Anderz

Great point. The big corporations today can evade tax to obscene levels. Legally! Although I still believe it's too early for a UBI but I could be wrong.

"FISA court abuses do indeed exist. And they point to a disturbing rot in the justice system: unelected political appointees taking power into their own hands to surveil and investigate political topics under the guise of national security. This goes beyond Trump, Mueller, and the rest. This is about a total lack of transparency and accountability in a government that is supposed to work for us. We need answers, and it looks like we’re about to get them." - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/what-to-expect-from-inspector-general-michael-horowitzs-report-on-alleged-fisa-abuses

The introduction in A Course in Miracles sums it up: "The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. This Course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God." - https://acim.org/acim/what-it-says/ Leo said in a video that reality is difference. I think that even can be used as a description of God. And the difference gives rise to timeless, changeless and infinite information. Change appears as this information continues to become manifested in the now, moment by moment. So how can changeless information be threatened? It can't! It's exactly as the introduction to ACIM says. And if this is correct, then we should sooner or later experience the truth of that and transcend fear. Because manifestation is not just some random information, it's highly intelligently structured information allowing reality to manifest higher and higher order, from atoms to molecules to single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms and so on. Biological evolution is a consequence of that, not the cause of it. Reality is expanding wholeness in harmony, which I defined as love earlier. And even that is exactly what ACIM says, that fear is an illusion and that only love is real. I find that amazing and even though self-biased I can't see how reality works in any other way than that. One distinction, I don't know yet, is that my theory says that fear has a definite and temporary purpose for growth and development, while ACIM seems to describe fear as some form of error, but I could be wrong about that. I wouldn't be surprised if ACIM says the same thing even about that!

I think flip-flopping about issues is fine, but I have a suspicion that Bernie Sanders is like a leftist version of Ron Paul, put there by the establishment as gatekeepers. They say things that sound good to capture the minds of certain categories of voters, while in reality it's meant to produce nothing! By their fruits you shall know them.

Will a UBI create jobs? I thought it was about managing an increase of automation and loss of jobs. And also, with over half of the population without jobs, without a UBI I suspect that the economy will start spiral downwards making the whole market dwindle and thereby threaten the few jobs that are left. Then what about millionaires and people earning a lot of money? The answer is that the UBI will just be a tiny addition to their income and be irrelevant to them basically. On the other hand, for a person with a low income the UBI will make a huge difference because he or she will be able to keep BOTH the UBI and the salary from the job. Middle income people will be able to use the UBI for extra spending but it will be insufficient for replacing their salaries, so they need to keep their jobs or radically downsize their living costs. Ray Kurzweil said that price/performance of products and services will improve exponentially, even for physical products when they become information technology through things like 3D printing and nanotech. So with a constant UBI (not counting inflation), the UBI will be able to pay for more and more products and services.

Ouch. Now I remember. I have actually already experienced heart consciousness recently. It was absolutely incredible. My consciousness expanded so that I experienced the external environment with a larger field of a combination of my brain and my heart. The experience lasted less than a minute, but it's something undeniable. My mind cannot make up something like that. Because it was an expansion of awareness, not of any mere mental experience. Holy Moses. How could I have forgotten that. Now I will really focus on mindfulness of the field of the heart (not just the biological heart but the energy field connected to consciousness).

I was curious about what ACIM says about the heart. I have a theory that our hearts are disconnected from our conscious awareness and that a connection to the energy field of the heart is necessary to connect to the higher intelligence of reality. And here I found in ACIM Lesson 164: "There is a silence into which the world can not intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. There is a sense of holiness in you the thought of sin has never touched." - https://acim.org/workbook/lesson-164/ That's exactly in line with the idea I have about the heart. It's more than just a flowery metaphor. It's about an actual connection to a higher intelligence field via the field our own hearts.

