Scholar

I don't know if you can force yourself to burn through something. Why do you want to do that anyways?

Isness is Acceptance. If something exists, it is accepted. That is what Acceptance is. The fact that Suffering exists, means that it was fully accepted. Total Acceptance means to Suffer, to fear suffering, to resist suffering, to be happy, to be unhappy. To be tolerable, to be intolerable. Acceptance is not merely psychological, it is metaphysical. You have already accepted EVERYTHING. You accepted infinite Suffering. And this is it, this is your acceptance of it. Your existence is pure and full acceptance . There is no deeper acceptance than that my friend. This is your courage. You have accepted Existence so fully that you made yourself ignorant, because your ignorance was required for reality to be complete. Your inacceptance is that which you Accepted. Everything that will ever happen to you, you are fully embracing. That's what it means for something to happen to you.

The issue is that idealism, pantheism and mysticism require a relationship to an opposite to exist. Oneness cannot be conceptualized without it being opposed to Seperation. Thus, you have fallen into a duality, and called one side of that duality fundamental. That duality is not fundamental, unless it is deemed so. To pose something is direct, there must be indirectness. To pose something is Experience, there must be a World and an Experiencer. By calling Reality Experience, you have accepted the Opposition to it, you have accepted Seperation, Otherness, Outsidedness. See, if you had no conception of the physical, it would make no sense to call anything mental. What would mental even mean if it was not "non-physical". This is the monkey chasing it's own tail. Reality is not mental, nor is reality physical. Reality is = Reality is = Reality is = Reality is You attempt to put a boundary on reality, You seek to find it's most fundamental Nature. You seek to capture it so you, in your ignorance, can call it this or that, or can discover it to be this or that. If you think Separation doesn't exist, then you do not see Separation. Fundamentally, everything that you deny exists. If it did not exist, you could not deny it. And most importantly, just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Existence is so Absolutely Relative and Groundless, that it doesn't even have to Absolutely Relative and Groundless to be Absolutely Relative and Groundless. It is so Groundless that it is not even Groundless. Look into it. It is so Groundless that even the Absolute is Realitve, and it is so Relative that the Absolute is Absolute, without being Relative. This is why the impossible is Possible, because there is no Restriction other than every Restriction. You think Truth is one thing rather than another. But everything is Truth. Not just a little bit, but Absolutely and Relatively. You hold no more or less Truth than an ant does, or Donald Trump does, or the Buddha does. Unless it is deemed so. The irony of the Ego. When it finds Infinity, the first thing it will do is tell itself what Infinity is, not realizing that in that moment, it lost Infinity. Your mind cannot do anything but find a shape in the shapeless. Helpless, like an ant. Because you are not beyond an ant, The only difference is that you could realize your limitation, and how much of an ant you actually are. That the point of your existence is to be an ant, and that you will be an ant until you dissolve completely. As a practice, observe Isness and how it keeps shaping itself. And then, let go of observation until there is no observing left. That observation itself was just another shape. That Isness is so Infinite, that what IS deemed to be most fundamental, is only so because it is deemed so. That even the realization of that, is merely another shape, another deeming of it so. And then... It is not called Mystery because it is impossible to communicate. It is called Mystery, because it is Mystery.

So I recently am having the experience of kind of reactivating certain parts of my ego that I seem to have repressed through spiritual work. When I do so, I notice emotions coming back to me that I kind of missed from my experience, which seem to be be directly tied to identity. I think I underestimated how much emotional regulation/creation is tied to the ego. And the fact that these emotions were gone from my experience tells me that dissolving the ego is not as simple as it seems. Some dissolution might be harmful, and some dissolution might only seem like dissolution and actually be mere suppression. Identity very much determines how the world is perceived and what emotions one can and will feel. And sometimes when we remove "ego", we might even remove positive emotions from our experience or suppress them.

How do you know whether or not you just use this as an excuse to be able to avoid contemplating this? I doubt you have direct insight into the state of mind of this person. This person could have all sorts of issues that you are unaware of, they might even be deluding themselves in some form. Think of what happened to that Conor guy.

This is interesting. How do you know this? How do you know whether or not to encourage this when you don't truly know what he is experiencing? I mean, all you have is a bit of text, could it not be that in actuality there was something else going on that could be harmful to this individual? For example, what if this person did go deeper and it lead to their suicide. What if your encouragement would lead to that? How do you prevent that from happening when you give advice and even direct commands to people you have no oversight over?

Yes I am open to being wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that a fool is a fool.

