thedoorsareopen

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.

I thought disciplined meditation would train my mind to be quiet, but I’ve found there is no such thing as that. On this level, the brain truly is just an appearance in the dream world. What seems to determine the focus or lack thereof of my mind has more to do with which ancestor or entity I’ve had in my aura lately, and how many stressors are appearing in my 3D reality. But over the past year I’ve had experiences of meditating on nonduality for 4 hours, then getting up and seeming to fall right back into a thought form of agitation. Similarly I’ve gone without meditation and reached very calm clear states of mind after a run or an orgasm. It frustrates me that there seems to be no progressive way to train and discipline my mind, it’s just one more appearance in the dream world, of which my control over is only illusory. Anyone else have this experience, oh fellow appearances in the dream world?

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.

Zelenskyy is very brave, he’s brave compared to most world leaders, let alone compared to a keyboard warrior like you. If he wasn’t brave, it was expected Ukraine would fall in 3 days, and purely thru the bravery and courage of Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people have they been able to retain their independence. And that’s WITH dealing with a turncoat like Trump and unstable support from the US and the west. Seriously, you could not be more wrong about what Zelenskyy’s made of. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” He had the option to flee his country, instead he stayed and fought, and single-handedly forged an independent Ukrainian identity with his people. None of that was assured. It shows how biased and mistaken you are to characterize him as you did.

I went to a 10 day meditation retreat last summer, and it didn’t really seem to do anything but train my ability to sit. I saw a lot of dots and colors though. But as for quieting the mind, there seems to be a whole ecosystem of my personal thought forms, plus ancestors, entities, and guides all constantly dropping thoughts into my awareness. There is actually a massive amount of activity on this level going on all around me all the time, constant signs and synchronicities to the point that im kinda bored of the whole thing. They all seem to want me to live some storyline or another. My ancestors are constantly advocating for their chosen religions regardless of how long I’ve been rejecting them. I get articles on my social medias about Islam and Christianity constantly, because that’s what my extended family and ancestors practiced, even though I walked away from Islam decades ago. At this point I can silence my mind in under a minute, and can reach deep silence reliably in maybe 20 mins or so. But I thought meditation would help silence this constant cacophony and it kinda makes me laugh that so much of what I thought was a distracted or dopamine-addled mind was really just the effects of these perspectives that seem to be around me whether I want them to be or not… Anyone else?

What happened to all the pro-Trump bros who were on this forum last summer? I thought this all was good, because of vague vibes about masculinity or “the system” or some shit.

I remember when Leo first started going into spiritual topics, this was I think 2018 or 2019, and I was at the right place and time to go full on into that journey with him, not knowing what I would find. It was all new to me, I thought nonduality was this radical concept. I thought I'd discovered some secret of the universe. I thought that getting into spirituality would make me smarter, more in tune, closer to a supreme intelligence, possibly even able to discover new knowledge and help improve the world in some way. Instead what I've discovered is that all of the information in my reality is and has always been carefully manipulated at all times to give me certain impressions of things, based largely on my already conditioned beliefs. The world is broken on purpose, because perfection is supposedly boring. In fact, the world is just an appearance and in my human form, I may as well be a cartoon character. And God or whatever was there the entire time, watching every one of my pains. I supposedly deserved them because I didn't learn certain lessons. Because I was making decisions thinking I was a person who lived in a world. I thought I was completely alone and made no impact. I thought my decisions didn't matter and no one was paying attention. I also thought that being polite and following the rules was the best course of action, and boy is every single piece of stimulus in my reality now determined to tell me that is not the case. Has anyone else been dragged into this storyline of how the billionaires are keeping the common man down, and golly we just gotta rise up and restore the natural order of things? I liked society the way it was. I'm not looking for a crash to the system. But I guess I had finally made a life for myself in the secular world I thought I lived in, finally figured out how to stop feeling so much inexplicable emotional pain, so now God's gotta bring the hammer down. I guess every single person I ever saw in my life was also an illusion, but I have seen so many people who had no relationship with God who were healthier than me, more energetic, happier, better teeth, more friends, more laughter, more joy. I'm not sure why I have to be God's bitch boy. I followed a religion, and the people who followed it less strictly than me got rewarded more. So I stopped following it. But I never ended up fitting into secular society much, most of my life I've been a loner. I had good friends, and none of them had any kind of relationship with God, and they also were happier, healthier and enjoyed more and better relationships than I ever did. So then I got into spirituality and over the past 5 years I have seen so many people who have all, day after day, delivered to me the most banal spiritual "advice" while living lives that seem more functional than my life ever has been. No matter what my relationship to God is, it seems I'm always doing it wrong, always on the outs, can never get it together, and everyone around me is just doing so much better than I ever have, without any practice. So is that what this is? God became man so man could sit in a hologram of self-degradation? I'm surrounded by people who don't have to have a meditation practice, who didn't have to invest several years in a "spiritual journey," but have more loving families and better teeth than I ever will? I remember when I started this shit I thought I was gonna get smarter lol... instead I just learned the metaphysical parameters of a clown world. It basically just comes down to squirting love through your diaphragm, and whoever can do that the most, wins, I guess.

The CFPB is one of the best agencies for taking action to protect actual consumers and average people making ends meet. It's quite responsive to citizen activism, it's the reason overdraft fees are no longer given free reign and are limited to a small amount, and it's an impressive model of how government agencies CAN have a slim footprint while actually working for the citizen's interest.

*giving a shit 248 years of operating just fine, and I finally got over my childhood trauma, like literally last summer, and then this ridiculous scenario started. So I guess it’s just not possible to chill, work a job, share some laughs, and have a good life? If it’s not decades of unexplainable emotional pain, the outside world just randomly stops functioning? Why is life like this? What was the point of all the nonduality and meditation and shit? I feel the will to live fading.

I’ve been straddling suicidal ideation for 22 years, and things were starting to look better. I don’t need to appreciate any more realness.

So unless I meditate more, my higher self’s gonna destroy my world?

Cmon guys, gimme some spiritual buzzwords to explain why this is actually normal and expected. Light and dark, some bullshit like that

23 Nobel Prize-winning economists call Harris’ economic plan ‘vastly superior’ to Trump’s This is lazy strawmanning that relies on hazy unconscious feelings that the guy who says "You're fired" is a better business man than the touchy feely effeminate Democrat, and is not supported by anyone who's run the numbers. The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that Harris's economic plans would add $3.95 trillion through 2035, vs. Trump's $7.75 trillion. Harris's Opportunity Economy policies would directly lower costs for working and middle class Americans, increase access to entrepreneurship and homeownership for the average person, increase economic activity in the working and middle class economy, and would likely return more in taxes to the federal budget than Trump's plans. Trump's plans hinge mostly on continuing tax cuts to corporations and the top 1%, which after 40 years of trickle down economics, has been shown doesn't actually trickle down to the vast majority of Americans. And kinda flies in the face of your idea that somehow Trump is the anti-corporate dominance candidate. Oh, and one big cost of Trump's plan? Deporting 16 million people don't come cheap, least of all to our values.