axiom

I’ve done the hard and long work, but I still consider myself very lucky. Also unlucky. The drive that makes someone rich usually comes at the expense of other things.

Becoming rich is luck. It cannot be taught. Mensa is a society for socially awkward, high-functioning autistic types. I don’t know how people discovered his Mensa membership. Generally, you can’t overtly say “I’m a member of Mensa” without looking pretty silly, so if you want people to know about it, you have to pretend the info was leaked. All part of a carefully crafted image really.

In the UK this does not apply. Not sure about the US. I think that those of you suggesting all household income should be split equally should ask yourselves why. There are many situations in which a partner is unwilling to work, and unwilling to contribute very much in other ways. They think that their contribution is simply to exist. The providing partner will often stay in a situation like this for years even though it makes them miserable, because they hope that with enough encouragement (and eventually desperation) the parasite will realise that without sharing the workload, the host is going to die. Years roll by, and eventually the host is so energetically depleted and so miserable that they decide the only way they will survive is to divorce. … and then they have to divide everything 50/50. This makes marriage a little bit pointless in my opinion. The alternative is fairer to both parties - as they can only take away what they brought in. Over the coming years people are going to be suffering significant hardship. There may be war, but there will certainly be severe recession and relationships are going to be tested. The prospect of marriage will become increasingly risky for a person who has worked hard to build up resources, as losing 50% could quite literally mean the difference between life and death. Inflation in the UK is predicted now to reach over 18% next year. The hyperinflationary curve is only just beginning. People will be much more risk averse over the next decade.

Wealth can be shared during a relationship as an act of goodwill. That’s fine of course - it’s the right thing to do provided both partners show equal willingness to contribute. But there should be no entitlement to wealth after a relationship has ended - other than the wealth that was brought in to the relationship. Marriage does not protect both partners equally. It protects one partner asymmetrically - the one who brings in less and/or works less. I think marriage will no longer be a thing in 50 years or so.

Unless the woman in this scenario was forced to be a housewife, I'm not sure this stands. I think having a job and some independence (socially as well as financially) are important for self esteem and sanity. If the woman chooses to be a housewife even if the man would prefer that she works, then that's parasitic, and I see no reason he should have to be leached from during the relationship (let alone after it). Emotional support should be on both sides regardless. There is no reason a woman should be entitled to any of her (ex) husband's salary or savings simply because she has been emotionally supportive in a relationship. If she contributed financially, then that's a different matter of course.

Plenty of drama there.

@Razard86 Some talk about transcending the screen, but this isn’t a very popular idea as it sounds totally incoherent and absurd until it happens.

It was about the pointlessness of appending meaning to experience.

@Leo Gura You could compromise and hold a banana to your head.

@Holykael What are your favourite movies?

Total and absolute surrender to God - to yourself as God - to yourself as nothing - tends to happen when the ego has completely given up all hope. In a way, hopelessness is the long preparation and the ground for awakening. When you have been thoroughly chewed up and spat out by life, when you have faced all your demons, when you have experienced the worst of all suffering and can take NO MORE, you come finally - exhausted and crawling on your bloody knees - and you surrender. In a moment of enlightenment you are destroyed and liberated. God thereafter works through you unimpeded. Your life then becomes only about serving God. For some people it may happen more gently. It depends how much of a person is “in there” to begin with. The final showdown with the ego does tend to involve a lot of wailing and gnashing teeth however. It will burn up every last ounce of itself in its final moments. It’s a fight to the death for its survival.

@Holykael I think you’re generally correct. Being human and living in duality is a sort of hell. It may even be the hell referred to in holy books. It is nonetheless a temporary state. The ultimate destination of all humanity is enlightenment - a merging back into God - regardless of where any given human is on the path.

Some of the entity encounters on DMT lend credence to this idea also. And you may have heard of archons… If we consider the parasitic manipulations of insects, there are some distinct similarities. It’s not that the infected insects feel like they’ve gone mad - quite the contrary. They function almost entirely normally. It’s as if they’re experiencing a different yet entirely coherent reality in which it makes perfect sense for them to weave their webs in a different way. The DMT experience for humans also feels entirely real, crystalline and cohesive. Just different. Its a disturbing thought.

