thedoorsareopen

So for the rest of this discussion I'm going to give responsibility for Hamas to the Palestinians, who democratically voted for them as their chosen representatives, and ignore your attempts to continue to infantilize them and their decisions, and claim Israel is secretly controlling everything. Literally the only faction in this whole situation that opposed the Arab Peace Initiative WAS HAMAS. BRUHHHHHH.

You say, conveniently leaving out the massive years long Intifadas the Palestinians waged. BRUH. The Arab world at large has famously for decades denied the very existence of Israel and their official stated foreign policy towards it was to "wipe Israel off the map." "From the river to the sea" is literally a call for genocide of the Israeli state. This is what I'm talking about. This debate is boring because it's just people projecting onto you while literally accusing you of projection. For the record, I'm not pro-Israel. As someone who doesn't like organized religion much, it doesn't strike me as a very happy place. But at least it's ostensibly democraticish, and it's got its shit together. The solution is for there to be two states that live in peace side by side. But from where I'm standing, having a massive occupied belligerent population living side by side is not a stable situation and as someone who lives on another continent, I would like to see it get resolved somehow. I would like to see Palestinians and Arabs put their big boy pants on and join us in the 21st century rather than acting like their human rights deficient society is just going to war of attrition us back to the stone age.

This is why this topic engenders so much indifference. Every time I try to bring up the 2000 deal that Yasser Arafat walked away from, the pro-Palestine person says no no, it was Palestine who offered the deal and Israel denied it. And then you link some article from a pro-Palestine echo chamber where all the details are reversed. I’m not even saying that I’m not susceptible to such things either but again, this is madness and so boring how intractable it is. And then the other part is where all Palestinians and Arabs are absolved of their deeds because supposedly Israel is the grand puppet master directing them to do it, again justified by some unverifiable echo chamber conspiracy brain rot. In every discussion of this topic there are multiple levels of absolving Palestinians and Arabs of agency or responsibility for their actions. The bottom line is the Middle East was about as peaceful as it’s been in my 40 year life, and then Hamas shot up a music festival. They broke the peace. The things you say Israel did that are supposedly equivalent happened AFTER that. Sucker punching some civvies at a music festival in a time of peace is some ugly shit. But when a Palestinian does it, the world treats them like a wounded animal who doesn’t understand their actions and can’t be held accountable for them. And then you conflate the idea of the Palestinians and Arabs letting Israel live in peace as the same thing as Israel taking over the whole Middle East. No, this is what BORDERS are. One doesn’t have to dominate the other into extinction. But, if you spend decades shooting rockets into your neighbor, you incentivize them to come over and hold your land to try to make you stop.

I do sympathize for those suffering and dying in Palestine. I pray for them, and I think it’s sick how irresponsibly Hamas put their lives in danger. I also question how much human rights they would really have under an Arab regime anyway. My Arab friends assure me that “human rights” is just meaningless, made up western propaganda, so I guess Arabs don’t need those right? Allah will dictate what their rights truly are.

Hamas killed people and knew their actions would get countless more Palestinians killed. Hamas has blood on its hands. The only people I see in this discussion ever being held responsible are Israel, all worldwide Jews, and the American president. I have never seen anyone in online debates consider what things Palestinians could do differently, or Hamas, or other Arab nations. The justifications I see for Palestinian violent resistance frame it as a need for Palestinians to hold and recover land, possibly even “take back” Israel, as a part of Arabs’ supposed rightful ownership of the whole Middle East. But when it comes to that greater Arab region’s responsibility to protect or provide humanitarian support to the Palestinians, we pretend they’re all just individual stranger countries. Egypt closed its border tight. Qatar funds Hamas and uses Palestinian lives like disposable chess pieces for power plays. Here in the US, Arab American month was recognized by the federal government just 20 years after 9/11. Millions of Americans do the emotional labor to welcome Arabs and Muslims into American society. But the idea of middle eastern Arabs embracing their Palestinian brothers, let alone Israel, is somehow unthinkable. There are so many other ways to resolve this issue than putting 100% of the responsibility on Israel and the US. If Arabs really care primarily about the Palestinian people, then a couple million Palestinians could easily be absorbed into the other Arab countries. And if it’s really about the land, then all parties involved could come to some kind of deal. But every time there was a deal on the table, the Palestinians rejected it. I heard from Arabs at the time it was because Arabs are in it for the long haul, Islam has existed far longer than this ephemeral United States and western world, and if a few Palestinians have to suffer and die while the Arab world fights its war of attrition on the west, at least their lives were sacrificed for the cause, and they’ll be rewarded in heaven. This is insanity. It’s funny to me at this point, the idea of Arabs ever presenting an actual plan for how we can all get along together on this planet, is just unimaginable. Other cultures on this planet do it every day. The idea of a headline like “Arabs lead the way on Middle East interfaith initiative” is somehow an absurd fever dream. But “Arabs attack a music festival,” yep, that’s the one that’s real. It’s sad. The “debate” on this topic is nothing but sad retreads that go nowhere. The idea of the Arabs ever being like “yknow what? We’re just gonna eat this one because we can see this is causing endless problems and we want to be good global citizens, let’s just take care of the Palestinians ourselves rather than continuing to make it someone else’s problem” or literally ANY other NEW approach to the situation… I see new and innovative approaches to everything, from everyone, all over the globe, all of the time. And this region is just stuck in the same old BS like reruns. What is happening today is exactly like what happened in the 60s, the situation hasn’t progressed at all.

