A question for Leo on his recent duality video.

[Peter124]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@Peter124 Even enlightened beings need to look out for their survival, so there will always be conflict, disagreement, and violence.

If two enlightened people are locked in a cage with no food, one of them will likely eat the other one. This is the nature of survival and it is not wrong. It must be accepted and embraced.

Be careful not to over-idealize or over-romanticize life. People still got to eat, shit, and fuck if society is to exist.

With greater understanding I have faith that we are capable of finding ways that can accommodate these needs without necessarily leading to violence. If we chose to. 

What you said is true in such an extreme case. 

With wisdom any dilemma can be resolved. 

It's something that we can learn from how Ghandi liberated India without relying on violence. Meanwhile he did make some mistakes, he did display how a non violent path can lead to a liberating path.

With that said, yeah I do agree that there will always be disagreement and some conflict. It's a matter of choice of how to respond. 

One could respond adding fire to fire and creating greater conflict, 

Or come to a compromise and mutual understanding to resolve an issue.

Heck with all this useless fighting and energy spent arguing already over resources meanwhile we already have enough food and water to feed everyone, 

We could instead chose to put aside our differences, give each other assistance and care and work together to say, resolve the dilemma of climate  change. 

Whether we will is another story however we still do have that choice. 

Jesus's lifeis the best example of an enlightened individual who embodied and exemplified this I can think of.

The first church in the book of Acts is an example of that kind of mini society being conducted.

[TheAvatarState]

29 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@Peter124 Even enlightened beings need to look out for their survival, so there will always be conflict, disagreement, and violence.

If two enlightened people are locked in a cage with no food, one of them will likely eat the other one. This is the nature of survival and it is not wrong. It must be accepted and embraced.

Be careful not to over-idealize or over-romanticize life. People still got to eat, shit, make money, and fuck if society is to exist. Life is Love, but life is also brutal.

This is an interesting perspective. I agree with the second part, but I'm having trouble imagining an enlightened being eating another for survival. Even if there was a guarantee that one would survive if the other died, I believe that both would come to the realization that to keep balance, both would have to starve to death and make peace with that. This is because they would both have a nondual understanding that they are the same entity. They would unconditionally love each other, and realize that one living at the expense of another is not the way forward. I believe we are to eventually transcend these animalistic instincts. That's the higher perspective, in my view. 

[Inliytened1]

@Leo Gura well...it depends on how deeply enlightened the individual is.  If he can truly transcend he will let the other in the cage get the food and will sacrifice himself.

But to be at that level you have to be at the level of Christ.  

[Leo Gura]

52 minutes ago, TheAvatarState said:

They would unconditionally love each other, and realize that one living at the expense of another is not the way forward.

Hahaha... this kind of naivete is exactly why I said what I said. This is not how life works.

Life ALWAYS works at the expense of other life. You can minimize that to some degree, but you cannot eliminate that totally. Just the fact that you are alive means some other organism cannot be alive. For example, the fact that you were the winning sperm means that millions of other sperm had to die.

The problem is that you're not yet conscious of the trade-offs and costs of life. Study more closely how life works. Life and death are a duality which necessarily must feed off itself. It's not just an accident that wolves must hunt rabbits to survive and squirrels must hunt acorns. For every acorn that a squirrel eats, that's one potential oak tree that dies. So don't think that squirrels are innocent little creatures. Squirrels are acorn murdering machines.

This needs to be accepted and understood, not avoided or worked around. You must profoundly realize how life and death are intertwined. Otherwise you will be under the illusion that if we could just get rid of death, everything will be peachy. No! The point is to realize that death itself is inevitable. You cannot be alive without dying.

Cooperation and competition are a duality. You cannot have a life of 100% cooperation and zero competition. You must realize how the two co-arise.

You have a self/ego for a very good reason: because you need it to survive. Selfishness plays an important role in life. You cannot just be 100% selfless and stay alive. If that were possible, ego would not be needed and it would not exist. You must realize that selfishness and selflessness are a duality too. You cannot have one without the other.

With all that said, we can still work towards a more selfless society. But don't get overly utopian about it. People still gotta shit, eat, make money, fuck, and kill. Be clear-eyed about such realities. Life has hard stakes. Don't take survival for granted. It's very easy to create a sceneario where you will have to kill to survive, and you will. You do it every day. You just conveniently ignore it, because it's not useful to your survival. You are a survival machine first and foremost.

When a Native American hunter killed his prey, he would say a little prayer for taking the animals life. He realized that he had to take the animal's life to sustain his own. That is what it means to be aware of your selfishness. This is not something to feel guilty about. This is something you can turn into a spiritual experience. Survival is a spiritual experience (if you look at it the right way, without taking it for granted).

