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Anything out of context can be terrible. The fact people are labelled as slave or not does not define their living conditions nor their happiness. This is no excuse to make people into slaves, everyone should have freedom. But we cannot just conclude animals feel pain because if they were humans their rights would be the same as the one of a slave. Since animals do not understand ownership of things nor ownership of themselves by humans they cannot suffer the idea that "oh my god I'm a slave" as opposed to humans. They can only suffer their life conditions, which of course should be as good as possible in the best society.

Are you saying even other humans don't think, it's all just god that thinks or animals don't think?

I think I'd prefer that than being homeless though. After a while of taking me on walks with a leash you might get tired of holding the leash as you'll see I'm not dumb enough to run into cars. The thing is, we go on walks for the animal, not for the owner as the animal needs to move. I do agree it's not nice for an animal to live cramped in a tiny apartment and that's the only reason why I don't currently have pets. Sure I am attached to the idea of reproduction but if I had already lost it I would no longer be attached to it nor suffer it. Maybe it's not humaine to cut the genitals off of our pets but that's a different discussion from having pets in the first place. They don't need the concept of being raped to dislike being touched in a certain way. Slavery is a concept, in itself it's not painful unless judged as painful. The poor life conditions behind that concept are often what's painful. Of course those more basic concepts of being touched in a way they don't want is still concept but I think it's concept simple enough for even them to judge as painful, in their non-linguistic manner. If pets weren't attached to us you would never find your dog back when you lose it and you would permanently lose your cat upon letting it go outside. Dogs are most willing to flee but mostly out of excitment and they seem to be willing to come back after a while. Cats and dogs sure are loving animals. Our treatment to them may not be entirely fair and I think we can progress with more animal rights but still, I think you need a good relationship with a dog. You have no idea how well they can cheer you up

We were chilling and dogs and cat tagged along because they were useful to hunting and killing pest. It wasn't like we enslaved them at first, we had a symbiotic relationship. Now it kinda degenerated into consumerism but at least they don't have to do work for us, we house them for free and they just have to be nice. I imagine the life of a dog or a cat is not that stressful, at least not comparable to being a human slave in the 1700s. They don't even have the concept of being a slave or not. At the end of the day our cats and dogs are attached to us. It's not like releasing them in the wild would make them more happy. Is it ethical to no longer breed them? Is it intrisically painful for them to live with us? We can give them more rights but animals cannot respect our right since they don't have the concept of rights. Honestly, I think our relationship with dogs and cats are a pretty good deal. Having a dog is generally a fun experience for both the person and the dog as long as there is no animal abuse.

Then why suicide? You can pretend suicide feel good by saying it's comfortable, but those are not the same. If your heart felt like suicide was right there would be no doubt. Yet there is, just as there is this forum post. There's no reason to resort to suicide though. If you want to contribute to society you can, it really is up to you. You don't have to but you certainly can. Putting all of that aside, what would be the next amazing to do in life? It doesn't matter what happened, right now what do you want? When you say suicide, I doubt what you want is the pain of hurting the body. What do you think you can only have in the "afterlife" you can't have right now?

As long as you believe this is a negative aspect of you you'll feel the need to belittle others to "compensate" yet none of this is necessary as this is not something to feel bad about. The properties of your meatbag doesn't define your ability to live a happy life, reach enlightenment or have fullfilling relationship. If you believe it is though, you'll act like it is and let it dominate your life.

Why would they be triggered by the "fact" one can be enlightened and narcissist? It's not like what you are saying affects them in anyway, they are not limited by this idea. Even if it were true it wouldn't change whether I'm a narcissist or not nor affect the way I live my life. Does it bother you that people say you aren't enlightened? Isn't it "triggering"? The fact you open this thread shows insecurity about if you are actually enlightened despite selfish behavior and you are here looking for validation that you are but none of this validation will ever be enlightenment. If you see yourself as enlightened then you are no longer open to enlightenment as you assume you already have it. But enlightenment is not a "thing" to have nor status, enlightenment is the end of all dualities including the duality of a separate you. A narcissist cares only about himself but with enlightenment you realize you are nothing and everything so there's no you to care more about than others.

