Moral Reservations About Enlightenment

[Faceless]

15 minutes ago, StrangerWatch said:

I don’t suffer all that much, so nah. I’m thinking about the world at large.

Yet you say your a hedonist. Contradicting my friend. 

 

[StrangerWatch]

Just now, Faceless said:

Yet you say your a hedonist. Contradicting my friend. 

 

How so? Hedonists care about the well-being of all conscious creatures, not just their own.

[Faceless]

5 minutes ago, StrangerWatch said:

How so? Hedonists care about the well-being of all conscious creatures, not just their own.

If you say so friend lol 

[Nahm]

The answer, imo, is always both, but only in terms of thought, because - that’s where all the duality comes from. If there’s fear, or doubt, then the quality of our thinking is diminished. 

Suffering is not necessary to experience pleasure. The illusion is just much more obvious, and much more personal. We think,...this creates and filters duality, so there is a common default of choosing one of two, or trying to reconcile two. Without fear or doubt, we naturally choose preferred.  If two options are preferred, without fear or doubt, we’d naturally choose both.

Maya is playing it’s best game when, in a split second, it has already convinced you to so easily forget it is illusionary, and it is you. Forgetting that, we start to incorporate, justify, and accommodate what we ourselves - do not even prefer. It is the obviousness of the situation that stings us. That the focus, the attention, was ours all along. 

[lens]

Quote

How so? Hedonists care about the well-being of all conscious creatures, not just their own.

@StrangerWatch Does that also go for all the animals we nurture and kill in order to eat? Or of their natural habitat that we are slowly destroying in order to advance ourselves? Are you sure you are not just sticking around to humanity, and more especificaly, you here? You can say you want the well being of others but that's because seeing them suffer hurts you, if you didn't feel affected you wouldn't give a crap and i'm sorry that's hipocritical, have you never stepped on a bug or hurt it and didn't bother to finish it off? Imagine how painful that must be, but it was annoying you right? Truth is a humans life is equal to every single creature, make it meaningfull or not. In the end everything in this life is concerning you, it's internal not external. Don't deny the reality you are in, face it.

 

[Nahm]

@lens And yet...enlightened masters often use phrases like “you could cut my arm off and I wouldn’t care”.

[StrangerWatch]

11 hours ago, lens said:

@StrangerWatch Does that also go for all the animals we nurture and kill in order to eat? Or of their natural habitat that we are slowly destroying in order to advance ourselves? Are you sure you are not just sticking around to humanity, and more especificaly, you here? You can say you want the well being of others but that's because seeing them suffer hurts you, if you didn't feel affected you wouldn't give a crap and i'm sorry that's hipocritical, have you never stepped on a bug or hurt it and didn't bother to finish it off? Imagine how painful that must be, but it was annoying you right? Truth is a humans life is equal to every single creature, make it meaningfull or not. In the end everything in this life is concerning you, it's internal not external. Don't deny the reality you are in, face it.

 

Nah, man. All life is not equal, insofar as levels of awareness differ between them. A bug is not worth much more than a plant, which is probably not worth anything compared to a human, based on brain activity. Of course, it would be better if there was no need or compulsion to kill at all, but that’s life. Not my fault — and as I’ve said, I wish it weren’t so. I don’t accept it, and I don’t completely love it.

[Leo Gura]

@StrangerWatch Good/bad, better/worse, evil, value, worth, purpose, and meaning are all projections of your ego-mind. They do not exist.

The holocaust is no different than any other physical occurrence. The only difference is, you are deeply invested in it, and it hurts your ego to allow for it. Hence you refuse you give up your judgments. Because they are necessary for your self-image to survive.

But you are highly biased. So none of your positions can be taken as truth. You do not care what the truth is in this case. You care about how to keep yourself alive. You've confused these two things.

You're not likely to breakout of this self-biased way of thinking about the world until you have an ego-death experience. Only then will you truly understand the power of the dynamic I'm describing.

Although it should be pretty obvious simply from a philosophical chain of reasoning why all value, worth, and morality must be utterly subjective. Hardly any two human beings agree about morality. That's should be a dead giveaway that it's not objective.

[Joseph Maynor]

You won’t lose your morality.  It will just no longer be YOUR morality.  Enlightenment is not about changing yourself.  It’s about detaching from a concept that says all of those bits of reality are MINE.  You’ll go Meta and just be mindful of reality instead of believing that reality means anything about a separate sense of self.

Edited January 31, 2018 by Joseph Maynor

[StrangerWatch]

42 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@StrangerWatch Good/bad, better/worse, evil, value, worth, purpose, and meaning are all projections of your ego-mind. They do not exist.

