RendHeaven

I know exactly what you mean

Sounds like something a slave owner would say. Self-serving distinction. The position I have spelled out is full of nuance. I've spelled out how slavery is a meta-principle on a spectrum with degrees. All instances of what I call "slavery" have the commonality of restricting sovereignty and leeching personal gain, while differing in intensity and harm. This gives a fuller picture of our inter/intra-species relationships. Whereas the unnuanced position would be to label slavery as an exclusively bad thing and to pretend that we have nothing to do with it and that our practices must be justified and unquestionable. This is the stance of you and Dan. You draw a hard line in your mind which separates the notion of slavery from your daily unconscious practices, and you're prone to arguing fiercely that this line cannot be crossed and that anyone who dares to cross this line, like me or Leo, must be automatically wrong and deluded. I actually don't have a position to defend here. I don't care if I turn out to be a slave owner or not. I'm not mad either way. My sensemaking is unclouded. I'll say it again, but look: the bottom line is - golden handcuffs are still handcuffs they call it pet OWNERSHIP for a reason. It's baked into the language we use. "I own a dog" "I own a cat" Try to contemplate the ramifications of that without bias. The pet owner's benevolent nature is a deflection. Symbiosis is a deflection. Slavery is fundamentally about OWNING OTHER BEINGS. Contemplate ownership.

Domesticated animals are genetically bred to prefer their slave conditions. This issue of slavery goes far deeper than your individual actions, it's a collective human web. Acknowledging your "slaving ways" does not make you a nefarious progenitor of evil. It's more like being a willing participant in collective selfishness maximization. Or, you are close minded. How can we tell the difference? Really contemplate that. "I'm obviously right and you're obviously wrong" is begging the question. It looks like you're not really engaging with the step by step breakdowns I've written for you on the meta-abstract mechanism of "slavery" Your disagreement boils down to "I don't like how that word makes me feel so everything you say must be BS" Not mutually exclusive with psychedelic contemplation lol : ) Please spell out any "false assumptions" you spot.

I can't bring myself to demonize them because I kinda get it. They're just as ugly as me. Except I got lucky with my environment. It hurts twice as bad, empathizing with victim and victimizer simultaneously. Every time I contemplate our human condition I'm picking up shattered fragments of my heart

There it is

"slavery" is a specific subset of "restricting freedom" "restricting freedom" becomes "slavery" when the person doing the restriction receives PERSONAL GAIN from the dynamic. The personal gain component is very important. not all slavery is the same. There is extreme slavery which is purely exploitative and brutal. This is what most people think of when they hear "slavery." This is the kind of slavery that makes your gut curl up and your blood boil. This is the kind of slavery that you would never associate yourself with. a more softcore variant of slavery entail subtle value extraction and subtle freedom restriction. At a surface glance it will not look like slavery at all. It may even look charitable or kind. Try to see "slavery" as an abstract principle. There are degrees of slavery in almost all relationships due to survival demands. "but it feels wrong to conflate ACTUAL brutal evil slavery with softcore exploitation!" Well, notice how your mind wants to draw a mental barrier between "evil" slavery and everything else. And then you want to personally identify with the good guys and "other" the bad guys. Such thinking will not lead to holistic understanding of the human condition or of Consciousness. There is a really profound and special "unity of fragmentation" that happens in your heart when you finally embrace that YOU are a slave owner and a slave at the same time. Both literally and abstractly.

It's tricky. parents placing boundaries on kids is a sort of half-slavery in the sense that yes, the sovereignty of the child is being restricted - however this is primarily done for the child's own benefit, and most importantly those boundaries are temporary until the child is able to find the strength to make its own decisions. But it would behoove parents to be very self-honest, and admit that everything they do for their child, no matter how selfless, is still "personal gain" in the sense that the survival of your child is the survival of your self. So in a twisted way, you can't escape your own selfishness.

