Xonas Pitfall

Exactly. Because from then on, you can basically say: GOD actually imagines OTHER GODS, fully more powerful and bigger than Him. GOD then imagines things outside of His control, OUTSIDE of His reach, OTHER to Him. GOD then creates something so OTHER THAN HIM. He creates EVIL, and it is SO TRUE AND REAL. It is REALER than GOD HIMSELF. Then He CREATES A REALER REALITY THAN HIS OWN MIND. And even though it doesn’t make sense why that reality would be realer than this mind, it IS. GOD can imagine ANYTHING BEYOND. And then that reality has HUMANS, and GOD also said that it didn’t come from GOD but from THE DEVIL. So the world is actually REALER THAN GOD. All of this is a fundamental contradiction. Unless you predefine and say: God can imagine a “fake separation” into a relative world like that. If you don’t define/clarify this, you make your entire system meaningless and useless.

Of course it can be imagined, but then we have to separate the absolute from the relative. Just how the relative others, humans, evil, destruction, etc. can be "imagined" and "real," but fundamentally, it is all still part of the coherent, one Self. You can imagine multiple gods, but they would all have a fundamentally "false" separation between themselves. Otherwise, the oneness is negated. At least that's how it can be coherent to me. It's possible I'm missing something here.

Supposedly God. That's why having something "so far apart from God, Other than God" that even God cannot reach makes little coherence.

I'm not sure this tells me much, haha. False as in incoherent, non-integrous, non-whole, non-one.

Wouldn't this be the one example that's contradictory? What would the "other gods" be made of if not from God? What would the separation between them even be? I suppose this aspect is a bit confusing, haha.

How would you see the infinity of gods fitting into this? I think this was the one that always confused me. By definition, God cannot have any other, or any other level of "wokeness" beyond itself. So to imagine any other "god infinity" beyond it, unless it's in some way a fragmented, imposed, fake limitation/separation, seems unfitting.

For me, the way omnipotence is experienced is by slowly realizing how your current frame, your present moment, is being constructed. These honestly can be very funky, weird, and scary, pure-insanity-type awakenings. I remember when I had one of these experiences; I was genuinely scared for my mental health, and it took me some time to integrate what I had experienced. But basically, the inquiry went something like: What does it actually mean to create? Does reality come from the mind first, or does reality generate the mind? How can I know? Do I remember when I was created? Who created me? Did I have a beginning? Did I have an end? Does the mental necessitate reality, or does reality necessitate the mental? And then you'd slowly realize the duality of mind/reality, and then those would collapse onto themselves. I remember I'd look at the floor in my room, then the chair in my room, and realize: a mind plotted it out. I'd then see a building, look at 3D modeling blueprints online, and realize, OH, MIND. MIND. Mind plotted it out. Then I'd question aspects of nature and non-human things. Is creativity an emergent property, or is it a primordial thing? Then I'd question: can a less "infinite" object create a more "infinite" object? The concept of requisite variety? Etc., etc. At the peak of this, I was having childhood imagery that I'd experienced since I was very young being remembered. I'd remember how I imagined my organs and brain when I first discovered those ideas or concepts. Then stories of people. I remember things becoming extremely cartoonish, abstract, and fluid, and it became impossible to tell the difference between what was real and what was imaginary. MIND. MIND. MIND is primordial. MIND is omnipotent. MIND creates MIND. IMAGINATION. INFINITE LIMITLESS IMAGINATION. MIND. GOD. Basically, when you have a trip/awakening/experience where you start recreating, recontextualizing, and re-remembering how you created yourself, your body, your room, and your current frame of consciousness right at that moment, that's when, at least for me, I had a glimpse of that insight. Obviously, there's no guarantee it'll happen the same way for you, but I'd try to aim my mind toward it, or at least be open to those levels of "insanity." This, however, almost sounds sane when written out. When the actual insight happened, it didn't feel sane at all. What helped me was questioning the duality of MIND/REALITY. Once you realize MIND is primordial, then the omnipotence follows. But it can be quite a wild trip, and I did need a huge dose to break through, so... 😅