If you are asking why, you aren't in a state of understanding. Otherwise why would you ask if you already know why? Does constantly asking why grants understanding? In a conversation with someone else, asking why can make them create an explanation for you and listening to it can lead to some understanding. If you were stuck constantly asking why though, you would never listen and never understand. Sure someone's explanation can be helpful (or not) but your own explanations are made from the same POV of the one that receives it, so it's really not useful. No insight will ever arise from self-explaining why things are the way they are. Of course asking why can lead to you going forward and be willing to answer that question and do whatever it takes to answer it, but none of what it takes to answer the "why" is "asking why". If you want to understand why a banana is yellow you can start learning about pigments and chemistry and figure out what pigment is in the banana that makes it yellow. None of this requires any asking, you could just do it for fun without even being bothered by not knowing why.

The only way to actually know is to stop thinking you already know and look! There is an answer that feels great, the "solution" to this puzzle. Once you touch it with your mind it feels great. This feeling is direct experience, just like sight and sounds. How do you know anything for certain? You just don't. Any idea can be wrong, except the lack of idea. Direct consciousness, what you see, hear, feel, touch and smell, is not an idea however, so you can trust that! What else do you want to trust? What even is "believing in enlightenment" to you? I would suspect this is where there could be lots of misconceptions. Enlightenment is not a style, an idealogy or a way of thinking. There are no enlightened people, only people that claim stuff and nothing such people say will ever be better than your direct experience.

How is self hypnotization into stop believing thoughts different from stopping to believe thoughts? Let's say you start believing really hard that your hand is ugly. Everywhere you go, you hide your hand, scared that people see it and make fun of you. Now this obviously feels bad. Some people tell you this is not true, you should let go and stop believing. Are they self-hypnotizing into no longer believing their hand is ugly? It's silly from our POV because we don't believe the lie that our hand is ugly. But from the person that believes, it's like challenging their reality. If you challenge your reality you may start believing new bullshit and hypnotizing yourself. But if you don't believe anything you can't go wrong. Can you debunk me if I don't claim anything?

If you happen to already be hypnotized, what would you do to get out? If you doubt meditation to be a practice which undos your own "hypnosis" then what will you do to get out of it? Maybe you find a anti hypnosis technique, the super wake up technique which consists of smashing bananas together. How do you know that technique works and you aren't just "hypnotized" into thinking that works? It's pretty simple when you take a step back. You can go wild with thought, thinking is what hypnotize and only lack of thoughts (which is the same as lack of duality) will let you out. You don't need to believe anyone about this, your heart will let you know that's the way. That being said it's easy to have misconceptions about enlightenment which can feel "hypnotizing" if you try to take them as dogma. Enlightenment is very simple and it's not about selling enlightenment to other people.

