An young being

But does the quantity of gods really matter? I have been taught a poem by Kambar during my school days which roughly translates into " If you say, God is one. God is one. If you say God is many, God is many. If you say God is none, God is none. If say God exists, God exists. If you say God is something, God is something. If you say God is everything, God is everything. God exists based on our beliefs. If we understand that, life will be better." I believe it applies to all faith.

By the way, where are you planning to start your tour? I believe you told it's from South, but we Indians don't consider Goa to be a South city.

Nice! But I am not sure if volunteering jobs would fetch you good money. ( Although I have little knowledge in that area.). In Tamil Nadu, you have the advantage that even smaller cities are above average in development. Chennai will be the first choice to have a balance between finding work and exploration. Pondicherry and mahabalipuram are popular places to visit nearby. The city is also cheaper to stay compared to other major metro cities. Next to Chennai, Coimbatore is the most developed city ( Isha yoga centre is popular there) , followed by Trichy and Madurai.( which also houses a popular temple). I believe you can easily find some work to do there. You can also check room rent prices in each city using booking.com. A disadvantage in Tamilnadu is that tourist spots are spread across the state. But if you travel by bus or train, they are very cheap!

This belief itself might turn out to be an insult to our intelligence.

The quality of the play is so good that no matter how many times we tell us things like, "I am alone, I am all alone" , "This is all a dream" etc., we will be pulled back into 'reality' faster than we imagined.

Because the snake is flexible and can gulp its own tail?

The answer is "I don't know".

Yep! And you have to be compassionate towards yourself as well. And be grateful that you are in a better position than them.

If you feel you are short on money and will be suffering without enough of it, you have to concentrate on making enough money to meet your needs rather than finding a job that entirely fits your passion, atleast for the time being. In such case, you have to find a balance between how much money the job provides for survival and how much you are passionate about it. You can be passionate about multiple things in life and it's not necessary you have to allocate the most of your time to the thing which you have the highest passion. What you are doing right now is good. You are passionate about chess and you are allocating some time to it every week. Try to do the same for other things you are passionate about by allocating some time for other passions in your free time. It can be as simple as helping people at your workplace.( which you already seem to do). This problem of feeling inferior arises due to comparison. You are comparing with people at a higher strata in your society. But for the universe as a whole, it doesn't matter how far you are in the ladder or how much you contribute to the society or what others think of you. Remember that Earth is a tiny dot in the universe and for God, it doesn't matter whether that tiny earth gets bigger or smaller. What Elon Musk does to change the world is just like adding a drop of water in the ocean. For God, Gandhi and you are one and the same. God can make all the human beings in earth attain the highest possibility of development in a second, but God doesn't do that. God wants to experience life as you, and experiencing life is the universal life purpose. All other purposes that human makes ultimately serves that purpose. It doesn't matter how you live your life, what only matters is how unique your life is. No matter what you do, your life is already unique. You are the only one who are experiencing the unique life you are living and striving to live. It doesn't have to be great or better. It can even be the worst possible life in the world. If your mind still wishes to compare, compare your life with the millions of beggars on the world. Compare with the homeless people and the people who are unemployed. According to your definition of life purpose, they don't have any life purpose at all, yet they live a unique life as others in God's perspective. And they wish to live too. If you still wish to become a better person in the society, which is also a unique experience and loved by God, it's important to improve life in steps. There's nothing wrong in having great ambitions, but make sure your desires are within your reach and not far fetched. All the levels of comparison are made within your mind, so setting an achievable and shorter goal like getting a better salary or getting a small promotion will give you the same happiness as, for example, Elon Musk establishing another billion dollar company, when comparative success is removed out of the equation. Instead of creating bigger goals, develop your humane characters such as compassion, gratitude, love etc. They will affect your happiness more than the other factors. What your post is about is ( seeing others success as yours) is also one of the characters falling in the humane category.

True, I came to know about that only after entering this forum, even though it seems to be a popular theory among westerners.

In decades, maybe. In the last and present century, definitely not! These things happen all the time. But we can live as a human only for 80 to 100 years, so these things seem new to us. Even if there is a possibility of extreme events such as a third world war, things will recover in due time. Already we have recovered from a pandemic despite huge losses of life and economy, and the present wars are smaller in scale compared to the wars we have seen in the past, and Trump is not going to destroy the democractic system, so we can recover sooner than we think even if the damages are heavy. Still, people should worry about how things are becoming worse, since people's voice is important in raising awareness among governments, that's the essence of being democratic.

When AI could do the work at ten times lower cost than human labour, I believe it can definitely help improving the economy. You seem to think that I suggest AI as a solution to solve all world problems. But, the fact is that AI technologies are already taking widespread adaptation in various facets of our life. No matter whether it causes unemployment or not, companies will adopt AI and replace humans slowly, if not at a faster rate, because it saves them lots of money. So, the smart thing to do here is to examine the best approach to solve AI related problems rather than trying to ignore AI completely and demonise it.

