" From there we can also simply steer the conversation either in a cultural deconstruction way where we ask ourselves why that coke dealer's dating strategy is working for him or what I find most useful is taking our goals and building an action path from there. I think we can agree that becoming a coke dealer to build a high quality dating life is not the move and one of the simplest arguments against it is that it only offers superficial short term value as opposed to being a man that can offer value on the long term. Then we have the point on validity, same answer valid to who? I personally at this point in my life have big goals and not a lot of time to waste so I only hang out with people with whom we can mutually help each other achieve our goals. That doesn't mean I want society to get rid of people that don't fit that mold but I just don't enjoy spending time with them and I don't think they would enjoy spending time with me also. That's the mark of a solid society, having the diversity to support different lifestyles. I think it's a very important question to have especially in a world looming with AI revolution where we are presented with this question in real time globally as a species. Thankfully it seems that our capacity to produce a massive surplus of value to redistribute around will increase. Perhaps in a few decades we'll be able to take care of every human on earth and the concept of offering economic value to society in order to survive will be a distant memory. Even then I will say that an average AI UBI funded life is still gonna be inferior to a life full of purpose, ambition and adventures. In a world based on scarcity that question is much more poignant though. Fundamentally it's a question about agency and optimization in reaching your goals though. The most valuable life to live is the one where you can accomplish your objectives in the deepest and most efficient way possible. I think what mostly gets in the way of that for men I see are limiting beliefs and lack of optimized strategy. That's mostly what I talk about on this forum.

I am. I never asked for your permission to point out your bad points. You could make the argument that your higher self asked me to do it on your behalf and thus it was your will all along. That's a fine line of belief if you find that it serves your life in general but then you better start addressing me with my proper pronouns. You can call me My Lord or Your Highness. Either is fine. I don't give out insights for free, you should ideally be grateful to have your own foolishness revealed to you!

I find poorly thought-out points shared in a public domain reduce the quality of our communication and thus life. It leads to confusion which leads to spiritual bypassing which leads to a life built around coping as opposed to high quality living.

That's what I mean, you're being intellectually lazy and spiritually bypassing. God can split itself into an infinite amount of containers. The container of @LordFall is saying that the container of @JoshB is making bad points that he hasn't thought much about. That's an irrelevant point to our basic shared reality. That's like saying because our universal consciousness stems from God you don't have to pay your rent and you can buy as many houses as you want to because you are ultimately the unbound. Let me know how that works out for you, I'll be waiting for divine irony to manifest itself through your limited perspective.

Yes it happened to me all the time a few years ago. Not sure if it had to do with psychedelics I took around that time but I would wake up not remembering who I was for a full 30-60 seconds and have to piece together my identity with clues from the room. After a few times I would remember that this had happened before and think, 'Well, how did I make sense of it last time?' It's a very interesting state of being, it showed me glimpses of what pure consciousness without memories feels like. It's definitely interesting how the psyche comes back from that. I had to piece together that I was in a room, where might this room be... I guess I had a room like this many years ago but that was in Calgary now I am in Toronto and then I remembered who I was and what kind of responsibilities were waiting for me. I think that's the basics of existence really, what is the next force that you will have to answer to. For me it was a work shift since like most biological forms I need to eat! Interesting to think about what would we would to if there were no obligations and we were just an unbound consciousness?

You're confusing absolute metaphysics with relative reality, which is the textbook definition of spiritual bypassing. At the absolute level, sure, all of reality is one undivided consciousness dreaming form. But on the relative, functional level, we operate in an objective shared medium: gravity works, physics applies, and you are literally reading and responding to pixels generated by another distinct locus of consciousness over an internet connection. Trying to use absolute non-duality to invalidate basic empirical communication makes the philosophy useless. If there is no shared reality, why are you typing replies to convince an "imaginary" projection?

I see so I am imaging a random user named @JoshB gracing my screen with bad not well thought out replies? That's good to know Josh but I think you can do better. I'm concentrating all my imaginary brain power to give you superior insight and communication skills.

From what I researched, it's 5 floors and the Star Wars exhibit is only 3/4 of one floor. Although a narcissism diagnosis only goes so far until it goes into the realm of fair play positioning! You better damn make sure that in the Museum of Spirituality your work is seen before any mention of Jesus or Buddha otherwise you're not even trying! Jesus told people anybody not listening to his teachings was gonna be tortured forever, how is that for narcissism with some totalitarianism baked in for divine measure I'm gonna learn from the greats that came before me and claim that anyone that doesn't play Legend of the Abyss when it comes out is not only ruining their life by comparison to the fun they could've had but their afterlife is toast too and also their ancestors look down upon them in shame.