https://www.actualized.org/insights/a-capitalist-self-deception I appreciate the post! One thing, though, is that I often hear the following arguments from the "other side": "Yes, but not everyone can do their job. Yes, but they have unique skills and experience that are extremely difficult to acquire. There are only a handful of people in the world who can run a company of that size." "Yes, but they are taking on all the risk when they make these bold moves that no one else can, such as making huge investments, buying businesses, or projecting future market trends." "Yes, but they are taking on all the responsibility if the company fails. They are the ones who have to answer for it." "Not everyone can be a CEO, etc. Without their leadership, the company might not exist." "Yes, but if they succeed, everyone benefits. Employees get jobs, investors make money, and the economy grows." "Yes, but they could make more money elsewhere. Companies have to pay a premium to attract and retain top talent." "Yes, but their compensation often comes in the form of stock, so they only make enormous amounts of money if the company performs well." "Yes, but the value created by someone like Steve Jobs can be enormous. If one person's decisions can create hundreds of billions of dollars in market value, why shouldn't they receive a tiny fraction of that?" "Yes, but people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos have abilities that are so rare that comparing their compensation to that of an average employee doesn't make sense. There might be millions of competent managers, but only a handful of people capable of building companies of that scale." "Yes, but you can't simply replace Elon Musk with 100,000 ordinary employees and expect the same results. Leadership, vision, and the ability to make unconventional decisions are not easily substituted." I guess the main counterargument is that, yes, they should be compensated to some extent for their skills, risk, and responsibility. But does that really justify earning 100,000 times more? Or 200,000 times more? Where do we draw the line? How do you usually debate this point, or how do you think about it?

No worries. And no, I am definitely not trying to parrot or appease Leo in any manner. I've raised points against Leo on many of his opinions, topics, and blog posts in this forum whenever I've disagreed with him, and I continue to do so. I've been both correct and wrong. My last goal is not to think in this forum, haha. One of the main reasons I'm here is to expand my understanding. I'm just debating, and these topics aren't necessarily the least tricky, which is why I like having discussions about them. - I'll try to be a bit clearer, but basically, there is no "compartmentalization" from God's POV. This is tricky to imagine because you're mostly using your human POV, which has clear distinctions between imaginary vs. real. You need to distinguish things that are more real, meaning things that have a sensory impact on you, from fleeting, inconsistent thoughts. But from God's POV, if God must experience evil, aka "have evil within itself," to fully be itself, then God would have to somehow experience it. However, evil doesn't really exist in this realm because it's all just one mind. There is no "other." Again, that's the point I was making about nonduality. Nondual literally means no Other, no otherness. So... how would it do that? What would be the fundamental "mechanic" of God even being able to experience Evil? So the only way for God to experience "evil" would be to somehow "lower it's conciosuness/delude" itself or "forget" that it is God for some temporarily finite period of time so that it can experience it. I don't know if you've ever seen that image of the universe holding a mask. I'll put it here. God needs to create some kind of "frame" or "limit" around its consciousness to even perceive evil. That frame is you, and everything else is a limited being within it. If you had no frame, bias, or point of view, there would be no separate things to perceive, only God God God God God, all of it, without distinction. That is why awakening sometimes involves your vision having transparency, pure whiteness, pure darkness (blackout); the collapse of all distinctions. There is no separate observer imposing boundaries on experience. Even scientifically, if we stripped away categories, reality could be reduced to particles and fields interacting. Atom interacting with atom, field interacting with field, over and over again. You’d basically see the brown/universe thing around everywhere (just referring to the image/graph). In order for God to even experience some sort of “pain,” it would need to fool itself, put on a “mask,” figuratively speaking, AKA impose a “fake limitation/frame” onto itself to see a temporary "fake" separation between itself and the other. It would then temporarily delude itself into thinking that it is not itself interacting with itself, but that it is some other actual "OTHER REAL" entity that is actually harming and hurting it. And since God, “as it says, so it is,” has no mind/reality distinction, when God creates this “illusion,” it is not separate from reality. And that “middle experience” of a mask is what we essentially call human life/ego. It's not necessarily "creating" evil. It's more like God limiting its own consciousness and compressing it into a human experience where concepts like evil, suffering, and harm can even exist. Otherwise, God would simply experience everything as one whole, without a separate "other" to experience those things happening to. Hence, it can't even conceptualize or see "Evil". - From God’s POV, it’s kind of like planting a prank on yourself or planning a surprise for yourself. How could you ever fool yourself? You can’t. The only way you could is if you somehow temporarily forgot, in which case it would become a genuine surprise or deception. How can God experience anything that requires “otherness”? It can’t. It never actually can with its full consciousness, because “otherness” isn’t real or true. So the only way it can do it is by “lowering its consciousness,” forgetting, fooling itself. That’s why evil is often called “low-consciousness behavior.”

