Apparition of Jack

To me "The Invention of Lying" is a perfect encapsulation of stage Orange attitudes religion/spirituality. In the movie Ricky Gervais' character is the first human in history to be able to lie, and so he uses this ability to "make up" stories of God, the afterlife and so on.

It exists, but I personally feel one of the problems with it is simply a matter of language - saying that White Privilege exists is accurate, but a lot of people will respond negatively to the phrase, because they don't understand what it actually means and they have will become defensive claiming that they don't experience privilege in much of their own lives, which would be accurate for a lot of them (for instance, being poor.) I prefer the term "privilege of Whiteness", since rather than saying some immutable thing about you (being white) is privileged, rather one of the factors that you possess (having whiteness) is privileged, which is a much less controversial thing to accept. White Privilege - or Privilege of Whiteness - is the phenomenon that when stripped of all other elements (class, health, etc.), someone with whiteness will be unfairly advantaged over someone with blackness, or someone of colour, and so on. Yes, a poor, working class white person might not feel privileged in their day-to-day life of poverty and financial stress, but that white person is far less likely to have a negative interaction with a police offer than the exact same person if instead they were black, for instance. Of course, many white people aren't aware of this, and due to self-bias assume that their cordial interactions with police officers are the "norm" for everybody else, so they will not accept that they get treated better than others based on one aspect of their being. Of course, the problem with getting too caught up in white privilege dynamics is that, if not met with Yellow-level integral thinking, it can become an ideology unto itself, and people can build up whole worldviews around taking down white privilege and seeing every interaction through that specific lens (when another lens may be more useful), and can create an "us vs. them" mentality. For instance, it's true that Bill Gates benefited from white privilege in his quest to become super wealthy and develop a revolutionary technology company - (would Microsoft have taken off if it was headed by a couple of black or Latino college students instead? Perhaps not, and even less likely so during the early days of the 80s and 90s when it was being founded) - but does that mean that every bit of hard work and personal insight that Bill Gates used in order to manifest Microsoft is now discredited because he had this one particular area of unfair advantage? I would say no. Bill Gates is still a visionary in his own right, ignoring the race he was born into. Honestly it's a complex subject, and I don't want to dismiss the very real concerns that non-white people have with it. It's still a very real phenomena and it does create a lot of social injustice that doesn't otherwise have to exist. Being aware that exists and and taking conscious steps to counter-act it is very beneficial, but it doesn't have to become an all-encompassing worldview too. There are greater dynamics in society, politics, economics, etc. than just whiteness vs. non-whiteness, but it is still an important one that has to be considered. EDIT: Just to clarify, the solution to solving it is, as with most other things in life, increasing consciousness and cultivating Love / Truth / Awareness and so on. As you grow and develop in consciousness, you will begin to identify with more and more of the world, and you will begin to recognise that any benefits or injustices other people experience due to their race are intimately tied with your own well-being. From that period onwards, the dynamics of privilege will become increasingly untenable to you and you will want to do whatever you can to help elevate society beyond them.

You know, I just had a thought as to might be healthy Red. A self-disciplined bouncer or bodyguard might make a good example of Red. Someone who doesn't necessarily have qualms overstepping boundaries in order to achieve their goal but isn't necessarily vindictive or vicious about. They will be restrained and respectful and will resort to violence only as a last resort, but when they do there's no hesitation is seeing the fight to its completion.

I've thought about this, and to me an example of healthy stage Red might be something like a journalist breaking the law in order to get a scoop that exposes widespread corruption. The journalist themself might be at Green, but that desire to expose the truth no matter the legal consequences to me would be them utilising a healthy Red aspect. I'm not sure what a healthy example of someone centered at Red would look like though. From the POV of our modern societies that moved up to Orange and even Green Red can seem violent and backwards, but I'm sure there are examples of it being healthy and useful. Maybe a tribal leader in India who has seen their tribe succumb to poverty and in-fighting due to exploitation / discrimination uses their wits and cunning to bring the disparate parts of the tribe together and push for their rights on the legal stage might be an example of healthy Red. I don't know.

Was the Black Death also an effort to move the world towards a cashless society?

I just watched the video to see what all the fuss is about. I really don't see the issue. From what I can tell it's poking fun at the structural prejudice against women in the high-flying world of achievers and doers, which absolutely exists. If you want to rise up in the corporate world, or become a famous director, or become a producer, or anything else like that, then being a woman is a hindrance to you. In this regard I think the message makes a fair point, since it is frustrating for the countless hard-working women out there who find their dreams harder to manifest due to structural sexism. If there's one thing you could criticise this song for it would be that it promotes code-Orange success/status/wealth as something desirable to achieve, but considering this is the pop music industry we're talking about then this is par for the course. It's really here nor there with regards to the controversy.

@Leo Gura My bad You've got me hooked on him!

Anand is at it again! He spells out in very clear terms what the 2020 election means and why billionaires don't grasp what's happening on the ground, as well as the necessity for a hybrid of both capitalism and socialism.

