thedoorsareopen

I remember when Leo first started going into spiritual topics, this was I think 2018 or 2019, and I was at the right place and time to go full on into that journey with him, not knowing what I would find. It was all new to me, I thought nonduality was this radical concept. I thought I'd discovered some secret of the universe. I thought that getting into spirituality would make me smarter, more in tune, closer to a supreme intelligence, possibly even able to discover new knowledge and help improve the world in some way. Instead what I've discovered is that all of the information in my reality is and has always been carefully manipulated at all times to give me certain impressions of things, based largely on my already conditioned beliefs. The world is broken on purpose, because perfection is supposedly boring. In fact, the world is just an appearance and in my human form, I may as well be a cartoon character. And God or whatever was there the entire time, watching every one of my pains. I supposedly deserved them because I didn't learn certain lessons. Because I was making decisions thinking I was a person who lived in a world. I thought I was completely alone and made no impact. I thought my decisions didn't matter and no one was paying attention. I also thought that being polite and following the rules was the best course of action, and boy is every single piece of stimulus in my reality now determined to tell me that is not the case. Has anyone else been dragged into this storyline of how the billionaires are keeping the common man down, and golly we just gotta rise up and restore the natural order of things? I liked society the way it was. I'm not looking for a crash to the system. But I guess I had finally made a life for myself in the secular world I thought I lived in, finally figured out how to stop feeling so much inexplicable emotional pain, so now God's gotta bring the hammer down. I guess every single person I ever saw in my life was also an illusion, but I have seen so many people who had no relationship with God who were healthier than me, more energetic, happier, better teeth, more friends, more laughter, more joy. I'm not sure why I have to be God's bitch boy. I followed a religion, and the people who followed it less strictly than me got rewarded more. So I stopped following it. But I never ended up fitting into secular society much, most of my life I've been a loner. I had good friends, and none of them had any kind of relationship with God, and they also were happier, healthier and enjoyed more and better relationships than I ever did. So then I got into spirituality and over the past 5 years I have seen so many people who have all, day after day, delivered to me the most banal spiritual "advice" while living lives that seem more functional than my life ever has been. No matter what my relationship to God is, it seems I'm always doing it wrong, always on the outs, can never get it together, and everyone around me is just doing so much better than I ever have, without any practice. So is that what this is? God became man so man could sit in a hologram of self-degradation? I'm surrounded by people who don't have to have a meditation practice, who didn't have to invest several years in a "spiritual journey," but have more loving families and better teeth than I ever will? I remember when I started this shit I thought I was gonna get smarter lol... instead I just learned the metaphysical parameters of a clown world. It basically just comes down to squirting love through your diaphragm, and whoever can do that the most, wins, I guess.

The CFPB is one of the best agencies for taking action to protect actual consumers and average people making ends meet. It's quite responsive to citizen activism, it's the reason overdraft fees are no longer given free reign and are limited to a small amount, and it's an impressive model of how government agencies CAN have a slim footprint while actually working for the citizen's interest.

I’ve been straddling suicidal ideation for 22 years, and things were starting to look better. I don’t need to appreciate any more realness.

So unless I meditate more, my higher self’s gonna destroy my world?

Cmon guys, gimme some spiritual buzzwords to explain why this is actually normal and expected. Light and dark, some bullshit like that

*giving a shit 248 years of operating just fine, and I finally got over my childhood trauma, like literally last summer, and then this ridiculous scenario started. So I guess it’s just not possible to chill, work a job, share some laughs, and have a good life? If it’s not decades of unexplainable emotional pain, the outside world just randomly stops functioning? Why is life like this? What was the point of all the nonduality and meditation and shit? I feel the will to live fading.

