Leo Gura

I use these terms interchangably.

That's exactly how you get enlightened masters who molest people, or are secretly greedy, or dogmatic, or can't run a biz, etc. There is a lot more to life than sitting in a cave. If all you plan to do is sit in a cave for the next 50 years, okay. But that is not what you will do. You will enter all sorts of complex interactions with people in a complex society. That's when shit will hit the fan.

"Time to upgrade to LSD." -- The Buddha

Rationalism, materialism, scientism, moralism, intellectual crusading, demonization of Islam, duality. Sam Harris is stuck playing the role of an intellectual. The lesser Jihad. All classic traps you should watch out for. Writing a book or talking about spirituality & meditation does not mean one is awakened or has a profound understanding of nonduality. If you're at stage Blue/Orange/Green, Sam Harris might be useful to you. Once you get beyond that, he will hold you back. There's nothing "wrong" with him. He is who he is.

@Bryan Lettner Sweet!

That's a concept

Oneness is a very tricky thing. Let's say you are not compassionate, does that mean you are less one? There is a danger of taking on "compassion" and "goodness" as truer than "hate" and "badness". But that just perpetuates the duality. The deepest levels of consciousness are beyond compassion, beyond human concerns, beyond being good. The distinction between love and hate must collapse in the end. The ultimate litmus test would be this: when you see great hate, are you still able to love? Does your compassion extend to the perpetrator as well as the victim? Or are you cherrypicking?

"valid" and "invalid" are also inventions of the human mind. The Truth is TOTAL. It includes Nazis, rape, murder, genocide, war, slavery, hate, racism, sexism, abuse, violence, theft, and a trillion other things. That's TRUTH. What I'm trying to do here is show you that you are cherrypicking the truth to suit your ego. Which is something you'll have to outgrow if you really want to reach liberation and peace. Truth and politics don't mix very well. Have you noticed? Have you wondered why that is?

Of course! Not just freedom of speech, but even self defense and the right to life. The truth is, you have no rights. All "rights" are just inventions of the human ego to make life easier for the ego in an otherwise brutal reality. The reason you value freedom of speech is because your ego wants to mouth off its agenda without being limited. Egos hate having their agendas limited in any way. It hinders the ego's survival ability. If we passed a law which said that I could rape your child, but you are forbidden to ever speak of it, not even in court -- that would be a huge problem for your ego.

"When it's not necessary" is a highly subjective call. The ego always finds it convenient to do unnecessary things. A person who does violence to another doesn't do it gratuitously. In his mind, he feels it is very necessary -- selfless even.

That's right, you can. Absolutely nothing is stopping you from doing that. Welcome to liberation

You understand -- right? -- that most of the evil done in the world is done by people fighting for their rights? Fighting for rights is ego 101. I know you don't, which is why I went out of my way to underscore that it is a survival issue. The ego is very sneaky. It loves to don the veil of devoting oneself to the "protection of others" when in fact you are devoting yourself to advancing your own egoic agenda. Devotion creates a self-righteous ego which then goes on to commit great atrocities. All great atrocities are done in the name of good, freedom, liberation, truth, rights, fairness, etc. What do you think terrorists and Nazi's are doing? They are trying to make the world a better place. "Make the world a better place" is ALWAYS relative to your ego! There is no such thing as an objectively good world. A good world for one group is a bad world for another group. Which is why conflict happens. Even if you think you can get all of mankind to work peacefully together, that is still mankind's collective ego. Who's to say that mankind is a good thing, and not a cancer in this universe? You? Mankind? Ha! Do you see the conflict of interest problem? This is very important to understand. Otherwise you will still be under the ego's influence. Consider: the only reason you care about mankind is because you identify with being mankind. That's your ego. If you were an ant, you wouldn't care about mankind at all. Nor would you care about slavery, human rights, or anything else of that sort. Your self-identification extends far beyond your physical body. You identify with all sorts of abstract self-images, like the image of "being a decent human being who fights for the rights of the weak and the poor against the oppression of the strong and greedy". That's YOUR self-image! It turns you on. You get off on it. Playing this role is an addiction.

Well... if you think about what a loop is very abstractly, it's a singular object which links back with itself via some backward, as yet unseen connection. So two ends which previously seemed separate are ultimately recognized to be one and the same. Try slowly drawing a circle and see what happens. Duality goes full-circle into nonduality The beginning and end are one.

