r0ckyreed

I don’t support AI. I guess I will check out Vanguards website for investment tips.

I wanted to share with you all the first video clip that made me question Buddhism and meditation. Ever since I understood the first 30 seconds of this video, I had an insight that Buddhism and meditation alone are not conducive to the highest levels of intelligence. I always wondered why I had meditation has stunted my memory. I realized that if you stop thinking, you stunt your intelligence, and you stunt your memories. Memories require repetition to keep them alive and so does learning. Leo even pointed this out in his new video on Insight, where somewhere in the video, he stated that he cannot meditate because he is too curious and that Buddhist monks simply aren't that curious about life. This made me wonder that Buddhism is about attaining Nirvana, some fairytale of an end of suffering, rather than the goal of pure understanding. Watch the first 30 seconds of this video. Meditating for long periods of time comes at a post. That cost is pure understanding and intelligence. What I have gained from meditation is calmness and peace of mind, but I would not exchange that for intelligence/understanding. Then, of course, Jed McKenna helped me to see the problems within Buddhism and meditation. I still meditate from time to time, and it is helpful, but 10-20 minutes a day is all I think is necessary. The main reason why I meditate now is to cultivate my ability to be joyful, aware of the beauty all around me, and to be satisfied with nothing. I think meditation is really important for happiness and peace of mind but excessive meditation comes at a cost. I no longer expect any deep insights from meditation anymore. I get those through observation and contemplation. Here is the video below! Enjoy!

Thanks for all of your responses guys I appreciate the input! I get those of you who say it is selfish and self-centered to not have kids, but don’t overlook your double standards. Any choice you make in life is going to be for your own self interest. You could argue that having kids is selfish. Society is already biased and puts pressure on people who don’t want kids to have kids. To be most effective at being selfless, one needs to honor one’s needs, values, desires, and development. If you neglect your highest desires, you won’t be good for anyone or the world. The world needs everyone of us at our best, and that starts with honoring our purpose. Selflessness and selfishness go full circle. My purpose may not be to have kids, but I will still be ejaculating and reproducing into the world because that is my highest desire. I am an existential therapist and have just started that chapter of my life purpose. If I have kids, I see that slowing down my goals in my life purpose as of right now. This is all a lesson for me that this is an area I lack clarity on and need to contemplate even more.

What is Consciousness? Why is Consciousness experiencing a human being right now with blonde hair instead of something else? Are other people conscious? How could there be multiple consciousnesses? What would be separating one consciousness from another? How can an object in my consciousness have consciousness? How am I constructing reality and sense of self/other?

How do I get started in investing? What website or apps do you recommend where I can start putting my money in? Do you all invest using cash app to invest, Robinhood, or what? What do you recommend?

I heard that the longer you keep your money in the market, the more you will make. If you keep putting in and pulling out, I heard that’s a bad strategy because nobody can really predict such future events. Cracking the market is a myth. I have a 401k with 6% matching with my new job. I plan on putting 10% of paycheck in there each time. Maybe that is what I should focus on most? I also thought about index funds as well.

You aren’t afraid of death. You are afraid of suffering. There is no suffering in deep sleep. And no suffering in death. What you really fear is the process of losing yourself and everything you love while you still exist.

This is how I feel. I feel like I am in a relationship with the right woman. She checks off just about every box for me. My only fear is having children, but maybe my desires will change 10 years later. I am 26 now. If I have kids, then that is an irreversible decision that I would have to live with and be responsible for. However, why not both? Why can’t I have a family and be a Serious Philosopher? Maybe it isn’t either or.

Just keep meditating and focus on life purpose. It’s been 8 days. I bet he’s camping now and doing #unplug. Let this be a life lesson: The quality of your life hinges on the quality of your interpretations.

Everything and everyone is the Self. There is only one conscious Self in existence and that is me.

EVERYTHING!!!! EVERYTHING!!!! EVERYTHING!!!! EVERYTHING!!!! EVERYTHING!!!! Ad Infinitum!!

Failure doesn’t exist. As long as you are persistent, all “failure” is an opportunity, learning experience, and stepping stone to success. There is no success without going through massive failures. Every successful person was a failure. True failure is giving up on the journey and not taking the call to the hero’s journey In the first place. Done.

Giving up.

Our true purpose never dies, it just changes as we learn more about the world and ourselves. Keep following your curiosity and inspiration.

