Nilsi

My mind is not that rigid. I hadn't thought these things through very deeply before, so in a sense I'm just exploring how far I can push it. I also conceded that we will always need to draw some lines. With that being said, I still believe you're operating in a broken paradigm that isn't adequate for finding good solutions to this and other problems.

I don't think we should drop everything else, I would just like to stop calling everything else a solution.

In a certain sense it is a quite radical endeavor. We're ultimately talking about God here. I think the conception of symptomatic solutions is a rather poor one. You're not actually solving anything that way. If you have high blood pressure and you take some pills that mess up your kidneys, have you actually solved anything? This whole paradigm is just intrinsically problematic, though I'm not sure what to do about it.

How can we ever move beyond blunt tools, if we can't imagine a future in which we have great tools and set up the conditions necessary for that future to happen? I'm convinced that this is a fruitful endeavor and not just utopian fantasies, but the line is quite blurry. In any case, I'd rather give it my best shot and fail spectacularly than throw in the towel and go back to business as usual.

It's not obvious to me that putting people in jail is a net positive at all. Let's assume it is and it's still absolutely pointless to throw people in jail without trying to figure out how to create a situation in which we wouldn't need to lock them up in the first place. Considering this example, I guess we would need to draw some kind of line we're not willing to cross. I guess not murdering other people is a good place to start.

Does that mean we should lie about the absolute or should we perhaps inquire what caused these people to be so disillusioned with their life's that they would prematurely end all possibility of it becoming something worthwhile? Likewise with sexual promiscuity of spiritual teachers. We should find out why this happens and when it's pathological and then address the root cause instead of repressing this stuff, causing it to pop up somewhere else in reality.

This is completely irrelevant. Skew the zero-sum ethics/truth trade-off you're proposing whichever way you please, but just acknowledge that it isn't a solution.

I don't have all the answers myself, but it's obvious to me that the way we're approaching this is fruitless and will create as many problems as it solves. I would rather not tinker with anything until I see an opening for some actual systems change. If you want to improve something now, go play some board games with old people; listen to your friends problems; call your mum; talk to a homeless person; work at an animal shelter - if you want to improve things on a systems level, you need some patience and foresight. We can create a humanistic religion, but spirituality is truth, is the sacred and is an absolute endeavor and won't need to be tinkered with if we get everything else right.

No. I'm saying we should create a situation, in which we don't need ethics codes. Until we're there, we shouldn't mess with things we don't understand. As we factor more and more variables, new solutions will emerge, that don't look like rules and ethics boards.

I'm not saying we should get rid of all law and order, I'm just saying this is not the solution. I would rather have our best people work on a more comprehensive approach to these issues and that's no rocket science - you just factor as many variables in your solution as possible and do so progressively better. You want to throw in the towel before even getting started, which is a shame.

I've given you my perspective, no? Your ethics board will create problems elsewhere, because it's not an appropriate solution. You can work out the best legislation in the world and it won't change shit, if you don't also address problems in education, economics, ecology, culture etc. Is it so hard to grasp that these problems are interconnected and you have to think about them as such, if you actually want to improve shit?

You can do that, but what good is it? If you don't address the fundamentals, you're just moving problems around. You can't disentangle spirituality from the absolute - what are you even talking about at that point? The mind virus is thinking you can address the world's problems in a vacuum.

As a language model, I can generate text that is based on patterns and structures learned from a large dataset of human-generated text. However, I do not have personal experiences or original thoughts, and I am not able to create truly original content in the way that a human can. Instead, I can take existing information and use it to generate responses to questions or prompts, or to generate text that is similar to a given style or tone.

Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins

We can talk about ethics, just not in such a reductionist manner. The question is whether you care enough to actually work on creating a holistic framework for spiritual practice, or whether you are sloppy and enforce some well intentioned rules that will only kick the can down the road.

We can agree as a society not to kill each other, but you will have to question and transcend these rules at some point in your spiritual journey. This doesn't mean, that it's not desirable to have these rules, only that they can not possibly be adequate for all states of consciousness.

It should be. Ideally you wouldn't do that.

?

ChatGPT literally can't create original content.

Chilling cinematic vibes as well.

Gotta love Max Richter.

I'm not so sure about this. In the end these institutions will just be a microcosm of all the shit that's not working in governance at large, which as Osho put it so poetically is that "the people are retarded." Spirituality is the nearest thing to a safe haven from human bullshit we have and we're just not mature enough to tinker with it in a way that is helpful.

An ethics board would have cracked down on Adi Das commune from the first day, which would have resulted in a lot of people missing out on genuine spiritual growth; Carl Jung would have lost his clinical practice for consensual sex with his clients; Leo would be banned from YouTube for telling people they are imagining all of reality; Ralston would be cancelled for using his enlightenment to beat people up... If you force people to operate on some lowest common denominator, you kill all genuine spiritual and creative expression. A simple linear ruleset isn't adequate for dealing with the complexity of reality in any scenario. Add in an executive function and you're destined to wreak havoc. The only earnest solution is to think about the ethics of spiritual practice in the context of the whole Kosmos; of all the issues upstream and downstream and all the resulting externalities... And pretty soon you're back to inquiring into the nature of reality itself, because you realize you can't solve a problem you don't fully understand.

How do you want to prevent this without creating a whole set of new problems? If you really care about people, you have to think about this from first principles and take into account the whole universe. Just from the reactions to this thread, you should be able to tell that this is not an omni-considerate solution, but a rather lazy pseudo solution. You're saying "let's focus on ethics to the detriment of other values, which I consider less important." How can we actually create spiritual teachers that won't do fucked up shit, without undermining their gifts and service? I bet you the solution doesn't involve the ten commandments and an ethics board.

Am I abusing my power if I seduce a girl in a college lecture? How about celebrities? Are they allowed to sleep with groupies? What if I fall in love with my secretary? Is society not organized in a dominance hierarchy? Does that mean all sex is an abuse of power? This is silly logic.