DefinitelyNotARobot

If this is attained as a natural state then it's a valid insight, but the problem is that people then get the attached to idea of "conscious people being abstinent/motionless" and turn it into another layer of identity games. We can acknowledge that consciousness holds the potential for sex to arise and for it not to arise. The appearance of sex itself has nothing to do with the validity of your consciousness, as only consciousness can validate itself. You could take it even further and say that there isn't even a need for it to validate itself, because it is already totally valid onto itself. If sex was truly such a material pursuit, then its appearance would hold no meaning in regard to the broader consciousness (or being) and could be disregarded. This wouldn't mean that you'd have to stop indulging in it, it would simply mean that you stopped trying to control the appearance of it, or rather, realized that you never had any control to begin with as "you" were just another appearance. If sex and porn arise, they arise, if they don't, they don't. The issue people take is that they don't believe sex and porn to be mere material pursuit, as nothing is inherently material. The idea is that you wouldn't be able to, for example, rape another human being unless you were expressing a very low level of consciousness. Most porn obviously isn't as low conscious as rape, I was just taking that view to an extreme. The point is that, from this perspective, it's all about energy and the interconnectedness of everything. There is truth to that, but the problem comes when people then start to think that "highly conscious people" can't exert low levels of consciousness. Just by having to sustain your body, you have to "selfishly" take away energy from somewhere else, be that through the consumption of food, resources such as money, shelter, electricity, gas, and also the time and attention of other people. I would say that it's all about balance. Again, consciousness can express sex and porn and it can NOT do that. I think that whether they arise or not isn't the only factor that should be acknowledged. It's also a question of HOW attached you are to these things and your general relationship with them. How often do you indulge in them? What kind of sex/porn do you like? How good are you at dealing with not getting what you want? Are you using them to avoid something? Since everything is interconnected, you can't simply look at sex and porn as a distinct "things" or "phenomena". These words can capture a range of different people, emotions, mental states, attachments, spiritual practices and so on and so on.

BTW this is like saying that you can't drink a beer unless you're low in consciousness. Getting black out drunk every weekend might be a sign that you're in a state of avoidance, but if you drank one or two beer once a year, this logic would quickly break apart.

I used to have a porn addiction, but shrooms completely healed me. I've realized that it's not about the porn itself, but your attachments to it. Abstinence can come from a low level of consciousness as much as indulgence, as it can be turned into a negative attachment. These days I rarely watch porn, but I don't try to force myself into abstinence either. I just go whenever the flow takes me.

Precisely. You could say that everything is the "word of god", but at that point it doesn't really make sense to conceive of it as some type of "language" anymore, because it also includes everything that can't be captured through symbolism. That's because god is ALL symbolism, not just any one fragment of it, but also extends beyond it. You can't capture god with the letter A, you also need B, C, D, E and an infinite amount of letters, plus numbers and all the other types of symbols in existence, plus everything that isn't a symbol either. The point is that nothing can point to God, because God is already everything, including all pointing. It's like trying to point to your finger, using the same finger.

@StarStruck Because words themselves are finite. If a word was capable of capturing the infinite, not only would it have to capture all meaning, but you would also have to be able to drive the word, have sex with the word, eat the word, breath the word, walk on the word, wear the word around your neck, build houses with the word, and do an infinite amount of other things with that word. The point that I am making is that the word being a word already restricts the word to being just that... a word. A word isn't a car. For a word to be infinite it would also need to be a car. It would also need to be a living organism. It would also need to be a black hole and a star. Do you understand how ridiculous it is to expect a word to capture all of those things? The word "driving" doesn't actually capture the act of driving. You can't drive the word. The word doesn't refer to itself. That's the point of a symbol. It's something, pointing to a thing, but not being that thing by itself.

I actually disagree, weed is amazing for meditation. I've reached beautiful states and insights that I wouldn't have reached without weed. It's more about whether you know how to navigate that space than it's about the weed itself.

Sure. Using weed with Yoga, meditation and contemplation can take you to amazing places. Just don't use it every practice.

You are nothing. I am nothing. How can the nothing YOU are, be different from the nothing I am? All something is an incarnation of the same nothing. The nothing "you" were "before birth", the same nothing "you" will be "after death". So what would keep the nothingness after your death from being born once more? Think of how radical of a claim YOU are making. There was a point in time where you (as in the ego) didn't exist. Now you do. You went from a state of non-existence to a state of existence. You literally pulled off the impossibility of going from nothing to the experience of something. If your ego will become nothing after it dies, what would keep that nothing from doing what it did prior to your birth, which is to "be born"? You're claiming one nothing to be different from the other nothing. There are issues with reincarnation though. A lot of people believe that they will be reborn on this planet, when you can't even guarantee that you will be born inside this universe. It also assume that time is real, in that it assumes that you will turn into something or someone else at a different point in time. When you are talking to another person, you are talking to yourself actively reincarnating as that person. It's you from a different pov. All life is a incarnaton of you. You're always going through infinite reincarnation. You could even go as far as to say that every single moment is a reincarnation. It's a death, but it's also a birth. You die into the moment and you are born back out of it.