The holocaust is no different than any other physical occurrence. The only difference is, you are deeply invested in it, and it hurts your ego to allow for it. Hence you refuse you give up your judgments. Because they are necessary for your self-image to survive.

But you are highly biased. So none of your positions can be taken as truth. You do not care what the truth is in this case. You care about how to keep yourself alive. You've confused these two things.

You're not likely to breakout of this self-biased way of thinking about the world until you have an ego-death experience. Only then will you truly understand the power of the dynamic I'm describing.

I don’t doubt you’re having a great time down in the depths of existence, Leo. Greater than any of us can imagine. And you’ll openly admit that you have cast aside all concepts of good, bad and meaning. You’re a nihilist. You don’t believe that suffering is real and should be avoided, except superficially. To you, it really doesn’t matter if Africa is suffering with negligence of their most basic human rights, or if Asia still has countries akin to WWII Germany and the Soviet Union, or if Western civilization is converted to extreme religious dogma which it helped propogate.

 

Seems to me you’re no better than the nihilistic solipsism growing out of the New Age movement, based on what you’re saying here. As I suspected. Through your Enlightenment work, you’ve created a religion out of your own subjective and impulsive observations, and as such you’ve cast aside any responsibility for the world you’ve now left. You may call it higher existence — I call it egotistical cowardice.

 

And BTW, I’ve had ego death experiences. Yes, it feels amazing. Yes, you lose all attachement. And no, I don’t believe it’s the right way to view the world all the time. Because there is no meaning in the universe outside the meaning conscious creatures create for themselves, and that biased meaning is not to be thrown away because IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.

[Joseph Maynor]

5 minutes ago, Mighty Mouse said:

Correction... he's a pretend nihilist, while pretending it's not nihilism.

A nihilist is still clinging to belief.  When you reach the state of Brahman nihilism doesn’t make sense.

[StrangerWatch]

4 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

A nihilist is still clinging to belief.  When you reach the state of Brahman nihilism doesn’t make sense.

Don’t just cling to the words I’m using, please. Understand what I’m saying: Functionally, Leo is someone who doesn’t care about the quality of the content within reality. Nothing matters to him.

[Nahm]

@StrangerWatch You’re missing the entire boat. Can’t transcend what you’re stuck in without serious determination in the practices. Given where you’re at, have you considered doing anything about your suffering for those less fortunate? You really do create your own reality. How you think is paramount to getting any further with the life you want. Resistant thinking like that, blame, commiserating - not headed anywhere. 

[Nahm]

@StrangerWatch Shocking to me. Shocking. 

[Shin]

13 minutes ago, StrangerWatch said:

Don’t just cling to the words I’m using, please. Understand what I’m saying: Functionally, Leo is someone who doesn’t care about the quality of the content within reality. Nothing matters to him.

This is pure projection from your part, there is no way to know that.

[StrangerWatch]

5 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@StrangerWatch You’re missing the entire boat. Can’t transcend what you’re stuck in without serious determination in the practices. Given where you’re at, have you considered doing anything about your suffering for those less fortunate? You really do create your own reality. How you think is paramount to getting any further with the life you want. Resistant thinking like that, blame, commiserating - not headed anywhere. 

Interesting. You’re taking the position of a stoic and saying reality isn’t perfect and ultimately something to be endured. I can respect that. I doubt Leo would think the same.

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Hardly any two human beings agree about morality. That's should be a dead giveaway that it's not objective

Morality is not subjective. Our opinions on it may be, just as our opinions on global warming are subjective. The well-being of conscious creatures is measureable at the level of the brain. I know my own suffering is objectively bad, and given my genetic ties to everyone else around I’m inclined to believe their suffering is equally objective.

[Joseph Maynor]

 

[StrangerWatch]

3 minutes ago, Shin said:

This is pure projection from your part, there is no way to know that.

It is how I interpreted his words. He’s free to correct me, should he read this and discover I’ve misrepresented him.

[Shin]

6 minutes ago, StrangerWatch said:

It is how I interpreted his words. 

You see the problem here ?

[StrangerWatch]

25 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

 

Her conclusion is basically that morality has no objective basis, and that justifies loving everything — torture, rape, racism, totalitarianism — unconditionally. A horrifying statement; clearly she has deluded herself.

 

Neuroscientist Sam Harris has written a book called The Moral Landscape, which argues that morality is objective. This 4-minute video gives a glimpse into his reasoning, and there’s also a 22-minute TED talk which basically illustrates the thesis of the book quite well if you care enough to watch. I’ll link you both videos. Watch either of them as you please: