trenton

What if identifying with the ego was considered a mental illness which needed to be treated with psychedelics?

This issue is part of why I have a strong resistance to spiritual work. I have had my entire sense of reality undermined and it instilled me with a deep sense of fear. The main insight that I have been struggling with most is the deeper truth that reality is a dream, an illusion, or a hallucination. My entire sense of physical reality is a construction, and when I become deeply conscious it starts to have a destabilization effect. Sometimes this message is repeated to me in lucid dreams and when I look around the real physical room I get this sense of "This is a fucking dream! What the fuck!" This seems to be the deep extent of self-deception. It seems impossible because everything seems so real yet it is imaginary. This destabilization trauma can be traced back to childhood trauma. It was a sexual incident that happened when I was six, and it had a whole string of trauma responses which shaped the person I became. Part of the destabilization happened when I started lying to myself saying "it was just a nightmare." It was in this moment that I became conscious of my mind's capacity to deceive itself. It drew into question how deeply self-deceived I could possibly be. I started looking around the room with the fear that everything was a hallucination along with my entire life story being a fabrication and with my very existence being drawn into question. In response to this destabilization trauma, I tried to ground myself through a commitment to "truth." I came to believe that I could not love myself without accepting the truth of who I was. I therefore used relative truth as a smokescreen to hide from absolute truth. One example would be "it was not a dream" to ground myself in the face of the deeper truth that reality is a dream. I would go on to use various intellectualizations around which I formed my identity. I would be using relative truth as a crutch to hold onto my sense of reality. As I continued doing trauma work, I began letting go of various intellectualizations that I no longer need. I discovered time and time again that they were means of masking deeper pain even if they were true from a certain point of view. Maybe I cannot love myself so long as I am not conscious of my true nature as God and Love and clinging to material existence out of fear prevents me from awakening to Love. As I tried to use truth to ground myself, I became deeply philosophical. I would make many different theories about reality thinking I was being smart. I started off holding an absolutistic stance around the nature of reality which served to stabilize my sense of reality. As I continued exploring philosophy and truth, I eventually discovered relativism which reintroduced my destabilization. It seemed to imply that all meaning and purpose was relative and not transcendent, which reopened my struggle with meaninglessness. Moral relativism seems a bit scary at first, but it makes perfect sense. Yes its true that somebody could put a gun to my head and say "morality is relative." At the same time you can look all throughout history at religion being used to abdicate the moral high ground while justifying genocide because of the belief that that is what God wanted. I found this a bit destabilizing, but I eventually accepted it. If good and evil are defined relative to perspective or ideology, then it suggests that if Absolute Goodness existed, then it would need to be more foundational than moral judgement. This would need to start with being conscious enough to recognize that moral judgements are imaginary and that I am creating good and evil through imagining them into existence. The more difficult one was the relativity of truth. This undermined my entire sense of reality because it depended on the existence of absolute truth as a correct view or interpretation. This sounded like insanity at first. I eventually came to accept it through epistemic relativism and relativity in logic. Depending on the basic assumptions of any epistemic framework, it will lead to different conclusions which are then held as true. There are also different types of logic like formal logic instead of fuzzy logic. Depending on the situation or how different types of logic or epistemic frameworks are applied, you can reach different conclusions which are valid relative to the underlying framework of the sense making system. This is how I made sense of relative truth, and it suggests that if Absolute Truth exists, then it is more foundational any belief system or epistemic framework. I was actually wrestling with relativity around the same time I discovered Actualized.org. Part of the reason the mind gets stuck on relativism is because it is creating a false sense of acceptance by trying to ground a new sense of reality in the relative truth of relativity. Relativism as an ideology thus becomes an obstacle to deeper levels of consciousness necessary to see Absolute Truth which is more foundational than any perspective. Perhaps I would need to be conscious of how I am constructing true and false in order to make sense of things which would point me to the more foundational Truth. At the end of the relativity rabbit hole, it comes to the truth that reality is relative. For example, material existence is relative to the normal state of human consciousness, but at deeper levels of consciousness you can recognize the non-dual nature of reality and the deeper truth that reality is a hallucination with consciousness being more foundational than material existence. This is the deeper truth that relativism is pointing to, and I haven't fully integrated it because my body, mind, and being are resisting returning to this level of consciousness. There are also scientific reasons to support this radical degree of relativity such as time being relative. Ultimately my entire worldview and my entire sense of reality is relative to my degree of consciousness. As I looked at various spiritual books and started meditating, I eventually had another destabilizing experience. I was listening to an audiobook, Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. I listened to various insights and started experimenting with them throughout the book. I listened to it all day, while becoming more and more present. It started becoming a deeply pleasant and happy experience of just being present and existing. As I approached the end of the book, I did a deeper meditation which led to a destabilizing experience. It was like pure nothingness was the foundation of existence. Not only was I nothing, but so was everything else nothing. As pure nothingness, I was one with all of existence, making nothing and everything indistinguishable. As I realized that everything was nothing, I started to realize that reality was an illusion which undermined my entire sense of reality. I had never experienced this kind of consciousness before, and I have become afraid of meditation. According to some of the books I read about this, it takes some getting used to when you first start experiencing absolute nothingness. So these are my examples of destabilization trauma. I have come to realize that I have been using the relative truth of spiritual teachings as a smokescreen to prevent the realization of these deeper truths. I now realize that I don't need these intellectualizations which I commonly use as a defense mechanism in a variety of forms. As I healed various traumas, I let go of various intellectualizations and my mind has become increasingly peaceful and present. It still involves a lot of emotional labor because I am undoing the person I became in response to deep trauma. Currently I feel like I am being left with a sense of not knowing, but at the same time not needing to make intellectual schemes. This mental energy was a previous defense mechanism that I no longer need. They were masking pain. How do you guys suggest going about addressing destabilization trauma? I think this is critical for continuing spiritual work because sometimes it makes you feel like you are going insane.

