Leo Gura

@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.

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.