It's very important to face the brutality of life, rather than trying to avoid it, pretending like it's not there. Life is fucking brutal. Business is brutal. Relationships are brutal. Etc. This brutality is a real test of your capacity to love. Your love can become so strong precisely because life is so brutal. You can cry for every carrot you eat. "Thank you carrot, for giving me your life. I promise to use your energy towards the highest good."

[Peter124]

33 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Hahaha... this kind of naivete is exactly why I said what I said. This is not how life works.

Life ALWAYS works at the expense of other life. You can minimize that to some degree, but you cannot eliminate that totally. Just the fact that you are alive means some other organism cannot be alive. For example, the fact that you were the winning sperm means that millions of other sperm had to die.

The problem is that you're not yet conscious of the trade-offs and costs of life. Study more closely how life works. Life and death are a duality which necessarily must feed off itself. It's not just an accident that wolves must hunt rabbits to survive and squirrels must hunt acorns. For every acorn that a squirrel eats, that's one potential oak tree that dies. So don't think that squirrels are innocent little creatures. Squirrels are acorn murdering machines.

This ends to be accepted and understood, not avoided or worked around. You must profoundly realize how life and death are intertwined. Otherwise you will be under the illusion that if we could just get rid of death, everything will be peachy. No! The point is to realize that death itself is inevitable. You cannot be alive without dying.

Cooperation and competition are a duality. You cannot have a life of 100% cooperation and zero competition. You must realize how the two co-arise.

You have a self/ego for a very good reason: because you need it to survive. Selfishness plays an important role in life. You cannot just be 100% selfless and stay alive. If that were possible, ego would not be needed and it would not exist.

Do humans have to kill humans over small minded arguments when compromise is possible? 

The goal isn't really for human life to become immortal. At some point there will be no human life 

However, our collective ego is basically casting this cycle of life death and rebirth and the harmony in nature out of whack because of divisions we created in our minds. 

Really, violence in human society exists because of anxiety and fear caused by lack of understanding. 

For example. We have more food and water to supply everyone, we have scientists who can construct living structures that can coexist with nature. 

We have the choice of natural resources over coal and oil. 

And the choice to clean our litter, preserve the habitat and lives of endangered species and perhaps even regrow the trees in the forests with the seeds we have preserved. 

Again, just out of respect for the earth's ecosystem. And to allow this circle of life to be as it was originally created to be. A life form dies to be transformed into energy by another life form through to gain strength, for the most part reproduce and die to be turned into consumption. 

However, in our ignorance we have came to believe that we are above the rest of nature and that our lives are more important and so in our arrogance and pride we end up fighting each other because then, we come to see others as a threat to our own status. And the result is a devastating role in climate change and the slow unjust destruction of earth's ecosystem. 

All we're saying is that, let's end our own ignorance and bias towards violence and hostility towards one another, learn to live as one human community and play our role in nature as was always intended for harmony to be on earth. And as you said that I agree with, it doesn't mean that we will be never have to kill animals in order to eat, it's just that we are way over stepping our boundaries and setting up death camps for animals, over feeding them with crap and slaughtering them in horrific ways. 

Like if you've seen those videos of all those chickens in the Pens all smooshed together and torture before being butchered without regard.

So, in becoming more in harmony with life, we also have the choice to reduce the sheer amount of animals we're killing and to make it so that it's done in a far more respectful way. And actually give thanks for the animals for their nutrition. The food industry needs a massive rehaul and we must learn to consume (even some animals) in a way that doesn't end up destroying the ecosystem. 

Basically take ownership and responsibility for our mess and take actions to be more in harmony with the rest of life while accepting our fate. 

Edited April 17, 2019 by Peter124

[Leo Gura]

19 minutes ago, Peter124 said:

Do humans have to kill humans over small minded arguments when compromise is possible?

Obviously not. My point is that the arguments humans have are not always small-minded.

Who should control the Middle East? Iranians? Jews? Arabs? The US? That's not a small-minded argument. That's a serious survival issue affecting hundreds of millions of people. How is it going to get resolved? How many people are you willing to sacrifice in order to resolve that situation well? 10 thousand? 100 thousand? 1 million? 10 million?

See, it's not so easy. Life is extremely complex and counter-intuitive. By trying to compromise you might end up getting 10 million people killed.

Are you going to compromise or fight with the big oil companies on global warming? If global warming gets out of hand, millions of people are going to die from starvation, disease, displacement, violence, and civil war.