I think this might be a good place to share my story. I once had a Christian therapist who started asking me about my spiritual beliefs. She started off by telling me that my explanation of good and evil was too complicated. I explained a meta perspective which accounts for moral relativism, suggests that evil is imaginary, and that goodness is deeper than morality. She didn't seem to be interested in understanding my spiritual beliefs and instead made various assumptions about how I conceive of God, Jesus, the Bible, and prayer. She later took a confrontational approach to me and started saying "how dare you try to control the future." She told me that my life wasn't working because I am not letting God run my life. She therefore told me that I needed to surrender to God and told me I needed to start praying. She pulled up a prayer about Jesus which I objected to. Jesus doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does a Christian. She ignored my objection and insisted that I pray to Jesus. I ended up freezing up and my mind went blank. I had a high sense of anxiety and hyper vigilance for the next three days. I didn't want to talk to people. This was supposed to be therapy. Why the hate against Christianity? Stuff like this.

@Lyubov Yes, the child is still part of this grand truth. In fact it is possible that everything about God and spirituality still stands as true. The problem is that although it may be true in the ultimate sense, People who begin doing spiritual work are often unaware of the unconscious forces that get them into spirituality in the first place. If these forces involve severe trauma, then spirituality quickly devolves into further layers of an ego identity which in turn masks the deeper pain, and thus prevents self discovery. I believe this is one of the reasons why spirituality fails for many people and why so many people fail to awaken. They could be chasing spirituality for their entire life hoping God realization will change their lives, but in reality they never realized that the reason they started seeking truth to begin with was actually to create an elaborate method of avoiding the truth. Thank you for recognizing my value as a human being. I know your life is probably just as complicated and probably involves suffering that you never fully expressed along with various confusions and contridictions. Whatever struggle you face, I hope you know you were always lovable too.

