gettoefl

I don’t think the issue is whether mental suffering is real, because clearly it is. Symbolic stimuli can trigger the same physiological cascades as physical ones. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between fire and meaning. The key difference isn’t reality, but duration and reuse. A cell or animal responds to threat, discharges energy, and then returns to baseline once the stimulus ends. The human mind by contrast adds something new: it stores meaning and reapplies it across time. That doesn’t make mental suffering unreal but it does make it persistent. So the distinction is not biological vs imaginary suffering. Rather it is situational suffering versus self-reinforcing suffering. Both are real; one completes naturally, and the other loops and loops. Your gladiator example is a perfect case in point. The immediate physiological shock is unavoidable. What magnifies and prolongs the suffering is what the symbol is taken to mean beyond the moment namely annihilation, finality, identity-ending. That layer is by no means intrinsic to the thumbs-down; it’s interpretive, and therefore correctable. This doesn’t imply the mind is an evolutionary error. Instead it introduces a new capacity: continuity of meaning. That capacity enables culture and coordination, and also enables suffering to outlive its cause. And thus easing suffering isn’t about denying biology, symbolism, or mind. It’s about loosening the insistence that a symbol must keep meaning what it always meant before. When that insistence relaxes, the same energetic system functions as before, but without turning every signal into an existential verdict. Mental suffering isn’t fake. It’s just the only form of suffering that can be allowed to finish. Anyway that's it for me and I bid you Happy New Year brother. I appreciate our occasional joustings this year.

I do concur that life involves tension and self-regulation, but I am suggesting that suffering itself is not inherent to life’s forward movement. A cell adapts, repairs, and persists, yet it doesn’t suffer in any human sense. What seems to introduce suffering is not tension alone, but memory and self-reference, namely the carrying forward of experience as meaning. Indeed when life is filtered through continuity, comparison, and identity, tension becomes something personal. The Instagram example illustrates this well: the nervous system isn’t just responding to the moment, but to what the moment is taken to say about the self. Remove that interpretive lens and the energy remains, but the suffering now collapses. So suffering doesn’t look like a necessary engine of development so much as a signal that meaning has frozen. Adaptation and growth can happen through responsiveness without any anguish; anguish arises when interpretation hardens and can no longer update. Again I agree that denying suffering as “unreal” doesn’t work. But neither does assuming it is inevitable. What seems to ease suffering is not escaping life’s tension, but releasing the insistence that tension must be explained, owned, or resolved by a separate self. When that insistence relaxes, fear, even the fear of death, softens naturally, not through any belief, but through the loosening of fixed meaning.

I think what you’re pointing to here contains deep truth, especially around not denying suffering or bypassing it. Where I’d like to gently nuance things is in how suffering is explained versus how it is experienced. It seems to me that suffering is not actually inherent to life itself, but to a life interpreted through the mental modes of continuity, preservation, and memory. A self-regulating organism clearly repairs damage and avoids destruction, but suffering is what arises when these functions are experienced as personal threat, loss, or meaning. Repair and avoidance can however occur WITHOUT anguish; anguish appears when past meanings are carried forward and reapplied. In that sense, suffering is less a driver of life and more a by-product of remembered meaning being reused. On the physical / mental distinction: I agree with you that separating them too sharply doesn’t hold. Still, what seems crucial is not frequency but how meaning gets assigned. A sensation becomes suffering simply when it is interpreted as proof of danger, failure, or impermanence. The same sensation, without that interpretive overlay, might be intense without any being psychologically binding. So suffering isn’t in fact the energy itself but rather it’s the conclusion drawn from it. Regarding ego-mind: I fully agree that it’s not helpful to simply dismiss it as “not real.” It clearly functions. But function doesn’t mean final truth. An interface can be useful without being authoritative. The difficulty comes when the interface is taken as a reporter of reality rather than a translator with limits. When that happens, continuity, identity, and survival narratives harden, in which case suffering follows naturally. I also fully resonate with what you say about misalignment. Where I might phrase it differently is this: suffering doesn’t indicate a broken structure so much as a fixed one. It’s not that something is wrong, but that meaning has stopped being fluid. When interpretation is allowed to loosen, even briefly, suffering often reduces without denial, suppression, or transcendence. As for “opening to the absolute”: I will just add that this opening doesn’t always arrive as a dramatic recognition of totality. Often it shows up more quietly, as the absence of insistence, the release of certainty, or the willingness to not reuse old conclusions. Fear of death tends to soften not because one knows something new, but because the need to conclude anything at all relaxes. So perhaps suffering isn’t best understood as a necessary engine of life, nor as an illusion to be dismissed, but as a signal that meaning has become frozen. When meaning is allowed to renew itself in the present, suffering naturally diminishes, not because reality is denied, but because it is no longer filtered exclusively through memory. That reframing, at least for me, preserves the seriousness of suffering while also pointing to a way it can genuinely ease without bypassing, denial, or metaphysical claims that need defending.