23 Nobel Prize-winning economists call Harris’ economic plan ‘vastly superior’ to Trump’s This is lazy strawmanning that relies on hazy unconscious feelings that the guy who says "You're fired" is a better business man than the touchy feely effeminate Democrat, and is not supported by anyone who's run the numbers. The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that Harris's economic plans would add $3.95 trillion through 2035, vs. Trump's $7.75 trillion. Harris's Opportunity Economy policies would directly lower costs for working and middle class Americans, increase access to entrepreneurship and homeownership for the average person, increase economic activity in the working and middle class economy, and would likely return more in taxes to the federal budget than Trump's plans. Trump's plans hinge mostly on continuing tax cuts to corporations and the top 1%, which after 40 years of trickle down economics, has been shown doesn't actually trickle down to the vast majority of Americans. And kinda flies in the face of your idea that somehow Trump is the anti-corporate dominance candidate. Oh, and one big cost of Trump's plan? Deporting 16 million people don't come cheap, least of all to our values.

I love this format. But I'm only 3 minutes in and disagreeing with Ben Shapiro so hard, lol. He frames the discussion about inclusivity as inherently zero-sum, i.e. to raise up so-called "DEI" people (barf), it necessarily comes at the expense of other groups (white men, obviously). I have such a different take on this. I have a parent who came to the US from a far more racist and homogenous country, where discriminatory attitudes are just considered normal, part of how social taboos regulate their society. Part of the miracle of America is that we have figured out how to accommodate so many different types of people, not just legally, but socially. For example, within our lifetimes, we went from a society where average people held mocking and discriminatory attitudes towards LGBT. And we went from that, to a society that has mainstreamed LGBT (or at least LGB). It turns out, it's totally possible to share company with a gay couple, or a lesbian couple. It's basically the same as spending time socially with a straight couple. Like, how do you treat a man and woman in a relationship? Great, do that, but for gay couples. This is part of what makes our shared national character so great -- we are able to accommodate vast amounts of difference between people, and make it work. It's not about pushing one group down to lift up a minority, it's not even about accusing some strawman of a big mean racist guy keeping the poor minorities down. Racism and discrimination are inherently unconscious, primal behaviors. It requires a little engagement of the pre-frontal cortex to transcend that, but we've collectively done it before as a nation, with racism, with sexism, with discrimination against the mentally ill, with homophobia, and with the disabled. It turns out, with a little forethought, we are capable of including everyone in the mainstream of our society, not just legally, but socially. And on the national stage, a black and brown woman in the highest office of the land is going to mean so much for an entire generation of women and black and brown people. That inclusivity really makes a difference in a way someone like Ben Shapiro will never directly experience. Obama becoming president completely changed the way I saw myself as a person, and as a member of American society, in a good way. But Ben says that a woke academic wants us to push whites down to lift up others, and that simply is not the case. That's not happening. Arguments in good faith are one thing, conservative strawmen laced with dogwhistles are another. Still, it's engaging to see some face to face debate!

"In this episode, Michael reveals a key source for his reporting on Donald Trump: Jeffrey Epstein. Through behind-the-scenes stories and never-before-heard recordings, Michael recounts Epstein's candid insights into Trump’s rise, revealing a world of power plays, unsettling competitions, and twisted allegiances. The conversation unearths Epstein’s perspective on Trump’s character, ambition, and his relentless pursuit of power."

I liked this clip of Harris talking about issues with real people. I imagine that if you are someone in the Black community doing volunteer work or mentoring, and a credible presidential candidate comes in spouting statistics that you're familiar with about the challenges African Americans face in the US, it's gotta make you feel heard.

One of the reasons I'm so bullish on Biden and Harris is that Biden made a marked shift in policy for the first time in my lifetime from the previous neoliberal era, and yknow what? It worked. It worked really really well. He proved that Keynesian economics and industrial policy had good effects on the economy. Instead of Obama's austerity and giving in to the Republicans, leading to a slow recovery that took approximately 8 years, Biden proved that stimulus bounced the economy back immediately, saving untold years of middle class misery. We take that for granted, but it was decidedly not the standard policy in the neoliberal era, since at least Bretton Woods and the 70s, if it ever was. Biden Just Declared the Death of Neoliberalism