I am coming to the realization that my seeking of truth is fundamentally a self-deception designed to prevent me from true self discovery. This is common in people with trauma who try to find meaning, purpose, and healing through truth, God, love, and spirituality. So long as the pursuit of truth is a compensatory value based on trauma, it is not my genuine value. This kind of behavior started when I was six. What happened was my mom accused me of sexually abusing my sister. I lied badly. This led to a cascading effect of trauma responses. This included my fear of self-deception which was rooted in my mother making me feel like a terrible person in addition to lying. The trauma was so severe that it undermined my entire sense of reality. This is when I created a persona which revolved around seeking higher purpose and truth. These were not intrinsic values because they were imposed with the intent to rebuild a sense of self worth. In this process I isolated myself from others, convincing myself that love, connection, and relationships were either of low value or something that would fail to demonstrate the value of my existence. As I operated under the sense of valuing truth, I ended up creating a lot of defenses through intellectualization. This included the rationalizations for why incest is okay. I actually made countless intellectualizations designed to shield myself from underlying pain. Over the years this developed into using spirituality and philosophy as a source of further intellectualization. Therefore, although the point of spirituality is to discover the true self, for me these philosophies only served to obscure any genuine self discovery. This is likely the reason why people can work on this stuff for decades and get nowhere. I started to think about what my values might be if they were not truth, intelligence, God, or things of that nature. My intellectualization was never about truth. I know before the trauma I used to value love and connection. I felt that having a deep connection to someone gave me meaning and maybe it in a way validates my existence. I also held money as a high value. This makes sense because if I had 5 million dollars, then I would be free from the job I don't like which is sucking my life away. It makes sense then, that I can be looking for something that will make me money. I came to these realizations as I did a deeper dive into biology and its implications in psychology. What I discovered is that in a freeing, liberating sense, I am a normal human being. It helps me to view myself and others through a more compassionate lens, seeing how my struggle shaped me along with the realization that I suffer in a similar way through similar challenges to a lot of other normal people. The desire to prove myself exceptional or special was also a source of seeking self worth, which is also very human and normal. My mind continues to get more and more peaceful as I understand myself at deeper and deeper levels. In a sense the intellectual side of me was extremely helpful in driving me to seek this understanding. It drove me to research so much about a variety of topics in seeking freedom from my own inner chaos. I may continue to educate as needed, but I feel my mind slowing down significantly after processing this trauma linked to the beginning of my truth seeking. Perhaps true self discovery can finally begin for me. As it stands I have a lot of possible exploration in terms of what could fulfill me. Currently, I don't really know, but my childhood values points to the possibility of love being a source of fulfillment.

I finished watching the video. I agree that most of the arguments are bad, but there are a couple I find compelling. First, the perennial argument that points to many different cultures and religions. This argument was the reason I took spirituality and the possibility of God seriously. There was a lot of overlap between different cultures and it suggests that there is truth to it, but does not guarantee it. As I investigated spirituality, I learned about mystical experiences which also seems compelling. I did some consciousness work through different spiritual books and it triggered different states of consciousness. if my degree of consciousness had this much of an impact on how I see the universe, then it suggests that a radical degree of consciousness could show me absolute truth. Again, I am following the trail of bread crumbs. These arguments do not guarantee God from my point of view, but it makes it plausible enough to warrant investigation into consciousness work. As it stands God is a possibility to me and my intuition says God is real, but this comes without having had experiences of radical degrees of consciousness which I am pointing to.

@Emerald it was Carl Jung that said that. I have been reading about him to learn more about self love. In terms of the unlived life of my father and his father, they told me a lot about being good. My grandpa carried intense guilt and trauma because of his former involvement with gangs and his son ended up getting involved in gangs as well. When my grandpa told me to be good he was trying to steer me away from the path he went down which locked him out of many opportunities in life. My grandpa later stopped his life of crime but my father never stopped. The narrative they told me was one about redemption and breaking the cycle of criminality. This narrative holds parallels with how I think about life purpose. A big part of me seeking purpose has to do with redemption and what I believe is my fundamental lack of self worth. This is why I'm writing about self love. I automatically judge myself as evil despite having tons of evidence to the contrary. I'm trying to find a way to think about life purpose that does not involve redeeming myself for being inherently unworthy of love, and instead is built upon things that bring me joy. I am pretty much lost as to what that might be. For now the best I know is to keep seeking self knowledge and understanding. This serves to create inner harmony and self acceptance. I am also trying to undo the entire protective identity I formed in response to trauma. It likely masks my authentic values and the authentic self that was lost in the chaos. As for the unlived life of my mother I'm not sure what burden I might be carrying. She had children as a result of statutory rape from my father and had to drop out of high school. She said that raising kids forced her to think about someone other than herself. My mother is what I believe to be the source of my redemption narrative. She was the one who accused me of sexually abusing my sister when I was six which made me feel unworthy of love. This is when I started taking things like life purpose seriously to justify my existence rather than kill myself. Purpose is redemption in this context. I don't know what my mom most wanted out of life. Whatever it was it was probably sacrificed in favor of having kids and raising them as a single mother. She also struggled with bipolar disorder.