Bernie Sanders has flip-flopped it seems about the idea of a universal basic income, the idea that automation will soon replace so many jobs that one solution is to give all adult citizens something like $1,000 or $1,200 per month unconditionally without strings attached. I believe that it may be too early for a UBI but already within a decade or so it might be one solution. Here is one of Bernie's more recent answers: "Audience member: “I know you’ve expressed support for universal basic income in the past in your interviews, but there’s this guy Andrew Yang who wants to give everybody a thousand bucks a month with a VAT tax, and I think to win the Democratic primary, you’ve gotta do that.” Bernie Sanders: Nah. I’ve got a better idea. Audience member: You won’t do it? Bernie Sanders: Nope. Sorry you came all the way from Alabama. Here’s a better idea. I understand that idea. I have a better idea, and the better idea I think is that in a nation in which there is so much work to be done, just think about it. You’ve got an infrastructure which is crumbling. We can put millions of people to work doing that. Transforming our energy system in terms of weatherizing homes all over this country, building a more efficient transportation system. Putting more money into wind and solar and other sustainable technologies. We can create millions of jobs doing that. Think about daycare. You want a world class child care center? You need well-educated, well-trained, well-paid child care workers. We need many of them. We need more doctors in rural areas and in urban areas. We need more nurses. We have a dental crisis all over this country. We need to train dentists and get them out there. We need more social workers. You want to reform our criminal justice system? You’re going to need people to start working with prisoners. You want kids not dropping out of high school? You’re going to need mentors working with them. There is an enormous amount of work to be done and what we believe in is guaranteeing a job in this country to anybody who is prepared to work. I think that’s the better approach." - https://medium.com/basic-income/on-the-record-bernie-sanders-on-basic-income-de9162fb3b5c

Great I immediately found this video about precisely the problem I described in my previous post.

Wait a minute. The quote above is correct. There IS no actual choice! It's really obvious when looking at reality as a whole process. Is the person separate from that process? Absolutely not. Choice is therefore completely an illusion, a necessary illusion, as a part of the emulation of free will I mentioned earlier. Another thing mentioned in the quote is the unholy trinity: sin, guilt and fear. All of those are illusions, I can see that now. The problem I have is that I don't experience the reality of it yet. Awful. I'm like in a split state of identification where I see the truth intellectually and at the same time feel fear and anxiety. I know that a deep, deep change is needed into the subconscious, but still, it's a frustrating situation.

@Leo Gura Yes, I realized that I was at first thinking in too black & white terms and then I came to think of the integral approach which seems better and more realistic. I'm super excited about your upcoming heart topic! A bit off topic here, but maybe not because it could be related to corruption: I read in a medical article that we humans cannot feel pain in our hearts! Instead we feel what is called referred pain. That made me wonder what other connections to our heart are blocked, such as emotional connections. And look at all the cardiovascular disease. Could that be related to an emotionally disconnected heart?

Leo has a new video about corruption: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRvQlgu_bRs Great stuff. Leo talks about corruption from a very big picture perspective. I got the feeling that what he was describing is what I call the global ego. Anyway, how to solve the problem of corruption in society? With Leo's explanation it seems that a total transformation of our whole worldwide civilization is needed in order to, not fight corruption which just perpetuates it, but to transcend corruption altogether.

I now started wondering about what ACIM says about free will and I found this: "36) Is there such a thing as free will, and what is it anyway? This question must be answered in two parts: 1) In Heaven there can be no free will, for how can the Son of God be free to choose when there is literally nothing there to choose from? In a non-dualistic reality, which is the state of Heaven, there is only perfect Oneness. That is why A Course in Miracles states that the Will of God and the will of His Son are one and the same. And so there can be nothing else, and therefore nothing to choose between. ... 2) Within the dream, however, which is the realm of perception and illusion, the concept of free will becomes extremely important and meaningful for it is the mechanism of salvation. In his dream, the Son believed that he had chosen against God, and this set into motion the whole drama of the unholy trinity -- sin, guilt, and fear ..." - http://www.miraclestudies.net/Question36.html I think that's a great answer so for me ACIM is consistent with my own self-bias which I believe is the truth. In a way there has to be self-bias until we realize the truth or falseness of ideas. At least if we want to stick to a single belief. Another idea that came to me is that we cannot realize the truth of reality being automatic and determined in our ego identification for a part of the ego is the illusion of free will. And it wouldn't work to realize it too early because we would just feel powerless and that is a false realization. Instead the real realization of automatic reality will give a sense of personal freedom and of being a part of reality instead of something experienced as a separate entity.