This second sentence still puzzles me to this day. If the what the first one is saying is "there is no interpreter", no self that does the interpretation, sure. But the second one is like saying "there is no thought" as distinctions or dualities are the basis of all thoughts. OK thoughts are not actually there, they are "thought". We can say thinking is a "false process" or that thought isn't. Perhaps Truth is the lack of those distinctions and perhaps that there is no such thing as "not truth" as those moments of being lost in thought happen exclusively in the past (we think they happened). But then in this moment, as I look at my banana, I can clearly see it's edge. It's distinction between banana and no banana. The image that is presented to me (the appearance of the banana, before interpretation, the clouds let's say, the direct experience of sight) has the potential for distinction. Yet if I was in a sensory deprivation tank, what would appear in my direct experience would not allow for potential for distinction within itself. Sure I can use memory to compare the sensory deprivation to a normal "full of pattern" image but within the image itself. What if I am put in a sensory deprivation tank with some drug that gives me total amnesia (no memory access)? In such a case, the mind wouldn't be able to make any distinction since it has absolutely no sensory input to distinguish anything from anything. It would probably be a state of full enlightenment with no thought and pure joy. Yet if I were to truly stop making any distinctions, it wouldn't be much different from the sensory tank experiment. There wouldn't be a distinction between "medium which allow for distinctions" and "medium which do not allow for distinction". When you talk about your crystal balls or your lens, you say we use a lens to focus on a specific part of ourselves (as god, as everything) and from what we see we assume to be human having our human life. But I don't see this lens. This sight of the banana peel (eaten by that time) doesn't seem complete to me. My field of view is not totally empty like a sensory deprivation tank yet it's doesn't have the maximum amount of entropy and it doesn't seem to show every thing. You could say that well, all the other stuff I think I am missing (for instance the sight of an apple) are ideas coming from memory and thus not true. But then isn't that the same thing for change? Any change to what I'm seeing happens in the future or past, so the entire universe, for all of eternity, is this sight of a banana peel and all the other stuff I see, with the stuff I hear, feel, touch etc. There has never been anything else and there will never be anything else that this? That's just hard to swallow. Especially as I can turn my head and see other stuff entering my field of view. So then what, it was never the previous scene, it always was the new scene? I know I'm in some sort of misconception. I spent a fair amount of time on my last mushroom trip trying to "unzoom" my field of view and see what's "outside". Maybe there's a duality to be collapsed between what I see and imagine but what I imagine always seems unclear and some sort of "duality soup" than what I see in front of me (what appears as what is). What I imagine is like just ideas and not really images like consciousness is. I'm curious if you have anything to say that can give insight and I'm curious about what's the real deal with your crystal ball. At least I'm confused as to what is the lens you talk about in actuality.

I wouldn't recommend just listening to someone. How about directly challenging the idea that there is a you unable to differentiate between what is real and what is not? Believing this idea is the same as having psychosis. If you go see a doctor, they'll give you a diagnosis which might make you believe even more that you have psychosis. I have great respect for modern medicine and all of it's accomplishments but when it comes to mental illnesses they don't really know what's going on because it's a software issue, not a hardware issue.

Experiencing seems more effective How do you know studies know what they are talking about? It happens inside but it's studied from the outside

Whether you think of gratitude or you go back to neurotism is really a function of what you "use to think". Think a lot in a certain way and it becomes easy to think like this in the future. In the materialist paradigm, we would call this learning. In the absolute, there is no learning because there is no past in which we hadn't learned it yet, this past is imagined. This is all just thought quality measurements though (how good are you at thinking positive thought). In this case you are defining level of consciousness as quality of thought, which is all just thought and not consciousness. Essentially if what you focus on is having positive thoughts of gratitude, wonder, etc. you are focusing on a self which isn't thinking what it should be thinking instead of focusing on the present moment. How good you are at thinking positive thoughts isn't directly a function of how much 5-MeO you put in your ass though. There are other way to cultivate gratitude and other positive feelings.

First I would deeply challenge this idea. Anytime you feel bad, come back to this. What is it that you are missing? Don't just ask it quickly, focus on the question and keep coming back to it. You listed a bunch of things you "should be doing" but none of those things would really fix the root issue. Cleaning your diet and having a nice sleep schedule can help you think of yourself positively, inciting positive thoughts but it won't contemplate and dissolve the negative idea for you. If the belief remain unchallenged, it will keep ruling your life. Maybe you are reading this and you are not convinced. "I really believe I don't have what it takes". Ok then. If that is really the truth, why not just accept it? You have to notice that this thought is not only thought, it is also being rejected. No matter how much the mind tries to take control of things with this thought, the heart rejects it because it's not true and so you feel bad. As long as you keep trying to dictate how things are and what you are through thinking, it will feel bad.

I would be careful with the quantification of consciousness. Consciousness is the present moment, it's what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, touch and sense right now. It never changes, it just is. We could then start using thoughts as the basis for quantification and say that 0 thoughts is pure consciousness and try to count how many beliefs we are currently holding but even this is not so reliable. How many thoughts are you thinking right now? We only can think one thing at the time although we can have the thought of there being lots of thing going on. So you can either be stuck in thought or not. There's no mid-way to duality. You can make more dualities to your dualities but it's all the same. One could judge the quality of thoughts instead and make some sort of scale. But then it's much simpler and honest to say "I feel irritation" than saying "I'm 58% awake". This whole idea that there is some sort of consciousness level in there and everytime you take a psychedelic you get spiritual XP is quite nonsense. There is no brain, no neurotransmitter to "upgrade" and certainly no spiritual XP or awakening level. All there is is the present moment. You are 100% awake and enlightened right now. If you object to this statement, this objection is exactly the thought that is believed and which gets in the way of pure consciousness.