I had an important discovery recently that helped me recover from past relational trauma. I used to be mad at myself and see myself as weak and flawed because I loved my father. My father was a gangster involved in countless crimes including drug deals, extortion, and the sexual exploitation of minors. I blamed myself because I didn't turn him into the police which could have prevent him and his gang from hurting other people. Part of this is due to survivor's guilt from sex trafficking. Part of me says I somehow could have protected the innocent. I recently discovered that I had no conscious control over my love for my father. Bonding is based on many underlying biological processes which in turn strongly influence our surface feelings and thoughts. This is by design because evolution required children to form strong bonds with caretakers regardless of the immoral behavior involved. The result is that I easily rationalized that it was for the best that I don't turn my father into the police. This entire process was the result of unconscious forces beyond my control. It is therefore not fair to judge my moral character based on these factors. This helped me to stop the inner conflict I had with myself around loving someone evil. My new goal is now not to avoid loving other people for fear of exploitation. It is instead to design a more resilient form of love which does not blind me to the dark side of someone I love. This is hard to do because this is a fundamental tension between human biology and moral integrity. It is hard to not be compromised by these unconscious forces into aiding in evil even if inadvertently. This kind of phenomena can be seen not just in my relationship with my father but also in cases of domestic violence in which the victim loves the abuser too much and thus tolerates clear devilry. As I seek to build a more resilient from of love, I would like to better understand the biology behind different types of bonds. This includes men and women in romantic relationships, parents, fathers and their sons or daughters, mothers and their sons or daughters, siblings, humans and pets, and humans and objects. I want to know how these bonds are different based on the type of relationship and what kind of feelings and thoughts are likely to emerge as a consequence of biology. As I understand how bonds are formed I want to use this information to form more resilient love that is resistant to manipulation and evil. How do you resolve this fundamental tension between biology and morality? How should you handle the situation when someone you love is evil but your mind instinctively rationalizes and defends them as if they are extensions of yourself?

I am currently working on a book about self love. I finished my first draft for chapter 1 but I'm going to expand on the artworks and metaphors behind them. This chapter discusses how the mind constructs illusions through meaning, stories, emotional attachment, and so on. It ends with practical techniques for recognizing and breaking out of illusions. The first painting I used was " the treachery of images. " it is famous for "this is not a pipe." The metaphor behind it as understood in this chapter is that the mind creates images and models of reality but then mistakes those models for reality itself . In the context of self love this can be applied to what you believe about yourself, who you are, and what you are capable of. Your thoughts about what reality is ultimately blinds you so long as you are attached to a model, thought, or perspective. The mind gets lost in itself and its illusions. I have a drawing I'm going to make for this chapter to expand on this metaphor. I wanted to draw a hand reaching out of a black abyss and through a chaotic sea and into a white light in which the hand disappears and fades. This is how I think of the mind in terms of grappling with truth. There are many layers of meaning behind this image I want to make. Part of the meaning behind it is that seeking truth behind the domain of relativity leads to the mechanism by which truth is sought being deconstructed for it itself is a construction. The mind creates various lies and stories to try to grasp truth, but all of them ultimately collapse into nothing. The truth is too profound to be grasped through conventional thought and sense making. The ego is seeking freedom from itself and it is using mind to get there only for all of its illusions to fall apart. Do you know any other paintings or artworks that symbolize how the mind works and how it constructs illusions? There are many perspectives I could I use to expand on this and it should become a very interesting chapter. Thanks for any help.