An integral approach to corruption can be useful, which means transcend and include. Yes, the corruption will erode itself out of business in the long run, yet as the situation is today, with massive corruption everywhere, it can be useful to catalyze the process of cleaning up corruption by pointing it out and even fighting it sometimes. Not necessarily fighting corruption from a position of anger because that often means we are confused about the issue and the anger is then a lazy habitual response that covers up our lack of a deeper understanding, Leo's video about corruption is an excellent example of how to point out its mechanics instead of just angrily attacking different forms of corruption.

That made me think that corruption is often connected to money. In the early history of humanity barter was invented, but that's a clunky and cumbersome way of doing transactions. Imagine today buying an iPhone with a heap of tomatoes. So the invention of money made trade much more efficient. However today in our information age money is starting to become cumbersome too! Picture having to deal with credit cards and online payments when using Facebook and posting on this forum for example. That would make using Facebook and forums a pain in the neck. And even for content creation, if a user has to deal with monetization of his or her content, having to deal with money even for things like earning money on YouTube also robs the person of a lot of time, effort and energy. Edit: It may seem that starting to earn money on YouTube is such an easy thing to do and will require minimal effort. In reality the person has to spend a lot of time and effort promoting his or her content outside YouTube (hopefully not with spam :D). And also the mind of the average person will be hijacked by a strive for how to make money rather than freely focusing on what content to create. A LOT of work is needed to earn serious money in that way. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that information technology will become dirt cheap within decades. And not only that, physical products will also become information technology, and he predicted that we will have a combination of open source products and commercial products available to us, meaning we would only need money if we wanted the commercial stuff. It will be possible to live without money! Also, automation such as robotics and artificial intelligence will take over more and more jobs, both blue collar and white collar jobs. And even today presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson are talking about the need for a universal basic income (UBI) which means all adult citizens are given say $1,000 per month, unconditionally, no strings attached. So fortunately both corruption and money will soon, historically speaking, become extinct. Impossible you may think. Well, think of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ray Kurzweil had accurately predicted that, but to almost everybody it came as a huge surprise how such a monumental colossal power structure like the Soviet Union could suddenly just collapse like that.

Baboon societies in nature are very violent, even with psychological harassment and the members have high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. These societies are very corrupt one might say. Our social skills as humans are basically still at the level of a baboon society. It's totally ridiculous! And that we still need legal systems just proves the point. Generally, humanity has a complete lack of true integrity. I don't even look at mainstream news nowadays, not as a protest but because it's just embarrassingly childish and insane activities that are reported in the news. So how to deal with corruption? Don't even cringe or do a facepalm in the face of corruption. Just ignore it. The corrupted baboons will sort themselves/ourselves out. Leo mentioned in the video how corruption removes itself over the long run.

Mark Passio said when talking about natural law that if a law can be broken it's not a real law. Very good point! Don't get me wrong, the legal systems and law enforcement will still be needed for decades to come. I'm looking at the very big picture here. And Leo said that to really remove corruption requires higher stages of consciousness. Also a very good point. Mark Passio's natural law doesn't work for the complexity of today's and future societies without an evolutionary leap of consciousness for humanity. But okay, I admit that Leo is correct about how corruption still needs to be prevented by changing how governments operate. It's just that when I looked at the very big picture, then wow, maybe we are in for some evolutionary leap into a form of intelligent natural law, possibly even some kind of global collective consciousness.