What else are they doing? If they are actually contemplating and deeply questioning reality, then I have no problem with "meditation. The issue is that you will find monks and other people like Jianyu, who have IQs of 75 and have little understanding of reality after years of meditation. That concerns me. Meditation isn't enough to understand reality to its fullest. If all one does is meditates and follows Buddhism doctrine, then they are missing out of 99% of the rest of reality. However, I think a good point is made that it is a matter of the quality and kind of meditation that one does. I guess I don't. I thought I knew what it was. What more is there to meditation than counting breaths and repeating a mantra? I thought meditation was supposed to be simple, as simple as being present? I thought Buddhism was about alleviating suffering through its noble truths and eight-fold path? Anatta or no-self is only a 1/3 of Buddhism. The other 1/3 is anicca, impermanence and 1/3 is dukha, suffering. I prefer to be humble and curious. That is why I made this thread. The small clip gave me doubt, and I want to see what evidence there is or if there is anything that was missed or overlooked. So far, I have done satisfaction meditation really successfully. I am able to embody high levels of happiness from no external stimuli, but my understanding and intelligence hasn't change at all. Meditation has been a method for bringing peace to my mind rather than pure understanding. Can you see this? What insights cannot be gained through traditional meditation?

I don’t think any logician would say that God creating itself is logical. They would call that the fallacy of begging the question or circular logic. God is a fallacy in the logicians mind. How can something come from nothing? No logic can explain that. No logician would except magical thinking or magic as the answer. A logician sees reality as a kind of clock whereas a spiritualist sees it as a mysterious mind. Logic and mystery are at odds. The logician wants to make sense of the mystery. But the True Mystery of Not-Knowing puts logic in its place.

I guess meditation can be very broad. I think meditation is important to learn to not identify with thoughts and let them control you. And I also think it is good to let the mind wander for creativity. So I guess you could call the former Vipassana and the latter Do Nothing.

Realizing what existence is takes a lot of intelligence and wisdom I would think. God is more complex than calculus. But I guess you have a point that one could understand God but not calculus since calculus is something invented whereas God is something Absolute. But I would still feel like that the person who realizes God is more intelligent than a mathematician. Intelligence is such an interesting and complex concept. I think intelligence and wisdom are deeply connected. I guess you could have an awakening and stop learning after that. Yeah, awakening isn’t the end goal.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/tech/tiktok-ban-bill/index.html This is liberalism and conservatism in action. I personally air on the conservative side because I think TikTok has done nothing but lower the IQ and work ethic of its active users. There is a reason why it is called TikTok ("Tick tock" your life clock). However, the bill seems to be more about the potential for national security breaches. What are your thoughts about this? Should we be more lax about social media or should we be strict?

You imagine a reality with logic. If you stopped imagining logic, it would cease to exist. Logic is a language that is dependent on the mind. Why would God create such a thing? Because God is Infinity and Love. Love is complete wholeness and lack of bias that also includes bias. God includes all of reality that is bias and non bias, good and bad, logical and illogical, etc. etc. I would suggest that science is beyond logic. I could be wrong, but science is such a broad concept. The basic definition of science is "a method for deriving knowledge and understanding." Observation is science, meditation is science, psychedelics are science, academic science is science, witchcraft is a science, etc. The question is what kind of science do you want to do? What are you most curious about and how can you derive knowledge about that in the best possible way? Every question you ask will require to you invent methods to derive the answer. There comes a point where logic meets its limit when it comes to more intuitive ways of understanding reality. Academic science is only a narrow domain within Science with a capital S. There is nothing beyond science but our lack of knowledge.

Where did you get the idea of non-attachment from?

Where do you find logic? Can you find logic on a tree or in your hand or is logic something you project onto the world? Where did you first learn about logic from? How do you know that logic is logical? Is logic relative to our epistemology or is logic relative to a certain dimension? These are all good questions to contemplate. Somebody invented logic and fallacies. Logic is a structured way of thinking about reality and concepts. It isn't necessarily true because there are many nonlinear, illogical ways to conceive of reality that are also valid. Logic is relative to ones experiences. If you are an atheist, you think the idea of God is illogical. If you are a spiritual person, you think of rigorous scientists and atheists to be "illogical." The boundary between logical and illogical is not so clear cut. We imagine logic. What is true in all cases. Logic is only true relativistically to one's state of consciousness. There are insights that can be had about life that are counter to and beyond your rules of thinking.

But what do you think about the clip in my original post? It confirmed my deep-seated doubt that you can meditate for 50 years and never reach infinite intelligence. How can you raise your intelligence if all you do is sit and do nothing? To become wise and intelligent requires having new experiences and insights. There is only so much that can be learned at a university or monastery. What is an awakening if your IQ is still at 75? What is awakening if you don't even know any facts about the universe or how to simply live life and pay taxes and treat people with kindness and love? Just because one raises their consciousness to the realization of no-self does not mean that they are intelligent and truth-realized. There is more to it than cessations.

How is it wrong? It is literally what is stated in The Mind Illuminated? I don’t deny that creative people don’t use anapanasati or that it is useless. I doubt these creative folks are doing anymore than 1 hour a day. They do the meditation and then they forget about it and do their thinking. If all they did was anapanasati like a monk at a monastery, they wouldn’t be writing their books. At some point, you have to stand up and think deliberately.