Tim R

Which are your 3 favorite books?

1. It's not a belief. This has to be absolutely clear. 2. Show an ordinary object to the person, for example a spoon. Now explain, that you only call this thing a "spoon". Explain, that we only call this thing a "thing". Whatever we say about it, it is not what it is, because it is not a word. 3. Ask the person to look at his arm/hand. Ask the person to determine where exactly your arm ends and the hand begins. Where is the boundary, exactly and precisely? There is not boundary - you can't see, hear, smell or touch any boundary, because there isn't one. And so, the person will have to notice, that the boundary between arm and hand is made up and totally artificial - it is not "out there" in the real world. Ask the person to determine, where the boundary between outer space and the earth is, precisely? At what point, exactly does the atmosphere end and space begin? Down to an eighth of an inch, where is the boundary? It doesn't exist, does it? No, only as a concept, not in reality. If the person thinks the big bang is real, great; explain, that at the beginning of the big bang, there was only one dense, hot object, which simply expanded ever since. It is still this one object - it simply isn't as dense as it was 13 billion years ago. 4. Explain that because all things aren't what you call them and because all boundaries are only concepts (even seemingly "clear" boundaries), every thing must be one. Don't expect the person to drop his ignorance. If he doesn't want to understand, he won't.

I highly recommend you to watch this video. This topic I think is now more important than ever since about 75 years. Great, great video. Some high quality stuff. The channel "Academy of ideas" is absolutely top notch when it comes to psychology and society.

How so??

Sorry mate, but you missed my point. I can achieve just as much as someone who believes in law of attraction (belief is not very useful, is it?). The things you want to "manifest" will manifest, but not out of thin air or because you simply thought about them. So yeah, it's just your work that brings the desired results into existence, there's absolutely no need to call it some "law of attraction" or to add some meaningless ideas like "universal energy".

There's woo-woo and then there's woo-woo. "Law of attraction" is the useless type of woo-woo. It's a childish fantasy, wishful thinking paired with terms like "vibration" and "universal energy"... "Raise you vibration to align universal energy in order to manifest whatever you wish for!" is a typical LoA thing to say. It's foolish esotericism and nonsense - and I am not saying this from a purely rationalistic perspective.

Best explanation I've come across so far. It's (the act of creation based on) association with ideas that are novel and useful.

The amount of views for many of your newer videos seems to hover somewhere between 40K and 80K views, whereas you now have 1 Mio. subscribers. Is that frustrating? Did you anticipate this development? How do you deal with the fact that much of your new content is watched by less than 10% of your subscribers? With that in mind, what are your plans for Actualized.org?

Without time, everything would go on just the same. Time has the same relationship to process/happening as length has to space. Stop confusing time with change. What lasts? Nothing. (really think long and hard about this one...)

Anybody else get the feeling that it's always the same conversations in this forum only in slightly different packages? There's no point in clashing mere philosophies, if the truth is recognized - for it is not a philosophy.

When I say "reality accepts itself" I don't mean this in the ordinary sense.. (You know, when we say " I am Joe Shmoe and according to my beliefs, desires and needs I either accept or reject the current circumstances"). When I say "reality accepts itself", I mean that in a non-dual way - in other words, there is no possibility for reality not to accept itself. Don't think that reality has any choice to accept or reject itself. There is only acceptance, no matter what. Whatever is, is, and there is no way that something is not. Therefore there is no ways reality couldn't accept itself, because everything is.

In reality, there are no two thing opposed to each other. Where does one thing start and the other thing end? These limits are not real. Equally, the boundaries between pleasure and suffering don't exist. The division between pleasure and suffering is arbitrary. Only because you say so. Why not? You ask: why is there suffering, why does suffering have the right to exist? Suffering doesn't need any right to exist, just like anything else. Existence is prior to reasons.

1 John 4:16 "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." Just found this one right after John 4:12, this one blew me away

Revelation 1:18 "I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades." 1 John 4:12 "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."

How is it possible, that some of the absolute greatest scientists like Stephen Hawking were stuck in the materialist paradigm? I mean, seriously, Hawking for instance was so damn smart, do you guys think he knew about the relationship between map and territory? I just refuse to believe they didn't know about mysticism...

have you ever had a dreams that's that you um you had you'd what you could you do you would you want you you could do so you you do you could you you want you want them to do you so much you could do anything? Man, if that ain't genuine poetry I don't know what is...

@Leo Gura Only because you don't like their article on you! No I'm just kidding of course, I think you're absolutely right. Rational Wiki claims to debunk all sorts of pseudo-scientist topics and all that is even slightly "Woo-Woo" with a typical hyper-rational, "skeptic" mindset which isn't true skepticism at all. Why does this happen? Why are they never skeptical of their own assumptions??