To make a far-fetched yet accurate analogy: the government creates a gated community with its firewall rules. Just because the gated community is a blanket set of rules over the whole nation, those rules still act as a gated community. The same with things like free speech. The government says "In your own home and in private settings you can say whatever you want, but publicly you will be punished if you use hate speech." Here again we see that the government long-term cements the problem and hampers the ethical and social development of us as individuals.

Leo talked about the need for building structures to prevent corruption, especially in the government. But isn't that precisely the kind of "firewall" that Leo himself said is a part of the problem? My theory is that fighting corruption HAS been necessary historically, or else the whole society would collapse into some Mad Max scenario. But from a global perspective, fighting corruption is the wrong way in the long run because of the firewall building problem.

I think of it as "sub-conscious" as meaning processes going on below conscious awareness. Bruce Lipton gave a great example of subconscious vs conscious mind. Think of a situation where you are driving a car and are daydreaming or in a conversation with a passenger. Ten minutes or more can pass without you being aware of driving the car, because your conscious mind was occupied with daydreaming or in a conversation with the passenger. Lipton then asked: so who drove the car? Your subconscious mind did it for you automatically. Another example you can test right now is to check if you are consciously aware of your breathing. If not, then your subconscious was doing the breathing for you automatically . Breathing is a curious process which usually is done automatically but the conscious mind can take over the control of the breathing. In that sense the conscious mind has more power. Bruce Lipton called the conscious mind the government of the body.

I have also been feeling depressing emotions lately. And then I realized what Bruce Lipton has said about the conscious mind vs the subconscious mind, and if I remember correctly that the subconscious mind is a million times more powerful than the conscious mind. That's why things like positive thinking hardly works he said, because the subconscious is just like a tape player repeating old habits and even ancient biological instincts such as the fight or flight response even to fearful thoughts about the future. Totally irrational. So my approach now is to continue with mindfulness practice and observe my thoughts and also observe my emotions, especially sensations in the body. That's a way of accessing the subconscious I believe. It's a massive process needed to change the subconscious but hopefully it's an accelerating process so that all the subconscious emotional mess becomes cleaned up faster and faster the more I practice.

In this thread I have forgotten to mention that presidential candidate for the 2020 election Marianne Williamson has been hugely influence by ACIM. Here is what she has said about it according to Wikipedia: "...A Course in Miracles [is] a self-study program in spiritual psychotherapy. It is a book that is based on universal spiritual themes. It is not a religion. It does not claim any kind of monopoly on truth. It has no dogma. It has no doctrine. It talks about love and forgiveness and I think that many of the people who are students of A Course in Miracles come from all religions and even no religion. The book says nothing about [Jesus]. The book does not get us to try to believe in God... The book tries to get us to believe in each other".[26]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Williamson Williamson is at the moment not even in the list over the top 10 Democratic candidates, so it will require a miracle it seems to make her win. Nevertheless it's quite amazing having a presidential candidate so closely connected to ACIM. I hope she will win in 2020! Another huge difference between today and the past is that decades ago when A Course in Miracles first was published there was no Word Wide Web and that's a huge difference in terms of potential for spreading knowledge without the need for big mainstream media and news sources.

Oh! Most of the ego is in the subconscious. That's pretty obvious but I have overlooked that in the past. If I remember correctly, Bruce Lipton said that the subconscious mind a million times more powerful than the conscious mind! That must be why I have been feeling anxiety, fear and almost depression despite being able to often observe my thoughts. And that's why ACIM is such a large book with pages and pages of text. Because the message needs to penetrate into the subconscious and that's a massive task.

ACIM has a concept called "attack thoughts". My take is that ALL thoughts are attack thoughts. Some noisier than others and can be detected by the worry, irritation or anger which accompanies them. Other thoughts are subtler yet equally deadly and just sneakier.

I came to think of a realization. As I understand it, ACIM says that all our thinking is distorted. A simple practice then is to mindfully reject all one's thoughts, not just observe them as in usual mindfulness practice.