No Self

The simple answer is that ionising radiation is bad. X rays and such that damage cells at the atomic scale. Other radiation cannot cause harm in that way.

This is true. Keep in mind that old age makes change even more unlikely, when it was close to impossible in the first place. It is easy to be naïve when dealing with narcissistic personality disorder, as we project our normative mindset onto others. "He will change" = famous last words. I wish Trump well and hope he recovers somewhere where he can't hurt anyone again. But even he is ultimately mortal.

https://www.near-death.com/experiences/suicide/will-i-go-to-hell.html

Not using taxpayer money to prop up the fossil fuel industries would be a good start. In a broader sense, downsizing the government via fighting waste and corruption, rather than attacking programs that benefit the lower classes whilst being complicit in military and other excesses.

I believe the front pattern in the window of the microwave is a faraday cage to make it reasonably safe to look inside. No harm in not looking though!

I did not write this post that you are (not) reading now.

There is little substance behind the claim that protons, neutrons and electrons in a particular configuration give rise to consciousness. It is just a way for scientists to shield their walled garden from having to consider religious or spiritual concepts.

I happen to agree! At the end of the day, the events that you speak of boil down to contemporary society being just plain primitive. Apes with technology. Wooden clubs replaced with F-35 fighter jets and ICBMs. And spears replaced by slaughterhouses. Historically, human primitiveness has been caused by the inevitable outcome of primitive vs. advanced combat. John Green once told the story of native Americans quizzing European invaders on the issue of land ownership. They asked, "Isn't the Earth for all of God's men?", to which the Europeans responded with guns. The shameless lying and cheating of the more primitive side in today's politics is a microcosm of the same thing, except that the outcome is less inevitable. The election outcome is significant because it involves the most influential country on Earth and whether its direction will move towards enlightenment, or revert towards primitiveness such as fossil fuels, environmental destruction, authoritarianism, racism, cruelty, etc.

If you read up on serial killers, you will find that many of them had childhoods full of mayhem and extreme abuse. (And likewise for many other notorious historical figures like Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler.) The part of the brain responsible for empathy becomes completely disabled, making it impossible for them to be restrained by any sort of sympathy or guilt. It is a recipe for extreme behaviour. Biographics is a channel that has covered many such cases in depth. It has been said that the pathological ego is the same thing as you or I, just taken to the ultimate extreme. All of humanity's evils, including collective ones such as the Holocene mass extinction event, have the same egoic origin of lacking respect and lacking conscience. This is also what creates a world where extreme child abuse that gives rise to the serial killer phenomenon is possible. Being constructive, it is important to acknowledge the behaviour of the lowest people as a part of ourselves that we normally prefer to project elsewhere. This helps us to understand that healing the world to the best of our ability is a natural outcome of real development away from egocentrism. Though it is important for certain people to be behind bars, the part of us that likes to judge serial killers and the like is itself the ego.

There have been historical societies which venerated suicide - kamikaze in WWII springs to mind. But the consensus from Near-Death studies and spiritual texts is that a young person seeking to escape working through personal challenges via suicide will have to face them again in some other lifetime or other form. Hence, it cannot be advised (separate to the issue of voluntary euthanasia). And we are by no means here forever anyway. The best advice I can give is to 'die before you die'.

What you say is true, but what is to be done? Michelle Obama's idea that "When they go low, we go high" began the ongoing trend of Democrats sitting on a moral high horse, being outraged over and over by increasingly dishonest or hyper-hypocritical actions by their Republican counterparts, while the latter accumulate more and more actual power. If people are going to be seduced by Trump's noisy fear-mongering antics, nothing we say will change the outcome of this election. Moving forward, we should think outside the box. Future activity should perhaps be directed not at opposing Trump (hence offending his sheep and continuing the same political iron curtain that divides the population against itself), but the enablers of Alternative Facts that serve as his pillars. For example, Facebook has proven one of the worst things to ever happen to world politics, yet rarely is it the focus of serious attention. I'd start there.

There is no way of predicting what one will do, as nothing is based on rigid mental rules in that state. If we need a Bible to tell us 'Thou shalt not kill', we must have picked up the idea that we are all secretly serial killers who must suppress our most demonic urges in order to be good. All this makes it easy for the mind to fear becoming a 'bad person' and halting the process of pursuing ego death at the 11th hour. And yet, all of the most infamous people in history have acted from a place of heavy ego, while the greatest people have had very little ego.

The path-walker is the final stage of the ego illusion. Somebody begins to cross the bridge of enlightenment, but when they arrive at the other side, nobody is there anymore. Nobody was ever there beyond an appearance combined with identification. In conveying his wisdom to sincere seekers, Ramana Maharshi would sit in silence, and many achieved breakthroughs just by being in his presence. Failing that, his message was along the lines of 'you are already the Self [enlightened]'. Only if this also failed did he get involved in more complicated discussions. The point in saying 'you are already enlightened' is to encourage the seeker to look elsewhere to mental ideas, and investigate what is the consciousness that perceives anything that appears in any form. Ramana said that purpose of asking 'Who Am I?' is not to find an answer, but to dissolve the questioner.

Life is a show about nothing.

It is important to advocate for change that you believe in, but it is important to use tactics that are effective. The mindset that saw pro-reform protesters massacred in Sharpville (South Africa) in 1960, Tiananmen Square in 1989 or Syria in 2011 is absolutely primed in modern day US. Leftist protesters have been defamed as pests who need to be beaten into submission, or even a threat to a way of life that must be exterminated. In this climate, traditional protests could be a counterproductive measure. Other ways must be found, and we must accept that it could end up taking many years to restore democracy.

