Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 14
Pantheism is true. Panentheism is even more true.
The distinction between God and its creation is imaginary.
Humans love to create a bunch of confusion and noise around pantheism in order to avoid simply realizing that it is true.
There is this odd phenomenon of atheist spirituality, or secular spirituality. These are people who disbelieve in God, self-identify as atheist, rational, and scientific, yet they do spiritual practices like meditation and may even do stuff like mystical practices. These people try to be spiritual but while rejecting the notion of God and the supernatural. These people do not understand what spirituality really is, but they think they are quite advanced. Such people are usually academic types who think they've figured spirituality out through academic methods. Nope! Self-deception alert.
The lady who runs this channel is such an example. She is an atheist yet she also studies mystical traditions and talks about nondual concepts and mysticism. She practices Sufism. She knows the theory of various mystical traditions such as Buddhism, Zen, Daoism, Kabbalah, etc. She has done academic work in religion and spirituality. But ultimately she has no idea what mysticism or spirituality is. This is an interesting case-study in sophisticated self-deception. She wants spirituality, but without God. She wants mysticism, but without Truth. To her, mysticism is just human experiences and feelings. This is a great example of how to screw up spirituality by taking it too lightly, taking it as something academic, something human — by not taking metaphysics seriously. It is spirituality done for psychology benefits. Spirituality as cognitive science and psychology. This is Sam Harris-type of spirituality, and I want to make you aware of this strain of spiritual self-deception.
Her channel is called "No Nonsense Spirituality", but of course it is nonsense spirituality. She uses words like "enlightenment", "transcendence", "mystical", and "oneness", but she doesn't fathom what these things are. And the people who follow her channel have no idea she is misleading them because she sounds so sensible and inoffensive.
How do you correct someone like this?
Is it possible to be an atheist mystic? No
Is it possible to be an enlightened atheist? No
Is it possible spirituality has nothing to do with God? No
Is it possible mysticism is not about Truth but just experiences? No
Spirituality is only about one thing: Realizing you are God.
Everything else is derivative noise.
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This is one of the reasons why I am so against stuff like westernized Zen and Buddhism. It leads to this kind of atheist spirituality, which totally misses the point of Awakening. Western Buddhists believe they can have enlightenment and atheism. This is spiritual weak-sauce designed to suit Stage Orange rationalist sensibilities. You have to go much deeper than that.
Buddhism and nonduality is a very convenient way for atheists to avoid admitting they are wrong. But where is the fun in that?
The whole point of spirituality is to get completely mindfucked. :D
Note: The reason I tend to be a hardass about these topics is because I don't want you to miss God.
If you become conscious enough, your couch can start to look like this:
How is this possible? Well, under the materialist paradigm is it impossible, excused away as mental illness. But once you realize reality is only Mind/Consciousness then it becomes possible.
This is the difference between materialism and idealism. The difference is not merely theoretical. The difference has practical consequences for what things are. Under materialism, a couch is strictly just a couch. It can't be anything else. But under idealism a couch becomes whatever you imagine it to be because there is no such thing as "an objective couch".
"But Leo! That's just your imagination!"
Well, yeah... but what you're missing is that a plain old objective couch is also just your imagination.
If you take 10 grams of mushrooms, you will see your couch grow teeth — and even weirder things. Why does it work this way? Because everything is imagination.
This is what scientists are missing. They don't understand that objective reality isn't a thing, objective reality is imaginary. This is what I mean when I say that scientists have no creativity, no imagination. It takes serious imagination to see a toothy couch. If you don't have the imagination you won't see it. Scientists are literally not imaginative enough. But then they mistake their lack of imagination as the limited physical world.
"But Leo! You are just rationalizing your mental illness!"
No. I do not have any mental illness. My mind is rock-solid. I wish my mind was less solid. It would make spiritual work easier. Ironically, I suffer from not having mental illness. Unlike normies, I want my mind to be more fluid. Of course there are serious downsides if that goes too far, so I'm under no illusions about that.
If you were conscious enough, you could have an intelligent philosophical conversation with your couch. That's not a bug, that's a feature. That's what makes reality so freaking cool. It's a shame that people are too closedminded to appreciate it.
Don't you see? It took a lot of imagination just to write this post. Which is why it was written by me and not a scientist. A scientist does not have an advanced enough mind to write this post. A scientist does not have the creativity nor balls to write a post like this because his colleagues would cancel his career. Luckily, I avoided placing myself in such a compromising position, which is why I can talk shit about science. I could not say these things as a respectable member of the scientific community because I would be excommunicated. And then how would I gain any social influence to be listened to?
Key insight: Your Mind can operate outside the framework of science! Your Mind is not limited by science — unless you place those limits on yourself. Every limit of the Mind is imagined by the Mind. Science is an imaginary set of limits that scientists insist on saddling themselves with. But nothing about Mind requires you to join their conformist movement. Science is a game where a group of children lock themselves into prison cages and then all tacitly agree to scream at each other — "OMG! Don't go outside the cage or you'll lose your mind!" — if any one of them dares to explore beyond the cage.
What lies beyond the cage of science?
Toothy couches — and such.
A nice artistic depiction of God-Realization.
This is the aspect of Consciousness that Buddhism and nonduality is missing. They act as though this does not exist. That is because it's way more advanced than meditating your way into Emptiness. This level of consciousness is unimaginable to a meditator or self-inquirer.
What I teach is designed to get you not just to Emptiness but to this level of consciousness. This is what God's Mind feels like:
Note: Do not take this too literally. This depiction takes a lot of artistic license. This is not literally what you will see upon God-Realization, it just gives you a "sense" or "feel" for it. It also conveys how different God-Realization is from Buddhist Emptiness. God-Realization can look many different ways. There is way more variety to God-Realization than Emptiness, since Emptiness is just a simple primitive but God-Realization has complex content.
And people ask, "But why call it God?"
What the fuck else do you call that?