Don't forget that small vs big is a duality. Small things lead to big things which lead to giant things. So the small details matter.

[TheAvatarState]

@Leo Gura Please don't call me naive. I actually agree with everything you wrote. Life IS brutal, and we only got here off the backs of countless other human and animal lives. Of course! If the natives did not eat animals, they would have died, and whether that's "right or wrong," here we are. Ta-Da! 

However, I feel like you may only have part of the story here. While there is a necessary duality of cooperation vs. competition, nature as a whole is predominantly based on cooperation. Our higher light and instincts, while an integration of the two, is something that ultimately transcends human nature. Your example of the two enlightened beings highlighted something that I believe adds another twist to this story. See, two lesser men would probably debate which life was worth more, and if they couldn't reach a consensus (which they wouldn't), it would inevitably turn to a fight to the death. However, we're talking about two enlightened beings. Would they debate which life was worth more? No, that's impossible. Would they fight each other to the death? No. I firmly believe that the only conclusion to be reached, from a nondual universal perspective, is for both to die in peace. I personally would rather go out that way than to live with that on my conscience. There is something here that transcends animal instincts, to appeal to karmic balance.

I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm just asking you to seriously consider this possibility. Would you sacrifice your body so that another may live? Would you kill another man so that you may live? You are both the victim and the perpetrator, so only if you answered Yes to both of these questions would your scenario play out... But would it? That's a stalemate! There would be no purpose to any of this nonsense, would there?

As an example, remember the brilliant ending sequence of the two ships in The Dark Knight? See, the Joker was convinced that either one of the boats would blow the other up. That's human nature, is it not? And yet, it took a brave prisoner to come forward to do the unthinkable. "I'll do what you should of did a long time ago," as he threw the detonation device out the window. That was the action of an enlightened being. 

Edited April 17, 2019 by TheAvatarState

[DrewNows]

@TheAvatarStateIMO it would all be very intuitive but It’s also dependent on the circumstances and relationship and not so much the enlightened aspect (which goes beyond perspectives). Sure maybe neither would fear death but to say ending another life is going to weigh on their conscience is just ego, there’d be no regret. Enlightened individuals do not identify with a nondual universal perspective 

[TheAvatarState]

2 minutes ago, DrewNows said:

Sure maybe neither would fear death but to say ending another life is going to weigh on their conscience is just ego, there’d be no regret

You're right, there would be not regret no matter what decision they reached, because regret is egoic attachment to the past. Enlightened people make decisions decisively. Maybe "weigh on conscience" isn't the right phrase. 

5 minutes ago, DrewNows said:

Enlightened individuals do not identify with a nondual universal perspective 

They don't IDENTIFY with it, but it's the only true perspective to have in this case, considering there are no outside forces at play. Just two men in a cage. Let's say they were lost in the woods, one died of natural causes and other guy had to eat him to survive. Sure, that's happened before. But this hypothetical scenario is interesting. It's a stalemate. I think both would surrender and not play into the petty game of who gets to survive.

[DrewNows]

3 minutes ago, TheAvatarState said:

You're right, there would be not regret no matter what decision they reached, because regret is egoic attachment to the past. Enlightened people make decisions decisively. Maybe "weigh on conscience" isn't the right phrase. 

16 minutes ago, DrewNows said:

Yes but also there’s not really any decisions going on. Like I said, it’s intuitive/ isness 

4 minutes ago, TheAvatarState said:

They don't IDENTIFY with it, but it's the only true perspective to have in this case, considering there are no outside forces at play. Just two men in a cage. Let's say they were lost in the woods, one died of natural causes and other guy had to eat him to survive. Sure, that's happened before. But this hypothetical scenario is interesting. It's a stalemate. I think both would surrender and not play into the petty game of who gets to survive.

There is no True perspective. Just all the infinite relative ones Including that of the universal. 

Now in your example there still isn’t enough context but surrender to life is a must, no matter how it would play out. There’s no games but what may appear to be depending on the context. But let’s say two guys enlightened same age and health, no qualms or agendas in play, there’d be a good chance both would die together. Genuinely I see everyone to be enlightened at their core 

[Shadowraix]

1 hour ago, TheAvatarState said:

Please don't call me naive.

Investigate your feelings on this. There is work to be done there.

That aside

An enlightened individual is not without ego. This is all speculation at best. But the cage example you are getting too hung up on. 

[now is forever]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Peter124 Even enlightened beings need to look out for their survival, so there will always be conflict, disagreement, and violence.

If two enlightened people are locked in a cage with no food, one of them will likely eat the other one. This is the nature of survival and it is not wrong. It must be accepted and embraced.