That's awesome Mistreatment has nothing to do with the definition of slavery. Your arguments are frighteningly similar to those "well-intended" white plantation owners who took pride in how compassionately they treated their black slaves. "But we never beat them! and they get so many perks for being on my plantation!" Yeah, well, the bottom line is you're still dictating the life of another sentient being. Golden handcuffs are still handcuffs. This is a self-serving strawman of slavery. Slavery is fundamentally about limiting the sovereignty of another being for personal gain. Even the most benevolent pet owner, by definition, is limiting the sovereignty of another being for personal gain. Personal gain in this case is a very subtle thing. You're not exploiting animals in any obvious ways. But something as simple as "they bring happiness to my life" is an emotional leeching mechanism, a transaction of sorts. The animal is encaged on your premises without the ability to dictate its own life. In turn you feel happy. And you get to project that the animal is also happy. Which gives you double, triple the happiness because now you have a story about what a good person you are (which is an indirect benefit you get from restricting their sovereignty). None of this makes you evil or bad. This is just a technical account of what pet ownership actually entails. It is what it is. No, the alternative is to be self-honest and to love/accept yourself for partaking in slavery, instead of flailing in denial. Yes, but at least they would be self-determined and free. Your argument amounts to: Enslaving them helps them! And to that - yes. I agree! Just call it what it is. But don't get emotionally wrapped up in it. Slavery does not automatically = bad. That would be social programming. Remember how Leo says that everything is Love? This discussion might show a crack of light into how even slavery could be Love.

You're very emotionally charged about this, and it's clear that you're not even capable of temporarily occupying the counter-position to play devil's advocate against yourself. My family has two sweet dogs, and I'm happily aware that this is slavery. No emotional turmoil for me, because the truth is the truth. Maybe rewatch Leo's most recent video. Defensiveness is a red flag of low perspective.

We can't rule out the possibility that environmental toxicity in the mother might transfer to the fetus It's a messy world out there...

You think this was an accident?

Poignant.

No, oligarchy brings in Trump. It's already an oligarchy. We do not have a democracy right now. Elon literally bought Trump. This is not the authentic will of the people - this is the will of the people twisted and contorted and manipulated by those in power. People are dancing on strings.

If you somehow scale your corruption tolerance to Infinity, you seamlessly become literal God dreaming this precise reality!

I bet you will like Claude 3.5 sonnet. You can try for free at claude.ai and then start a separate conversation on poe.com if you run out of free credits

ChatGPT is way more clear and concise than schizo lol Great list. Would like to see a steelman of seed oil denier/a critique of the seed oil defender to avoid begging the question. It's odd to me that we get pro vegan critique, anti vegan critique, but only anti seed oil critique (without pro seed oil critique).

So in short: Authentic realizations and answers are born of Acceptance/Love, therefore lead to genuine understanding. Forced/thrust-upon answers are necessarily anti-acceptance (otherwise there would be no need to force them), therefore anti-understanding. ... Is this distinction something you ideologically absorbed from a teaching like Actualized.org? Or did you Realize this insight for yourself during contemplation? How do you know the difference? After all, the moment Leo hands you an insight such as "Acceptance of what is = Love," it's very tempting to just adopt this theory because it just sounds so intuitively correct. But a lot of false concepts sound and feel intuitively correct. For example, to this day we treat "space" as a static empty void, a sort of linear immovable independent container in which objects reside. But Einstein’s general relativity showed over 100 years ago that space itself is a dynamic, warping "fabric" which responds to mass and energy (i.e. it is interdependent, nonlinear, flexible, relative - the exact opposite of our intuitions!) It took a herculean feat of human cognition to break free of and challenge Newtonian dogma (Einstein of course had brilliant mentors that were already paving the path). Essentially all I'm saying is that no matter how intuitively true something sounds or feels, you still cannot take it on faith. It has to be tested somehow. So I'm curious in what ways you have tested this notion of Acceptance and Love leading to understanding, because it does smell an awful lot like regurgitated Leo rhetoric. But that's not a bad thing per se, because maybe it's still true! But how would we know?

This is great. There is something inherently false about rigidity. The most elegant explanation I can offer is as follows: At higher consciousness you realize You Are Infinity (regardless of higher or lower consciousness). You are All. All is Infinity. You are Consciousness. Consciousness = Infinity. Truth is what is. Truth = Infinity. So for an ideology to explicitly deny exploration or to say that contrarian thinking is "off limits" is anti-Infinity, therefore anti-Truth. But it's not so simple. Because for someone who hasn't recognized Infinity yet, they are not able to leverage this kind of slam-dunk reasoning. The trick is how do we falsify rigidity without invoking the "get-out-of-jail-free-card of Infinity?" There is a delicious epistemic mechanism here where from a position of ignorance, you can only falsify rigidity by daring to go beyond it, forging into the unknown, and looking back at the prison from which you emerged. But a rigid worldview is DESIGNED to prevent this opportunity for falsification! It is an enslavement mechanism which pretends to be looking out for its captives: "You shouldn't think beyond the confines of this box, because all the wrong stuff is out there! We already have all the truth here!" But how can you know that without going outside the box? Haha but it wouldn't occur to you to contemplate since all you've ever known is stuff within the box telling you to stay there without exploring. Delicious. Bias is so key. I'm curious to hear how you determine whether or not you are being biased. How do you know when you are being biased vs unbiased?