It will be much harder to find examples of Yellow than Blue, Orange, Green. Especially short stereotypical snippets. Yellow doesn't lend itself to easy ridicule and stereotyping. That's sorta the point.

@Alexandar Edwards Your question is coming from a certain level of consciousness: duality. Your question is really about survival, not being or Truth. Survival demands constant manipulation. That is life. Improving society is a function of survival. Think of politics as nothing more than hunting squirrels in the forest to make sure you don't starve to death. That's what government is fundamentally about. There's nothing wrong with improving society, just like there's nothing wrong with hunting squirrels to survive, but there is a meta-issue: your preoccupation with survival is keeping you from realizing that the world is an illusion. What if one day you wake up and realize that all of this work you've been doing to improve society was happening inside a dream state? Such that slavery, racism, evil, nuclear weapons, science, and even your mother and father do not exist because they were just a dream? How silly would you feel then to have worried so much about all that stuff? These are awakened people you are talking about it. To them, reality is just a dream. Nothing is serious. Whatever actions they take to "improve society" is just for shits and giggles. They are shooting at squirrels in the forest just for fun. It's a form of self-amusement. They are detached from it. They would not really care if the entire planet was nuked tomorrow. They would be just as happy. It would not be a problem for them in the same way that seeing the Earth get nuked on TV isn't a problem for you -- because you are conscious it isn't real to begin with. All human suffering is unreal. This kind of level of consciousness is difficult to fathom for someone who has not awoken from the dream. It is unimaginable that this could be possible. The reason an enlightened sage is good at helping people is because he is already dead inside. There is nothing for him to fear or lose. The world does not need improving, yet there is nothing else to really do here but help improve the world. That is the paradox. But you won't understand this at stage Green. You need some enlightenment experiences to understand it. P.S. Morality is a function of survival. Not Truth. The ultimate truth is, there are no problems whatsoever and evil doesn't exist. Yes... detachment is a very radical and counter-intuitive thing. P.P.S. Advanced sages don't usually come out and say this so bluntly because they would be crucified by ignorant people for saying such things.

Added this one to the blog because it's really good: https://www.actualized.org/insights/strange-loop-meme

Duality be damned!

Best Sadhguru quote ever

@Revolutionary Think That's not a strange loop, that's karma

Because to take Trump seriously is to go too far. The proper response to Trump is ridicule. You don't engage someone like that in serious discussion because he is not an honest actor. He's a con-artist and he doesn't care about truth. So there can be no serious philosophical discussion with him or his ilk. This is not really judgment. Yes, it's my subjective evaluation. Trump is who he is and he cannot be otherwise. In fact, he is a facet of myself, so for me to demonize him would be just me demonizing God. Which is silly to do. But that doesn't mean I have go along with Trump's machinations. Trump is just very unconscious, and there millions of unconscious people all over the world. I can refuse to take part in their unconsciousness without making it a personal thing. For me to concede ground to unconsciousness when I know better would just be foolish. Whether you agree with me or not is not my problem. You are free to disagree with me and love Trump. Ultimately you have to learn to think for yourself. I am just presenting my ideas here. There is always a point at which you have to draw a line. For example, if someone comes to you and says, 1+1=5, you laugh him off. If you took every such case seriously, you would be very open to manipulation. People could just overwhelm you with false information to push their egoic agendas through. So there needs to be a firewall. The key is tuning your firewall properly so it doesn't reject legitimate points of view. It's always possible to miscalibrate one's firewall, but in the case of Trump, I'm not too worried about that being a problem. He's just not presidential material. This should be obvious to any unbiased observer. If you disagree, then we'll just have to agree to disagree and we'll see who wins at the ballet box in 2020.

No, Infinity is not a concept, because concepts are finite. I mean actual Infinity. Which cannot be spoken because you are it. Calculus speaks of transfinite infinities, which are smaller infinities than the Absolute. I am speaking of what Georg Cantor called Absolute Infinity. See my 2-part series: Understanding Absolute Infinity Absolute Infinity is identical to what you call "life", "perception", or "physical reality" -- but you are not conscious of its true nature as yet.