@Emerald Machines represent the industrial complex that came with SD orange. Today’s humans are just wheels in the giant machine called civilization. It is inhumane and soul sucking. Go ask your regular 9-5’er. Civilization is like a basic soul sucking bitch. So in that sense AI will help people to leave their boring jobs and give them the opportunity to free their soul by doing spirituality in their free time. But most of them will use this opportunity to delve into the matrix (female world) even further by engaging in their addictions. Addictions is an interesting word in Turkish: it means addicted to matter(mother’s world). If one doesn’t have a strong animus, the pull of the anima is too strong and one gets sucked in the belly of the matrix(illusion that addiction will gratifying to the soul). In that sense the matrix is ever all-loving but ruthless, mechanical, beautiful, scary, unconscious and all-devouring. While the “patrix” is the opposite. 

The Skydiver’s Standard:
You don’t need to jump out of a plane to say skydiving looks dangerous.
That’s the heart of the Skydiver’s Standard — a rhetorical double standard where someone demands high-stakes, full-experience immersion before you're “qualified” to critique something, while they freely judge other things with little to no experience. "You can’t criticize gymnastics unless you've trained for years." "You can’t question a religion unless you've lived it for decades." "You can’t critique a political theory unless you’ve read all 2,000 pages of its founding texts." And yet, the same person feels perfectly comfortable making casual judgments about things they haven’t gone deep into. That’s the double standard. It’s selective gatekeeping — raising the bar for critique only when it protects their own views or identity, while lowering it everywhere else.
Examples in use:
“You're telling me I need to read the entire Bible before I can question anything about it — that's the Skydiver’s Standard.”
“She says I can’t have an opinion on contemporary art unless I’ve studied it for years, but she rants about video games all the time. Classic Skydiver’s Standard.”
“I don’t need to be a chef to know when food tastes bad. Stop using the Skydiver’s Standard to deflect.”
Why it matters:
People often get shut down in debates because they haven’t “done the work” — not just of being informed, but of being deeply initiated. The Skydiver’s Standard exposes how that bar is applied unevenly, depending on whose worldview is under scrutiny. It gives us a simple, powerful phrase to push back: “I can understand the risks, patterns, or flaws in something without fully living it.” We don’t have to jump out of a plane to know the dangers.
And remember, the Skydiver’s Standard is about proportional critique, not uninformed opinion. So as long as you're not using it to reject expertise, and instead using it to challenge inconsistent gatekeeping, you're encouraging fair, thoughtful discourse — not laziness.

@Leo GuraYou could say that I'm a leftist( I'm not) but I lived all my life among conservatives, and I tell you that conservatives are exactly the strawmaned stereotypes the left makes them to be. I perfectly understand them, all their behavior is with the intent to maximize survival, hoard as many material possessions, money, land and status. For them status within society trumps everything. As long as they are viewed as a upstanding successful Christian, they will kill and dominate whoever stands in their way to attain that status. I have yet to find a single good characteristic about conservatives! Discipline and hard work ain't conservative traits! Those are good survival traits, which plenty of leftists posses too! Other than that, the words that depict conservatives best is endless greed, devil like selfishness, not the slightest fucks given about the environment, animals or minorities or the weak. Smiles in your face but would kill you if they could get away with it if you have different opinions than them. 

The reply right before @Moksha from @OBEler has to be the one of the funniest things I’ve read on this forum, given the context of the situation.
But, yes, thank you @Moksha for your service!

"If you see meme material, make a juicy meme out of it"
                                                              - The Buddha
 
Introducing Leo's Infinity Tai Chi dance move:

@Serotoninluv Which NPC are you? NPC029390294013947383?

There's no such thing as wicked ideas here. You are grappling with one of the hardest aspects of reality. 
People can talk about life just being a game for God, life being experiences for God to enjoy, etc all they like, but at the end of the day it seems like a bit of a consolation to pretend that real suffering isn't happening to real people. Telling the people who are dying of cancer or starving in Yemen that "It's all just a big game for God to experience suffering" is first-world escapism at best. 
Yes, yes, there are no people, if they were enlightened they'd see it was a game... it all makes sense from within one particular framework of reality.
But let's temporarily entertain the idea that reality isn't just a big playhouse for God. What then? 
We come back to the Problem of Evil. Why would God (in whatever form) create a world in which some individuals have zero suffering, and others live and die in complete agony? 
Perhaps that's just how it is. The ripples of the Big Bang. The flow of nature. 
Which is why I withhold judgment or speculation about the "why" of things. It seems a bit too convenient to handwave it away by saying "Ah, but God is balance, so he made everything for himself to enjoy!" 

Romantic relationships
 What an amazing video by David. I still felt like I can have a Holy Relationship with a person, but he says that a Course is saying that God did not make bodies, and a Holy Relationship is a relationship with your Source, not with another body.

I definitely did not and still do not really want to let go of a fantasy of being in a relationship with a perfect, holy partner.
In another video, David said that you were close to enlightenment a few times, but were unable to let go of romantic relationships and so, remained stuck in the illusion. Like in Matrix, Neo can't really function without Trinity, it turns out that they are interconnected very deeply.
Even after almost a decade of separating from my love in this dream, I still dream about her every other night. The belief in being saved by love in a romantic relationship is so deep, it's probably the main thing that is keeping me stuck dreaming. If I completely let go of it, then there's nothing that I really want here. Most other things, like money, travel, cars, a nice house, falls away if I don't think I will ever have a perfect partner. I'm doing it all for her. It's pretty obvious now that a romantic relationship comes with many other things that can basically keep your attention on the illusion until the end of your life, and so God is forgotten, death happens again, and another cycle begins. 
However, I know for a fact that God exists and he is EXPLOSIVE AMAZING PERFECT TURBO QUATRO LOVE, so, actually, when comparing him to the "good" things of the world, there is no sacrifice. David says that ego believes in sacrifice -- uh oh, be careful, if you go with the Course all the way, then Jesus will ask you to let go not only of the bad parts of the illusion, but also the good ones - the weed, the sex, the games, the romance. 

But now when I think about it - are they really that good? They usually hurt me in some way or the other, they don't really give me the love that I want and in the end, stop me from experiencing the TURBO QUATRO ULTRA ETERNAL LOVE. 
Video games and shopping
I've just read Ken Wapnick answer a question on video games, as I play a lot of them, he said that yes, they are one of the things we use to keep God outside of our minds, but we have to be gentle with ourselves, as it might not be time to let it go.
He said how Helen used shopping to keep Jesus out of her mind, and she knew what she was doing it, so she did not judge herself for it, but finally, when she accepted the Love of God, she didn't need shopping anymore. 


Freedom of the Mind or "freedom" of the body?
 
J man comes right out and says it - what do you want - freedom of the Mind or freedom of the body? For both you CANNOT have. 

He also says that whenever you seek for pleasure through your body, you will eventually find pain. 
I feel like these two statements are central all throughout the Course. 
David said - we want something like the best of both worlds - we want the Spirit to be with us always, and we want amazing romantic relationships, pleasures of the body, and everything else the world has to offer. We want to mix Heaven and earth, but uh oh, that does not work. :{ 
He said that when you desire only Heaven, you get it, but when your desire is split, you get mixed results and don't. UH OH. THAT'S A BIGGGGGG ONEEEEEE.
All my desire? Wait a minute. You mean all of my desire, every moment of every day, just for GOD? wowzers J man, you asking for alot.