UnbornTao

Every belief is, essentially.

I guess I've never thought about it. Interesting distinction. Will have to work on it.

What is Johnny Sins doing here?

It is also the case that truth, as a pursuit, is most likely a fantasy for most people, if they even think to care about it in the first place. More often than not, it is "the Truth," ohhhh - that is, the promise of a better experience, some adopted belief they are looking to verify, or something along those lines. A crucial point is that the truth is already assumed to be known: it is this (God, Love, matter, nothing, this and that). This enormous assumption is precisely what fuels the search from the start. It is a form of bias with a "spiritual" twist. Essentially, it is the pursuit of a belief. In my experience, people rarely tell the truth - or care about it at all. They may do so when it is attributed meaning, value, use, or worth; when it is seen as something that can do something for me. "People see what they want to see, and what they want to see never has anything to do with the truth." - Roberto Bolaño

That can be true when it comes to certain forms of programming, but belief doesn't exist objectively or on its own, except as a mental activity held by you. Seeing it as a belief is the first step. The deeply buried ones are seen by us as intrinsic aspects of reality, so they're trickier to unearth. A good (and challenging) practice to take up is to identify each and every belief you hold and drop them all, aside from the functional ones. But seeing something as a belief and not as a reality tends to immediately undermine our certainty in it.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/watch-kanzi-the-bonobo-pretend-to-have-a-tea-party/

Just be careful not to mistake them for what is true - which we all do all the time.

Got it.

It is the impulse and drive themselves, prior to any willful action. You are breathing now.

@Cred Also, are you using AI to write your posts? If so, ease up on that and disclose it when you do. Just a heads-up.

Thanks. And what was that like? Were you able to experience having no language at all - no self-talk, no symbolism, no reference, and so on? Did you experience the genesis of this invention? It's a difficult meditation, partly because we will try to use some form of language to get us out of language. We shouldn't forget that language can also take the form of images, sounds, and so on. Imagination, for example, seems to be largely language-based, which is the main thing we'll do when we try to answer that question with our minds.

I'm the one with the tambourine.

@Human Mint Good believer. Well said.

For some reason, I want to watch The Land Before Time again - or Littlefoot, whatever it's called. I think I watched it as a kid, and it left a strong impression on me, if I recall. Might have been the series.

Well, you wouldn't receive that very well either, would you? And again, I don't know where this sort of antagonistic relationship to survival comes from. Again, it's your life. To think that one is somehow "above" survival is delusion.

Okay. It's more about focusing on one's own ignorance and unconsciousness. But I think I understand the sentiment.

From George Washington and Lincoln to Trump. What an upgrade.

That episode is old. We all should make chocolate cookies at some point in our development.

As always, I like to point out that everyone's shit smells, including our own. And perhaps this tendency to overlook our own stuff adds to this sense of... spiritual superiority, perhaps.

The religion or the podcast?

Stop defending your victim's mentality so much Survival is life.