Scholar

Leo has yet to master how to teach people, doesn't he. Why I wrote this post: My mood at the moment is bad, which is why I visited this forum. I am seeking for some sort of intellectual entertainment or challenge, and I stumbled upon this thread. I read alot of Leo's posts and listened to myself talk about how I disagree with him. I saw that I actively tried to find something to disprove whatever he was saying, because I don't like the idea of "bad" enlightened people. I project onto Leo that he might not yet be wise enough because he was not long enough on his journey. I feel anger and resistance. I also feel proud for being able to analyze my mind to such an extend. This entire post is me simply self-expressing, trying to impress people and make them awe about how smart and unique I am. The comment that I wrote about Leo not having mastered teaching yet comes from an urge to communicate that I have started to read the book Mastery. I project onto Leo that he himself took the motivation to become a self-help teaching from this very book, because it seems fundamental to what self-actualization is. I feel smart for having noticed that, even though I have no real evidence for it being true whatsoever. I feel a need for Leo to confirm this, I want affirmation from him. I want him to be proud of how well I am at self-analyzing. It's funny, and I feel somewhat ashamed.

I want to try an experiment, and I want people to join in if they feel like . Whenever I write a post on this forum, I will add the motivations of why I wrote the post and how I feel about it. It will start right now. People are not supposed to respond to the honesties at the end of the posts, they are just there to be read by members. Why I wrote this post: I want to be a less serious person because it's something that I struggle with in my life. To do that, I thought I could open a thread in this forum and see what people might say. I feel smart for having had the idea, and I seek approval from other members of this forum. I feel really awkward writing this, but I will do it anyways. I care about how people recieve what I am writing right now. I am still doing it as I'm writing this. I'm just writing this to be approved of. It feels strange. At this point I feel like I am writing too much. Now I feel proud that I'm going to post this.

In Leo's new insight he is talking about how seriousness is a sign of a defensive ego. But how do you practically go about becoming less serious and more playful? Aside from meditation, what else can one do in life to stop taking it so serious?

For me, my main motivation to do anything is suffering. Why did I write this post: I wanted to write a post so I could do the whole "Why I write this post" thing again. I don't even really care about why I am motivated, I just use this thread as an excuse to post. At this point even the very thing I tried to implement to humble the ego with, is used by the ego itself. It hides being it. I shouldn't even say it, because it is me. I hide behind it. I hide behind the fact that I am analysing an ego, even though it's me, the person talking. I still feel like I need to prove myself, and I feel proud that Leo upvoted my last post. It motivated me to write this post, as a way to prove that I am really going to do this now. It seems like my ego is just growing even though I wanted to do the exact opposite. I feel ashamed for writing this, but at the same time proud that I can do that. It seems like I am distancing myself from the mask "Scholar", and thus enable to be honest, which I shouldn't. I think for this to really be effective, I would have to reveal my identity, but I am way too scared to do that. I just edited this post because I care about how others will recieve this post. I see a certain humor in how ridicilous all of this is.

I'm not seeing math as a creation, I see it more of as a symbolism for what is going on in the mind. Mind is not creating math, math is part of mind. We see dimensionality without formulated math. A dog has just as much math running in his mind as a human. He has a sense of time, of casuality, or dimensionality and movement. I don't think it's as simple as "we created math and that's why it can precisely predict all movement in the universe". What I am questioning here is whether what our mind is seeing as movement is a mathematical creation itself.

I don't think we are even talking about the same thing, or about what is referred to as evil. Sure, you can make up your own definition, and thus create a symbol for something else and simply call it evil. But, what most people's symbol of "evil" refers to doesn't seem to be what you are talking about. This is more of a discussion on language, not a discussion on the nature of the mind, really. The only thing that I can see us disagreeing with is words. My word for evil is not referring to the same as yours is. It's like my word for apple is your word for banana. It makes no sense to converse about it, because we are talking about completely different things.

It doesn't seem to correlate with my understanding of evil, because with your definition evil is basicily just a property of the universe. There is nothing bad about it at all. Disharmony is not better than harmony. Destruction and corrupton is not better than love. What you just listed is more of something that people would call evil. Disharmony is not evil itself, but it is viewed as evil. By your definition, there is no reason for evil not to exist, and evil seems to be something that the mind really, really doesn't want to exist. When we say something is evil, we don't wnat that to happen, right? Some people like disharmony, corruption and destruction, and would not call it evil. So, what does evil really mean to you? To me it seems like you just picked something that you view as evil, instead of defining the word evil itself. If you are a construction that requires harmony to exist, then disharmony is somethnig that would kill you. So, you don't want disharmony, because it will destroy you. But by creating harmony, you are killing disharmony. So, from the point of view of disharmony, it seems like harmony is what is evil.