I agree. How are realized answers qualitatively different from thrust-upon answers? Do you think you can spell out the difference for yourself? For example, Realized answers: self-derived felt understanding etc. etc. etc. VS thrust-upon answers: absorbed from others thought-based understanding etc. etc. etc. There should be hundreds of subtle distinctions here... If you find the energy to think this through, compare the final list and ask yourself why is beating a child mechanically incompatible with the "realized" list? Why can't I beat you into self-derivation? Why can't I beat you into felt understanding? This seems intuitively obvious but try to spell out why. Now wonder, what can I do for you to encourage self-derivation? What can I do for you to encourage felt understanding? Maybe make a new list: Discouraging self-derivation: Beating/forcing you Memorization Judging you against a standard etc. etc. etc. Encouraging: Holding space/allowing for individuality Originality ...? ...? ...? etc. etc. etc. This inquiry can branch out forever. We can contemplate the results of our list and ask interesting questions like - "Is originality always a virtue? Is it necessarily a truth-seeking north-star? What about people who follow their "originality" and end up in realms of falsehood? How do we correct for that? Do we enforce cognitive guardrails to keep the anarchy of originality in check? But then how is that any better than forcing you to arrive at predetermined answers? Might be useful to pause and self-reflect here. What's actually happening here? Are we learning? Are we beginning to approach truth by the mere act of reflexive contemplation? The punchline of course, is that all of this is only possible because we were not beat into cognitive submission...

"Shouldn't be" is a loaded term, but for the most part your words seem correct. How does the same teaching become inherently less truthful the moment it introduces traumatic association bias as a method? i.e. Let's say Leo's teachings are represented as "LT". Traumatic association bias is represented as "TAB." Why is LT+TAB < LT? This is not entirely obvious, because LT (leo's teachings) remain constant. Which means that everything he says is still the same in both cases. Both teachings should be equally true, since his words remain the same. And yet, by introducing truamatic association bias into his teaching methods, the entire teaching literally becomes LESS TRUE even when the words spoken are identical! This tells us that learning or discovering THE TRUTH is a function of mind that runs deeper than the domain of words and language. You can say all the technically correct words and still be so unaligned with truth. We must then wonder, what is the medium by which we align to truth, if not language? You said: "you cannot rely on your feelings to get to the truth. All that will do is obstruct you from the truth" What then, CAN we rely on? What is our truth seeking north-star? I'm leaving this open-ended on purpose to encourage hopefully diverse flexible answers from different people. There are no right answers here... or is there? I guess we'll find out. But notice how I would not ever be able to take this attitude if I were beat into cognitive submission from a young age...

Not necessarily. I can overcome fears by "forcing" myself to square up where my "authentic" self would rather flee. Other people can also help me do this by "forcing" me - for example my male buddies coercing me into approaching the girl I like. Force IS compatible with authenticity. But it may not be compatible with "authentic learning." The key word is learning. Why can't I beat you into learning? So far - your answer is: "you can't beat me into learning because authentic learning can't be forced" - which is a total circular argument. I agree with you on the principle but we're not showing our work. I'm asking a deeper question - let me phrase it to you this way - how is the domain of TRUTH independent from and greater than the human domain of coercion? Why does human coercion inevitably fail when it tries to contain the TRUTH?

@Breakingthewall @RightHand Wow. Excellent inquiry from both of you. I don't find these perspectives to be mutually exclusive. I think you both have a strong point.

But why? Why must authentic learning be free of force? What about truth makes it incompatible with force?

I'm cooked.

I do find chapstick to be redundant and unnecessary. A simple tallow-honey blend is the best moisturizer I've ever tried - it has full face and body effectiveness, including lips.