DocHoliday

@John Iverson No it is not...no matter what you do there's always at least the polar opposite to it (if it's a big decision). But just look at all the smaller things you do throughout the day, there's soooo much variety and potential for numerous (infinite) other choices and possibilities.

I think this topic would belong in the "Health, Fitness, Nutrition"-thread...

@Leo Gura Thanks for the reply, I'll contemplate on that for a little bit even though I already know what you're getting at and that it's totally legit

@Leo Gura Yeah kind of but not really...that's where our bodies come in, since without them there wouldn't be no perception or experience. The sun surely illuminates itself but it could never see itself or experience itself for that matter without some other "separate", "external" observer with a sentient body to do so. The same would go for consciousness or infinity -> if there was no one to "know" or experience infinity then it wouldn't "be there". That's the essential purpose of aware and especially self-aware creatures. But please correct me if I'm wrong here.

@Ether Daaaaaaamn, that really deserves a like-button. Got a good chuckle out of that.

@MarkusSweden Come on, of course there are! It may still take its time but one thing that is for sure is that change is always guaranteed to happen, so if it won't happen in our lifetimes, perhaps it will in the next. Meanwhile, always make the best of what you have and never sell yourself short - there's plenty of potential in people, they've just never gotten in touch with it.

Everything happens as it must happen. Reality is absolutely infinite, meaning everything that could happen, will happen at some point (in consciousness). That's what Leo tried to get across to you with his analogy of the infinte block of sand in which everything that could ever be shaped out of it, is in a sense already there. The same goes for his blog-video with the sheet of paper and the (adorable) little paper-figures. To grasp this is the ultimate proof for the fact that you don't have free will and just why God permits "evil" to occur - it just couldn't be any other way, you see? So, to apply this in some practical way to your life, whenever you wonder why you feel so stuck in your life or why you can't progress on your spiritual path and just why you seemingly can't achieve enlightenment or why bad things happen to you and why there are terrorists and why there are wars and all sorts of crimes commited against our own human kind and why we destroy our planet and just why life tends to play out for you as it does - remember that reality grants everything and that everything happens just as it has to happen. THIS IS IT FOLKS! It's the ultimate act of surrender, the final stage of complete ego-death - the moment when you truly realise that there is just absolutely no control whatsoever over anything that is or that happens. This is also what is meant by some other post floating around here titled "All mystics agree on this one thing...", which is that: "all is well". It's precisely for this exact reason that e v e r y t h i n g h a p p e n s a s i t h a s t o . You just can't escape it, you see? Every remaining resistance against this is remaining ego, is remaining self-deception, is remaining unnecessary suffering. To truly embrace this fact is what will make you flow with life in perfect union and harmony. This is in it's essence to not give a fuck, at all. You simply don't care about the outcome anymore - the total letting-go of absolutely everything. You will no longer care about whether you will achieve enlightenment or not, you won't care about the achievement of other "higher states of consciousness", you will no longer care about life or death, a t a l l . You won't even care about the fact that you don't care. You simply let life happen as it happens by allowing everything. You are the super-conductor for life, as pure as it can be. I'd propose to you to contemplate this for a while.

@MarkusSweden Well my friend, let me tell you, there are tooooons and tons of highly creative people out there, since everybody in his own right is a creator to some degree. Most of them just never get to realise or actualise their ideas and concepts due to the way we have constructed our societies and economic systems nowadays. If we'd let everybody freely create whatever they'd want to create without any limitations....oh man, that'd be pretty much the pinnacle of our collective human development.

@sarapr Many of us will probably understand what you're saying, yet it's a weird way to put it, frankly. Reality neither exists nor doesn't exist. Everything isn't nothing and nothing isn't everything. It's obviously dificult to explain this (meaning non-duality) with the language we use, which is why it's incommunicable, which is why we can't explain it by attesting to either the one side or the other as you did. This is what is meant by Leo in his latest video by the realisation that the relative is incorporated within the absolute. Our way of describing things in our dualistic way is the relative perspective which is obviously incoporated within the absolute perspective that is it's source which won't allow any attributes to stick to it.

@MarkusSweden Well yeah, it was bound to happen because that's what had to happen (this is obviously also applicable to everything else that could have happened). And yes, that thought still implies that there is a particlar separate "you" that could have understood things much earlier. But as it turns out, reality is different, it is as it is, being that that hypothetical you or I in fact did not get it earlier because of the various reasons that prevented that, whatever they may be, I don't know. But, things are as they are, whatever they may be and everything happens as it must happen, that's it You see, there's really not that much to it, at all. This is one of the things that is so strikingly simple, that we often make it way harder for ourselves to understand them than it has to be.

@egoless Probably, but that's always the challenge right? The transition from experience into language that is... In the end, you won't have anything else apart from your personally true experience anyway, so I guess people will figure things out for themselves (as they obviously also have to). Just imagine somebody putting a gun to your head...suddenly things would become very clear of what it is that you were just philosophising about and what you have truly embodied on your own that nobody could ever take away from you.

@egoless Yeah, good point. It's truly revolving a lot more around the how and rather than the why, even though people might be sometimes confused with those two and actually want to ask the same thing, they simply don't really know it. I've done it often enough myself, even though in the end I always wanted to know the "how".