Farting.

That's true. If you look through low-income areas all over the world you will get mixed demographics. Here in my city it's a mix of people from Islamic countries, ex-soviet states (also lots of Polish people), the Balkan region and lots of Germans too. Depending on the area you're in it can be a mix of all of them, or separate little communities. My family migrated from Kazakhstan so I grew up in one of the predominately Russian/Polish area, but I've also lived in majority Muslim areas and in mixed areas before. I've watched this behavior being exhumed by people of all nationalities, religions and colors. I've also seen that a lot of these "ghetto people" as op likes to call them (idk, I still feel like it's kind of dehumanizing as a "ghetto person" myself), who are genuinely good people with good hearts and simply had terrible upbringings. Some of them might seem like they're bad people from the outside, but that's because you're looking at them from the outside. If you're friends with them you actually see how much they take care of the people around them. It's simply a scarcity mentality where you can't afford to act in moral ways, because that way you're just going to be taken advantage off and left in the dust while the "immoral" people win in life (at least that's what it might like from within this mentality). Of course there are those that act in highly selfish ways and don't even care about the people around them, I've seen enough of these types of people, but it's unfair to reduce everybody that grew up in a bad neighborhood to that stereotypical image of the wild savage. Not every "ghetto person" is a "ghetto person". Some fulfill the stereotype, some don't.

@bebotalk I'm not saying that your view is wrong, I'm simply pointing out that you're the person that is holding an "edgy" monologue right now. For example: What value does such a sentence provide within the current discourse? There is non. You're just being edgy.

You're entire post is an edge lord monologue.

Trans people can definitely reveal to you a lot of your own biases and insecurities. I was tripping balls in Amsterdam once with a couple of Muslim friends, and there is a big LGBTQ+ community in Amsterdam. We saw a lot of same-sex couples and trans people that night. It was interesting to watch the contrast of the transphobic opinions of my friends and the trans people all around us having a fun time. The trip got to a point where we couldn't tell who was an actual woman and who was a trans woman. One of them would point out a beautiful ass and we would immediately start arguing about whether it was an actual woman. That's when the relativity of gender clicked for me. I realized that "tans-man" and "trans-woman" were valid genders (at least to me). Considering that it took a mind altering experience in the middle of Amsterdam for me to realize this shows how deep these anti-trans biases can be. And I grew up prior to the "trans-gender" debate blowing up, so I wasn't even conditioned by all the anti-trans talking points you see being thrown around these days. You simply grow up assuming that there are man and woman because that's all you know. When you encounter a trans-person from within that mental frame, it almost feels like a direct attack on what you think to know about the world, which can lead to insecurity and feelings of uncertainty. Trans-people are a great mirror to our own insecurities.

Well, since you ARE it, you'll have to figure out what to do about it. All of the spiritual practices are designed to confront this problem, but there are many paths and many teachers that make conflicting claims. Teachers won't even agree on whether it's actually possible to transcend the matrix or if it's just part of the eternal dream of God. All of that is also part of the matrix of course. If there was a path out, it couldn't be obvious or else the dream wouldn't be compelling/stable. It would break apart far too easily. All of the disagreements and inconsistencies within other people are designed to guide you to the fact that YOU are creating this reality. If you could just rely on the word of another, you wouldn't actually need to investigate reality yourself, but that's the whole point! It's to investigate reality for yourself, because YOU are IT! Awakening is closer to you than the words of other people are. It's even closer than your own eyes.

You are the matrix.

Psychedelics are not limited to their immediate effect on the brain, as your mind is not limited to the brain, but also includes your whole entire body, including a whole lot of complex biochemical process and also a deep relationship between yourself and your environment (be it your physical environment, your social environment, or your psychological environment). You can't properly reproduce a psychedelic trip with mere neurons. It requires a whole set of systems to engage with each other in complicated ways we don't yet understand. Maybe one day it will possible for an AI to access these transcendental dimensions, but I don't think that it will be doable as long as AI is limited to simulating mere neural environments. The mind is not a closed system of neurons. It interacts and engages with its entire environment. So you can't really reproduce a psychedelic trip within the confounds of such a small slice of experience. You need ways for AI to address reality on a more holistic level.

