Jirh

Long-term partnership and attraction are two different things, almost opposites.

Security is not a joke. But to be fair, devastating bugs in code existed long before AI, and they killed large companies and businesses before. This has been the risk with software since the beginning. It's nothing new.

Is curiosity an issue?

Yes, but this just evades the question. It doesn't answer it. Non-duality is a great system of thinking in many areas. But it shouldn't be used to bypass deeply existential and philosophical questions. Something is clearly happening. It's not nothing.

There's a certain amount of stress and challenge that is healthy and ideal for growth. It's different for different people, but it's there. Too little makes you soft, and too much makes you hard. As a child, you want constant doses of mild to moderate stress and challenges. This build resilience and strength to handle more difficult situations as an adult.

It looks like there aren't real people with real lives anymore. Life of the ghosts. Everyone is glued to their phones, sucked into another world in another dimension, here but somewhere else, somehow. Obsessed with their online image, carefully crafting illusion after illusion, without any regards to their self-image. Chasing dopamine hits endlessly, until they're numb, so they increase the dose, and get even more numb. Elaborate games of manipulation, of deception of oneself and others. Losing everyone in the process. Fear is running the show. Deep insecurities. Increasingly so. Shallow and hollow. No depth, no reality underneath. Empty shells, perhaps attractive to the onlooker, but deeply disappointing where it matters. Deeply boring, too. Are people capable of genuine connection anymore? Are they even alive?! Prison of a different kind.

Truth is ugly. Beautiful truth is crazy. Sane beautiful truth is impossible.

The idea of this thread is that the doing itself is a manifestation of understanding and that it's enough proof of it. Whatever you can do, is something you actually understand, on some level. The ability to do something is a testimony of your understanding. Some people seem to disagree with this, but it's clear to me that it's true. It doesn't make logical sense, but it makes intuitive sense. It doesn't apply to everything in the universe equally, but it certainly does apply to some things. You can understand driving a car without learning how a car engine works. You don't need that knowledge to understand the act of driving. Once you're able to drive, you've understood driving, in whatever narrow sense that may be. The counter argument to this claim is that there's not much conscious conceptualization going on in learning how to drive a car. It's mostly subconscious. So it doesn't qualify as conceptual understanding. But that would be comparing apples with oranges. Because conceptual understanding is a field, and intuitive understanding is another. Both has advantages and limits, but they are not opposites. They complement each other. And that's what most people who disagree are probably missing. The more you learn about something, the more you understand it. And the more you practice it, the more you understand it too. I think it's nearly impossible to disagree with this.

True. But I bet they don't understand it.

I don't know about this specific issue, but generally when browsers show unusual behaviour, my first instinct is to do a hard refresh of the page. (Shift + F5)

Exactly! But it looks like this thread is targeted at a specific audience who are supposed to understand it. It's not a discussion. It's a lazy, vague, short, personal lecture.

Don't let it go. Don't you see how far it's gone away?!

Being is definitely one form of understanding (Feminine, instinctive, non-verbal, intuitive, unconscious). The other form is intellect (Masculine, learned, verbal, logical, conscious). Both forms are valid.

Sublime Text (Free use, with occasional reminders) SpaceSniffer Draw.io

I love you, man!

I think we can say birds understand flying instinctively or unconsciously, if that makes sense. Clearly, they don't understand it cognitively or consciously.

A reminder to whom? Seems like some context is missing and that this has some personal element to it.

I don't resonate with the idea of something and nothing being the same thing. There's absolutely some thing that appears to be. And it is "some" thing precisely because it can't be explained. If it could, it would have a name. The word God was used to explain away this some thing. But it added even more confusion. There's definitely something happening. What is it? And why is it? I have no idea.

Sweet is love. But love is hard.

Proud to be crazy. Crazy to be proud.

The problem isn't much about deriving truth from whichever source(s). It's more about assuming it needs to derived in the first place.

It is simply the deep, stable, and constant recognition that you are not the body, that the body belongs to you, but isn't you. That you are something beyond the body, beyond logic and the mind, and beyond any labels. It's the complete dis-identification from the human story and agenda, as in being separate from them by a space of awareness. In other words, it's the lack of enmeshment in life. There's an awareness that stands between you and the human. The human is related to you, it just isn't you. It's not the thought that says "I am not the body". It's the actual feeling of being something beyond. Life before enlightenment: You believe you are the body, you can't even question or doubt it. You are your human story and agenda. Life after enlightenment: Same on the outside, but completely different on the inside. However, this should not be confused with mental disorders such as depersonalization or derealization. These conditions are not enlightenment even though they share some characteristics. The major difference is that enlightenment comes from high awareness that's likely the result of proper practice, while those come from lack thereof.

A rock has no consciousness, and at the same time no ego. It makes sense because less ego means less distinctions, and less distinctions require less consciousness. So yes, spirituality is likely a higher form of ego. Everything alive has survival instincts, and they can be co-opted and occupied by ego (most clearly seen in humans), but these are not technically ego.

If I understand correctly, you are suggesting that form and formlessness are identical, or at least that the distinctions between them go away somehow. That is perhaps interesting, but does not explain why form is appearing in the way it is. In other words, it does not address the question: Why something rather than nothing? From my pov, there seems to be something out there (an objective world, a dream of some kind), and something inside here (a subjective witness, a dreamer). There seems to be something beyond the dream that is somehow actively generating it, or a formlessness that is generating form, including a consciousness (special kind of form) that sits between form and formlessness and connects them together. The distinction is still intact in my experience. There's just an added awareness that the body which seems to be a container of the "I" is not the "I" itself. You are suggesting that consciousness is the substance of the Self and that everything is the same consciousness in essence. I am interested to know the reasoning behind this correlation.

That is a deeply wrong and dangerous belief. Spiritual attainments are real and their benefits are real. You can stop suffering, you can find love, you can improve your life, these are all true statements that don't contradict spiritual advice. The only danger spirituality poses is to falsehood. A life that's built on lies will not even remain neutral, it won't just "do nothing for you". It will be undermined and threatened and ultimately unraveled by the truth. And I hear you that there are a lot of lies in people and in society, but there's also truth. That truth remains unshakeable, and it intensifies.