thedoorsareopen

I wanna be a nebula after this.

I just wanted to really push back on this moronic, conflationary take. All of the best, most loving, most exciting hours and days of my life have taken place at music festivals. And I went on the pilgrimage to Mecca once. That was a fucking shitshow. Mecca is an ugly place full of unconsciousness, hatred, crass commercialism, jewelry stores everywhere, rampant oppression and classism, indentured Bangaladeshi servants with no rights, women wearing the symbol of oppression that is the hijab and burka. Mecca was one of the most crassly commercialistic places I've ever seen in my life, and I live in Los Angeles. Attending the stoning of the jamarat was singlehandedly the absolutely most hateful and ugly moment I have ever witnessed with my own eyes, that is the benchmark of darkness upon which all my other experiences are weighed against. Music festivals, on the other hand, are bright, sunny, exciting, filled with laughter, dancing and joy. The very best of humanity at its most ecstatic. And you want to dismiss that as degeneracy, while contrasting the poor innocent middle easterners as pure. Eyeroll. I remember my Saudi friend talking about driving around looking for bootleg bathtub alcohol. I remember him talking about him and his friends casually engaging in rape, with no remorse about it. Middle easterners are humans like anyone else, and they'll get their kicks however they can. By the way, do you think the billionaire leaders of Hamas don't do cocaine and drink alcohol and deal in human trafficking and prostitution? I've seen so much unconsciousness and hypocrisy in middle eastern culture. You to want to tell me that is what purity is, but peaceful revelers at a music festival are the problem and were "asking for it" simply by dancing peacefully, I can't believe you're advancing that argument to rationalize the heinous rampage Hamas went on on October 7th. Disgusting.

So you don't live in the 21st century. Cool. I'm haram just for existing. So are many of the people I see in the west who are calling for "free Palestine." I'll remind them that you'll happily take their support in your favor, just so you can turn around and use haram as a justification to discriminate against gay and trans and liberated female lives and other ethnicities than you. If you're seriously using haram as a justification for murdering festival goers, you are part of the "eye for an eye" thinking and aren't helping find a solution here. The rest of you are just dismissing everyone you don't like as imperialist colonizers and saying "no u" when I bring up historical events. This is the state of this debate. It's literally a war. There's no one working for peace here. There's just people trying to shout each other down, murder each other down. Just like Muslims in my childhood never tried to reach across and understand my perspective, they just enacted violence on me, marginalized me, hurt me, and tried to silence and minimize me. Whatever you want to say about the west, at least the west accepts that people different from us exist. The west, like everyone, needs to protect and perpetuate itself, and it will do what it takes to do that. But we accept that Palestine has a right to exist. The opposite is often not true. Several of you in this thread are straight up saying the west as a whole needs to stop existing. I'm not saying that Palestinians need to stop existing. But a lot of Muslims I've known have said that I straight up need to stop existing, and cite their religion as an incontrovertible justification for that. Meanwhile in my area you've got queers protesting for a free Palestine. That's why I side with the west.

Because the Palestinians have been offered many opportunities to take responsibility for their nation and they've refused them all! If you refuse the peace because you're banking on changing the negotiating terms through murder, I don't have much sympathy for you. I have loved dancing in my life. I saw the video Hamas proudly made of murdering the festival goers at the Nova festival massacre, it's utterly fucking disgusting. What's happened in Gaza is also disgusting, but the middle east was in a period of rising peace before Hamas shattered it with this heinous attack. Israel didn't just wake up one day and decide to start bombing. We have to agree, spontaneous massacres are unacceptable, right? Right? Either we deal with this as a separate incident, in which case Hamas is clearly and unquestionably in the wrong, or we lean on the "this conflict goes back thousands of years" trope, in which case Palestine's repeated refusals to resolve this situation are fair game to bring up. And the idea that the real bad guy in all of this is the United States, when the US has been the one historically pushing these two parties to the diplomatic table again and again, is fucking bullshit. We're not racist, we just want to build a society where Arab terror is not constantly being threatened as an option. I'm so tired of this "poor Palestinians" thing, do they live in the 21st century with the rest of us or not? If so, then draft some documents and take fucking responsibility for building your nation. If they're really going to represent themselves as poor downtrodden indigenous people, when they've been in this situation for so long and refused every chance to gain resolution, self-determination, and dignity, they shouldn't be surprised they're still in this position. And before you dismiss things like the Oslo Accords, don't forget that the alternative that Arabs really want is "from the river to the sea." That's the position they think is fair, and claim actual attempts to get both sides to get along like the Oslo Accords are western conspiracies to keep the poor Arab down. No! We just want you to fucking deal with the fact that other societies exist on this planet! Other societies and ethnic groups exist in the middle east, FFS! Once upon a time, it was the Arabs who were the colonizing force in the area, but other native groups exist and have roots there too.

It's kinda funny how much people give a shit about a place that's smaller than fucking Maryland. I assume you guys are upset about the conflict in Sudan too, right? Or is that one not as sexy for the internet white knight brigade cuz the fighters on all sides are Muslim?