By backlash I mean a backlash from reality itself. I don't care about deplatforming, but his and the nonsense of others will have consequences whether or not it's unfair, or whether or not he is less dangerous than right-wing talk radio. The attitude of "It's not my responsibility that X happens" simply is not sustainable in an interconnected world as ours. At some point things will come and bite Joe Rogan in the ass, aswell as everyone who denied reality for so long. Reality won't care who was at fault or what kind of justifications they had for what they did.

Joe doesn't just risk misinterpretation, he is actively engaging in misinformation. He used the excuse that his show is only entertainment many times, and that nobody should take anything seriously anyone says on his show. Yet he keeps bringing on scientists that agree with his bias, and talking about subjects in quite serious manners. In the end, the world doesn't care whether or not he feels responsible. There will be a tremendous backlash, and the longer we ignore it, the bigger the backlash will be. Truth has no mercy.

That seems to me a very individualistic stance. I think it is a bit naive. Deplatforming probably wouldn't be helpful, but I think he should feel responsible for the information he disseminates. He has a huge impact on society and with the power he holds his responsibility increases too. People "should", be aware that Joe is unreliable, but the reality is that they are not. Living in Lalaland and pretending like Joe is not actually encouraging people to take his content as a reliable source of information is dysfunctional to me. But it makes sense to me that you would take this stance as you in my view also tend to reject certain responsibilites and impacts you have on others with your work.

Over time the courts will tend to adopt the cultural dogma, independent of what stage they are at, so that is something to keep in mind. In this case it seems more like an individual judge is stage green (or partly stage green) or appears to be, rather than a systemic change of the judicial system. We have to be careful with rapid shifts, because often those are not genuine evolutions up the spiral but rather an enforcement of cultural norms (memes of a certain stage) through mechanisms of lower stages. For example, shame will be used to enforce LGBTQ dogma, rather than compassion. A stage blue person for example might adopt stage green memes because they are collectivist, rather than genuinely caring about the issue. They care about it because they know they should care about it, otherwise, shame on them!

I disagree. I think he had an immature reaction to it and later caught himself so pulled the statements back a little. This is one of the aspects that is dysfunctional about MrGirl, he loves being contrarian. You can feel it in his personality, sometimes he says shit just so he can make a confrontational statement.

If society was truly egalitarian those burgers wouldn't even be legal to sell or buy.

I honestly don't think the guy knows what socialism even is.

@Carl-Richard @Danioover9000 Somewhere in this conversation, I think it was in the last third.

Mr Girl thinks meditation is basically cult stuff and he doesn't believe in it, he had a very typical stage orange reaction to it when I heard him talk about it. He is actually pretty similar to Jordan Peterson where he projects his own trauma everywhere, he is a very dysfunctional person.

I think there is a bit of a lack of consciousness regarding this topic on this forum in general. It is the cause for most of the suffering and destruction in society, therefore I think we should try to extend our circle of responsibility by dedicating some of our attention to these issues. Conscious Politics must include animals and the environment. The pillar of unity is compassion. Compassion is our way to understand others, and to the degree to which we are ignorance of the suffering and the concerns of others, to that degree we are biased, we are blind. If we want to live in a good world, we must first be able to see the world for what it is, and that means to see and feel the world from the perspective of all individuals. If this is not achieved, your blindness will cause your own suffering, aswell as the suffering of others. The issue with prioritizing humans to such a degree is that it is not a conscious decision, but rather one stemming from bias and ignorance. We do not know why we are prioritizing humans, we simply do. This is a function of lack of awareness, not a function of a holistic view of the world and a conscious decision to do so for the sake of harmony and unity. To achieve Unity, we must see everyone, we must include everyone. I would like for everyone to consider this before they post here, to consider how partial their compassion is, how it is skewed, and how one will seek to justify that bias, and to rationalize it. And I want you to consider what this blindness already has done to this world and to humanity. I think what makes humanity special is that we can consciously extend our love to others and other things. That not intelligence is what makes us truly special, but rather that we can fall in love with anything. We can fall in love with ideas and concepts, with people and things, with activities and perceptions. And how we guide that Love will determine how our world will look like, and how much we will prosper.

Oh, ye I can see that I might have misinterpreted it lol. Yes, cognitive dissonance will assure that changes won't take place, which is why reasoning often is ineffective when attempting to change people. You cannot just make people rational when they are motivated reasoners, so changing them through rationality can be futile. I think they are connected, I think only once enough individuals change can policy change. If we live in a society full of nazi's, of course we won't stop the holocaust, because nobody thinks there is something wrong with it. Once people see animals as individuals and resolve their emotional attachments, the reasoning to animal rights flows naturally because it is the obvious thing to do. I don't imagine that black abolitionists made enough of a difference to change the outcome, I think we would have still changed even if black abolitionists did not exist. Yes, I interpreted your points in a certain way based on our past encounters, I am not in defense mode emotionally speaking.