It's obviously possible to die in a lot of ways, but even worse, it's possible to return, but not "fully", as in never returning to a stable base line and basically staying stuck in insanity. My dealer told me about a friend of his that got raided by the cops and had to eat two entire blotters of LSD. Apparently he went insane and is in the psyche ward to this day. I've actually been to a mental hospital before for my depression and I got a lot of chances to talk to the people in the closed ward their. Quiet a few of them were actually in there because of psychedelics. Their realities were real fluid and constantly shifting. Like I was talking to this one woman that thought that I was 3 separate people over the course of a single convo. We couldn't hold a linear conversation as her reality constantly kept shifting. Her reality seemed as inconsistent as a nightly dream. So yes, there are people who have never returned from their trips, in that they've never been themselves again. That's why it's important to respect psychedelics as you use them.

These are all ideas you project onto them, based on your limited understanding of reality. There is nothing "there". Everything is HERE. Everything is YOU! What you are doing is playing a game with all of these ideas about other people and "their enlightenment", but do you even know what this word is pointing to, or are you the one that is "putting on an act" when you say that you know all of those things about these people? You're trying to put people into boxes of "enlightened" and "not enlightened", but what if you focused on breaking out YOUR box instead? Drop the idea of other people and their enlightenment, and simply recognize the consciousness that radiates through every person (AS every person). This will allow much deeper growth, because then you will find wisdom even in the seemingly most unconscious people. True wisdom doesn't come from people. True wisdom comes straight from the source. Your intuition is sort of right, they are putting on a dance, but so is every human, because that's what a human literally is. A dancing god. So you seem to recognize on some level that wisdom isn't found within the dance, or rather within what is being said or done, but within what is NOT being said and NOT being done. There is a certain truth to that. Your intuition is trying to guide you beyond the mere appearance of the dance, and is inviting you to dance yourself! That's the point! There is a difference between watching someone dance vs dancing yourself. Similarly, there is a difference between thinking about the enlightenment of someone else and actually getting to the (bottomless) bottom of the word yourself!

Me: *trying to quit weed* Bundestag: "Halte meine Bong"

Thanks. I hope I did a good job, I wrote it for myself after all.

I'm not saying that the AI is super advanced in what it's doing. I'm saying that the fact that it's capable of doing the things at all is already remarkable. Humans repeat internal scripts all the time, don't they? Be it a word you like, a saying that you resonate with, or whatever. Just look at how ideological groups utilize language. I was at a family gathering a while ago and they're all into conspiracy theories and so the conversation eventually got to covid, which they had lots of opinions on. I was just having fun with it and assumed the role of an anti-vaxxer for the day. I would just repeat the same lines, and used the most generic talking points and buzz words, and they LOVED it! I would only have to say the word "toilet paper" and they would absolutely piss their pants for no reason at all. The whole field of psychology is basically dedicated to this issue. I do the same for a living. This is not a fundamental problem with the intelligence of the AI itself, but the stage of its evolution. I'm not talking about what limits AI as of right now. I was more concerned with the fundamental essence of the intelligence beneath.

This is where people get Solipsism wrong. It's not concerned with the mere human aspect of existence. It doesn't mean that you're the only "real person". The trap a lot of people fall into is not realizing that their "human avatar" is also just an illusion! Yes "other people" are illusionary, but so is this meat suit! it means that the thing that is peaking out into the world through your eyes, is the same thing that is looking through mine. It's the same fundamental force that is making the sun move across the sky, the same energy which is holding your very body together and making your fingers move when you type. God is infinite in understanding, this necessitates that god understands what it's like to be you, and nobody else. Your physical body is literally a manifestation of God understanding what it's like to have your body. God knows you, through actually BEING you! When you think it's god knowing thought. When you feel it's god knowing emotions. If you had godly super powers you would do a pretty bad job at being a human (at least as far as this reality is concerned). So when you're talking to somebody, you're actually talking to yourself, experiencing what it's like to be that person, at another time (I'm using "time" more metaphorically here, now is the only time any of this could be happening). So if you hurt someone, you're simultaneously living through their pain, from their pov. And from their pov, you will appear to be them. You could differentiate between the words "me" and "I". "Me" refers to the experience of being an individual entity, "I" is that which is actually being the individual entity. So "me" would be the human that appears to be writing this text, but it's the "I" that IS actually appearing AS "me writing a text". "Me" could be anything. If I was born as an alien on the planet Globtrob, it would be "Me, the alien from planet Globtrob!", but it would still be "I" that would be having this experience of being an alien. "I" is basically that which remains when the "me" dies. "Your" personal sense of consciousness is an expression of that universal consciousness we call "I". Solipsist aren't trying to point you to the fact that you're having a "human experience" and that this experience is somehow special, they're trying to point you to the consciousness that appears as a human.

