Leo Gura

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.

What is relationship? Pull up the entire English language

A) The context in which Ouspensky is speaking there is obviously a relative one. He is not trying to describe the Absolute there. B) I doubt Ouspenky truly understood full nonduality.

That's not a materialist notion, that's a mystical notion. If everything is consciousness (and it is), there is no reason why a robot cannot be self-aware.

Well, you have to contemplate the very nature of life to understand this idea of "world peace" and "no more evil". Consider that to be alive one must destroy and kill. At the most fundamental level, life needs to take energy from other life in order to live because it is one, and so cannot get energy elsewhere. Even if you somehow miraculously made every human a sage, all those sages would still need to kill to live. Even if they all became vegans, human cities still kill millions of animals just with their footprint alone. So this "world peace" wouldn't really be world peace, it would be peace for 1 species out of millions of other species. The only way you could call it "peace" is by saying "no other being's suffering matters but humans". Which wouldn't be a very sage-like position. The true sage understands that suffering, inequality, death, and "evil" are absolutely necessary, making his peace with that fact, rather than trying to turn the world into a hippie Care Bear kingdom, where nobody's farts stink. Reality is brutal and impersonal. It will find ways to fuck your peace. What happens when robots rise up and exterminate mankind the same way mankind exterminates ants? Will you be at peace with that? It sure will be peaceful when all the humans are dead and AIs of much higher consciousness are running the show. But my guess is, humans won't think of that as "world peace", they will think if it as the greatest evil.

@Nexeternity Man, you are on a 5-MeO roll.

@TJ Reeves You are right of course in that I have a lot of embodiment left to do, and embodiment is the hardest part. I don't really even consider myself at Turquoise. My strength is cerebral more than physical or energetic. Which doesn't mean I'm opposed to those things, it's not just my strength, and what you see on Actualized.org is me focusing on my strength. You have to consider that different people have different inclinations, personality types, body types, energy levels, and strengths. And of course, each strength is also a weakness. There are trade-offs and pros and cons to every specialization and strength. Not everyone is meant to climb Mt Everest shirtless. And in fact, most people are constitutionally incapable of that. For example, I sunburn very easily and I'm very sensitive to cold. My Youtube videos might give the impression that I am at the end of my growth process, when really I'm just getting started. But just because someone excels in physical strength or prowess doesn't equate with consciousness. Bruce Lee got nothing on Ramana Maharshi, for example. Ramana was the pinnacle of embodiment. He just doesn't fit the jock stereotype of a dude benching 500 lbs while beating his monkey-chest and hi-fiving his bros at the beach, a la Top Gun. I have heard stories, for example, from reputable sources, that Bruce Lee was rather a fake, and would lie about losing matches and steal techniques. Not that it really matters. But you do have to be careful about judging people based on their public personas, which tend to be unrepresentative of what's really going on with them behind the scenes. Of course master-level embodiment is way more inspiring than a talking head. Yes, if I showed videos of myself levitating or laying on a bed of nails, people would get all jazzed up.

It'll mindfuck you pretty good. And that alone can be very useful.

@Ether Quit and be homeless?

The problem with the old school paths is that you can meditate for 30 years and still get nowhere. Every path has its traps. The trap is not in the path so much as in the ego walking it. Wherever you go, there you are.

@Uncover Look into Pickup. Take a bootcamp. It will shatter your reality as far as what's possible with girls. Just don't become a dogmatic and narcisistic PUA-bro.

Some food for thought: Even if everyone on the planet was enlightened, there would still not be peace on Earth. The nature of survival is nasty, brutal, and unfair. Not everyone in the world can live in a nice cushy suburb. Just by the very fact that your body exists, it is denying existence to other things/beings. Life is a dirty business.

That is where you'd be wrong. If enlightenment was as simple as people like to think it is, there wouldn't be so many spiritual books, teachers, teachings, and debates. The traps in this work are legion. The facets of enlightenment are many. The depth of this rabbit hole is beyond all human comprehension. And there is way more to enlightenment than enlightenment alone. If you neglect to do the research, I would bet good money you will never make it to enlightenment at all, and even if you have a glimpse or two, you will turn into a Zen devil, as so many people here are doing. There's nothing like one or two glimpses of the Absolute to bring out the devil in you. There is a very good reason why the world's oldest spiritual traditions are deep, intricate, and enormously nuanced. Because that reflects the nature of the spiritual terrain. But you will not appreciate any of that without lots of careful and openminded research. Enlightenment is simple. Enlightenment is complex. Enlightenment is all those things, and none of those things. When faced with the unknown, the wise person does research rather than making simplistic assumptions.

The really scary part is, even on mushrooms, he still hasn't experienced Absolute Infinity, the fullest nature of God -- I would bet. That is like a whole nother ballpark beyond what mushrooms usually show. Someone please give that man some 5-MeO so he discovers what Zen really is

It will be online for a long time, so don't worry about it.

@Sheeba 5 years in college is a long ass time, and chances are you come out of it still not knowing what you want your career to be. Figure out your life purpose ASAP so you don't piss it away. I would not invest 5 years of the prime of my life into something that wasn't what I was really passionate about and which didn't advance my career. You need to figure out how you're are going to meld your top passions with putting food on the table. That is your core challenge at your age. If you don't figure it out now, chances are, you never will. It will be MUCH harder after you are in the workforce. You will not have the free time to explore options, develop the right skills, or build a portfolio of work -- you will be working like a mule 8 hours per day.

I find that philosophy is a field best studied on one's own. Academic philosophy is really poor and not based on a search for Truth, but largely mental-masturbation and history. Why not start your career/biz and study philosophy as a hobby on your own? That is really the best of both worlds in my opinion. Spending too much time in college is not good.

https://www.actualized.org/start

Makes you wonder then, what makes him a Zen master if he isn't conscious of that already?

This is not a thing you can resolve with your mind -- not even close. Something is nothing, and nothing is everything. But this cannot make any sense to you while in your present state of dualistic consciousness. You have to collapse the distinction between something/nothing. Who said there is a difference between something and nothing? Start questioning that assumption.

@Cepzeu As they say in Zen, nothing is hidden. Perception is reality. If you are not seeing it, it doesn't exist, so to speak. But even more of a mindfuck is to realize that even that which you are seeing, also doesn't exist! Existence and non-existence are a conceptual duality. But since you're new to this, just start off with becoming aware of perceptions coming in and out existence (your awareness) every second. Mindfulness/meditation is all about starting to take your perceptions literally, and not figuratively like most people do. Which means, if you don't see the chair, stop assuming it exists. And if you want to take it one step deeper, when you look at a chair, notice it doesn't actually exist! The chair is made of nothing, like a hologram or an object in a video game. It's a virtual chair, so to speak. A hallucination. But that's not easy to see without crazy focused awareness skills.

"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein @TJ Reeves So what role did 5-MeO play in all this? How significant was it compared to all the other stuff you did?

@Max_V Psychedelics are the best tool I know for that. They will make you face the fear head on and it will be laser-effective. After you die a dozen times on psychedelics, you stop worrying about death and start looking forward to it.

@Source_Mystic I have testimonials Although on a more serious note, I wasn't speaking of my LP course (those were your words), I was speaking of many other things outside the domain of nonduality, of which the course is just one thing. Newbies get so stuck on seeking nonduality that they fall into the trap of neglecting all the other important aspects of life. That is what I was mocking.

Zen Devilry at its finest.