Leo Gura

Wow! Lots of opinions on this issue. I've read them all and will take them all into consideration when making my decision. As of now I'm leaning towards pulling the trigger and killing the entire reputation and Thumbs Up system. We can give it a test run for a week, and if it really sucks, we should be able to go back to the old system ats any time without losing data. Changing 8000+ usernames is not an option. Usernames must remain as they are. And it's important to be able to distinguish usernames for purposes of weeding out spammers and trolls. It's too hard to police randomly generated usernames. Some of your other suggestions are also not technically feasible. While reality may be infinite, this forum software is anything but. Daily posting limits are doable. We could set of limit of like 5-10 posts per day, to keep people from mentally-masturbating too much. It's a rather radical limitation. Not so sure about this one. Part of the problem would be that there won't be any clear indicator of how many posts you have left per day, and most newbies wouldn't even know there was a limit. It's very rare that forums has such strict posting limits, so it would be counter-intuitive and confuse most people. They would bitch and moan about not having enough posts. And ironically, that would only eat up more of their posts. The "Featured" status is not dependent on reputation or likes, that is a tag which Mods must manually apply. So that isn't going away. 5-star ratings at the top of each thread are also an option.

Changing usernames has been disabled for over a year. Username changes are definitely not allowed. (Way abused feature). Of course you would say that, you're merely a Babbling Baboon

@Max_V The member's post count stat (basically the only one which would be left), would reflect how long the member has been active on the forum pretty accurately. It's hard to fake that number.

@NJM50 Yes, I think that's possible, but the chief sin is the social proof which accrues via the Thumbs Up on individual posts. The idea is: It might be refreshing to read a thread with just pure text, no likes of any kind distracting you. No thought of checking who liked what. No thought about deciding which posts to like. You'd just read the text and judge for yourself, rather than relying on social proof, which is rather lazy.

Derrida is best plugged

@Psyche_92 That is the challenge of life purpose work. Just stay mindful of it and carry on as best as you can. Pace yourself, but don't go too slow. Keep reminding yourself that trusting in your highest self will be worth it.

We already discussed this topic last week. Watch your gossip and projecting. The fact is you do not know any other person's mind. So focus on your own psychopathologies. Any nondual school can be easily shown as a cult to a casual observer by cherrypicking things. Nonduality sounds insane to any ordinary person. If you spliced together snippets from all my 300 videos and showed it to a psychiatrist, he would call me an insane dangerous narcissistic psychopath and recommend immediate clinical intervention. And of course, if Ben turns out to be a Zen Devil, that shouldn't surprise anyone either. Plenty of them around. By now you should be aware of the infinite trickery of the mind. No one is immune. NO ONE!

@Sletty Good! You're asking the right questions. Very, very simply: "physical reality" has precisely the same ontological status as last night's dream. If you want to claim that last night's dream was "real" and "objective", go ahead. But my guess is, that's far from what you're trying to do here. You're trying to cling to duality. Objective/subjective is a duality which must collapse. Science is utterly inadequate to lead you to Truth. But it's good for manipulating the dream. All of existence is a farce. That's the essence of enlightenment. Yes, you need to come to terms with that. And you ain't gonna like it at first. Whatever you've experienced with Vipassana practice so far, is like 0.0000001% of the radicalness of Absolute Infinity. It will destroy the floor beneath your feet. Life as you know it will cease. You will be dead from that point on. Maybe try a strong psychedelic to blast all your resistances away. You are too stuck in your own logic and it doesn't sound like you will make it out without serious help. BTW, if you're doing Vipassana properly, you should be clearly seeing that "brain" is just a concept. What is this nonsense abstraction called "brain"? It doesn't hold water. There is no such thing in your direct experience. It's just a dogma. Look very closely.

@Joseph Maynor You've also been influence by McDonalds Doesn't say much.

@Deep Limiting belief. I've personally met plenty of enlightened people who live a normal Western lifestyle, have sex, have kids, go to work, etc. You don't need to live in a cave unless you want to. P.S. If enlightenment ends up creating less bankers, good riddance! That's sorta the point. "Conscious banker" is an oxymoron. Hopefully that banker would quit long before enlightenment.