I have recently learned that my sister plans to attend family therapy with me and my mom. This causes me such extreme fear and anxiety that it causes me nightmares, horrific sleep paralysis episodes, and a return of suicidal thoughts. I struggled to find ways to cope, resulting in me jumping between laughter and screaming while banging on objects. Once again I decided against cutting myself even though I was tempted to cut myself without suicidal intent. For the past several weeks I had a great peace of mind. I was preparing to move out and so was my sister. I had hope that for at least most of my life, I would not have to fear contact with her. My peace of mind depends on the news about my sister and her future relationship with me. Ideally I want to be in a position where I don't need her for anything and I can be free from her. My biggest fear about therapy is that not only am I going to have to talk about my emotions, but I also have to worry about my sister lying about past abuse to manipulate the situation. My mother and sister often put me in an impossible situation. On the surface they say they want me to open up about my feelings, but when I do it is met with backlash like a lot of yelling and cussing. When I stay silent they treat me like I'm the problem for not being willing to just talk things out. My sister then calls me childish for avoiding conflict even though she is not capable of handling conflict by just talking things out. They force me to bottle up intense emotions and then act like I'm the problem even when my trauma has been weaponized against me. The field of medicine and therapy have failed me. They told me that when I was ruminating on my family problems, it was a sign that something was wrong with me. They started giving me anti psychotic medicine which not only didn't work but also damaged my liver resulting in further medical complications. I have been doing everything I could to work on myself and be the best I could be despite my trauma. I took responsibility wherever I could and I have seen this approach to relationships with my sister backfire on me. My desire to be the better person will be capitalized on and exploited. The hospital failed to recognize the trauma responses and treated me as if I had mental disorders. My relationship with my family has significantly impacted my medical situation and my major life decisions. Unfortunately, the institutions I went to made me go back to living with them due to past suicidal thoughts. I want to protect myself from future harm. I fear that everything I say will be used against me and trigger retaliation like it previously has. There are so many potential problems with these meetings that need to be addressed. Any idea on how to handle this? Do you think trying to tough this out for the next few months will destabilize me further? I feel perfectly peaceful so long as I don't have to worry about my sister.

@Letho you have some good insights. Thank you. I guess I need to maintain that I don't want to talk to my sister even if the entire family treats me like I'm the problem for shutting down and not wanting to talk. They don't see her manipulation tactics so they tell me to forgive her even if she is not sorry and refuses to take responsibility.

I tried ifs buddy. I had some good insights. In this case we discussed the protector and I am now looking for other family members.

@Ulax I think I would like to try that with claude. I already had good results from analyzing my trauma responses. I have gained some excellent psychological insights by combining my ideas and art about self love with the knowledge of the ai. If I can't do it with claude, I will try ifschatbuddy if it's free.

@puporing I have a hard time with this Stockholm syndrome case with my father. He mixed abuse and manipulation with seemingly genuine care. It makes it hard for me to tell if he was a predatory psychopath or a bad father who actually did love me though. In this case my father was responsible for countless crimes including drug deals, gang violence, child support evasion, and the sexual exploitation of minors including my mom. He threatened to disown me if I told anybody about his crimes, thus manipulating me into becoming an accessory to crime. During this time he also put up a front of being deeply religious and moral, claiming the father son bond was sacred. He told me false stories about my grandpa before he died. This allowed my father to manipulate me through grief. The narrative he pushed was one of me breaking the cycle of criminality and carrying on the Hamann name. I could tell in many ways he was fake. This makes me question was his love also fake. In this case he wanted me to tell him about my mom's crimes so he could use that in court against her. Hence he told me I could always talk to him about anything that bothered me. This kind of behavior matches a psychopath. My father sometimes took me to deals with him including a sex trafficking deal. This is where his gang member offered dad money for me to spend the night with him. I was disturbed by being exposed to sexual predators but dad played it off as a joke after declining the deal. While all of this was going on I loved my father too much to turn him into the police. The happy memories I shared with him, if he were a psychopath, would be a strategy of long term grooming for exploitation. My love for my father therefore makes me weak and unable to protect myself and others. The reason I don't like my sister is because she intentionally weaponized this trauma around my father against me. During her outrage she told me all about how sad was loving and caring like a father according to my cousin. All of this was irrelevant and clearly with the intent to cause emotional harm. She now normalized this by making passing comments in casual conversation about dad while hiding behind layers of plausible deniability. This in turn allows her to triangulate other family members against me. I want nothing to do with my sister because of covert narcissistic abuse. @Letho you are right about my struggle with boundaries. I don't know how to handle this situation because any attempt I make will only cause more problems due to my sister's manipulation tactics. @puporing Do you think my love for my father could be Stockholm syndrome?

