r0ckyreed

Maybe the simplest reason is that the Buddha never existed by as an idea in your mind or that Buddha did not understand God. Big assumption. I already covered that in my original post. How do you know what Truth is? You already assume you know what Truth is. That is a question mark. If you already have the Truth, then why be so defensive and adamant of Buddhism. You are lost in thought. Buddhism is a thought system. The opposite is the case. Sure some may appear to be open to the idea that the Buddha never existed or the Buddha never being enlightened. But they don't take that idea seriously. If they did, they wouldn't spend years in a monastery parroting the ideas of someone who could never have existed or never have been enlightened. That kind of commitment takes a certain amount of ignorance. Lol. Dude. Buddhism is and modern science are belief-systems. They are conceptual in nature. Buddhism and science depend on belief and thought. And like I said before, no thought or belief is the Truth. Truth is what remains after you kill Buddhism and all your beliefs/thoughts. Sounds like a lot of projection, assumption, and justification to give away your intellectual autonomy. Good luck.

Amen. And all other worldviews. And every “spiritual guru,” author, book, video, and teaching. Everyone wants to listen to a guru, but nobody wants to do the work themselves and be their own guru. “Spiritual” laziness is what it is. Taking full responsibility over my own intellectual/spiritual path, along with daily contemplation has been the greatest experience of my life. So much suffering is caused by outsourcing that.

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.

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