Please read the post again. I acknowledged that countries with very low birth rates need to bring it back to normal or above average levels. They are not going to help increase the birth rate, but can solve some of the problems ( not all) arising due to lower birth rates. This may not be possible with current technologies, but technologies are rapidly evolving that could help replace labour and repetitive work with machines, which most humans are presently doing. This mainly solves the economic growth problem. I am not talking about AI technologies that make humans unproductive or more entertaining. You could have an AI designed even to murder people or steal things, I am not talking about that. AI revolution is unavoidable. Would you tell smart phones are useless and unnecessary simply because they allow you to view pornography? I am talking about AIs in job sector which could replace boring and meticulous jobs and allow humans to pursue more creativitely rewarding jobs. Gene technologies at present are of no use now, it would take decades to arrive at what I am taking about. Also, regarding tests and trials, the whole world will be available with improvements in globalisation policies and not restricted to specific countries, especially in the future. And once again, I acknowledge that lower birth rates in first world countries is a problem to be solved. Now let's come to third world countries like India and Africa, which I have more experience with, and which I was talking about mainly. They have the highest fertility/population growth rates in the world. This would seem like a good thing for economy, more people means more labour force, right? But here's what happens if it continues at the same rate. 1. These countries are ridden by poverty. Every extra child in a family puts extra pressure to the parents. They will be forced to have lower quality education, lower quality of life etc. 2. Improvement in economy through increased population doesn't mean improvement in quality of life. More population means lesser GDP per capita. Also, many third world countries are affected by corruption, so there is no guarantee that the money comes back to the welfare of the society and could widen the inequality gap. 3. As I told earlier, AI could soon replace repetitive and laborous jobs, which would increase unemployment rates, which are already low in these countries

Being really alone is when you have nothing to interact with, not even darkness. If there is darkness, you can still consider it as a friend.

The whole point of meditation I believe is to stop reacting to memories. What is called as thoughts arise from different kinds of memories like some names you have specified. Some have the gift of forgetting quickly, which is widely thought of as a disability. They could easily forget all the memories, including trauma. For those who can't, meditation or mindfulness could be a great tool. How do memories get etched in our mind? I don't know the scientific reason, but based on my observation, we all know that the intensity of an experience, the most joyful and the most traumatic, are the ones which get etched strongly in our minds. But, most of us have the ability to forget as time passes, but what makes some people remember it deeply while others could forget it easily? It's the reaction to the thoughts that arise in your mind regarding that memory. The immediate thoughts on the trauma spontaneously arise in our mind from our memory and we can't avoid it. But, what we do is that we react to that memory, recalling the suffering you had gone through, which makes it a new and stronger memory. We keep doing it forever. In order to forget, we have to stop reacting, and that's where meditation and mindfulness can help us. Just learn to observe the memory and let it pass and it automatically becomes silent with practice or the mind moves on to a new memory. Another way meditation can help with trauma is preventing the creation of new traumas. When you practice your mind to be still, you become unreactive to the surroundings. This helps in not getting affected by significant events to or around you. A problem for people who meditate with strong traumatic memories is that these memories keep resurfacing on a deeper level during meditation. That's why it is important to have a proper teacher+ psychologist to guide you in being mindful. One of my suggestion will be to practice mindfulness in nature, either physically or through natural sounds and videos and keep them as meditative objects, so that positive thoughts fill up the mind. After regular practice, we can move to face the traumatic thoughts at our own pace.

💖💙💓💓🗣️🦴🤛✋👊👌🌱🌿🌲🌳 Seems like it is working fine now.

Many concepts evolved from Spirituality such as meditation, yoga, mindfulness, heartfulness etc. were practised widely from ancient days without any scientific foundation and purely based on experience. But it attained widespread popularity across the globe when it was found to be beneficial scientifically. There are many psychological concepts as well which are widely accepted, yet there is little to zero scientific research to support the theories. Though some concepts are difficult to prove by research, taking effort to encourage such researches, especially by people who are interested or advocate such theories or who have created them, is essential to help it reach global audiences.

Don't be too hasty. What if the data gets recovered?

Sudden or faster birth rate declines definitely creates tonne load of problems atleast in the short term, especially for countries where birth rate is already low. So, the key is to implement policies and awareness programmes that would keep a healthy birth rate, but making sure that it doesn't go beyond the limits. I was suggesting how AI could complement the declining birth rate and how developing but highly populated nations could benefit from a lower birth rate. I saw that he mentioned he was from a third world country, so I complemented those points. I am not aware of the problems faced in developed nations due to lower birth rate.

I have seen people around me die like bees in dozens. Some people believe in things followed by masses blindly. Some people speak against anything people do in masses, believing that if we do anything that majority does, we are wrong. Though both groups play their role in the society, both belong to the closed minded category. I don't know anything about him though. I have to see his videos to understand his mentality.

Sorry I didn't see the word education. Think about it in this angle: how ai can reduce the bias among teachers in educating or grading children, how ai can create or modify learning content based on the requirements of the individual student, how ai can solve the problem of manpower etc.

It's another way for people to feel that life is fair, which itself is unfair since they all are seeing only the projections.

So, why do other things exist such as movies, relations, pets, games, travel etc.? Most don't seem to help me in understanding anything. How could reasoning or even realizing be the sole purpose of existence?

Why can't the reason be simply to experience the universe and understanding it be just one aspect of experiencing the universe?

A present day example would be Swami Nityananda.