What you describes ressembles the inner child and inner parent duality. We could describe what you consider "head" to be the inner parent judging the inner child for "not being respectful" or "not acting the way you should". The inner parent is indeed thought but the inner child, the idea that you have unchangeable feelings which say "I don't like these people, I feel drained", this is also an idea. I see why you associate this to feeling, it feels bad to think that you are like this. These "thoughts" may seem different from other thoughts. Especially if you've been thinking like that for a long time. It's really not "intellectual"-type of thoughts. Our deepest beliefs often aren't even voiced, they are just unconsciously thought. They can be instantly released by noticing what they are and no longer thinking them. The idea that there are thoughts trying to do stuff is more thought. In reality there are thoughts and you either think them (identify with them) or not. It's not like those thoughts have any will of their own. They are selling you a story, a narrative and you either buy into it or not. As long as you buy into one that's not true, it will feel bad. I see what you mean by "trying to dictate" though. You would want to feel good when seeing them and you don't like fact it's not the case right now. But as long as you believe that you can't, you will not. Those "feelings" are not bad unless you judge them as bad. If you really feel them and let them exists you will see that they fade away quite quickly. If you refuse feeling them under the idea that they should not be there, they will never go. Noticing all of that can be quite challenging without the right tools. I find this meditation guide really helpful when trying to notice what is actually going on: https://www.actualityofbeing.com/meditation My answers are only guesses, at the end of the day, only you can find what's true! You can find it and it will feel amazing, I know you will!

<3

You are not like that. That's why it doesn't feel right when you think about it. There's no "control" to have on feelings, you just feel them. What does it mean when you feel bad? It means the way you are looking at thing, the perspective you are using is wrong. What feels bad is thinking that you are drained by your family while in fact none of the stuff they do or think drain you at all. You have some kind of relief when you stop interacting with them. Is it really because they drain you or is it because you finally break free from thinking they are draining you? Just the effect of no longer thinking about it must indeed be very relaxing compared to the constant stress of worrying about this. The more you believe it, the more you act like it's true. If you act like they are draining you down it will seem true to you. Yet feeling will be there to tell you that's not right. Why does it feel uncomfortable when you step foot in your aunt and uncle's house? Because at that moment you are fully focused on this idea that you will not have a great time and that it will irritate you and all of that. If you stop thinking that none of those negative effects would happen. The fact they all think backward doesn't affect you at all (again if you start thinking it does, it will feel bad) next time you know you'll be chilling with them and laughing with them and their silly ideas. I had issues like this not too long ago. At first I hated everyone lol Then one by one I contemplated what I didn't like about a specific family member and it turned out in my case, everything I didn't like about them were things I didn't like about myself. All the judgements I had for them were just "fears of being/becoming like that". Those fears end up being quite silly because there is no particular reason I would end up like them. The only thing to do with other people is to accept them as they are really. Of course they all have their tons of flaws and all of that, but it's not like we can change anyone. I think you are an amazing person and you already show your willingness to understand what's the real issue behind this. You seem to have already realized that their behavior isn't at all that bad, only your reaction. Now it's time to believe in yourself and let go of all those ideas about the way people affect you. Nobody can affect you or drain you, you are undrainable... unless you want to believe you are

Isn't that what you blame close minded people of doing? Like for instance assuming that UFOs aren't real without looking at the videos...