What I mean by hurdle is in the context of abiding by animal rights. Each individual can do so, it doesn't require institutions. You can go vegan whether or not there is a trillion dollar financial market, and in the end all this is about you not wanting to go vegan. You basically said "Well it's all futile and it won't change any time soon so why even try haha? But guess you can try you stupid idiot you won't change anything, you are a naive idealist", in a nice way. My point is that I think society would have changed independent of whether there were black abolitionists. The fact that black abolitionists were allowed to exist already required a stance that viewed black people as individuals. Why would they be vegan? I am saying that environmentalism doesn't have you arrive at animal rights, infact it might be the opposite in many cases like factory farming for example. We should not give animals the rights not to be tortured because it would be bad for the environment if we did free-range farming. In this case animal rights are not restricted to veganism. Aside from stating the obvious that veganism, like any other social justice movement, will meet resistance, what exactly was your motivation to post this?

That's not a hurdle though. Every individual can be vegan. We also won't ever get rid of all rape and murder, doesn't mean that makes it in any way harder to not rape and murder people. See, your mind will use the excuse that everything will never be perfect, therefore it's futile to try. That is an appeal to futility. Firstly, you don't know whether it is futile or not. The more people do feel they are obligated to follow ethical rules, the more likely it becomes that institutions will change. I don't think people voted slavery away because slaves rose up and defended themselves. I think people voted slavery away because they realized it was wrong. Environmental arguments are a red-herring because they don't really speak to animal rights at all. You could argue factory farms are better for the environment than free range farms that require huge amounts of land for grazing for example. Using the fact that people are seeking an ideal to dismiss it I think is not a very wise thing to do, because every social justice movement starts with an ideal. And humanity has to be more sensitive in their compassion than only giving those rights who have the power to defend themselves. But it all starts with people changing their view towards animals, and view them as individuals, recognizing that they are the same as us in terms of being experiencers, the only difference being the structure of their mind and body.

This is a very good example of how biased people are when it comes to these topics. I hear Leo make similar arguments. In the conversation, the person attempted to relativize their choice of being a meat-eater by saying that veganism causes harm to humans because for plant agriculture migrant workers are exploited. It is then explained to her that not only do migrant workers get exploited in the same way in the animal agriculture (as it requires more crops to produce to feed the animals) but that it also causes significant harm to people who work in slaughterhouses. The person then proceeds to completely ignore this point, and ignore the reason why they even brought it up, and then proceed to ask why the vegans are not focusing on the human suffering first and have that as a priority. Suddenly, they claimed that we needed to help humans so that they can help us (which she included herself in) to help animals. And remember, this was an argument for why she is not vegan, and why she isn't helping animals. This is how the mind works, it will do anything to avoid responsibility including contradicting itself and making itself look like a complete fool. I this is such obvious nonsense that any mindful person would laugh at themselves if they heard themselves think this way. This is what she said: "I am not vegan because actually veganism causes exploitation to humans, but actually it does cause less exploitation to humans, so I am not vegan so that I can tell you to focus on humans so that they can help us turn everyone vegan!" That's absurd, and that's precisely how cognitive dissonance works. It twists and distorts and perverts everything. It has only one goal, to uphold the contradiction, and it will use your own reasoning, your intellect, to achieve that goal at all costs. Your own mind is trying to convince you of the bullshit it is telling you so you can remain being ignorant of your bias and selfishness. In this instance we can observe cognitive dissonance as a result of wanting to uphold a positive self-image. When you seek to feel like you are a good person, and cherish that image, no matter what you do, your mind will protect that image. This is why when you poke them in the area they actually know they are wrong, they get so upset. It reveals to them their own evil, which makes them suffer.