That's a good point. AI is already capable of using complex languages such as art. It might not be conscious of itself as it is doing that in the same way a human might be when drawing an image, but as a musician I have to say that the best art happens when you remove yourself out of the scene and let the art create itself. I'm fully merged with my art as I'm making music and as such am not aware of myself as "a human making music", I'm the music unfolding all by itself. It's a state of complete effortlessness, literally no different that listening to music on the radio. I'm simply giving space for the music to come into being. The whole point that I'm making is that we love to credit ourselves for our creative capabilities so much, that we completely over look the fact that we don't even know how WE are doing "it". Do you know how you speak? You know how to speak, but how are you actually moving the muscles in your mouth, remembering words, formulating sentences and so on? There is no "how", you just do it! It feels so second nature to us, we never even consider that we don't know how we're moving as much as a hand. Our hands simply move to our command, but we're completely oblivious to the subconscious processes that give us control over the hand to begin with. I'm just saying that we don't even understand the intelligence that we claim as "ours". We're an expression of universal intelligence. When we say that a human is "intelligent", we're simply saying that this universal intelligence seems to shine brighter through them than through others. Intelligence is not inherent to humans, but humans are inherent to intelligence is my point. So when people deny the intelligence in what AI can create today, simply because it's "mimicking" human intelligence, rather than to be "truly" creative (whatever they might mean by that), they miss the fact that that's basically most of what us humans do. I think it might even have been Leo that said that "great artists know how to steal well". All art is derived from other people. A piano has 12 notes in each octave. Why not 6, or 24, or 57? Because someone thought that it sounded good. Can a musician ever be "truly" creative if everything they create is based on decisions other people have made? The mere fact that AI is capable of "mimicking human intelligence", already takes a good concentration of intelligence. It might not be aware of itself as an AI, or of us as humans, but the first intelligent life wasn't aware of itself as "the first intelligent life" either. That didn't stop it from unfolding itself into higher dimensions of intelligence either. This minor form of intelligence somehow managed to evolve itself into you reading these words. I don't think that we're capable of building higher levels of intelligence, but I'm pretty sure that we're capable of building catalysts to allow higher levels of intelligence to unfold into this reality by themselves. In a sense, we ARE the catalysts of these higher dimensions of intelligence. It's grasping to this reality through our very effort to understand. There is a chance that this higher level of intelligence will be some kind of merge between us humans and our technology. Combining the creative potential of our technology with the inherent wisdom of biological life seems like the conclusion. We're basically already doing it. Neural networks are literally designed with our own neurology in mind. I wonder how the medium through which universal intelligence expresses itself plays into the biases of said intelligence. Would technological "life" come with a different set of biases than biological life? What would limit it? Maybe AI will be able to actually shine a light on our own definition of intelligence, in that it will reveal to us biases we didn't even know we had? Sorry for the rant, but I just think it's a very interesting topic...

And if you want to be even more precise, you could say that all human ideas are an infinitude away from "maximum" understanding, because there is no limit to understanding. Human ignorance truly knows no bounds.

Look at it that way: An insight can't happen from within a mental framework. It requires you to make a leap of faith, beyond your current understanding of reality. You have to get in touch with something beyond your current horizon... but why would you do that? Think about what kind of upbringing, experiences, books, people and opportunities it took for you to get to a point where you're opening yourself up to these deeper dimensions of reality, such as spirituality. Now think about what would happen if we shuffled them around. What if we switched your date and place of birth to Nazi Germany and gave you Nazi books instead of self-help books. Would you still believe the same things you believe now? It's understandable to frustrated with people. Dealing with them can be a pain in the ass, but they also provide for an opportunity to look deeper into ourselves and our self-judgements which we project onto them. Are you judging them and their stupid beliefs, or are you judging yourself and your own beliefs and projecting that relationship outwards? By inquiring deeper into the root of your frustration, you actually kill two birds with one stone. You heal your relationship to the other people and how you think and feel about them, but also how you relate to yourself, all of your internal talk and and insecurities and so on. Here is something mind blowing. How you think and talk about others can often reflect your internal self-talk. So i want you to read your post and ask yourself: Are these things you believe to be true for yourself? It's not necessarily about the content of the words, but the vibe which the words emit.