r0ckyreed

Don’t exclude yourself. What gives you the idea that you haven’t been corrupted as well? All the people who taught you Buddhism, your gurus, your books and your society have already sold you the lemons and the lemon-aid. The Fiction runs deep. The worst mistake is assuming you already know the Truth when you don’t. You don’t know. Edit: You cannot live an authentic life or discover truth as long you follow someone else’s path and neglect your own. Kill the Buddha.

Spirituality is about connecting to Truth. If you don’t care about truth, the default is mediocrity, belief, cults, and ideology. Spirituality is a life style of being connected to reality as it is. And that is not always fun and enjoyable. A key hint is that if it is about feeling good, having fun, believing, bypassing, forgetting, pleasure, or peace of mind, then it is about happiness (remaining in the dream) and not about Truth/Spirituality (awakening from the dream). But do what you want. Nothing matters. Forget about spirituality unless you are tired of being asleep. How is that for an oxymoron?

Introspect why you are attacking and so defensive about Buddhism or any thought system. Seems like you didn't even read or contemplate my post. You haven't studied what the Buddha taught either. No one has because The Buddha and Buddhism is nothing but a hallucination in your own mind. You are just parroting your programming.

Gotcha. Science is too broad to be limited by materialism. Quantum mechanics seems to be challenging materialism.

The only thing you can truly know is that consciousness exists and that it is infinite. Period. Everything else is fantasy, belief, and falsehood. Not truth.

It isn’t about right, it is about truth. Leo doesn’t own the truth so it isn’t about him being right. Do you care more about truth or about being right? Edit: Who knows, with some of his insights on specific aspects of infinity, he may be well wrong as he deepens his discovery of infinity. What you think you know now may be well wrong. But it isn’t about being right, it is about being in alignment with your truth at this time. Just because you discover something that matches Leo’s insights or observations doesn’t mean it is true. You could both be mistaken given how profound reality is. The only thing we can know is that consciousness exists. Everything else is a belief.

Not sure how you concluded this. Science and math can and will evolve over time. How do you know that math and science cannot be bias free in 500 years from now or with aliens, etc.? Meditation is a form of science, and meditation isn’t biased? I agree with you that math will always be limited due to it being locked in the conceptual world of numbers, but science is not limited to that language/logic game. Conventional science is limited to language, but the science of spirituality is not limited to language but transcends it. Spirituality and science are one.

It is still a belief. Here is my claim, as long as you are alive, you will have fears to various degrees. If you defeat fear, you also defeat desire. And if you defeat desire, you won’t be alive long enough to enjoy your “accomplishment.” To live is to survive and to survive is to desire and fear. If you get rid of the foundation, everything will collapse. Maybe. Or maybe fear, in conjunction with desire and love, can also be a powerful, motivating impulse to transcend. What does it mean to be infinite if you are not able to experience and embrace fear? Infinity to me means inclusivity of EVERYTHING. Edit: You are infinite whether you want to be or not.

How do you know they were without fear? If you are honest, you have no idea how anyone else feels but you. Notice how no amount of logic will get rid of your fears. Try it out. You just have to learn how to work with it and that is a good thing. Being absent of fear doesn’t make one strong. Embracing fear is far more powerful and liberating. Courage isn’t the absence of fear but action despite it. I disagree with any negativity surrounding fear. Many spiritual teachers treat fear as an enemy. Fear is good! What you do with fear is up to you.

If you say so. I am just making sure. A lot of people love pretending they are awake here. It gets kind of annoying. The word “imaginary” is probably the most used word here. I wonder why (sarcasm). But hey, I am also a victim of pretending to be awake or more developed than I am. That is how the Devil tricks itself. The Devil cannot be killed if it tricks itself into already thinking it has. How do you know there is not an ultimate fear? Why do we fear in the first place? Why does it exist? We all have different fears but the same roots is what I’m claiming. How can we empathize if we don’t share the same roots?

I say fear of loss so that everyone understands and is not confused. That’s why I am direct in my communication here. The fear is deeper than the knowing of it. Animals have fears, but do animals even have a concept of death? Even if you realize that physical death is conceptual and never an actual thing, you still will have fear because the emotion runs deeper than your logic.

Maybe threatened is a better word than lack. Why do we feel threatened? Because I fear losing something I value?