Keep in mind that the scenario of the two parties living in separate, incompatible worlds was already the case during the previous election, and even to some degree the one before that. What is surprising is that this trend has continued despite (or because of?) the sheer number of insane dramas of the past 4 years. The power of the Fox news network is clearly at play there. Trump is unlikely to directly command his faction to initiate combat, though he does communicate with dog whistles so blunt that it would be hard to miss the concealed message. I have no prediction of what will happen in the election itself, but I unfortunately am expecting a fair amount of violence in some areas regardless of the outcome. Syria's civil war started under somewhat similar circumstances, with an authoritarian ruler versus large rebel groups of former military personnel. My best advice to anyone reading this is to not participate in any protests or demonstrations as the tensions escalate (such as the ones that followed Trump's first election); they do not have a good track record in persuading bullets to change their trajectory.

Anger is normally caused by being blocked from achieving a goal. Its apparent purpose is to trigger action to remove barriers. When combined with bad interpretations of situations, stress and unconsciousness, the results can easily lead to very destructive outcomes, such as road rage. The good news is that while anger can always arise, it cannot take over a conscious person. As it starts to arise, an observant person can choose whether or not to get involved. Somebody once used the analogy that the train will pull up to the station and open its doors, but you don't have to get on board. An Eckhart Tolle fan once did a clever cartoon that illustrates this point also. https://thesecretyumiverse.wonderhowto.com/how-to/reduce-your-pain-body-0126596/

This makes sense. One of the tragedies of text based communication is that there is no way of distinguish between banter or a ranter! Caveat Emptor.

This is a great topic, one that I'd considered starting myself if only I were a bit braver. When I was a young man, frequenting a car enthusiast forum, there were guys with $70k+ models and boy oh boy did they piss on everyone below them. The forum was effectively a hierarchy with the Alpha male being the guy with the most money, and everyone else fighting to climb as high as they can. A microcosm of wider society, perhaps. Imagine my surprise decades later to see some similar elements sometimes arise on advanced spiritual forums! One thing I have learned is that the ego will never go away permanently while the body is alive. The ego will always quietly, slowly re-assert itself and use spiritual advancement to boost its status or power. And yet, it is not necessarily arrogance for someone like Jesus to bluntly proclaim, "I am the light and the way." Calling one's self God is the height of profound truth, or the ultimate expression of egoic insanity depending on the state of who is doing it. The key seems to be benefitting from the perspectives and insights of others, without buying into any sort of competitiveness. If there is a hierarchy, I'd rather not be on it at all. The 'I' that would be on it is the very thing I am in the business of trying to dissolve.

Comparisons to Hitler have always been viewed negatively in political discourse since Hitler = bad. The biggest difference was that Hitler advocated expansionist policies in taking over other countries, along with exterminating minorities who had been demonised via propaganda. Trump's philosophy is the opposite, and would ultimately manifest in something closer to the isolationism of East Germany, walls and all. Lots of deportations and/or minorities being beaten into submission. He does not appear to stand for much beyond his own glorification and infamy, and the underlying fury of racial tensions seems to be a vessel that he uses regularly. I have compared Trump to Jim Jones before. And Benito Mussolini with his attempt at making Rome great again. But even this may not be particularly constructive given the main problem is having a large part of the population incapable of constructive discourse that acknowledge established facts. Frustrating as it may be, hyperbole on our part does not help.

'Risk management' is a term we used when I worked for a tramways company many years back. If no trams were run, there would be no pedestrian knockdowns and no fatalities, but at a cost of lacking transport for communities. If a lax attitude were taken towards safety, then there would be many fatalities. The middle ground involves maximising safety, running the service and accepting that some deaths are unfortunately inevitable; this is not classified as 'murder'. This is the inevitable process when all the variables are accounted for. COVID is full of unknowns, including long-term effects (though this applies to any rushed vaccines, too). All that is known is that it is highly contagious. We are having to make up the rules as we go, and inevitably there will be clumsiness over the first several months. Due to Dunning-Kruger, however, it only takes internet users users a few minutes to proclaim themselves experts on any given topic, hence all the strong opinions when truly robust facts are few and far between. Quality discussion will be imperative to find the right balance in the future, taking into account the extreme consequences of neglecting safety, or for that matter of focusing on the virus to the exclusion of everything else. Social media fake news is antithetical to quality discussion and should be called out. Here in Australia at least, there is still no evidence of increased suicides, though experts believe that that increase will happen at some point, while there has been an increase in 'self-harm'.

A few random points to make. There was a viral post on Facebook claiming that suicide rates had doubled during COVID. And, you'll never believe this: it turned out to be fake news. There was no suicide increase. The point is that one has to be careful when making assumptions without looking at proper data. It should be OK to have reasoned debate on the topic, but unfortunately it will be difficult to present any anti-lockdown arguments without having one's position conflated with various selfish/irresponsible/misinformed fanatics who humiliate themselves daily. The main problem with COVID is the risk of a massive spike in cases as soon as control is lost. This is different from other forms of death that can be prevented with using existing knowledge. If the lockdown situation were hypothetically to continue for many years, then many of the anti-lockdown arguments would definitely gain mainstream acceptance. But we are not at that place yet.

Do you have the option of a restraining order?

Anecdotally, I have observed countless examples of hypersexuality being linked to child sexual abuse. In some ways, it is a positive thing to break down walls of taboo. However, it is important to work through and overcome trauma if at all possible. This may or may not lead to a different quality of relationship in the future.