@MarkusSweden As you've kindly requested me to present my thoughts on this topic to you, here they are: Of course the question of "why there exists anything at all" is the ultimate why-question anybody could ask. As we have found out, the materialist paradigm does not provide a very satisfiying answer with "the big bang" because the materialist paradigm is bound to the infinite-regress problem when it comes to the answering of such existential and meta-physical questions. To me it's perfectly clear what Leo means and what he's referring to when he says what he says since it's been grasped on an experiential level (as it properly should be) but in order to clarify further to you and others who didn't (yet) have that experiential understanding, this is how it could be done: Leo actually already answers the Why-question himself in the (your) quote by saying that it has to be as it is or it must be as it is. Things can not be different than they already are. You can always ask the question of why things are as they are but fundamentally they are always as they are simply because they are as they are. Reality doesn't need to justify its way of manifesting itself, because that's what it does - it is pure being and pure consciousness that simply is, for no other reason than for the reason that is inherent to itself. To give you a comparision, when children play they never have a premeditated reason to do so - they simply play because it's their nature of playfulness that makes them do it. Reality or consciousness for that matter isn't different at all - it's nature is pure creativeness which is why Sadhguru for example likes to refer to the universe as "the creation". It creates because...it can, you see? I know this is probably highly unsatisfying on a logical or cognitive level, which is why the experiential component is so much more impactful and important in reagrds to this insight, since when you're going to have it, it's like "oh yes, of course! It makes so much sense, obviously it has to be this way and it couldn't be any other way! I understand...!". You can check out my post on "reality grants everything" if you like to have further information on this or just another attempt to explain the exact same thing because the post actually concerns the very same topic that Leo has now discovered for himself, only that I already posted about it weeks prior to it.

In fact, in addition to what I already said, unconditional love is ultimately equal to impersonal love -- it's just love all on its own. People who are truly unconditionally loving do not essentially radiate with love that is exceptional to the other but instead their very essence has become love. They don't necessarily need someone else to feel or express love since they have realised that true love is in its essence completely impersonal (EDIT) and everything else they might call "love" is merely a compensation for personal lack.

@MarkusSweden Yeah sry, next time I'll use more smileys so it won't come off as too harsh I obviously didn't intend to get across like that but people can sometimes be quite stubborn and naive on this forum (this is not referring to you, it's just a generalisation). Other than that, I generally don't refrain from calling people names or attaching various attributes to them because it gives them a bit of a wake-up call to their egos as well, but I do not (NEVER) intend to actually insult or hurt anybody since I know that (figuratively and/or not) I'm only hurting myself with that anyways. I always love whenever I remind myself of a short snippet of a conversation with my ex-gf that went like: Me: "Don't take what I say personally." Her: "Well, how am I supposed to take it otherwise?" Me: "Just don't take it personal... then you will get what I say" Needless to say she obviously didn't get what I was trying to get across to her but anyways... To answer your question in reagrds to sex, it's completely seperated from true love, meaning that it's a seperate thing to deal with. You can truly love people without having sex with them or even wanting to have sex with them but it's surely nothing bad if you do or want to, that's completely fine and natural.

You obviously have no clue what is meant by either love or unconditional love for that matter... We can only ever love - (or respectively fall in love with) ourselves. When "normal" (clueless) people say that they fell in love with someone, they essentially fell in love with someone else who either represents themselves to a great degree or resembles whatever they desire to be, become or have, with which they seemingly can't come up with on their own. Therefore, we only ever fall in love with what we already have (and want more of) or what we don't have (and want to compensate for). Compensation is actually the key-word here because true love manifests entirely differnt. True love only occurs when we recognize others to be a part of ourselves; or in other words: when we realize the essential non-differentness of others in realtion to ourselves. Of course, it goes without saying that this is deeply related to enlightenment and therefore, unconditional love is nothing else but the embodiment of this realisation. The deeper your enlightenment reaches, the deeper your capacity for love becomes. But obviously this kind of "universal love" towards everybody doesn't manifest itself in the way we "traditionally" acknowledge a love-relationship or a romantic relationship to be more precise. To be unconditionally loving doesn't mean that you're establishing romantic relationships with everybody and everything but it's simply the establsihment of an instant non-separable bond to everybody and everything you interact with, based on the deep realisation that you're essentially them and vice versa. It's true non-duality applied to social relationships and your way of dealing with them.

*In regard to Leo's newest video* : *cough*cough* Seems like I told you so all along...

This is so cringe-worthy, seriously. He just hasn't any proper idea what he's talking about since he's just picked up some random theoretical snippets and now thinks he knows it all...this is so dangerous what he's doing. Just talking to Teal Swan once or twice and reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle won't get you enlightened that easily!

@Hardik jain Tell me more about that Justin Burner guy, he seems interesting... But seriously, maybe just try to listen to music. It's the mildest form of stimulation in my opinion and it can help you a lot to first of all just be present and attentive for a longer period of time.

@Leo-Tzu That's just selective attention to a particular occurrence....it works the same for everything else, for example try to concentrate only on things that are red and all of a sudden so much more red things will "appear". It's a common phenomenon with people who buy a new car or a new phone or anything else for that matter...their attention shifts and is temporarily focused in on that particular thing.

@Gopackgo Thanks. Even though I kinda quoted myself there; this does not come from somebody else, otherwise, I would have put his name behind it.

"We always tend to judge and treat other people accordingly to the degree to which we can see ourselves reflecting in them."

@Shin Yes that is very true! Many "spiritual" people definitely get mindfucked from time to time when they realise that not everybody really resonates with their presence, even though they try to be as loving and embracing as they can. People are still people, so we wanna watch out for self-deception, right.

@Dodo Well, yeah...that's what I was saying. They judge what they can't understand BECAUSE they don't properly understand it. When you understand that everybody else is also essentially you in a way, and that you could be in the other one's position in life just as easily, then you're going to treat them in a very different sort of way, compared to when you think of them to be seperate from you and therefore, of a lower or higher value relative to you.

@Joseph Maynor Is this list representing the ones you just found that you could go investigate or have you already listened to their material? If you haven’t, definteley listen to Alan Watts, he should be way more popular than he already kinda is.