Tim R

@Leo Gura Don't you think some people should rather stay away from all this awakening business if it would do them more harm than good? If you don't have your shit together in life, stay tf away from psychedelics and "enlightenment". I don't see why you would do otherwise. "I'm not ready to awaken" might be a defense mechanism, yes, but what if it's legit? There's a bunch of people who went bananas because they weren't ready, not mature enough.

@Thought Art Nice, some good points on that list. And beautifully, they are all aspects of each other.

@Nahm I didn't mean "comprehending truth" as intellectual understanding, or as anything that could be shared or said. I know that Truth is just completely and entirely out of reach for any grasping endeavor. I'm not a native speaker, so maybe I sometimes use inappropriate words.

@James12345 You were probably banned either because you reduce everything we say to word games and then call it "illusion" or because of your intolerable one-upmanship. There, I said it. You don't engage in proper conversation, you just come along, say that everything is illusion and that we aren't even close to comprehending truth.

"Mean" obviously doesn't mean anything.

@taotemu Yes. That's why I love the Zen so much. Because they try to teach you this realization, that this is it, more directly than any other spiritual school, in my opinion.

I think he was just talking about love in the context of human emotion, not about love as the nature of existence.

The answer is no. "You" can't awaken and "you" can't do anything about it. Likewise, "you" can't not do anything about it. And don't let anybody fool you into believing that you can get rid of yourself or that you can become enlightened. Although I think you already understand that. However, so long as there seems to be an illusion, so long you will be under illusion. Because "breaking an illusion" essentially doesn't ever happen and so you will never" get rid of your ego". All you can do is frustrate yourself so much, that one day, you hopefully realize that you've been trying to solve an impossible problem. And then there will be peace.

@Someone here I did read your whole post! my long ass reply wasn't to that one sentence of yours but to those who think that it's a reasonable goal;

Feel free to add to that whatever your personal utopian life would look like. And now let's really think this through. Is this really what you want? Being completely content with everything that is? Well then why don't you do it right now? Because either you do it that way or you won't be able to do it at all. Whether you like it or not. Otherwise, your "perfect life" is a highly dualistic enterprise that is bound to fail, for various reasons. The first one is this: your desire to change certain conditions in reality so that you can be happy is what prevents you from ever truly being happy. This may not be a problem in the beginning stages of pursuing a good life, but the closer you approach "the perfect life", the bigger and more frustrating this self-contradicting wish becomes. After a certain point, you will have to drop absolutely everything and all desire. But that can't be done, because you desire to do so. You're trapped. Or at least that's what you think. Secondly, it's the desire for one thing without its opposite that will make sure that you will be totally frustrated You want to be at ease? Well too bad you can't know what that feels like unless you also know and feel the contrast of "stressed". Same goes for all the other comforts you think you can have without their opposites. You can't. After a while of feeling "at ease, blissful, without anxiety, etc." you won't feel that way anymore. Because you'll get used to it. And then you're right back at where you began this whole thing. The last dualism is Samsara and Nirvana. Samsara being the world of dualism and Nirvana the liberated world, the blissful world or whatever you think it is. But the truth is that the perfect life is not to be found in some blissed out state of consciousness where there are no more problems. The perfect life is amidst all your everyday life, with all its "flaws". Everything that you want to get rid of? That's part of Nirvana. And reaching the perfect life won't be achieved by getting rid of what you think is flawed, but by realizing that the flawed is the same as the perfect. This simply requires a shift in your thinking as to what constitutes "perfect".

Well that's a stupid goal.

@Blackhawk https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoriesofEverything/community

Have you ever wondered? What does it mean to be hurt, physically or emotionally? I haven't yet contemplated this question very thoroughly, if you have, I'd be grateful for your insight. What is hurt in relation to consciousness and identity (and survival)? It's some kind of suffering, yes, but... there seems to be a kind of.. I don't know how to explicate it. It's something like sadness or grief. But different. I have a hunch that hurt is somehow intimately tied to love, but I'm not sure how exactly... @Nahm I'd love to hear your thoughts on this?

Lamo?? you live in Norway. That's one of the absolute best countries you could possibly live in, where do you want to go?? Chill drug laws? Idk, Maybe the Netherlands, do your research. They have beautiful girls tho. Moving from Norway because of girls and drugs sounds pretty immature to me, but you do you.

@m0hsen And how would you know that?

@Nahm Sometimes I see that's it's so god damn obvious that I just wanna (lovingly) slap myself and everybody who asks silly questions. Yes. But sometimes I don't see it and then I start to think that it's necessary to think or contemplate This. But what is obvious if it wasn't for the hidden?

Guess I'll have to contemplate it myself then

@Goldzilla Actually yes, we are apes. Look up what constitutes "apes". We are very, very closely related to chimps, gorillas and orangutans. We are really not that different from them. Especially Chimps and Bonobos since they, together with us, are part of the Hominini.

@Goldzilla Because human beings are very, very social animals. All apes live in groups. And a lonely ape will die quickly. No group of apes will accept and take a loner ape into their group. Being alone goes somewhat against our nature.

@tlowedajuicemayne Beautiful, I really enjoyed reading that story

@Endangered-EGO Indirectly, yes. The way I understood it, they fed it enormous amounts of text from the internet, like hundreds of Gigabytes of text.

I don't mean anything by this. I just think the reply it gave is remarkable, considering the fact that it hasn't been programmed to talk about anything particular. Don't you think?? I mean we could talk about AI, intelligence and consciousness. But no AI will ever "gain" consciousness. AI is consciousness just like everything else. But I think consciousness expresses itself in different ways by limiting itself in different ways, i.e. manifesting itself in different ways. When consciousness manifest itself as eyes, consciousness can see, when it manifest itself as ears, it can hear. Consciousness is the same in everything, it only differs in appearance. And when it manifests itself as artificial intelligence - who knows how it experiences itself?..

Ok, yesterday I took the time to ask my friend a little more about it. This AI isn't programmed to talk about anything particular and most certainly not about non-duality. The people who are working on it have never in their life used the word "metaphysical". They don't know anything about spirituality, they are scientifically minded, rational computer scientists. The only reason I got access to it is because I have a friend who also works at my university. I personally know nothing about computers, I'm a biologist. As far as I know, the only thing that it's programmed for is to be able to talk in general and not to sound like a robot. That's why I shared it with you. I wouldn't have bothered to do so if I knew that what it would say was predictable.

Why not

Damn this is beautiful...anyone else tear up??