Appreciated!

I think this is an interesting discussion. As long as both parties acknowledge each other's counterpoints, I don't see any issue with continuing the debate. I don't think you've acknowledged anyone else's perspective anywhere in this post. If anything, you've immediately resorted to things like, "You're parroting," "You're spiritually bypassing hard lol," "You're making up opinions out of thin air," "I think you're being intellectually dishonest." There's no need to get frustrated. You raised a debate point, and now people are debating you. That's the whole point of a lot of these forums.

Not necessarily. You're looking at it through a very narrow timeline. Ages ago, you could've said, "There's no reason God couldn't create teleportation so I can hang out with my pen pal instead of only sending letters," or "There's no reason God couldn't create a place where food is already prepared so I don't have to hunt for one meal," or "There's no reason God couldn't create some magical communication device so I can instantly talk to my family overseas." And that's still just a human perspective. As an animal, an alien, an amoeba, or some completely different evolutionary creation, your experience could be so fundamentally different from ours that we couldn't even conceptualize it. Not to mention that if you add the possibility of different dimensions, or things existing outside of space and time, the range of possible perspectives becomes even more difficult for us to conceptualize. That's why the relative vs. absolute distinction matters. When you speak in absolute terms, you're not talking about just humans in our current era. You're talking about all humans who ever lived or will live, across every ecosystem, invention, creature, mind, and imaginable perspective. It's extremely difficult to remove that bias and imagine the "God perspective." Even saying "God could compartmentalize this or that" is still anthropomorphizing God. Again, remember that if you acknowledge the existence of God, you're talking about something outside space-time and the laws of physics, the creator of those laws themselves. You aren't just taking a narrow snapshot of a single planet in a single galaxy over a few years. It's like basing all of your mathematics on Roblox or Minecraft, then being shocked that it only applies within that environment and not necessarily to the "outside world." As a finite being, you need rules, sanity, and a solid form of mental stability, just like how our bodies evolve to be efficient at certain tasks and not others. Our perception, cognitive understanding, and what we choose to filter in or out evolve in the same way. There is a reason a cheetah doesn't have human cognition, just as there is a reason our bodies aren't specialized like a cheetah's. You need a world with some form of consistent rules that you can base your sense of sanity on if you want to continue being yourself. If you take any of those funky psychedelics like salvia, datura, etc., you might not be able to distinguish between real and fake, mind and reality, yourself and whatever you are, or even whether you've taken a psychedelic at all. You might end up killing yourself and understand it as if you were some sort of juice cup object that got broken on a desk instead of your human self dying. The only time our consciousness was this fluid was probably when we were babies, before we had developed a stable sense of self. We simply forgot what that was like. Now we're operating within this frame, and it's extremely difficult to step outside of it because, quite frankly, it's impractical if you still want to remain a functioning human being and stay alive. You basically got RNG-ed into a "lower" consciousness and are experiencing what it's like to be trapped within that bind, or that "human-biased" definition. In another space, there could be angels and idealistic heavenly scenarios that you're describing. The key here is realizing that even the question, "Can't God compartmentalize this or that?" is already being asked from a human perspective. We're imposing our own concepts of space, time, separation, and causality onto something that, by definition, would transcend them. From the absolute perspective, there is no separate "this" and "that." Basically, there is no true "compartmentalization" with God. God is the mind experiencing whatever form creation takes. So if God imagines something, then from God's absolute perspective, that experience is real simply because there is no fundamental distinction between "real" and "imagined," or between "mind" and "reality." Those distinctions only arise from a finite perspective. If God is to genuinely experience an act as evil, it would need to construct a sufficiently stable frame, context, "false" reality in which that experience can actually occur as evil. Otherwise, from a detached perspective, it wouldn't truly be torture. It would just be like watching a movie or observing someone else's body being touched. You can think of finite existence as part of the mechanism through which God actualizes itself as everything. To genuinely experience something, God has to temporarily "identify" or "fool" itself with a particular perspective and its limitations. In that sense, the "delusion" isn't necessarily a mistake. It's the mechanism that makes finite experience even possible.