Getting free food... I wish I had these kind of problems.

"The cosmos is the word of god. God is the listener of words." God

So, reality is made out of imagination? Because everything you imagine, is imagination. Saying anything you can imagine is the source of reality is saying reality literally is imagination. I guess it's hard to imagine that reality is beyond imagination? Ironically, even the notion of reality itself is imagination. So, it literally is an imagination! The irony is so deep!

I was just contemplating the nature and attributes of materialism, and I have noticed a very specific notion that allows that paradigm to exist. The notion is: Things are doing. Very simple, there are things, and they do things. A human acts, a tree falls, an atom moves, the universe exists. We see the action independent of the object, starting from ourselves. We see ourselves as something that acts. A thing, that takes action. A mind that thinks, a body that moves. A will that is free. This very notion is a fundamental part of language. Without that notion, language as we know it would not exist, it simply couldn't. There couldn't be something, doing something. Everything we do in language is either describing properties of an object, or describing the action of an object. We have multiple layers of discrimination, of dualism. It's quite beautiful, but a completely delusional construction. For example, we might say an evolutionary process made the human come to be. We are the result of an evolutionary process. We picture, in our minds, a law, a principle, that governs objects in the world, and changes these objects. What we can do instead, is see us as human beings, as the evolutionary process. We are literally the evolutionary process. And the evolutionary process is literally nature itself. And nature itself is literally existance. This way of thinking, which is a way of seeing the world for what it is, would quickly end all dualism. The atom is not governed by the laws of nature. See, if we think that way, we have to find out what the atom is. There is a concept of atom, and we picture it as something with mass. And object. But what is the object made out of? Of course, it's just an idea, this is why there is no way to find out what mass is, or what it is made out of. The atom is not made out of mass, the atom does not exist whatsoever. There is no need, whatsoever, for an atom to exist. All there needs to be is the laws themselves, the actions themselves. So, an atom is not moving through space, instead, movement is simply happening. The human being is not subject to evolution, he is evolution. The mind is not a creation of the universe, it is the universe. It is the action, nothing more than that. It is existence itself. From there, the mind stops to think, because it recognizes that existence is just a word, empty in meaning, because meaning itself is not what existence is. Existence is what is. It's not even what is, because there is not something that is. This is the game language plays with the mind. I cannot state this otherwise. I have to use "it", I have to create the illusion of object, to delude myself into dualism. This is the very reason why language cannot grasp non-dualism, in any way or form. It can simply create an idea of it, or it can cease to exist. Materialism, language and ideas are the coming into being of dualism. But even dualism is part of the all, of existence. It's not really part of anything whatsoever, it simply is exactly what it is. The question is, how do you bring that paradigm shift to the masses?

If you know better, define evil.

The question is part of it, I'm not asking anything.

I haven't read all posts in this topic, but from what I can see the problem, and misunderstanding, lies in the words more than what is conveyed. Maybe instead of saying good and evil does not exist, we simply have to investigate what good and evil exactly are to us. A mere internal inspection should be able to solve this problem. Investigating the mind and how it works is all that Leo is trying to motivate, the importance of which is revealed once we have understood the mind, which is another word for reality. Good and evil, when we look at what we think it is, and we precisely inspect it, will reveal itself as either things we like, or things we do not like. When using the word evil, all it states is that one does not like it. We have to be very honest and conscious of the words we are using, because words, ideas, are what shape reality itself. Once we see that the word evil literally means "not liking"/"not wanting" something, we can bring this simple word in harmony with our objective in life. The feeling of not wanting something itself is what we refer to as evilness. The feeling is very real, it exists. But the feeling is merely a feeling. It can differ from one being to another. The recognition Leo is talking about, that good and evil is not real, is in a partical sense merely the recognition of what good and evil really are, feelings and thoughts in the mind. The thoughts and feelings are very real, the question is whether or not they are reliable. We want peace, and if we investigate the mind, we will see that trusting our feelings will not give us that peace, nor will it give other beings peace. So, what do we do now that we cannot even trust our own feelings? If we cannot trust the system of good and evil, which is a system of thoughts and feelings, how then can we do anything? Well, the feelings are still there, not matter whether we use the word evil and good, or not. The evilness will still be there, because it is a feeling. What will happen if we stop following the feelings and instead be more conscious of the very consequences of these feelings. Obviously we do not want evil to exist in the mind, it is a very unpleasent feeling. The irony is that, if we follow the feeling evil, we will create more evil, more of the same feeling. This is something you can observe in your own life most likely. Following the feeling of anger creaters more anger, because you are a slave, a puppet, of the feeling that is controlling you. That is what you seem to be socrates, a mere slave that cannot let go of it's own master. You do not seem to see the real consequences of your actions. You do not seem to see that following your feelings will create more and more of those feelings. This is all you really are doing. You can belief in evil and good, because they do exist, in your mind. They are as real as everything else. See, the illusion, just because we call it illusion, doesn't become a lesser part of reality than it was before. The word illusion merely means not following, literally. It is still part of reality, in an absolute sense. We simply choose not to be a slave. We are not using that feeling to motivate our actions. There is no real confusion in your mind. You know exactly what evil and good is, even right now. They will never change, all that will change is your ideas of them. The ideas are never what really is. Investigate what the words you are uttering really refer to, and what they mean, what they actually do to your reality. When Leo utters the words "good and evil do not exist" it will not change the fact of whether good and evil do exist or not. All it does is change action. This is what the words are for. They cannot speak truth, that's not what words are for. They merely construct a new system of belief, a new paradigm. When we say we know something, all it means is that we have constructed an idea. This is what knowledge itself is, or atleast the idea about knowledge. I would suggest to keep meditating, to keep inquiring the mind, reality itself, because there is really nothing else you have. You have not yet realize that you are constructing reality itself, that you are reality. If you do not see that, you will not realize the power of accepting the feelings that we call good and evil, of going beyond mere feelings, and use this very reality to serve itself. Simply put: Your mind is ineffective.