This is partially correct. The statement is saying you are nothing but a thought. This is true. But that's just the person who looks back at you from the mirror. You are also the supreme reality which has thought you and the universe into existence. So Rene Descartes only-half-smart. He just looked in the mirror and not into the void.

Math is logically true, not experientially true. We do not experience mathematics itself, only the thought of it appearing coherent. When we say we “directly experience” that 1+1=2, what we are actually experiencing is a sense of mental obviousness. That same experience persists even when the conclusion fails. For example, in absolute reality one plus one remains one, or in the world when one clone is added to another identical clone and result is still only one clone, not two. This shows that direct experience does not always validate interpretations; it only confirms presence. Confusion arises when coherence of thought is mistaken for revelation of truth.

Step 1 is to find someone who values truth to the extent you do. Relationships are spirituality's classroom. They're tools to keep you here or wake you up. A Course in Miracles says to heal one relationship heals all relationships since only you need healing and your mind is the only one. You just need to fix your eyesight. God is the only reality out there and in here.

Growth is who you're around. If you hang around a Jesus you grow. You are the sum of the 5 people you hang around with. Choose your mates and medias well. If you're a Jesus you can't help but help. The vibration infects all. People feel it by climbing a tree and spotting you approaching a mile off. You already know peace but your ego sneakily redefined it as comfort. You already know peace because you are peace. A Jesus will always help. He's still around.

Yes. what is being communicated is that you can only love the other to the extent you have found love for yourself. The world's love is the opposite of this. So I need to find my own wholeness, innocence and joy first. I will love this. Then I can start looking for it in the other. To see it in the other is confirmation I found it in myself. Loving is the litmus test I have completed my inner work. If I can't love somebody, I need to go back to the mat and sink deeper. My work isn't done. Ultimately all I will see is love, inner and outer.

Yes the Godhead which to me is the Absolute Infinitely Expanding Enjoying Terrain Chance Adventure ... and sometimes producing what at first looks like tawdry pitiful imperfection ... but is always flawless beguiling majestic ...

Here is the thing. We think we live separately from God - every look in the mirror confirms this assumption. The journey then is man->Christ->God. Christ is what breaks down the idea we are separate from God and enables us to live out of that truth. It is how we come to unitive consciousness and then to no-self and then to fullness in God. Christ is the marketplace stage of Robert's path where we live fully carrying out God's work. I am God is nonsense in egoic consciousness which is where all think they are. God cannot know a two-ness universe since two-ness is an impossibility we made up out of thin air. God doesn't mind we did this but knows there is a better reality where suffering is not the case and so God has Christ be the vehicle for the apparent journey back to oneness.

I'd say Christ is the activity of God that creates finite universes like this one. God knows nothing about here. Since just like the finite cannot know the infinite so too the infinite cannot know the finite. It God knew here, here would be eternal. God outsources this project to the apple of his eye, his Son the Christ.

She is good. Here is her 13 step path. Read from bottom to top.