I see it more as the American left, psychedelicized by the consciousness revolution of the 1960s, began naively reaching for a morality based on cosmic consciousness. And this strain is still a powerful motivator of liberal thought in American politics. However, mediated through the news cycle and party politics, this can't really be stated explicitly without being laughed out of the discussion. So there isn't enough explicit awareness of that cosmic origin and holistic nature of liberal morality that represents stage Green. On top of that, many naive hippies and radicals of the 1960s shipped off to Africa and southeast Asia, thinking that like the Beatles told them, "love is all you need," and that plus a little elbow grease would solve world hunger and whatever inequities existed around the world. However, they didn't realize they were looking at the world through a lens of white western paternalism, and had no awareness of the ongoing histories of the rest of the world. So it turned out that their idealistic attitude, and lack of awareness of their own privilege, couldn't on their own solve world inequality. So by the 80s, there was a sense that the entire movement had failed. They thought that holistic, cosmic thinking would erase borders and unite the brotherhood of man into a beautiful, technology assisted utopia, but trustafarians reached the limit of what they could accomplish without having to turn the lens of inequality back onto western society as a whole, which the US power structure had already rebuked with Nixon, and by the 80s these idealists reached middle age and retreated back into the power structures of American capitalism. Despite this, one of the enduring legacies of the 1960s has been western society incorporating more and more minorities closer to the mainstream of society, whether it's women, racial minorities, gender and sexual minorities, mentally ill, and the disabled. So by the 2010s, a new generation that had benefitted from this generational work, armed with good intentions, reached for the echoes of this cosmic, holistic consciousness that reverberated through the Sixties, but they didn't really acknowledge its origins as that, as they had filtered through society through academia -- feminism, critical theory, philosophy, and art. So in effect this became the "woke" movement, but love and light can only go so far without acknowledging the darkness of duality, and it has its imbalances. I still think of it as an admirable effort, but one we would all benefit from pursuing more consciously. And one we'd benefit from thinking about outside of the duality and realpolitik of American party politics.

More traditional wholesomeness from the party of family values...

Yeah this discussion of "leftist wokeism" is a total strawman that conflates a lot of dynamics on the left. When I think of the broad spectrum of people I've met working and volunteering in Democratic politics over the years, they were mostly NPR listening, Subaru driving normies. I met political activists who adopted more extreme social positions, but these only really find expression in subgroups. Someone in one of these threads showed a picture of a woman holding her husband on a leash in a party area of a vacation city, and boy what a red herring that is. If you're trying to portray LGBT = BDSM, you don't know what you're actually talking about. There's a false duality being equated here, based entirely on fuzzy conflations -- liberals are supposedly immature hedonists heralding the fall of Babylon, and conservatives are supposedly the adults in the room who adhere to the essential wisdom of heteronormativity. But what I actually see in real life is more that you have liberals, centrists, and some conservatives financially, and then you have the Dorito munching ATV riding rural Trump followers. Basically people who don't live around diversity are more likely to vote for Trump. And nothing I've seen from these people -- whether in media, on the internet, or in my experience in political canvassing -- has shown me any evidence that these people are really the mature ones in the room. In fact, the duality is completely flipped: the liberals, centrists, and financial conservatives are more mature and open to differences of opinion, while the culture warrior conservatives demonstrate ignorant and undeveloped bigotry, sexism, and crassness. How can these conservatives claim to represent the party of traditional values when they're voting for a candidate who talks about dick size? How can they claim to represent traditional values when they have all those posters of Kamala Harris's face grafted onto a porn star's body? How can they claim to represent traditional values when they engage in such hateful displays as this picture of Kamala Harris being led in chains at a pro-Trump "Halloween parade" from last night, seen below. The proof is in the pudding, and the current movement on the right can't seem to produce anything but grievance and hatred. Democrats want to give you healthcare. These geniuses want to build walls, chain people up, and take away rights. You guys are aware of Spiral Dynamics, yes? How do you not see this movement on the right is largely driven by primal stage Red instincts believing themselves to be stage Blue, all taken advantage of by a big ol' Orange demagogue? These are not the people of Christ. These are not even the Christian conservatives of the 1970s and 80s.