You cannot force consciousness like that, it rarely works. If someone does not care about other beings suffering, there is nothing you can do about it. You can tell them it's wrong, or unethical, but it doesn't matter. Wrong and unethical are just words, all that matters is how one feels about something, atleast for most human beings, because we are inherentely driven by emotions. Having consciousness of the suffering of other beings and just having knowledge is a vast difference. People need to decide to become more conscious of it themselves. Everyone can look up videos of how these animals are treated in mass production. Some might feel enough empathy to stop eating meat, others will not. Maybe visit the animals and see for yourself. Most people will not do that because they do not want to be confronted with the consquences of their actions. They themselves are suffering, which of course is the very reason for all of this. Morality is a strange thing, because we as humans design our enviroment specificly so we do not have to take moral decisions. I am farely certain that the emotional morality of most human beings on this planet would not allow mass production of animals, but we are so good at avoiding the entire thing that the moral decision is not taken. If every human being was to expirience all the suffering they have caused in this world, the thousands of animals that were sacrificed for them, I would assume that they would be unable to ever be happy again. It is too great of a burden for the human mind, which is why it must be avoided. This is the very reason why the Holocaust worked. Even those who knew about it, were consciously avoiding it. It's a way for the ego to protect itself. It's really the same mechanics that allow most people to continue eating meat. Of course, this is the very reason why morality is such an inefficient tool. True consciousness is what is required for sustainable change. If you truly love someone, you will not avoid their suffering, you will do anything to help them. You will not care about morality, you will only care about what you love. When you love someone, you feel it. It's not a sentence in your mind. And you don't help someone you love because you pity them, you help them because you actually want them to be happy. People love their dogs, so they protect their rights. There is no need for a moral argument when it comes to dogs. People protect them because they feel like it. You need to change the feelings, not the opinions, if you want someone to actually care.

Recognize that the inability to talk to undeveloped people means that you yourself are undeveloped.

Stop believing that there is no free will, it will not change the fact that you still feel like there is free will. When belief systems do not correspond to consciousness, problems come to be. You do not know whether there is free will or not, what you do is basicly adapt a paradigm because it makes sense to you. You have no consciousness over not having free will, you simply cling to the idea. The idea is not what is happening, the idea is just an idea. You can get depressed over the idea because you can resist it. You are like "Oh god... I-I don't have free will!! What will I do now??!" This very thought pattern is proof for yourself that you still feel like you are free. You still feel like there is a you. And unless you get rid of the ego, I do not think you can become conscious of free will not existing. So, for now, screw the belief. You feel like you have free will, right now, that's all that matters. You can investigate the feeling, but don't analyse it rationally, it won't do much good. Whether you think you have free will or not, both beliefs are completely delusional. Saying free will does not exist is just as much a delusion as saying free will does exist, it's completely ridicilous. The mind is playing a game, a drama. What you think is not what is. And the more you will think about it, the more depressed you will get. Because simply, your consciousness does not correspond to your beliefs. Saying everything is one, everything is consciousness, is not the same as being consciouss of the oneness of reality. If you simply adapt a paradigm, you will create a split, an inauthenticity within yourself. You yourself do not belief the words you are uttering, all it really is, is that they make sense to you. You don't feel like you have no free will, you simply think it's true. Stop believing the bullshit people want to feed you, even if it's Leo. Be curious, find out for yourself and investigate. If you keep doing it the way you have, you will see that it leads to suffering. Not everyone is suited for Leo's style of teaching. A wise master will withhold truth from you, because he knows that you will not see the truth in his words, you merely see the words. The words are delusion, no matter what words are uttered. All words are illusion, all thoughts are constructions. You are constructing a picture without having ever seen the world for what it is. You trust others to tell you what the world looks like, without bothering to open your eyes. All you see is darkness, and you hear people telling you about the light. How will that not make someone depressed? How could you possibly understand the light, if you have never seen it? If all you see is darkness, even light you will imagine as dark. This is fundamental.

