Leo Gura

The problem is that voters don't vote based on policy, they vote based on their own Spiral stage and cultural issues. The right wing is great at exploiting those cultural issues which trigger a fear for the higher Spiral stages and make people vote for lower stages. That is Fox News' entire playbook.

Rationalists love to shit on Deepak, but ultimately he is right, regardless of the technical details of the arguments. So the joke is on Sam.

@MountainCactus What you are not acknowledging is that the techniques in the books work for many people. You are speaking as though the books are some BS which don't work for anyone. The spiritual path is full of various problems. This is par for the course. Dealing with them is part of the path.

No, not necessarily. God is in charge and some diseases are part of its larger plan. Just because the ego wants a disease cured doesn't mean it will happen. Awakening requires surrender to the higher will of the universe. This higher will might require you to die in a car crash, or whatever.

It is the Kriya Yoganada taught and which works for many people. You are mudding the waters. There are hundreds of different yogic systems. So to claim one true one is silly. Pick a system and go with it, rather than debating about which is the true one. There is no true one. They are all imaginary inventions of the mind, with various pros and cons. You can invent your own yoga if you want, just as all yogas have been invented by someone before you.

@skywords Look dude, I got better things to do that play games with you. Drop it and live your life. I will live mine.

@skywords You're not telling me anything new. You're just speaking from the perspective of the Absolute while I was speaking from the relative. The relative perspective is important functionally, from the POV of survival. A society cannot be built if you regard outcomes like Stalin as of equal value as that of the Buddha. Even though of course in the absolute sense they are of equal value. I have discussed all of this before. You're conflating relative and absolute domains. There is no need to convince me of your paradigm. All paradigms and formulations of the Absolute are partial and relative. If you like your paradigm, fine. But convincing me of it a waste of time.

Nope, not at all. Those are relative labels. You have to understand the relative framework in which I use those terms. From the Absolute perspective there is no evil.

But young people hardly vote, so they matter less. The most famous people are some of the dumbest members of our species. Of course there a few exceptions. But the most wise are almost never popular or even known about. The wisest person in the world will never be as popular as Trump or Kim Kardashian. Because popularity requires appealing to a herd of idiots. It's much easier to impress 10 million idiots than 10 million serious intellectuals.

I don't know about that. Might just be coincidence. It's even more powerful if you inject it stright in your veins. So I wouldn't place too much importance in that.

Yes, of course. Even Trump and Stalin are very intelligent things. Their ego just gets in the way of access to God's infinite intelligence. But never totally. Even the most evil humans still use God's intelligence to do their evil. In fact, evil is highly intelligent. But nowhere near as intelligent as Goodness and Love.

That can be tricky. Depends on what exactly you mean. Be careful not to ground the ego or its sense of reality. Awakening is like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute only to realize that there is no ground. Then your life is a constant free fall for eternity. The ego-mind will do everything possible to stay grounded in the false ground of "reality". To seriously awaken this ground must be completely unraveled. You must realize that reality has no ground. Of course that ultimately will leave you right in the NOW. But first the entire ego-mind and sense of reality must collapse. Your entire sense of what reality is must be unraveled and deconstructed.

Way too much confusion in this thread. Just do the practices. They are so simple. It's like you're being asked to read a book on how to tie your shoelaces and then spend 90% of your time debating and doubting the simple instructions. Pull prana up the spine, then down. Do this over and over again. The end. The rest is minutia.

No need to troll him. He has a right to voice his critiques.

Of course. You're literally losing your mind. That leads to awakening. No it's not. You don't understand what reality is. Stop acting like you do. Awakening is not a belief.

It's just intelligence. Intelligence must be contextual, otherwise it's not very intelligent. Intelligence is a universal property of consciousness which can range from 0 to infinity and everything in between. Infinite Intelligence is the universe's total and complete self-understanding. Which is a real thing.

This one's pretty toxic Blue, so don't get the idea that all Blue must be this negative. But still a good example of Blue gone wrong:

You imagine it is. Imagination is not belief. But belief is one kind of imagination.

There isn't a safe way. Safety is a concern of the ego-mind. You must surrender to the possibility of the worst happening. Of course don't do anything foolish like jump of a bridge or burn down your boss's office.

No. "Real" is something imagined.

Your entire life and reality is imaginary and how you understand any part of life is itself an act of imagination which uses symbols and metaphors and other such functions of consciousness. So when such things happen during trips what you should notice is that these are just various ways that consciousness is imagining and communicating with itself. For example, you could picture that you have a disease by imagining that there is a problem with your DNA. Or you could picture that you have a disease because there is an evil spirit lurking in your body. Neither one is more "real" than the other because everything is imaginary. It doesn't really matter whether you imagine DNA or evil spirits. It's all imaginary! If you say, "But Leo, DNA is scientific and not as imaginary as evil spirits." You're wrong. Science is as imaginary as evil spirits. The only difference is that you imagine science is "real" and you imagine that evil spirits are somehow unreal. So there's multiple layers of imagination at work which create the illusion of reality. What you need to realize is that all ways of holding reality are totally relative. There is no one true right way to hold reality. All communication is relative. How you communicate with yourself depends on which symbolic paradigm you want to use: scientific, religious, mathematical, etc. It doesn't really matter what the paradigm is as long as it's internally consistent.

@Annoynymous Meh... it's hard to say. Don't necessarily draw a connection between the two. The Dems had historic wins in 2018. A Blue Wave did happen. So it could happen again. Trump is a buffoon of epic proportions, so this is a unique situtation in the US which should be looked at as a special case. No past performance will be indicative of what happens in 2020. We're in a whole new ballpark now. Things are very fluid. I think even Biden can beat Trump. Of course Biden would be a pretty depressing result. But what can you do? The country can only grow as fast as its citizens are wise. Progress is a long-term game. Bernie has already shifted the whole Dem policy platform to the left even if he loses. So overall, even with Trump in power, we are still making progress.

Not so fast. We are a long way from Yellow as a society.

This is to be expected. Older generations always have less progressive values. Progress is always made by the older generation dying off, not evolving. It's easier for most people to die off than evolve up two Spiral stages. Newer generations are always more progressive. Because it's easier to simply be born later than to grow out of your old ways. Which is why people under 35 overwhemlingly support Bernie while Biden's supporters are mostly over 50.

We always have to remind ourselves, Bernie is a long-shot candidate. It assumes great wisdom on the part of the citizenry to elect Bernie. This wisdom is often lacking. Most of the citizenry is not that wise or visionary. They often would rather vote for the status quo rather than take a risk on a bold vision. It's not merely corporate Dems which hold Bernie back with their smears. It's that many Dems are simply not conscious enough to understand Bernie's vision. Most voters are NOT progressives. So electing a true progressive is always a difficult long-shot. It's likely that Bernie will not win the Dem nomination. But even so, it's worth a shot.