@puporing Some of the behavioural modifying effects of parasites are extraordinary. Here's a good one. If you ever see a weird looking spider's web, take a closer look at it, and you may find a wasp larva nestling in there somewhere. The wasp lays the egg on the spider's abdomen, where it matures into a larva unnoticed. At some point the larva punctures the spider's abdomen with tiny holes and injects it with a cocktail of mind-controlling chemicals. The spider thinks it's acting in its own best interests, but instead of making its usual-shaped web, it will construct an odd-looking web that is tailor-made to conceal the presence of the wasp lava from predators. As soon as the spider is done spinning, the larva sucks out all of the spider's insides and discards it, dropping it out of the web. It now has a comfortable environment to see it through its pupa stage, finally to emerge as a wasp. Trematode parasites control the minds of crabs. they even inhabit and take control of their eye stalks. It's all fairly hideous but fascinating. Massospora latches on to cicadas and injects them (or infuses them) with psilocybin, causing the cicadas to behave in various hyperactive and hypersexualised ways which allow the fungus to widely proliferate. Who knows that these things are doing really... we cannot begin to guess at all of the motivations when it comes to humans, but we cannot rule out that we are potentially being manipulated similarly.

Have you considered starting a paramilitary social movement?

They seem to have developed initially as tools of protection and manipulation employed by parasites, i.e. trematode worms, fungi or toxoplasma gondii. The latter has a high correlation with schizophrenia and risk-taking behaviour (it spits a behaviour-modifying chemical into human neurons, then moves on to other brain regions... repeat X 1000). "God realisation" may even itself be a parasitic manipulation... but we are not necessarily aware of those (?) who have set the trap.

Good. Now contemplate this deeply

@Razard86 Maybe you're identifying with your beliefs too strongly. Not knowing is the highest wisdom. Words are simply part of whatever is unfolding (with or without you).

So very familiar. It comes up unexpectedly. Driving a car, making a cup of coffee, just looking out of the window at the weather.

It’s not just fear, it’s also love and anxiety and a lot of other emotions mixed together. Actually it’s an emotion that is entirely unfamiliar - like seeing a new primary colour - and that’s what is frightening about it. There is some sense of dread in it. When you are awakening, it sporadically materialises to snap at your heels, to make your heart skip a beat, to make you panic. It is nothing other than the dying of self into God. It is lingering resistance.

@Razard86 The concept of Pratītyasamutpāda within Zen Buddhism covers this. It refers to dependent origination. One of the most popular meditative practices involves repeatedly asking the question "Who is aware?", i.e. : 1. You are aware of an object 2. You are aware of being aware of an object 3. You are aware of your awareness. This is where many people stop. They think they are "done", by abiding in awareness. They consider awareness to be the pure and perfect substrate, their real "self". But they are still in duality. You can go further: 4. Awareness of being aware of being aware of awareness. 5. Awareness of being aware of being aware of being aware of being aware of being aware of being aware of being aware... In other words, infinite regress. It is like Russell's Paradox: The set of all sets cannot contain itself, even though it too is a set. Thus unknowingly, in an effort to preserve its own separate existence, the ego has constructed this final duality, a final misapprehension. The boss at the end of the last level of the most difficult game. But this boss can be beaten. It can be collapsed. This rarely happens because the self wants to cling on, cling on, cling on. It will grab on to anything to avoid its obliteration - the tiniest blade of grass to prevent itself from falling off the cliff. When "awareness of" is completely gone, the final duality is collapsed. What is left is pure appearances, pure immediacy. No observer, no filter, no dualistic "being aware of being aware". No infinite regress. Just appearances. In and of themselves. This world of appearances is sometimes referred to as 'God'. But what is God? God too is just an appearance. An appearance out of and from nothing. God is nothing. This is enlightenment.

That’s because the sense of self is an energetic blockage, or a filter of sorts. When it is gone, whatever is left can function unencumbered… no longer weighed down, more streamlined, more in flow. As per your image, there is at least 3X less processing taking place

They haven't gone the whole way. Almost but not quite. Their point is that conscious experience (as we tend to think of it) is illusory, and that all qualia is actually physical - It's just physical matter being viewed / measured from different locations, from different frames of reference. This is very similar to what @RMQualtrough was describing above. They also claim that their model proves that frames of reference can be changed, i.e. the sense of inhabiting any particular body. It's very similar to what a pointer of true enlightenment might sound like. They're really damn close, but it's quite a surprise that they invoke physical matter, since that's not an idea that's really taken too seriously anymore - even by hard-nosed mainstream physicists. The talk these days is generally of quantum wave functions. Advaita suggests that it's not physical matter, nor wave functions, nor even consciousness. It is simply an appearance. Again, very similar to what @RMQualtrough describes here. Speaking of which, If you (RM) are still reading replies to your thread, I'm curious to know how you're doing now.

@Theory James Randi died in October 2020. No prizes on offer anymore sadly.

All squares are circles. It depends on who / what is looking.