When I was in Highschool, I had a dream in which I met Jesus Christ. This being a dream means that all of this happening is me, so Jesus was me. I walked with Jesus through heaven until we came to a black abyss. Jesus told me that the abyss had within it unimaginable suffering. The suffering was so great that it would make me feel as though God had forsaken me when in fact he has not. Believing it would transform me for the better, I jumped into the abyss and embraced unimaginable suffering. Sometimes I make artwork inspired by this dream. I am including some of this art in my book about self love. Here is one of the pictures I was analyzing. https://photos.google.com/u/1/photo/AF1QipNqB9aGdpP_DsPS3D6cI-3KhgBWQwnrtbasTR0 I started writing about what the symbolism depicted in this picture was. It included a combination of psychological and spiritual symbols. I asked an AI how it would interpret this art and it suggested that there was a lot of similarities to Carl Jung. This is when I started reading about various concepts by Jung, and it recontextualized many of my deeply held beliefs about who I was. This reframing of my inner struggles and who I was may not be the God realization Leo talks about, but it does help with self love. Rather than seeing the abyss as a prison full of relentless suffering, I came to see the abyss as the unconscious. By attempting to escape from or defeat the monsters in it, I entrench myself in suffering. This creates a shadow and psychological wounds. Ultimately I am the abyss and all things in it. Jung also distinguishes between the ego and the self. When I tried to identify a sense of self, I usually identified with my present consciousness. This does not include the unconscious which included things which I was conflicted with. I think I have found a way to disidentify with the ego in a way that helps me love myself more. I just expanded how I define myself. It seems minor, but it is actually helpful. In addition to the abyss there is also a chaotic sea and a storm which represents what Jung called The Night Sea Journey. As the unconscious becomes conscious there is a chaotic period in which present structures within consciousness are dissolved so new ones can be built. At the end of the journey a more integrated self is discovered in the light which embraces the shadow rather than fights it. What do you think of this artwork and the symbolism behind it?

@Sincerity try this link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/apsMvaLmeCuqMkC58

I am making my own artwork that could be used to describe the mind. I tend to use a combination of Psychological and Spiritual symbolism often involving an abyss, blood, chaos, and a divine light. https://photos.google.com/u/1/photo/AF1QipNqB9aGdpP_DsPS3D6cI-3KhgBWQwnrtbasTR0 I can't get the picture posted in here directly, but here is the link. There are several layers of meaning behind it. Part of it is that the ego is seeking freedom from its own inner chaos and wounds. I tried to symbolize the domain of relativity and the domain of absolute, but it seems to be more strongly leaning on the psychological side rather than spiritual side. I'm not sure how else to draw relative and absolute truth. What do you think of this attempt?

@LastThursday thank you for the pictures. I will definitely want to read about the background behind these.

@LastThursday that sounds good. Do you know the names of any particular pieces or can you find the images?

@MsNobody thanks for saying what I was thinking. I just got done listening to Trump supporting go on for over an hour about various conspiracy theories including claims that January 6th was faked by the FBI. She isn't bothered that nobody elected Elon Musk to hijack all the government agencies, but she is bothered that the employees were not elected. She was adamant that illegal immigrants are horrible people raping and killing us. It's simply impossible to have a high quality and reasonable conversation about politics with these kinds of people.

I want to discuss Leo's approach to discussing things like selfishness. I see how his framework around spirituality might ultimately hold people back by perpetuating their suffering. This isn't just a problem with Leo, but potentially other spiritual teachers as well. Leo discusses selfishness frequently in his spiritual framework. It carries a negative connotation because it is closely related with how he describes evil or the devil. Although there may be some truth to the framework, the framework itself is still a problem which prevents people from ultimately letting of selfishness and ego. In fact framing selfishness as being closely related to evil can reinforce that which we are trying to transcend. For example, if I recognize that I am selfish in any context, the idea of selfishness itself carries with it the connotation which in turn carries judgement which in turn is more ego and selfishness. Seeing selfishness or the devil in this way places you in a war with yourself which is ultimately counter to higher consciousness. You might think that reducing selfishness requires removing judgement of selfishness and evil, but if this attempt itself is coming from a place of needing to fix to avoid being selfish, then it implies a problem or undesirability which still implies judgement. I'm having a hard time finding the right words to describe this situation. Although true that selfishness can keep someone stuck in lower levels of consciousness, the point of view that this is evil, devilry, or in some way undesirable, sets connotations associated with selfishness which in turn implies judgement which comes from a place of ego which therefore reinforces ego and maintains the illusion rather than dissolves it. Of course if these teachings involve people with mental illness or already terrible self esteem problems, then I imagine that the problem would be even worse for them despite their efforts to find any way possible to heal. I think there needs to be a different framework for spirituality besides technically correct frameworks which themselves serve to maintain unconsciousness through implied judgements. Maybe this can be amended through Leo's other teachings which have implications of traps in other teachings. For example, in the episode about being wrong he points out that beating yourself up for being wrong is itself wrong. Similarly, he mentioned things like excessive guilt which is not a resourceful emotion and can hold you back from actualizing your highest self. I would suppose the implied teaching is that to see yourself as evil for being selfish is a trap which maintains unconsciousness, but I see selfishness and evil being closely related in his framework. The reason I am discussing this is because I am writing a book about self-love and this paradox came up. So long as any form of spirituality comes from a place of fixing something that is wrong, then it ultimately withholds self-love by requiring being different. I am currently seeing spirituality as a process of discovery. It is as if having insights about external phenomenon is ultimately learning about myself. Perhaps it is because the mind tends to immediately contextualize information in terms of what it means for me. It is as if I change when look at things in a new way. Of course none of this is a license to murder people just to be clear.