I'll try my best to explain this. God is, by definition, God. If God were something else, then God wouldn't be God. The definition of God, as you will realize through contemplation, awakening, etc., is that God is fundamentally all, or that which has no "other." There is nothing outside of itself. It is all-encompassing. So God isn't merely a "creator"; God is everything. It is everythingness. If you agree with this definition, then you can follow the logic from there. For God to be all, to be everything, it is in a bind that is self-defined: it has to contain both the finite and the infinite. It has to be capable of containing both limitation and unlimitedness, and it has to create limitations without bias. Why? Because if God were limited by any bias, then God would be limited by that very bias. For example, if I define a set as the set of all prime numbers, then I have to include all prime numbers. If I leave one out, then it is no longer the set of all prime numbers. It would be the set of all prime numbers except 7. So everything has to exist without any fundamental bias. If God were biased toward creating a world without evil, then God would not be everything, because God would be limited by the exclusion of evil. If God is the set of all that exists, and you remove something because "that cannot be God," then God suddenly isn't God anymore. It becomes something that does not include that thing. You could therefore say that the only thing that "limits" God is the fact that God has to be itself, or everything. In other words, God cannot be biased toward one part of existence over another, because then it would cease to be everything. It has to take in everything and be everything. That's the first reason. The second reason is that the notions of good and evil, as well as pain and suffering, are extremely tricky. You could technically argue that you commit "sadism" every time you kill an insect, every time you choose not to help a homeless person, or even when you put your own body through pain by forcing your muscles to grow stronger. Evil and suffering exist as long as you agree to the rules of existing as a finite self. Every single moment of your life, you could theoretically end your life and exit this particular bind, but you don't want to because you want to continue living. As long as you are attached to existence, form attachments, and want things to be a specific way, you will inevitably experience some degree of pain and suffering. Take the classic example of a gazelle being chased by a lion. Both animals simply want to survive and feed their families. Who does God give the bias to? What should the animals be fed on? Are you going to commit "genocide" against the grass and nature too? How do you decide what gets eaten alive and what doesn't? If you're a game developer, I'm sure you can understand this yourself. It's incredibly difficult to satisfy everyone's preferences. Every time you reject a feature request from a player, for example, you could argue that you have caused some degree of disappointment or pain for that player. And this problem continues at every level: whenever one thing is given preference over another, something is necessarily excluded or denied. Bias is fundamental to all of this. Bias is also what separates duality from nonduality. Why should one thing be one way and not another? Why prefer this over that? How do I define what is evil for me and what is evil for you? What is good, and what is evil? Who gets to decide that? The moment you prefer one thing over another, you introduce a distinction. You are saying that this should be one way rather than that way. In that sense, preference itself creates a form of duality. As long as you're attached to being alive and to existing in a particular way, you'll experience pain and suffering whenever reality doesn't conform to that way. Who says you're entitled to comfortable weather all the time? Why can't nature suddenly become extremely cold and bring another ice age? Is that evil being done to you? From another perspective, you're imposing your preferences onto nature by expecting it to behave the way you want. From a nondual perspective, there is no fundamental basis for preferring one part of reality over another, because there is no ultimately separate "other" to stand in contrast to it. TLDR; Pain, suffering, evil, and sadism exist because God is, by definition, everything. For God to be God, it must encompass both the infinite and the finite. Once you enter the finite realm, pain, suffering, and "evil" exist depending on the perspective of the observer. It is "evil" to paint over a beautiful masterpiece, but it can also be good because it creates space for a new masterpiece. It is "evil" to die from cancer or disease, but from another perspective, the body and its cells fought to survive for as long as they could, and harmful genetic traits may not be passed on. It may seem "evil" that God doesn't simply give you a harem of beautiful women who exist solely to please you, but from the perspective of those women, it is good that they are not reduced to objects existing only for someone else's desires. It is "evil" to age and lose your energy and vitality, but it can also be good because you eventually return nutrients to nature and make room for new, novel lives to emerge. The moment you accept the finite world, you accept these issues, because a finite thing is defined by certain conditions it needs to thrive, be happy, and exist. If you could genuinely be happy with anything, you wouldn't be bound by those conditions. In that sense, you wouldn't be defined as finite, but as infinite. If you were completely fine with losing a leg, you wouldn't be defined by the normal human attachment to having an intact body. People will call you an "abnormal human" just for that. Evil, suffering, and sadism exist precisely because you are not a bot. Because if God were biased in any way, then as the creator, God would have to behave according to that specific bias, imposing an even greater limitation on you than the limitations we already experience.