It's not actually illegal, just not useful to anyone and therefore not produced by anyone. No government ever banned it or anything, it's just rumors about a single story on some website. It's not "more stricly guarded" than hard drugs, it's just not available because nobody produces it. There are superior dyes for that color so no motivation to make any. You can find any number of useless chemicals like this that are just not produced and thus not accessible. https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/dicyanine-a-98-acros-organics-2/AC407050010 Kilner's experiments could not be reproduced. You can believe he was right and everyone that tried his experiment was wrong. But then if you want to try his experiment, how would you get it right if nobody else than him can get it right?

There is no such thing as sleep, only rest. You can't take 3 hour to fall asleep unless you believe in the idea of a "me that is stressed" or a "me that can't fall asleep" and those ideas are the source of the anxiety in the first place. The mind always "wins". If you really want to believe those ideas they will become true for you. Depression and anxiety does have physical effects but that doesn't mean it has physical causations. If you worry 24/7 about something there will be physical consequences to that but that doesn't mean the problem is physical in nature. The higher cortisol might prevent you from sleeping but the reason that cortisol is there in the first place it's because of thought. If you couldn't think you wouldn't be able to stress. No you can't control what your next thought will be but you can avoid "thinking" it or identifying with it! This is the entire point of meditation, don't take those thoughts seriously, just let them "be there". At the end of the day, as I said you can believe literally anything you want. The only way to find out if a thought is true or false is to follow feeling. We can argue all day everyday but none of this argument would be a substitute from you finding what's true by feeling. If this way of looking at the world and depression doesn't not feel great, amazing, awesome then you are wrong about something. It doesn't mean I'm right, I could be wrong as well, some sort of master bullshitter. But when you find that truth it will feel amazing, just don't let any idea convince you that this truth doesn't exist or that it's unaccessible. This is the issue I had with Leo's comment, he's implying that "he's screwed" and that without psychedelics he can't find truth. That is false and so ironic when you think about it for a second. The reasons you have for "not being able to be at peace" are different but they do the same thing : make you unhappy. Even if you don't want to stop believing it, I imagine one can just take psychedelics and contemplate whether psychedelics are the only way to enlightenment, on psychedelics.

All you reveal to me is how seriously you believe the validity of those conditions. Each of those things need to be transcended and unfortunately I cannot transcend them for you. I went through very painful headaches, quite bad depression and even psychosis. I came to realize that each one of them is entirely rooted in thought, tricks of the mind of sorts. If you disagree with the idea that you are depressed, you cannot be depressed. Depression is a thought, even for animals. Animals might not have language but they still have thoughts and emotions. You seem to give lots of credits to those people and go as far as call them "enlightened". Nobody is enlightened, enlightenment is not a trait or quality. The fact I had an enlightening experience doesn't mean you should take my shit as gold from now on. I'm as prone as anyone else to fall for tricks of the mind and even get depressed. I "transcended" depression but I could get lost and start believing again that it's impossible for me to come back to clarify with some sort of new twist to the belief. I'm totally respect those people too but I don't think they are immune to anything compared to "normal" or "non enlightened" people. No matter what genetic or medical condition the body have, you can always accept it. This "genetic vulnerability" you talk about is entirely in the domain of thought. Can you see it? Touch it? Hear it? Taste it? It is literally imagined, thought. Of course animals don't have such complex reasons for depression, it's more like "I'm depressed because my babies are dead". It's still just thought, although probably easier to relate to. There's nothing to fix, the issue is thinking there's an issue in the first place. Most mental illnesses are imagined, they are "in the head". If it was a body problem, you could see it or feel it directly instead of thinking about it.

Enlightenment is not a thing or a property of a person it is the total lack of duality. By defining enlightenment you are creating a new duality which you can use to judge whether people are enlightened or not but none of that is enlightenment. I admit that first sentence feels funny though. Basically defining enlightenment as the lack of dualities using a duality betweens dualities and no dualities? You're better off not trying to define it. Suffering could be seen as creating a duality between what you want and what is. Basically not accepting the present moment. If you have a "headache", there are sensations in your head you are rejecting. If you have "major depression" you are simply not accepting the present moment and wishing it was something else or thinking there's a "me that is depressed". Feelings do not cause suffering. Suffering is not accepting feeling as it is and that's in the domain of thought. The opposite of that is feeling it.