@Breakingthewall This still sounds like the idea that one day selfish and evil people will get what they deserve like the just world fallacy. My father used to preach to me about how evil people would one day get what was coming to them as he read the bible to me. I'm not convinced that these types of people are horrified at what they have become. My understanding of karma is much more nuanced than the fancy dressed up way of saying selfish people will ultimately fail. I see karma as multi dimensional and not just as a moral calculus. I see it as multi generational with extremely complex consequences which cannot be clearly calculated. For example there can be karma from my family of criminals which created intergenerational trauma by creating a chaotic environment. Of course I ended up being hurt deeply without asking for any of this. Me being hurt without any fault of my own is a consequence of karma spanning across generations. It is not wrong or evil. Karma is impersonal even if it means innocent people get hurt because of it. Here is how my father described karma. "I am a good, honest drug dealer. I don't mix my drugs with rat poison. My crack is so good that my customers constantly come back looking for more. I end up making even more money off of this. This is a sign sent from God that I am a good person and what goes around comes around. God is rewarding me with more money and customers for this crack. I don't really believe in the devil, but I do believed that evil people will get what's coming to them."

@Leo Gura I think you might be making a mistake here. Can you walk me through how a 12 year old is supposed to protect himself from his father and his gang of sexual predators armed with guns? I'm not saying you should tolerate this abuse from others. I'm saying that some people are powerless and are forced to endure these sorts of things like being born into slavery for instance or being an infant abandoned by your mother as you die in a dumpster for being a rape baby. Perhaps you are referring to my silence which enabled this to continue. In my case it might sound shocking, but I loved my parents too much to turn them into the police. Sometimes I end up angry with myself for loving them which enabled several layers of complex manipulation. I find that I am able to forgive my father, but I am not able to forgive myself. Is this the sort of behavior you are referring to? Is it my selfishness of not caring enough about the other children to ensure the gang was brought to justice?

@Leo Gura I have three questions about your views on selfishness. First of all, you mention that excessive selfishness is self-defeating and only works in the short term. However, there are extremely devilish psychopaths like my father and his gang who often get away with their crimes and harming others for their own gain. For some of them they completely get away with things like molesting children by preying on the child's shame and silence. Some of them go their entire lives without any consequences. Therefore, when you say selfishness only works in the short term and ultimately fails because reality is fundamentally selfless, it starts to sound like a perversion of karma and the just world fallacy. What do you mean exactly when you say selfishness is short term and self-defeating if not that one day psychopaths will not be able to get away with horrific devilry? You probably mean something more nuanced than what I'm describing. Furthermore, if I must be selfish in order to survive at all, then does that mean that my existence is self-defeating because survival is temporary game? thirdly, I have a scenario I want you to consider. I want to see how you would apply your level of consciousness to this situation. Suppose your psychopathic father took you with him to make a deal with his gang. When you arrived a group of men started offering your father money to have you spend the night with them in exchange for sexual favors. In this situation you are a child and these men are sexually exploiting other minors. When I was in this situation I was terrified of these men and I thought they were evil. I ended up staying silent. How would you apply your level of consciousness if your father sold you to these sex traffickers in exchange for 600 dollars, allowing them to gang rape you?

If Cthulu does this to everyone, I think we could all gang up on him and threaten him back. We have the force of every military on the planet and the world leaders aren't going to sit ideally by as this monster terrorizes the entire globe with impending doom. Maybe I'm taking it too literally.