I edited my original post to include throwing away Actualized.org bullshit as well, but what I really mean is to stop parroting ideas that aren’t your own.

Ultimate fear is losing what you love - losing your attachments. For many people, death seems like the ultimate fear. But you only fear death because you believe you will lose something. Christianity doesn't make any sense because they believe that Heaven is a better place than earth, but yet, they are too afraid to go there because that means losing all attachments to life. But if Heaven is Perfect, then who cares about attachment? There is an assumption that death is the worst thing that can happen to you, even amongst religious people. All fear is built around the assumption that whatever you lose will be bad for you.

Is it? Does it? Good luck with that. Let me know how that goes. Exactly. Why do you fear? You still haven’t answered that one. Logically you say all of this, but emotionally, you are still scared and are still attached. Don’t try to logic your way out of fear, it won’t work in the heat of the moment when a bear runs after you.

Existence is a state. Everything is a state. Even worrying about state is a state lol. He can only say state doesn’t matter within a state of consciousness. You can’t escape state, you can only change it.

What is an actual awakening? How do you know what an awakening is? You don’t. I don’t. What is the point of a teacher if you are already awake? A teacher is nothing more than to serve as an inspiration to get you to investigate reality, awaken, and teach yourself. The best teacher is yourself. You cannot awaken without turning to yourself.

Sounds a lot like Nahm and other Neo-Advaitans.

If you throw out all ideas you have ever received, you are left with nothing but yourself in the reality of The One Experience. All POVs are distinctions you are imagining within The One Experience. All you have and will ever experience is yourself!!! Everything you experience is your experience! Anything you imagine outside your experience and being separate from your experience is your experience!

I think I get it at a conceptual level now. My “point of view” even if it is imaginary/mentally constructed is absolute. There is nothing more true than direct experience. I can imagine and believe in things that are far removed from reality or in other words direct experience. For instance, I can believe and imagine that I have 6 fingers, but I will always be confronted with the reality that I am imagining or constructed 5 fingers. But I guess if I didn’t care about truth, I could easily warp myself deeper into the illusion until I start caring about what is actually true. If all conspiracy theorists cared about truth, their theories would eventually collapse because nothing is more truer than direct experience.

But isn’t my own POV also a fiction as well? You mentioned that even my own hand is imaginary. By this standard, all previous awakenings and trips are imaginary and fiction unless you are awake right now. Why say everything is imagination when you could also say everything is real? I could say everything is destruction or everything is creation, but we view God as a Creator not a Destroyer. In the same way, we could say that reality/God is real and imagination is part of reality.

From my perspective, this is not always necessarily the case. Not all gurus know God, and we can’t assume there isn’t a therapist that doesn’t know God. The difference to me is that gurus are more like spiritual teachers, whereas therapists are more like mental health guides to help people improve their mental well-being. Therapists are basically like a mirror and mostly listen, ask reflective questions, and encourage/challenge the clients on ways they can get through their suffering. A guru is not as capable or “qualified” to help people process traumas and other concerns in a therapeutic way. Teaching someone isn’t the same as therapy becomes therapy requires the processing and uncovering of emotional pain.

I just started today! Here are my pictures! I am open to any feedback on how I can improve. Thank you! Copyrighted r0ckyreed (2022).