I 100% agree with the original post of this thread, people are hungry for politicians who will call out the media lies and nonsense of Trump and the Republicans. In online debates I always see people saying well, the Dems will never do that because they’re just controlled opppsition but my Democratic congressman literally sends me a weekly email with the title format of “Calling Out Trump’s Lies on [issue in the news this week]” and the email has detailed fact checks and rebuttals to the latest spew of bullshit. I don’t exactly expect a politician to save us, but are any of you actually plugged in to the grassroots organizations, like 50501, Indivisible, Visibility Brigade, or others? There is a HUGE groundswell of people who see exactly what’s going on and if anyone in government will respond to us, it’s Democrats. There are millions of people putting pressure on Democrats every day, and I’ve seen some Dems, like Newsom, Robert Garcia, and others change their strategy for the better thanks to this pressure. When people ask what the purpose of things like No Kings is, one purpose is to help enable politicians who are on the fence see that they have backing to do the right thing. And it works. I think the controlled opposition argument is defeatism that just helps you feel better about doing nothing.

It’s because of two things: 1. Gaza brought this upon themselves with Hamas’s outrageous October 7th attack. This started with their act of violence and violence is being brought back on them. 2. Palestinians have shamelessly called for the genocide of Israel for decades. Then they cry the same is happening to them when their violence has consequences. Palestinians don’t want peace. They want to guilt trip the west into letting them dominate. In simple terms this is why the Palestinian cause is not very sympathetic! Don’t ask me to sympathize with thugs and violent radicals when their violent radicalism blows back on them!

I'm putting this in the spirituality forum because it's not about the internet, it's about reality. I hear people talking about Zuckerberg and algorithms, but it's not them really. All my internet usage now all blends seamlessly into one another. And it's almost all arguments against anything I like, basically. There have been magic MAGA trolls making terrible arguments everywhere, why are they there, because they disagree with me. Even this forum, I lean towards my American heritage and away from my Middle Eastern heritage, so this forum is full of pro-Middle East, anti-American posts decrying the impending fall of the supposed empire. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, this place, it all blends seamlessly together. There is no "Leo Gura," there are a series of videos on Youtube, and posts on this forum. Based on what's on my mind this week or month, posts online about the I Am or manifesting will say every possible variation of what these things will or won't do for me. Today, nonduality is good, last week it was bad. Today, manifesting is all about action, last week it was "without lifting a finger." It all switches back and forth variously. Islam good! No, Islam bad now. Christianity good! No, Christianity bad. Or maybe Jesus good, but Christianity bad. Or maybe that's just dirty hippies talking. Actually, Buddhism good! No, Buddhism isn't even a religion, Buddhism just liberal westerner posturing, so Buddhism bad. Hinduism good! No, Hinduism not what you think it is, Hinduism bad. Chakras good! No, chakras bad. Nonduality good! No, nonduality bad aktchually. Liberals good! No, liberals bad. Your failure to pick a side is bad, and proof of what a coward you are! No actually everything is balance and picking only one side is bad. But most of all, whatever YOU are, whatever YOU identify with, is bad. The internet has just become, here are credible and highly tailored arguments against anything I like, and the appearance of thousands of people all liking things I don't like. The rest of it is either things I'm supposed to want, like women or gadgets, or a couple of decoy posts designed to give the appearance of actual people posting actual things on actual websites from an actual "exterior world". I predict the response to this post will be some kind of spicy gainsaying about so what bro, or what have you done that's so great, or you're schizo, or you're chillingly absolutely right because you're alone in the universe, or find Jesus, or whatever. Reality is mostly just a hologram trying to have the last word, no matter how ridiculous.

This is all a distraction from Epstein.

Yeah the current situation is basically my own personal hell, as someone who grew up with an Arab dad who was violent towards me and an American mom and other Americans who fell all over themselves to not be racist against Arabs and excuse their violence. So now we have my buddies the Arabs being seen as the victims after their egregious act on Oct 7, by my other buddies the western left. I believe in empathy and have been liberal my whole life, but the current situation is a real breakdown of the paradox of tolerance. The part that fucks me up the most is that the zeitgeist of music fandom currently has lots of people trying to cancel any band that does not come out as blindly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, when the original attacks were literally perpetrated upon audience members at a music festival. Thom Yorke gave a nuanced and evenhanded statement about how both sides have a hand in this complicated conflict, and people were calling for blood. Thom fucking Yorke. If any artist has spent their career successfully critiquing the banality of evil in our society, it’s him. And yet he’s getting shit on by morons who will never be neighbors with Palestinians and have to deal with the uncomfortable realities of what it’s like when your neighbors shoot rockets at your neighborhood for decades on end, and claim they’re doing it in God’s name. It takes two fucking brain cells to rub together to mutter “free Palestine,” but not a single person in decades of asking this have ever been able to answer me: there are 300 million Arabs. Why can’t any of this vast group of people do anything, anything at all, to help their brothers the Palestinians? If it’s so important to be free. Oh right, cuz under Arab administration they wouldn’t be free regardless.

If stage orange tailgates as a matter of course, and stage green leaves ample space but gets cut off, what does stage yellow do?

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.

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?