Carl-Richard

As long as you understand the difference between God's infinite mind and the finite human mind, that is most of the job done. Other words for God's infinite mind is reality, Consciousness, transpersonal consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, Qualia, awareness, emptiness. Other words for the finite human mind is the ego, thoughts and experiences, perception and cognition, feelings and sensations, private conscious inner life, personal mind, localization of consciousness.

But suffering and non-suffering, human and non-human, are dualities that don't even exist. Why are you denying the absolute? Just keep in mind that when you use the conviction in your own perspective to justify being an asshole to people who don't agree with you, you come off like the Westboro Baptist Church to those people.

@Yimpa Thanks Now you have no excuse to miss it

I would have to see the context in which that was said, but even on its own, this only goes to show that using the language of solipsism is highly ineffective for communicating the message, which is that everything is occuring within One transpersonal consciousness. When even people who have had mystical experiences are misunderstanding what is being said, that should tell you something. If you want to talk from the perspective of transpersonal consciousness, you firstly shouldn't talk at all, because that will be untruth. Secondly, it's not that others don't have a separate reality: it's that others don't even exist. "Others" is an arbitrary carving out of reality based on human biases and perceptions. From this perspective, suffering doesn't even occur, not even to "You", because "suffering" and "occurrence" is again an arbitrary carving out of reality. Now, if you want to skip these trite non-dual truism and want to concede to using concepts that can make sense of our human experience (like suffering), within that frame, you can start to introduce concepts like "others", "pain", "suffering". But then you also go beyond the idea that there is only One being, and therefore to make claims like "there is no other people that suffer, only me" is either to practice severely haphazard styles of communication (which is arguably what Leo is doing) or to actually confuse the two frames (which is what you seem to be doing). I know Leo doesn't care much about this, but some people do care about how words are being used and whether they carry cultural baggage that is bound to cause confusion, and two great examples are Rupert Spira and Bernardo Kastrup. Listen carefully to what they're saying when discussing how solipsism is distinct from idealism/non-duality and maybe you'll understand the distinction I just made above. 24:46

@Razard86 I've tried to unpack this many times, but all I can be bothered to say is that solipsism is a bad word to describe what Leo is describing. Try to not use such a culturally loaded term if you don't want people to misunderstand what you're saying. This fact and my request for you to tone down your flaming goes back to my previous post earlier today about miscommunication and not understanding someone's perspective. Instead of dropping such charged language as "lies, untruth", try to actually understand where the person is coming from, and try just a little to not make them feel bad. It's ugly how much inhumane behavior gets justified by this spiritual "holier than thou" attitude.

@Razard86 Stop making everything so god damn personal all the time. If you feel the need to make a point, do so respectfully. Think about it like this: if you have to go to the toilet, either do it discretely or keep it in. Don't just shit all over the floor and say "it had to be done".

Maybe he meant that images on a screen don't have a private conscious inner life (like biological organisms) or are meta-cognitively aware (like humans and maybe some animals), which you can make good cases for. The idea that "everything is consciousness" can be described by a different concept: phenomenal consciousness or transpersonal consciousness. Sometimes, thinking that someone is stupid is just a result of miscommunication or an inability to understand their perspective.

There is no worse trap than taking somebody's words as gospel and not discovering the answer for yourself. Find out why it's a supposedly a trap. Try to understand why Leo is saying what he is saying and see if it even makes sense to you.

Psychedelics don't get offended ?

Like I said, you can raise your consciousness and increase your ability to regulate your emotions. I remember when I was in the Rali cult, I would sometimes watch this video while trying to pour as much love into it as possible: It certainly had a powerful effect on my mental state. So that is definitely possible. But then the next day, I could be crying because I got a bad grade on a test despite trying very hard. These things are not mutually exclusive I can notice that some days, I'll be more conscious and I can "catch" an emotion as it occurs and consciously drop it, and it feels much better that way. But that is usually just for small annoyances like dropping something on the floor. When it comes to bigger things, you need much more stability to do that, and there is a danger in mistaking your ability to drop small annoyances for the ability to drop all emotions, while in reality you're unknowingly repressing an ongoing emotional response instead of working through it. That too I've experienced. So it's a tricky territory to navigate, and I'm just providing one perspective on how you can avoid these kinds of mistakes, and in this case, I'm focusing more on embracing the raw and maybe surface-level reality of the emotion rather than focusing on the subtle meta-levels, i.e. how emotions appear as pointers towards problems you need to solve, rather than how you can choose to drop emotions or create positive emotions for yourself.

It depends on what emotional issues you're talking about. Am I to blame for being brought up a certain way that created a lot of emotional issues? More no than yes. Am I to blame for not going enough out of my way to expose myself to new challenges and stagnating my emotional development? More yes than no.

That's not nice.

OMG why is this so good?

The alleged Leo quote in question was taken from one of his videos out of many 100s of videos, so I don't see why this should be reasonably different. I'm talking about Rupert Spira now. It's pretty much in your face.