You have a misunderstanding of what suffering is. Pain is not suffering, it's not bad at all. If you like pain, you like pain, like any other feeling there is. The feeling pain is just a way of communication. Suffering is when one is resisting a certain sensation, a certain feeling. The feeling of love can cause just as much suffering as the feeling of pain, the only reason it doesn't, is because we do not resist it. The feeling is not what is causing the suffering, the resulting resistance is. All of it is part of the survival mechanism, it evolved out of efficiency. There is no reason for a fly to resist pain, it's behaviour does not require that much of a complex system to operate. And what is unnecessary is what gets selected out. One day we will most likely be capable of creating creatures that do not suffer whatsoever. If a being is not programmed to resist, it will not resist, no matter what is happening to it. Infact, it will even be possible to make beings enjoy what they previously resisted. Death, pain, loneliness, all that we human consider as bad. You are projecting your own programming onto that of other beings. A fly does not feel lonely, because there is no reason for it to suffer in that instance. Human beings feel lonely for the only reason that it was an effective tool for survival. Beings that felt lonely, and resisted the feeling, had to find companionship, which in turn increased it's chances for survival. The same goes for fear of death, for pain, for all that makes us suffer. The lion does not suffer the way you suffer. In a natural enviroment there is always a balance of suffering and enjoyment, even if there are exceptions. The lion is not sad because he can only live 10 years, that's a human projection that you do. Your empathy is delusion. What we as human beings have created is an enviroment that creates suffering that is most likely comparable to that of a mass extinction. The trillion of beings that we put into an enviroment that they are not made for, is what is causing resistance in them, which in turn is suffering. This is why I think your evaluation is wrong. Humans do create far more suffering than nature does. But this very statement implies that humans are seperate from nature, which is of course a very naive thought. We are the process of nature. There is absolutely nothing about us that is beyond natural. Beings avoid suffering, which is the very reason why we want to get enlightened. It is the absolute solution to that problem. But once it's there, you don't see suffering as problem anymore. It is quite interesting, because it is a change in the fundamental programming of the mind. It's quite ironic if you think about it. We resist suffering so much that we even resist the idea of suffering itself. The not wanting to suffer itself is creating suffering.

It would be interesting to observe whether animals look at sunsets and sunrisings. We as humans naturally find sunsets very attracting, or in other words beautiful. In an evolutionary sense what we find beautiful is what helps us to survive or procreate. If you don't tell a child not too look at a sunset, will he naturally have a tendency to do so? I can't find any studies on this topic. But this might be one of the many areas where human ignorance is confused with human knowledge. We have no systemic model of how the human body and mind works whatsoever, and yet people claim to be experts, dismissing little details that might be essential. Sometimes it suprises me that our species is still around... Modern scientists literally dismiss facts because they don't know how they fit in their little model of reality. We are literally going against millions of years of wisdom because we think we know better.

Interesting, someone told me about it just a few minutes ago, seems like it is somehow trending? I'll try it out. Does someone here already have a sun gazing practise in place?