I have already watched Deconstructing The Myth of Science Parts 1, 2, & 3. Short point: I think Leo is really arguing against materialism ideologies (the assumptions/flaws of the scientist) and NOT science itself. We need to deconstruct materialism and other assumptions because it is effecting the quality of science. The problem is with the scientists’ biases/ignorance NOT science. Here is my view on the matter: What is science? Science is a method(s) of deriving knowledge based off of observations, hypotheses, testing, and reviewing. Science comes from the latin word scientia, which simply means "To Know, experience, and understand." Science is broad in nature and Leo is really criticizes materialistic science. We need to deconstruct materialism because that is a epistemological/metaphysical assumption. How do we deconstruct something? We contemplate. What is contemplation? Contemplation is science in action. It is deeply questioning something to derive the true nature of a thing, which is a form of science to me. The stereotypical notion of science is looking through a microscope. But if all you do is looking through a microscope, you miss out on the rest of the world. True science is a broad domain in which a microscope is but one tool used (just like contemplation is but one tool) to explore reality. Even psychedelics and meditation I would consider to be tools and forms of science because you are using that tool to explore consciousness itself. It is important to consider the tradeoffs of the methods and tools you use to examine reality. The ultimate form of science is spirituality, which is the science of self/spirit/consciousness. There are many different forms of science. The science of spirituality will be conducted differently than the science of psychology of mental health or of nature, anthropology, forensic science, physics, shamanism, etc. What makes something "part of science" is a method of deriving knowledge. A conspiracy theorist isn't doing science because they are filling their minds with beliefs that confirm their worldview. They do not care about knowing but more about being right. Scientists in academia could fall into the same trap of only conducting studies that confirms their worldview and interpreting the results to confirm their worldview. But this isn't to say that science is flawed, but that the scientist is flawed. I can make errors when I contemplate but that doesn't mean that I should stop contemplating. It just means that I need to increase self-awareness and contemplate why I make errors, but to do that, I need to think outside my own box, which is precisely the point of science and contemplation. The issue is that humans can use science -- a way of knowing and understanding -- in flawed ways. There is nothing beyond science. Anything you state that is beyond science, whether that is spirituality, psychedelics, meditation, enlightenment, paranormal, or supernatural is all part of science. The issue is the methods of which to investigate phenomenon will vary depending on what is being investigated. Studying the paranormal will require a different method of science than the method imposed upon us by academia. The same way, studying consciousness (i.e., enlightenment) is requires also a different method than academia science. A problem arises when we try to dogmatically use one method for everything. There is nothing beyond science but our lack of understanding. Science is the pursuit of understanding. Anything else in regards to business, utilitarianism, biases, etc. are all the limits of humanity not of science. When Leo criticizes science, I think he is really criticizing the scientist doing the science but not the spirit of science. The spirit of science is to understand. Life is all about understanding and becoming less ignorant. Like I said, contemplation, psychedelics, meditation, observation, experimentation, double-blinds, peer-reviews, chakras, forensic science, psychology, biology, physics, shamanism, witch-craft, etc. are all different tools and forms of science because they all aim at understanding life. Remember, science is all about understanding and truth. Teachers even tell us this, but the average scientist has not introspected enough to uncover biases, ignorance, and how their survival effects their science. So for some scientists, science is a means to pay the bills and help society in a practical manner. The flaws aren't with the spirit of science but with the spirit of the scientist and of the society/culture. EDIT: I also want to add that the method of which a scientist is using can be deeply flawed depending on the study. Now I think this is what Leo was really getting at. We want to deconstruct "The Scientific Method" as it is taught in academia and challenge other assumptions so that we can learn about other methods of conducting high conscious science. Sorry this is a long one. Let me know what you think.

A person may say they are doing science in the same way that a person may say they are doing spirituality. There are deep and shallow forms of both. I will have to do more reading of these topics. Recommend any good books on philosophy of science? I think the distinction is knowledge vs. belief, True vs. false. I agree here. Except I would rephrase it to state that humans are filled with beliefs, and as long as humans do not work to deconstruct beliefs and get at true knowledge, their science will be limited by their biases. Hence, their science will be corrupted, which I think I am starting to get now what you mean. The whole argument is based on the limits of modern science, the way science is conducted in the mainstream. I gotcha. But science as a whole is much bigger than mainstream and academic science, which is where I am coming from. Revolutions in modern science need to take place to deepen how modern scientists investigate reality. Me doing meditation and contemplation is a form of science that isn't viewed as so by the mainstream. Given that we are critiquing modern, mainstream, academic science, I would agree. Students have not questioned what science is and have never validated the scientific method as taught in academia as a "valid" method. Real science or A.K.A. spirituality is about deconstructing beliefs to derive true knowledge about reality. But who gets to decide what real or false science is? Science and pseudoscience are one you could say. You could also say the same thing about spirituality vs. pseudo-spirituality. But to navigate through this world, to investigate it, and to do good science, we have to create helpful distinctions to help us jailbreak the mind or we will get lost within the default of natural programming. Gotcha. Yeah when I think of "The Field of Science," I imagine myself sitting alone in my room contemplating and investigating my own mind. I also imagine Sherlock Holmes in his study looking through a microscope. All of that is science. The bullshit of science is writing papers and formatting all of that within the system of academia. I have been there lol. Thanks for helping me think this through.