@Jonson As close to raw organic whole foods as possible. Try as much as possible to avoid: Proceeded foods Packaged foods Sugar/Syrup Processed meats Products containing wheat Non-organic fruits/veggies Soda Junk food Candy Fried food Blackened food Transfats Artificial butters/oils Artificial colorings and chemicals Products containing dairy: milk, cheese, butter, etc.

@Joseph Maynor If you consider us Gurus, you're in trouble.

@Driven62 If I were you, I wouldn't wait for nonduality to fix that. I would self-reflect or use a therapist/coach type person to help me investigate the root source of the fear. When did I develop it? Where did it come from? Why is it there? This is a shadow work -type of issue. And then, I would try to expose myself to more ridicule in real life (trying to stay mindful while it is happening). Pickup can be great for that if you are a dude. Try walking up to a hot girl with your fly unzipped and tell her you want to make babies with her.

Doesn't surprise me. Sanity is insanity. The circle is complete

This issue can only be resolved with direct personal investigation. Our discussions here will forever be inadequate. Nothing I say should be taken as Gospel. I am merely offering hints and suggestions. And sure, they might be wrong. You won't know until you investigate for yourself.

Lol Oh the delicious, delicious irony. Relativity at its finest. How sweet Maya is

I never said Nagarjuna's philosophy is dualistic. You are misinterpreting Buddhism to fit what you want to be true. Indeed, 2000 years of Buddhist masters know more than you. The key is knowing how to understand what they are pointing to. When they say Mu, they mean utter nothingness, nothingness is beyond awareness, beyond consciousness, beyond all words, beyond all forms, beyond anything. Emptiness so empty to call it empty is too much. I'm not saying anything original here. This is as orthodox and pure Buddhism as it gets.

Happy illusory 2018!

@Max_V I wouldn't want to recommend them for youngsters.

@AleksM Sorry for hijacking your thread.

@Maxx I'm not interpreting, I was speaking from my direct experiences. Reality is so empty, there isn't even consciousness. That is true Sunyata, true Mu. Utter nothingness. Reality doesn't need consciousness. It just is. Directly! It's a mindfuck for sure. I sympathize with anyone trying to understand all this conceptually. It is just utterly, utterly radical. The mind cannot believe it. There can be no distinction between inherent vs not-inherent. That is a duality. You have to consider the possibility that your mind is lying to you more than I am.

That is an empirical question. But from what I've experienced, I see no reason why that cannot happen. Because consciousness doesn't actually exist. So no consciousness needs to be created. There is just BEING, which isn't just an abstract philosophical platitude. It resolves the mind-body problem, which is the chief obstacle to people accepting the possibility of conscious machines. The problem is, under the materialist paradigm, people think that humans "have consciousness". This is technically false. Humans don't have consciousness. Everything is just BEING. And a computer can BE just as easily as a human. So the task for computer scientists isn't to spawn awareness or consciousness, it's to create a digital mind which can fool itself into thinking it exists when it really doesn't. Of course I am just theorizing here, but theorizing based on my direct experiences of the Absolute. If I had to bet, I would bet that computers can be made as self-aware or more self-aware than humans, and access levels of consciousness which humans cannot even dream of. But I could be wrong.

Tell that to these folks, they got arrested: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/26/russian-cannibal-couple-may-have-drugged-killed-and-eaten-as-many-as-30-people-police-say/?utm_term=.4a879d1b0cc3

Of course dog shit and chocolate are ultimately made of the exact same thing: nothingness or consciousness. Yes, dog shit/chocolate is a duality. What you choose to eat is up to you. Personally, I prefer chocolate, but then again, that's just a matter of taste. Humans like chocolate, flies like dog shit. Maybe flies are on to something. You gotta keep an open mind about such things

Natural/artificial is a contrived duality. Alive/not-alive is also a contrived duality. Hardware/software is also a contrived duality. The entire universe is made of one substance, and it is capable of life and consciousness and anything else, given the proper structure and organization. Whether humans can actually engineer the right structure and organization is another matter. That's an empirical question. My guess would be, they probably will figure it out at some point, but not in our lifetimes. It will not happen at least until all of science acknowledges that materialism is false, and nonduality is true. Only then will neuroscience and AI really blossom.