As with everything, there is a quick fix and the long, hard route. The quick fix will give you results immediately, and the long, hard route will teach you life lessons that you would have never learned if you just took the quick fix. See addiction as a challenge that needs to be overcome. Overcoming a challenge requires growth. Thus, see the addiction as an oppurtunity for growth. Someone who was never truly addicted to anything does not need to learn the tools to overcome addiction. This is why you are blessed, because you are forced to learn, you are forced to adapt. Most people spend their entire life in comfort, and that's precisely why most people never are forced on the path of true growth. A recent video of Leo's actually scratched on that topic. The addiction is the beginning of the hero's journey, it's the mechanism that forces you to get out of comfort. On the way, you will have to learn discipline, you will have to learn positive thinking, you will have to learn how to resist urges. There are so many things you need to learn before you can overcome this addiction. If you cannot let go of the addiction, it simply means you are too weak, too unskilled, to do so. Don't look at it as getting rid of addiction, look at it as learning the tools to be able to deal with addiction. For a painter to create a beautiful piece of artwork, he needs to first learn the skills to do so. As for any skill, it takes great effort to learn. Now, if the painted didn't have have the objective of creating a beautiful piece of artwork, he wouldn't need to learn any skills to do so. The objective is the blessing, because the objective is purpose. It creates the motivation to learn, which is all you need to grow. Read the book "Mastery" by George Leonard. Getting rid of addiction requires you to become a master of self-control. If the addiction would just disappear, you'd lose any motivation to become a master of self-control. This is, as I said, why the addiction is a true blessing. This very principle applies to almost anything in life. From entire countries, to businesses, to the very species that we are. If our ancestors would not have been challenged, if there wasn't a constant need for adaptation, for mastery, then the human species would not exist. The human species exists because it was challenged to become what it is. The challenge is the greatest blessing. Without the challenge, human intelligence would have not needed to be developed. And what is not needed, will not be. You will fail this test, or you will grow. You will fail to adapt, or you will become something greater than what you are. This is the very principle of life, the root of all actions. Study this, because it might be the most important thing for your life. And do not forget, that this very principle itself, forces you to study this principle. You will not study this principle, if there is no need for you to study this principle. See it like this: It is the weak, who sees a need for becoming strong. It is the inferior, who sees the need to become superior. It is the truly unenlightened, who sees the need to become enlightened.

I can't get my head around this. Why can we predict anything? So, Leo sits in a room, and looks at some of his psychedelics. He then thinks "Oh look, psychedelics, if I pick it up and put it in my mouth I will have an expirience of the absolute!", and he does it, and it happens. Yet, once it happens, the entirety of what he thought is revealed as an illusion. What is illusion then, if it can predict? Why does there seem to be a mechanism that can explain anything. The problem is that even prediction itself will be revealed as illusiory, but yet it worked! And then he claims to be god, to be infinite, to be the absolute, but even that he was able to predict! What's worse, using this illusiory tool, we can predict all of the minds actions! We can predict when enlightenment happens, we can predict what the resulting statements of the subject being enlightened will be, we can predict it all! But yet, prediction is illusiory... Why can I create an illusiory map of the entirety of my reality, and then use it to predict what will happen when I take certain illusiory actions? Why can I explain what enlightenment is, outside of the expirience itself? What is the explanation? It's illusiory, it's not what really is happening, but yet it's describing something? I mean, I can even predict that all of this prediction nonsense will seem completely illusiory to me once I take 5-meo-dmt! How?

It's obvious that the mind is not the brain, because the brain is an idea in the mind. This is not the point. The point was that the idea might be referring to something beyond mind, something inaccessable. The idea is a way for the mind to be able to predict. So, when taking psychedelics, what is happening, why is there enlightenment? I am not saying that "taking psychedelics" is what is really happening, but it seems like there is a complete denial that anything is happening at all. Maybe happening is the wrong word, because what is beyond the mind is beyond the mind, so there might be no concepts to describe it, but there seems to be a completey certainity that there is nothing beyond the mind, because "outside of mind", is an idea in the mind. But, what if the idea is pointing to something? Why does taking psychedelics result in enlightenment? And once I take it, all of these concepts make no sense anymore, because the reality is altered. Why though?

I guess it makes sense now. But why is that? Why can it make sense? Why can there be a model that seems to correspond to what is happening? Yes, it's not really what is happening, but there seems to be this... I don't know how to describe it. As I said, why can we make models and predictions of something that is not model and prediction? Are we just overcomplicating things? Maybe there are parts to reality that are just conceptual, and other parts that are completely beyond it?

So, why am I listening to the talk? The talk is not enlightenment, it's monkeyism, isn't it? So, maybe from the being perspective, you just let the monkey do whatever it wants, resulting in the monkey crying out it's god, infinite, consciousness and whatever? Because being is always being, isn't it? So all that changes it seems, is the monkeys talk. Here it comes back to the whole predictions thingy though. Consciousness does not change no matter what the mind is doing. Yet, with the model of the brain, some day (even today), we can create an enlightenment expirience within a few seconds. It's a change in the mind, or if we look at it with the scientific model, a change in the brain. So, the change in the brain doesn't change anything about "being", does it? Yet, the mind, the brain, is what is claiming to be being. But it's not, it never will be. So what's the point?