This conversation reminded me of some fundamental disconnect I have with people when talking about certain issues. The materialist basically will say "Well, we have evidence that atoms exist, because these models allow us to preduct things", and the idealist of course will respond with this, which should completely kill any argument the materialist can provide: Whatever notion of materialism you have, whatever notion of an atom you have, whatever notion of objectivity and outsidedness (outside of consciousness) you have, it is all consciousness. If you say that any aspect of your consciousness is true, which you have to necessarily do to claim materialism is true, then you admit the material is consciousness/ideal. I came to this conclusion a long time ago by independent contemplation, and I can't quite understand what makes it so that some people just cannot grasp this. To me saying they lack the awareness to see this is unsatisfying. It's so simple, it's so obvious, yet it is being denied. It seems like they are so lost in a certain aspect of consciousness, that they do not even know what consciousness is. When they refer to the material, they do refer to consciousness, of course because they could not refer or point to anything but consciousness, yet the entire play is to pretend that it isn't consciousness. It's to say that consciousness is not consciousness. You cannot even escape this, it's obvious that you cannot escape it, it's self-evident. Yet, it is not seen. It's like the materialist is already an idealist, he just doesn't know it. He cannot be anything but an idealist, and anything he could possibly believe will be idealistic. Really, what is happens is that he contracted the ideal to a subset, to a concept, which he can then deny. But what is actually ideal is all of that which he could even claim to be true, or deny to be true. How can this be resolved? Is it just an issue with people being too immersed in the conceptual, and being unable to see the conceptual for what it is? A lot of this kind of dogmatism and basically delusion seems to come from people being too close to whatever concept they believe. It's like they live from that concept, they are like a fish in the water, not aware of the existence of the water. It is frustrating because it's something you just can't explain to people, because the explanation is so simple, yet they do not grasp it. They are completely deaf to it.

You are approaching this from the wrong angle. You are in the layer of the conceptual, and you are attempting to create a conceptual framework that you then will conceptualize to be the "real". That's basically what you are unaware of. Forget about direct and non-direct consciousness, focus exactly on what it means when you say "outside" (of consciousness) or "reality". The fundamental issue is you are not even aware what it means and what you are doing when you say something is "outside". That entire feeling you have of something existing outside of your consciousness, what do you think that is? It's a feeling. If you say that feeling is real, then reality is feeling, then reality is ideal. You cannot escape this. Fundamentally, anything you will ever conceptualize will be ideal, it will be made of consciousness, and if you really feel like that different aspect of consciousness is reality, then that's just another "thing" in consciousness. What you are basically doing when you say the world is material is like saying "The world is red!". You would call redness a perception, but you fail to realize that your entire sense of reality is a perception, including any physicalist and materialist notions. All of them are just made of mind, and the irony is, you call out and say "But that's reality, that is not mind, that is reality outside of mind!". Your concept is self-defeating because you say something is outside of your mind, yet you claim to know about it and say that it is reality. Whatever you will ever conceptualize, including the concept of something that you cannot perceive or that is outside of you, will be within you, and thus it will be ideal. All of that is still mind, you cannot escape this. You have to see that, rather than trying to create more conceptual frameworks. You have to realize that what you are claiming to be the case is literally absurd, it's a self-deception. You are pretending that your own ideas are not consciousnesss, that your own feelings about reality (which is what the problem here is) are not feelings, that they somehow transcend your mind. And even the notion of transcendence of mind is something within mind. This is the first step, once your truly realize that, you will see that your notion of reality, in the way your frame it as an mind opposed to a world, is something that is happening right here, in this existence that you are. That this is existence, and that your ideas do not give rise to existence, but rather that they are within existence. Then you will recognize the Unity of Existence. Not because you think that to be the case, but because it will be obvious to you that it is the case, and that everything you previously did was a game you were playing with yourself, and that you continue to play them game even now, as you talk about existence and Unity and so forth.

Maybe we should burn you rather than the books.

You make the mistake of projection. You yourself have done spirituality via irrational dogmatism, you have adopted beliefs in terms of outwards attention, as you say even today "That convinces me, that doesn't convince me!". You are a believer who is seeking the right belief. And now you discovered rationalism and materialism, which "convinces you more". But you are not actually being rational, you are just going from one system of faith to the next. For you I would actually recommend philosophy. Instead of looking at the world and testing certain belief systems, look at your own and try to justify them. Read some Hegel. The issue right now is not only that you cannot justify matierialism, you do not even know what it means to rationally justify something. You do not merely not see the limits of rationality, you are not even engaging in rationality. You cannot fathom that someone starts at rationality, and spents years and years studying philosophy and science and to then come to conclude that the world is not materialistic. Because that's not how it was for you. You were a silly dogmatist who realized how dogmatic he way, and now you are projecting your non-sense onto everyone as if you had discovered reason for the first time. You are lagging behind on hundreds of years of philosophy and science, which is the great irony here. All you know is dogmatically adopting belief systems via "I am convinced by this. I am not convinced by this.". You cannot justify materialism because it's just another belief you have. Now, go and actually learn what reasoning is, study philosophy and science for 10 years, in a non-dogmatic way, read hundreds of books, and come back here and talk to us about your materialistic nihilism.