I once posted a chain of 10+ videoes of Rupert Spira delegitimizing the concept of death. You can probably find something problematic in there if you dig for it. Anyways, I'm actually supportive of the idea of having all spiritual teachings under lock and key by carefully picked student-teacher relationships to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings. This postmodern Wild West era of spirituality is not good for anyone for a myriad of reasons.

There is more to spirituality than "death is an illusion". Existential topics like aging and death of loved ones touches on deep notions of self beyond the mere material.

Emotions often correlate with immediate external events, but often they don't (like when daydreaming), but the content of the emotion still addresses some externality, immediate or imagined. I guess when you're in a plane crash, you're handpicking which adrenaline molecules go into each cell in your body to generate panic? Generally speaking, emotions seem to correlate with circumstances, and it's possible to weaken that correlation (through raising your consciousness), but the correlation still exists.

I'm just pointing out how trying to single out Leo's use of communication in this instance as irresponsible compared to the larger sphere of non-duality is not well-founded.

@SeaMonster I think splitting hairs between grammatical cases is a bit of a stretch. Besides, you have people like Sadhguru and Osho who say the best thing you can do is to "die consciously", you have buddhists lighting themselves on fire and performing automummification, mahasamadhi, rainbow body. How is that for NLP?

I'm simply inquiring into the emotion and asking "what is the emotion for?", like you recommended in your previous post. Through that, I discover that emotions allocate attention and energy towards a particular goal. If that is inherently victimizing, then I guess it is, but then you're just as much a victim of your hand picking up a coffee mug, which sounds a bit silly.

Weed. I tried mixing it with alcohol, but I didn't like how it impacted my mind. I wasn't just trying to escape myself, but I was also deeply obsessed with existential questions, and weed fuels that in a particular way. It allows you to hyper-focus on your interests while also dissociating yourself from uncomfortable realities. It's a drug of distraction, meanwhile alcohol numbs everything pretty equally. You tend to suffer the same things over and over again. Your fears, anxieties, worries, insecurities; they're endlessly stuck on repeat. If they only occurred to you once, you wouldn't be suffering them anymore. On the other hand, pain is often due to something immediate or unexpected. It's more like a one-off thing, because you'll learn to avoid the source of the pain (although chronic pain is a bit different). I think you're thinking of choice as being 100% of your making, which is never really the case. But some things are more under your control than other things. There is a difference between being struck by lightening and sticking your fingers into a socket. Neither of them are either fully in your control or outside your control, but one is more than the other. Suffering is generally more in your control than being exposed to pain. Again, pain is very much a reflexive response generally to something unexpected, while suffering is something you're generally familiar with and which can be greatly reduced by making some conscious effort towards that.

Anxiety, substance abuse. Pain is more concrete and immediate, suffering is more abstract and cyclical. There are points to be made on both sides. There are many things largely outside your control, but some things can be said to be more under your control. For example, many substance addicts develop a self-destructive doom mindset: when things get hard, they revert to "fuck it, I don't care anyway" and it magnifies their problems 10x. A mindset like that is something you can change, and while it's not necessarily easy, it's a choice you can make. That doesn't mean it's 100% under your control. You can for example go to a therapist which will help you to make that choice.

I can talk as somebody who comes from a very privileged background in terms of material things, yet I've suffered a lot. Things tend to balance themselves out.

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@UnbornTao The very word "emotion" stems from being put in "motion", hence the expression of "being moved", and also "being motivated". Whether it's mostly a reactive or proactive emotion, it's still directed towards something, and this becomes very clear if you introspect about your emotions experientially. So I see a strong case to be made for the idea of an external cause or impetus for emotions. Now, you can be daydreaming about something and feel emotions based on that, which in that case, sure, you can't point to any immediate externalities (and it's just "created by you"), but still, the content of the emotion will direct your behavior towards something. Likewise, in a roleplay scenario, the emotions may be "manufactured", but if it's indeed an authentic experience of emotions, the emotions will still have directedness to them. You can also be highly conscious of your internal state and be better at adjusting your behavior with respect to emotions, while an unconscious person may linger more on the emotions or be wholly unaware of them and how they might be perpetuating them, but still, you'll unavoidably experience the directedness of emotions. I will also concede that you can be so very conscious to the point where emotions might seem almost non-existent or irrelevant from an outsider's perspective (as with some gurus or saints). But I would propose that these people are not "devoid" of emotion (or that they have decided to "not create emotions for themselves"), but rather that the intensity, duration and frequency of certain emotions is much lower compared to the average person. They still experience emotions, and the emotions still have directedness to them. My point with this topic is that often the directedness goes unaddressed and you're stuck with either wallowing in not feeling good and not finding a way out, or you find a way out but in a way that doesn't actually address the directedness and instead short-circuits it (like with "letting go" or many other spiritual approaches, or something like distraction or future avoidance of associated activities) which enables the emotion to keep repeating itself or become worse over time. And even if you are able to address the directness and the emotion subsides, merely writing down the lesson will firstly increase the chance that you'll remember it, and secondly, you'll have the lesson crystallized in text format.