I'd love to hear more about this!

Yes. If Lordfall's point is simply that, from a relative perspective, there is a lot of pain and suffering, then yes, absolutely. You'd be foolish to ever deny that. However, when you start using terms like God, nonduality, ultimate, foundational value, etc., you are usually implying a more absolute, nondual frame. This is why people corrected your post. From this frame, there are no fundamentally separate minds or "others" upon whom God can be sadistic. There is only God being God, one reality, one mind.

To think in just one mind without subdivisions is insane lol, that's like saying you wrote this post or I wrote your comment. > It is one mind. That's the entire point of Leo's Actualized.org. It's most likely that you simply haven't had these experiences, whether through psychedelics, meditation, sobriety, introspection, or other means. Which is totally ok; that's why we are in this forum to help each other At the highest level of awakening, you experience the collapse of the separation between Self and Other. The Self becomes all, and the "Other" is also recognized as the Self. I'm not trying to make this unnecessarily difficult. Yes, from our ordinary human perspective, the world is filled with beauty and horror, love and hatred, pleasure and suffering, creation and destruction, compassion and cruelty, and countless other apparent opposites. But once you start talking about God, nonduality, or the highest perspective and "values", your definitions have to change accordingly. Concepts such as sadism and masochism depend on there being an "other" toward whom an action is directed. From the highest nondual perspective, that distinction no longer exists. All apparent dualities collapse into one because there is no separate "other" outside of the One. That's literally what nonduality means (it is in the word itself - not DUAL, not TWO): there is no fundamental second thing, no separate Other, no independent contrast. There is only One. When we apply dualistic human definitions to the highest nondual context without first redefining the context, we are imposing distinctions that the nondual framework itself has already dissolved.

Yes. That's why I said it must be defined properly. Ultimately, the only definition you have is God = God, and everything else is a "cut" or definition derived from it. That's why it is extremely important to define the observed object, definition, or sentence, as well as the context within which it is being defined. But when you enter a nondual context, you must define it as a nondual context, and then all "dualities" are understood as one. The law does not necessarily fail, because you would never have defined A as separate from B in the first place. Whereas, within a dual framework, you would define A as separate from B.

We aren't spiritually bypassing. We are correcting a limited definition. If you want to try to define or describe God, God is the ultimate masochist and sadist, lover and enemy, creator and destroyer, giver and taker, merciful and wrathful, friend and adversary, source of pleasure and source of suffering. But these descriptions only make sense from the perspective of finite beings like us. Ultimately, God is defined as that which has no other. God is all. Therefore, concepts such as pleasure and suffering cannot be used as something being done to another being, because there is no "other" separate from God. Everything is within God. This is why terms such as sadist and masochist lose their meaning at that level. Those concepts require a distinction between the one experiencing something and the other toward whom it is directed. From the finite human perspective, however, God can be all of it, depending on how your ego is treated throughout this life, both by itself and by the environment around it. I could equally say that this proves God is incredibly masochistic, and that masochism is a "foundational" value of God, because God is also the person being killed, slapped, and dismembered, as well as every person who has ever experienced violence in combat. But this would still be a limited perspective that needs to be expanded. That is precisely why we are challenging you.