I smell middle eastern groupthink in this thread. “The west is the biggest terrorist in the Middle East.” LOL. I know you are, but what am I? It’s the same as how my dad and his relatives can only justify the Arab position by saying that 9/11 was a false flag perpetrated by “the Jews.” You can only advance a point by rewriting history, conflating events, and then the old Arab chestnut of blaming literally the entirety of the last century of middle eastern events on western powers dividing up the Ottoman Empire after WWI. Handily absolving Arabs of any responsibility for governing themselves in the process. So, what, you’d rather be united in being ruled by the Turks? Or what are you saying, it was the UK’s responsibility to build your nation for you? Yknow, being related to Arabs sucks. It’s not a fun culture. I wish I was half Brazilian, I could celebrate Carnival or something. But all my Arab relatives have to offer is emotional immaturity as a result of being from a society stunted by Islam, and grievances against the West. I’ve often wondered, why are countries like Japan and Ireland able to export their cultures world wide in a way that successfully portrays a positive image of those places, and makes people actually like them, but the Arabs cannot? Since I’ve been alive the main cultural worldwide impact of the Arabs has been 9/11 and 10/7. Shameful violent events. I’ve often wondered, why is it so impossible for the Arab countries to get together and build an effective diplomatic corps that can lobby for their interests worldwide? I mean the West doesn’t control everything. You’ve got China, Russia, south east Asia, Europe who are a lot less sympathetic to Israel. So why can’t the Arabs get their shit together and act like a big boy nation? Why can’t the Arabs interact with other cultures in a way that doesn’t involve calendar dates commemorating murder?

By the way, this is my take after living 39 years of life as an Arab American, and as I always say, prove me wrong Arabs, prove me wrong!

If it were up to the sages of the middle east, we'd be obediently reading our Qurans right now, not experiencing modernity. I'll take my western values, thank you very much.

This is the exact hand-washing of responsibility that keeps the Palestinians from being able to achieve an independent, self-governing state. They're like little kids saying, but they hit me! It's not fair! They have more toys! They being either Israel or the West. I was pointing to the fact that the US was the mediator bringing the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table throughout the second half of the 20th century, and you came back at me with "the entire concept of nation-states is wrong," in which case, what do you care whether the Palestinians have their own state? If we're gonna take that wide a context on history, the middle east is just mad it ain't the 7th or 12th century anymore and the idea of a strictly Islamic society simply doesn't work in a modern context, and instead of dealing with that crisis of identity it's just hoping to pull everyone back down into cycles of violence, back down the hierarchy of spiral dynamics. This problem simply can't be solved with eye for an eye thinking, and from where I'm standing, it ain't the US or Israel that's really standing in the way of resolving this issue. It's the grip Islam has on the middle east and the shame-based culture of that religion that prevents Arabs from negotiating or compromising. Admitting that Israel has a place in the middle east is considered this grievous loss of status, a "slippery slope" because the Arabs can only think in terms of conquest and conformity.

What fucking brainrot bullshit is this. The Israelis have turned down deals, and the Palestinians have turned down many generous deals (that get less and less generous over time) but the US for decades was the one pushing them to come to the table.

I'm kinda surprised to hear you say that meditating for two weeks straight was difficult. I consider myself less advanced than you, but I did over 80 hours in a week and it was pretty great. Better than dealing with my regular life most of the time, frankly.

Oh this is the guy who recommends people quit their jobs with no backup plan, cuz "the universe will provide."

I missed those videos but Leo is hardly alone in these things. It's like breakingthewall said, the mystical opening leads to many such direct realizations like this. Leo works in the nondual space, but there are a lot of mystical spiritual people who are more in the alien space. Honestly, the idea that you could transform into an alien, I believe you could look in a mirror on psychedelics and see yourself in your Pleadian form, easily. Just the same as you can look in the mirror and see the faces of your ancestors morph across your face. Now that, I have seen first hand. Could I replicate it on camera? I don't think so. But I have watched many many people claiming to channel aliens, and many of them actually LOOK alien like in their facial structure and hair cuts. And it's just like Leo said, these things are simultaneously accessible to the mystic, and too weird to ever translate into a sober human lifestyle that could become commonplace on this planet, so they remain in the realm of what our society labels psychosis, superstition, and myth. I have been flirting with psychosis throughout my life, but somehow never quite fall in. I must not be prone to schizophrenia, because I have most certainly spent months in the same mental space that leads people to believe that helicopters are following them, and that they're space Jesus, so they should stand on the street corner smoking crack at 3am, and yet I didn't ever experience my life falling apart like that. It just seemed like musing to me. I'd do some acid and see some cool shit, and then I'd just go to bed and head to work on Monday. But meanwhile my sense of reality was very abnormal. I'm lucky and grateful that I was able to simply muse philosophical about these things, rather than falling into psychosis or schizophrenia.

Started with nonduality, meditating on I Am. Have done a lot of heart chakra meditation. I learned Vipassana at the retreat I went to. Working my way thru the Gateway Tapes and have experimented with Carlos Casteneda’s techniques. Pranayama, energy work, a lot of chakra work, plus mantras. Starting to work with the Violet Flame and the spiritual rays now.

Again, wrong. He lives in the threatened country. And at the start of the war, everything was in doubt. He pulled off a master class in leadership, no doubt by being on call every minute of incredibly stressful 18, 20 hour days, for months on end before things stabilized. You will never know stress like Zelenskyy experienced in those days. You can just look at how the man looked before the war, compared to now. He used to be a comedian, ffs. And he’s also not like an American president who can order strikes on the other side of the world, then go to bed in the White House residence and see how it went in the morning. At the start of the Russian invasion, everything was in question for Zelenskyy and his people. His example is one of the greatest case studies in leadership of the 21st century so far. I have no interest in debating a mind so unserious that would call this shining example a bitch. I’m only here to remind the rest of the readers of this thread of the facts about Zelenskyy’s character, which he has proven admirably.