@Bulgarianspirit What about the desire to reach Mahasamadhi?

@Brandon L I can relate to you very much. My parents are also rather conservative and have no clue about psychedelics, they throw them in the same category with weed, crack, meth and heroine. Drugs are drugs to them and they don't have any benefits. When I was 18 years old, I started getting into spirituality and so forth. I only smoked weed, but a lot of it. Weed is a great and gentle teacher, if you don't overdo it. One evening, I visited a good buddy of mine, I came back rather late. Because I didn't tell my parents when I'd come back home, they started worrying (to this day, my parents start very easily to worry) because I was riding on my bike home. I arrived late at night, without any lights on my bike which drove my parents nuts; I could've been killed in traffic (I had to ride home for about 1 hour because my friend lived in the nearby village, the roads lead through the forest and very rarely have any light). Anyway, when I arrived home, I went showering. Suddenly, a thought popped up in my mind: "they just found out". And I was right. I went upstairs, saw the lights were switched on in my room, I heard some noise and there on my bed was my father sitting, in sheer disbelief about what he had just found: In my bag, I had a glass pipe (you know, for the weed, not like those damn crack pipes), some weed, and all my other smoking utensils, all neatly packed into a back box I prepared the other day, which was now spread open on my bed. Now, guess what: Just the very next day, I would move out to an other city for university. Well, my father was absolutely appalled. He leads a workshop for mentally disabled people and he knows about the horror stories of drugs ruining your psyche forever. He didn't tell my mother, because he wanted me to do it. He didn't cope too well with these news; that night, he couldn't sleep at all and so he came to my room every hour and switched on the lights so I couldn't sleep either. The next day, I told my mother. It was probably the hardest thing I had ever done to my parents, because they didn't know anything about weed at all, so my mother just had a complete breakdown, she couldn't believe her sweet little boy does drugs. My father doesn't know anything about it either, all he ever heard about drugs are the horror stories of how disruptive of an effect they can have on your psyche... I tried to explain that I used it for spiritual and recreational purposes, they didn't care. All they heard was "drugs", which triggered the most negative associations you could ever think of, and only that. You know, schizophrenia and pictures of heroine addicts who look like an abused scarecrow. I moved out. Finally, freedom. The relation between my parents and me developed very well since I moved out, I see them every 1 or 2 weeks. I know very well what you mean, when you say: Try to develop yourself to the point, where it doesn't bother you anymore. That's the trick. You won't ever get them out of their belief system/ world view, simply because they don't want to. Moving out will provide you with immense freedom and an opportunity to learn who to grow up. Don't cut them out of your life, they're still your family and they love you. What you will find out eventually, is that you love them and all their bullshit too, because that's who they are and it wouldn't be love, if it didn't include their world views and bullshit. Cutting them out would not be the right thing to do, I think. That's a real spiritual practice for you; how to love and accept people who you think are full of shit. Don't forget that you're full of shit, too.

I've tried to explain certain very, very basic ideas like "a word is not that what it stands for" or "your values are your own, subjective ideas" or "there is no objective right or wrong" to people I love, mainly to my family. They are however incredibly stuck in their materialist, illusionary, reductionist, and rationalist (even if they oftentimes aren't rational at all) worldview. I can't share any "advanced" philosophical ideas with them and more and more I feel misunderstood and excluded. To the very, very few good friends I have (they are into spirituality, science and so forth) I also can't properly present some of my visions and ideas which require a huge interconnected web of spirituality, politics, science, philosophy etc. It's just... I feel the misunderstanding and intellectual exclusivity has grown to such immense size that I just fear to become this one seemingly crazy, slightly passive-aggressive loner who thinks he knows better than everybody else. I am very wary of intellectual hybris, although I feel this is to a certain extent one of the traits of a mainly stage Yellow person. This is utterly nerve-racking and I get irritated. It's getting lonely. Help?

I just had an insight. We tend to glorify the teachers we follow and love and we want to hear everything they have to say and teach, what we ought to do in order to find happiness. But what we oftentimes don't do, is looking at the teacher's mistakes and learning from that. Despite all the teacher's wisdom, he fell into a certain trap. There's so much wisdom you can derive from that... What a trap it must've been, that even the teacher didn't make it. We forget that they are humans just like us who listen to them. Nobody's perfect. I particularly had to think of Alan Watts' drinking issue.

Hey @Leo Gura I was wondering, have you ever participated in an Ayahuasca ceremoy? If you haven't yet (which would surprise me), would you consider doing it?

A fancy term for the recontexualization of your perception of reality.

Yup, true. There can't be anyone apart from awareness who in turn is aware of awareness. That is why awareness is nothing and you don't exist - so nobody is aware of nothing. That's the point.

Hey folks, do you have any advice for microdosing with mushrooms?