They are all "stable/true" because they all stem from the Law of Identity. The other two are simply derived from it. 1. The Law of Identity This one is the fundamental law of everything, to be honest. You can derive what God is from just this identity. In fact, God is this law. This identity is truth itself. Things are what they are. If you are defined as A, then you are A, and as long as you are A, you can never not be A. You acquire everything that makes you A and everything that distinguishes you from B, C, D, E, F, G, and everything else. 2. The Law of Non-Contradiction This is simply derived from the Law of Identity. You cannot claim that A is not A, or that A is B, etc. The only way these things may appear to happen is through linguistic errors, or because the context and definitions have not been properly defined. Reality, language, and the paradigms we work with can sometimes be tricky and contain implicit meanings that may or may not be properly defined. For example, sometimes A can be B if B is simply defined as A with more steps. For example: All unmarried men are A. A bachelor is B. Therefore, all unmarried men are bachelors. A = B. This would appear contradictory, but the reason A = B is that B is secretly just A expressed through a different definition or way of describing it. To be a bachelor means to be an unmarried man. So A is already contained within the definition of B. B is not something fundamentally different from A. B is still, in essence, A. A = A; nothing is broken. The Liar's Paradox: "This sentence is false." It seems contradictory because if the sentence is true, then it is false, and if it is false, then it is true. But the problem is that nothing definite has actually been defined for us to evaluate. What exactly does "this sentence" refer to? If it refers to the words "this sentence," those words are not themselves a truth claim. If it refers to the entire statement "this sentence is false," then we are simply defining the statement in terms of itself and never arrive at a definite proposition to evaluate. The paradox does not show that something can be both true and false. The statement fails to establish a definite truth claim in the first place. The apparent contradiction comes from an improperly defined proposition. 3. The Law of the Excluded Middle The Law of the Excluded Middle is also completely fine and can be derived from the Law of Identity. If A is A, then A is A, and A is not everything else but A. Therefore, it cannot be something else at the same time. The ways people try to challenge this law usually come from imprecise contextual, linguistic, or conceptual definitions. For example, someone might ask: "How can something be bittersweet?" "How can I be both sad and happy?" But there is no fundamental contradiction here. "Bittersweet" simply means that something has both a bitter and a sweet aspect. Likewise, you can be happy about one aspect of a situation while being sad or unhappy about another aspect of the same situation. The apparent contradiction only arises when we fail, deliberately or accidentally, to define precisely what aspect, context, or sense we are talking about. Once everything is properly defined, the contradiction disappears.

If you'd want to define it as sadism, it'd probably be more accurate to call it masochism haha. God is, by definition, All, so there is no "Other" entity to be tortured or murdered. Sadism is usually defined by inflicting pain or suffering onto another being, but from the "highest" perspective, it's more accurate to call God the ultimate masochist, because It's inflicting all kinds of different emotions onto Itself in order to be Itself and know Itself. Although masochism wouldn't really be the correct term either, since It doesn't really have a preference for pain over pleasure. It's more like some void that must experience everything.

Making money can also mean just being paid for an aspect of reality that you enjoy doing or learning about. Why not excel in these areas of your life and find a career there? You don't have to follow the traditional path.

That's the trick... you forget

“But, but, but then all the rich people will leave for Dubai, Thailand, Moldova and the Cook Islands!!!”

Yes, I've definitely heard this argument. "Well, with investments, if they do well, you'd expect some kind of return. You risk X amount, and if things go well, you might get X amount back, or potentially many times more, or lose it all. They risked $100 million, made the right investments, recognized the market opportunity, positioned themselves well, and ultimately got a huge return. Yes, sure, it's an absurd amount of money, but it's an investment like any other. If you had that amount of money, you could theoretically do the same thing. But would you have? I don't know. I don't think so. That's why there are so few people like him in the first place." I'm not saying I agree with this viewpoint, but I definitely hear it argued.