@LfcCharlie4 If Bernie wins the presidency, then the answer will be yes, we are ready. There’s never a perfect time for social progress to happen, there’s never a moment when all the naysayers can come to the table and say “ok, we’ve heard you, at first we didn’t agree but you’ve convinced us so now we’re on board.” There are people who are so stubborn that they will go ahead and reject Medicare for All up until the day they die. But they are an extreme minority, and most people - even many people who initially opposed these ideas - will get on board once the ego backlash has come and gone and society has integrated this new, more holistic way of being. In 10 to 20 years from now, even Republicans will accept the need for universal healthcare, cheap education, and so on. That’s the whole point of evolution. It’s always happening, even if there are hurdles along the way.

I like to look at it from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It just makes sense that any collective effort - in this case government - should aim to meet everyone's most basic needs first (food, water, shelter, health) so they can function and grow as much as possible, and making healthcare a legal right is a powerful tool to achieve that.

Yeah, I'd like this too. Christianity still stirs under the surface of most western countries (even if we like to pretend we've moved beyond it) so I think a Christian non-dual video would catch a lot of eyeballs.

This man should be given a Darwin Award

@Johnny5 Who says it didn't? Maybe we'd all still be cavemen beating each other with clubs without the help of psychedelics

@ttm Having a spiritual teacher not talk about Love is like having a math teacher not talk about addition. You could try to do it but such a basic requirement of the topic would be lacking in your understanding that you'd find it hard to really get a handle on all the rest of it, and would show that the teacher themself has gaps in their understanding too.

Go go Turquoise Man!

@EternalForest I think you've made a common mistake (one that I have made myself) of assuming that once you recongise non-duality, all you're left to do is just sit there in enlightenment and not worry about anything at all going on around you. In some sense this is true, if you so choose you could just sit on your ass staring at trees all day, but in another thats just a shallow way of looking at it. Because remember, non-duality is so non-dual that it even allows for duality within it. Look at Leo. He's enlightened and yet he runs a forum, has a girlfriend, talks about philosophy and politics, does the shopping, posts memes, and all that regular stuff. Another thing to note is that while Tier 1, as you say, is guided by some sort of "innocent bliss", it's an innocence thats dependent very strongly on how the world is around you, and how the world moves will push and shove you about whether you want it to or not. Sure if you're young and healthy with no major responsibilities life might seem fun and breezy, but if you get older and sick, or if you end up in bad relationship after bad relatioship, or you suddenly find yourself looking after sick family members, or you get into financial trouble, or if you find yourself in a warzone, or if a political party that makes life harder for you gets into power, etc. etc. then being at Tier 1 will make it just that much harder to navigate these trials. Being at Tier 2 lets you be pro-active in creating your reality, rather than reactive, which is a great place to be. To me, the whole point of Tier 2 is that it gives you the tools to create the life you choose, not the life you've been told to want or the life you can't seem to get. If at Tier 2 you still want to have a family and go to soccer matches and watch movies, you can choose to do all these things, but if you don't want to do these things either, then you can also choose not to. You're not being compelled to do these things by your conditioning, or your society, or your hormones, or anything else like that. You're coming from a place of wisdom and control rather than ignorance and compulsion, which is an incredibly powerful framework to operate form.

Don’t let Trump see this

@supremeyingyang Germany is way too advanced to ever have a stage Blue government in all honesty, even the stage Blue nationalist parties seem to be facing a lot of backlash. What are the problems facing Germany that you think are being unaddressed? What do you think needs to be done to fix them? I'm trying to get a handle on your national situation and what seems to be your issue with finding out how to solve them.

@-Rowan I'd say so yeah, or maybe it's Orange making fun of Orange-Green marketing.

What's the voting system like in Germany? Do you have preferential voting, where if your first candidate doesnt get picked, it goes to your second candidate and so on? If so, you can vote for the most conscious, holistic parties out there even if they don't have that much support without "wasting" your vote, since then it just go to your second party, and so on. What are the parties in Germany like?

@tenta Why do you watch such nonsense?

Leo has mentioned Hegel as having non-dual knowledge before, and I think looking at history through the lens of non-duality/consciousness/infinite evolution would be very illuminating

If, once you've started to self-actualise and grow in awareness/consciousness/development, you start to look around the world and see that other people and society at large aren't progressing as fast as you, it's easy to begin to feel frustrated and to want to just tell society to "wake up!" and get with the times. While such reactions are to be expected, they also belie the very real process of evolution that is unfolding, day by day, in countless millions of big and little ways. Hence I'm opening this thread for people to document the evidence that society is really evolving, in real time, giving concrete examples that everyone can understand. I'll start with an example of emerging Green/Yellow values: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-14/why-whos-official-name-for-the-coronavirus-matters/11964176 The WHO has recently announced the new name for the coronavirus (it's called Covid-19, short for Corona Virus Disease 2019) and has taken careful steps to ensure that the new name doesn't cause one region/culture/animal/ethnic group to be unfairly demonised by people, the same way previous viruses have. Such a move from the WHO would not have likely happened even just 10 years ago. Also, while people will still unfairly be targeted during this current outbreak, the positive news is that because so many people have taken a Green/Yellow approach to this, the effects of this discrimination will be much smaller than they otherwise would've be. This is evolution in action. This is just one example among many. What will other people share with us?

@Annoynymous Nice! I even heard about that. It’s a small thing but still a step in the right direction