Be careful not to over-idealize or over-romanticize life. People still got to eat, shit, make money, and fuck if society is to exist. Life is Love, but life is also brutal.

then one of them is not enlightened, as an enlightened being will likely don’t care to die, or rather die than kill another. love is not egoic if it is, it’s not enlightenment. 

but i guess an enlightened being will not die without a fight if attacked. there are levels of existential in survival and levels of fate.

we can’t expect the world to be enlightened just because we have reached some higher states.

Edited April 17, 2019 by now is forever

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, TheAvatarState said:

@Leo Gura Please don't call me naive. I actually agree with everything you wrote. Life IS brutal, and we only got here off the backs of countless other human and animal lives. Of course! If the natives did not eat animals, they would have died, and whether that's "right or wrong," here we are. Ta-Da! 

However, I feel like you may only have part of the story here. While there is a necessary duality of cooperation vs. competition, nature as a whole is predominantly based on cooperation. Our higher light and instincts, while an integration of the two, is something that ultimately transcends human nature. Your example of the two enlightened beings highlighted something that I believe adds another twist to this story. See, two lesser men would probably debate which life was worth more, and if they couldn't reach a consensus (which they wouldn't), it would inevitably turn to a fight to the death. However, we're talking about two enlightened beings. Would they debate which life was worth more? No, that's impossible. Would they fight each other to the death? No. I firmly believe that the only conclusion to be reached, from a nondual universal perspective, is for both to die in peace. I personally would rather go out that way than to live with that on my conscience. There is something here that transcends animal instincts, to appeal to karmic balance.

I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm just asking you to seriously consider this possibility. Would you sacrifice your body so that another may live? Would you kill another man so that you may live? You are both the victim and the perpetrator, so only if you answered Yes to both of these questions would your scenario play out... But would it? That's a stalemate! There would be no purpose to any of this nonsense, would there?

As an example, remember the brilliant ending sequence of the two ships in The Dark Knight? See, the Joker was convinced that either one of the boats would blow the other up. That's human nature, is it not? And yet, it took a brave prisoner to come forward to do the unthinkable. "I'll do what you should of did a long time ago," as he threw the detonation device out the window. That was the action of an enlightened being. 

Of course it could work that way in the most ideal circumstance. But so what? In real life that is not how 99.9999% of beings behave. I was more interested in showing you how life works.

In practice even the most enlightened people are still forced to navigate life. Even if they don't eat people, they behave selfishly in other less dramatic ways.

The point is, don't over-idealize enlightened people. You will be disappointed when they fail to live up to your utopian fantasies.

You must explain why so many enlightened people act so selfishly, and your answer cannot be: because they aren't really enlightened.

[now is forever]

well first rule is, stick to what you would do! enlightenment is not about the enlightened master it is about mastering enlightenment.

try to not disappoint yourself.

thanks for the thought experiment!

Edited April 17, 2019 by now is forever

[nistake]

7 hours ago, Druid420 said:

What do you think about murder being fundamentally bad? It's all I can think of.

The other day I was reading an article about the black widow spiders on Wikipedia. They have a behaviour called "sexual cannibalism".

If you look at this behaviour from the ego's perspective, it's the absolute worst thing ever. You meet a female, you mate and after or during the act, the female murders you and eats you just because she's hungry.

And yet, for them it's the natural order of things. Neither 'good' nor 'bad'. Just the way things are.

[now is forever]

4 minutes ago, nistake said:

The other day I was reading an article about the black widow spiders on Wikipedia. They have a behaviour called "sexual cannibalism".

If you look at this behaviour from the ego's perspective, it's the absolute worst thing ever. You meet a female, you mate and after or during the act, the female murders you and eats you just because she's hungry.

And yet, for them it's the natural order of things. Neither 'good' nor 'bad'. Just the way things are.

the mantis does the same...

are you afraid of the vagina dentata, hahaha. 

Edited April 17, 2019 by now is forever

[nistake]

3 minutes ago, now is forever said:

the mantis does the same...

Yup. They don't fuck around. Females straight up bite off the male's head in the beginning of the act.

[now is forever]

11 minutes ago, nistake said:

Yup. They don't fuck around. Females straight up bite off the male's head in the beginning of the act.

well in the experiment with the enlightened masters,of one female and one male, who would be more likely to eat the other?

i wasn’t asking who maybe tastes or cooks better...

Edited April 17, 2019 by now is forever

[How to be wise]

@Leo Gura Many sages have given their lives to other people. So your theory is wrong.

[Druid420]

10 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

Without a self thinking "murder is bad", what remains?

The premature ending of your experience.