Carl-Richard

@Razard86 All your posts are just the same point repeated ad nauseum. "Woah dude, everything is relative".

No, you just said you want to drop ethical codes. This is obviously looping at this point, but I feel that the "solution" thing you're doing is a language game. It's this simple: you don't want ethical codes, neither now nor tomorrow, but you want something else ("root solutions", whatever that is).

Why are you acting like finding the root solution for things is 1. such a radical thought, and 2. incompatible with symptomatic solutions? It's the idea that we can drop everything else and invest everything in root solutions and thinking we'll get there which I'm calling utopian, not the attempt to find root solutions.

The only problem is that now you're off into utopian fantasies again. We're stuck with blunt tools for now, but no tools is worse.

Ah. That didn't really tell me what you think sex is. It tells me which frameworks you use to understand sex. You can use those frameworks to understand many things, not just sex. What kind of system is it?

"Rule #1: Don't fuck your students." "You're lying about the absolute! You're confusing the students, making spiritual teaching harder for the teachers!" I think this is just ridiculous. We should not put people in jail, just find the root cause. Very myopic, not very systemic. Anyways, this is looping.

Because the absolute is so fragile, as if it hasn't endured for all of human history, and as if it isn't the formless basis of all of reality, and that if a spiritual teacher wants to use it to satisfy their mammalian needs, we would be damned to question that. At least people on this forum aren't using the absolute to justify things like suicide...

So only when it comes to spiritual teaching, you want to remove the best alternative we have for assuring a basic level of social safety before we even have the slightest idea of a replacement? Well, I hope you'll never become a spiritual teacher then

Now you're doing something funny. Are you saying after all this time that we should have ethics codes for spiritual teachers?

Laws and ethics are limiting human expression in many ways, but currently we don't have any better alternatives for assuring some basic level of social safety. You don't get rid of the best alternative just because it isn't perfect. You also don't even have a slightest idea of what a better alternative would be.

What are you talking about?

Enlighten us. In the meantime while you work out your utopian fantasy world of enlightened saints, we normal people who live in reality will create rules which are easy for people to understand and follow. It's ridiculous that when we talk about normal everday stuff, everybody is like "yeah, laws and ethics are important", but when somebody mentions spirituality, everybody goes full relativistic libertarian nihilist. It's actually a mind virus.

And that is where you lose me. This thread has done nothing but confirm my suspicion that ethical questions around spirituality is absolutely necessary. If a spiritual state was given nuclear codes, I would evacuate the planet faster than the members of Heaven's Gate.

And why is that? Is it because if you ask people prior to joining the organization "would it be ok if we were to kill someone for your awakening?", many people would be skeptical? Do you think if you ask people "would it be ok if we had sex?", many people would be skeptical as well? Because I can envision both of these things happening (killing and sex) once you trap them into some teacher's orbit and slowly erode their boundaries over months and years, certainly if they've conceded their friends, family, money or any normal sense of autonomy. Non-dual mindtricks makes all of that exceedingly likely.

So spirituality is above ethics. Is spirituality above the law? Can I literally kill for someone's awakening?

I think all of these deserve ethical questioning indeed. I'm certainly not uncritical of past spiritual teachers, or Leo, or 100 year old psychoanalysts. However, it's one thing to look in retrospect and think "all of that would've never happened, and we would've been so much poorer as a result", but it's another thing to imagine an alternate timeline where they did follow some ethical guidelines. From that perspective, I don't think they would've been too hindered in performing their work in any significant way. I don't think Carl Jung was fucking people's brains out of their childhood traumas ?

Ethical violations don't require a psychopathic mind. Their subtle nature makes normal people subject to them as well. I don't call the people I'm arguing with psychopaths ? Unethical behavior is something you can easily fall into if you're not deliberately watching out for it. It often deals with normal behavior which feels totally ok from an emotional level, but which is only seen as problematic from a more abstract level (professionalism, etc.). I think it's negligence and ignorance rather than deliberation and evil that will stand for most of the ethical violations. That doesn't mean they're not a big deal. It's just means we have to be better at watching out for them. A better predictor for violations would probably be openness (which is associated with spirituality btw) and of course low conscientiousness: "I don't like these rules; let's make some new ones!" or "fuck rules!". Besides, look at it statistically: it could save some psychopaths, certainly some people who are on the boundary of psychopathy, and certainly some normal people.

Functioning can change without molecules getting permanently stuck inside receptors or lingering in the body for long periods of time. I'm also not sure if it would matter in the long run, as the system probably has ways of downregulating that activity (e.g. just removing the receptor in question).

When the tl;dr is longer than the original text ?

Give me a practical example of where an ethics board impinges on the practice of spiritual teachers in a way that justifies eliminating the ethics board.

Tl;dr? ?

@A_v_E If you're suicidal, you're not dead. Go get some help.

This place is too pure for you ?

A.k.a non-duality.

Solipsism is when you take your limited human perceptions as fundamental. Non-duality is when you take the limitless nature of consciousness as fundamental.