Confidence in oneself.
Inner knowing if what you are.
Knowing what you want.
Taking responsibility of life.
Being actively participating in life. Protecting.
Taking responsibility of others as well. Breaking barriers you have created for yourself.
Accepting reality, Accepting everything.
Being decisive.
I notice a lot of misconceptions when it comes to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders. I have a different perspective from most for several reasons. Firstly, my father was involved with a gang of child sex traffickers and I was one of the victims. Secondly, I have done a lot of research on criminology which is directly relevant to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders of all kinds. Thirdly, pedophilia is a subtype of preferential offenders which is disproportionately likely to have multiple victims. Most child molesters are not pedophiles and they have a diverse set of motives and psychological problems that lead to this kind of behavior without being inhuman monsters. Fourthly, empathy and compassion for perpetrators or victims cannot be cleanly separated for reasons I will explain. the core reason is that to vilify love and compassion for perpetrators is to indirectly shame child victims who cover for the parents that abuse them due to loving them, such that they feel their love makes them unacceptable and unworthy of life to the point of needing to kill themselves. Finally, empathy is not an excuse for harm. At minimum, cognitive empathy is necessary to inform prevention of violence and enable the protection of child victims by understanding what circumstances lead to victimization. You don't have to have warm feelings toward child molesters and you are allowed to be outraged at the harm they cause.
Relevant to this discussion is my past thread on deconstructing monster narratives.
In this thread, I mentioned incest perpetrators and parents who sexually offend against their own children. From the perspective of the parental perpetrator, they live in a distorted moral reality in which this type of love is appropriate for their child. They have all kinds of ideas about how this isn't harmful because harm comes from discovery rather than from the act. Sometimes they rationalize this behavior with cultural relativism, arguing that some cultures allowed incest, meaning the behavior isn't actually bad. The parent does not grasp the harm caused to the child because if they did then they would not be able to live with themselves, therefore the incest perpetrator must believe that the behavior is acceptable and the child can meaningfully consent. This pattern is common in parental offenders who are living a criminal lifestyle which corrupts their sense of what kind of love is appropriate, similar to what happened with my father. To clarify, most parental offenders are not pedophiles, but rather they are situational offenders who falsely believe that this kind of love is appropriate, which is technically distinct from pedophiles who are sexually attracted to children rather than having a distorted familial bond with inappropriate forms of love in it.
Given my research into criminology, this closely matches my father's behavior and actions while being relevant to recovery. This gets very unsettling and disturbing, but it is true nevertheless. My father showed several distorted means of attempting to bond and connect with me. Firstly, he was afraid of me thinking of him as a bad person, as ironic as that may sound. Because of this he needed to change the standard of what it meant to be loveable and desirable. He was so embedded in criminal life that he had no realistic exit without permanent life imprisonment. Therefore, he attempted to recast his behavior as gangster and badass such that he would seem desirable. This included boasting about his exploits of all kinds including death threats, drug deals, prostitution, and his relationship with my grandpa who he claimed had extensive involvement in his crimes.
My moral conscience was threatening to him such that he both wanted to change my perspective and part of him seems to have convinced himself that this was cool or an appropriate form of connection. The first incident involved my unwanted participation in drug deals. I was clearly heavy and upset with what had occurred, but my father cheerfully told me to "lighten up." He insisted that I was badass like him, but the violation of my values could not be ignored when I felt intense guilt and shame in response to these situations. I knew my father had done something wrong, but I never had the courage to tell anybody at least in part because I loved him. He also showed several patterns of grooming in that he wanted to keep the nature of our relationship a secret from others while using a lot of positive reinforcement.
My father also showed apparently genuine love in response to a situation with my mother and stepfather who were drug addicts. He appeared to both want my safety and to exploit my need for safety to get out of paying child support by using me to get dirt on Mom. This included his reminders that he was involved with a violent gang that would be willing to kill my stepfather, as if I could count on them for protection when in reality I was terrified of them and my father as well. I couldn't say these things to my father or other family members as doing so would jeopardize me further. The outcome is that parental perpetrators commonly don't realize the harm they are causing their children due to their implicit theory that a child would openly complain if they were unhappy. Similar to incest cases, the victim often appears to silently accept this kind of behavior due to coercive control which shares parallels with my case.
I detailed the trafficking incident in a separate document. The FBI expressed interest in my explanation of the evidence and how it connects to broader patterns in organized crime that often goes undetected. They said I do need a Bachelor's degree though to work in higher positions. I can post it in this thread too if necessary, but the necessary snippet is in the other thread for more context and evidentiary standards for these situations.
In terms of fathers who traffic their children out of love, this gets very fucked up, confusing, and disturbing. However, it matches my findings in criminology and maps onto all of the other patterns of my father. Part of why people join gangs is out of a sense of belonging that is being filled with a criminal group. Therefore, from this point of view, treating a child as if they belong to the gang is held as a form appropriate connection and love. This can include initiation through child prostitution in which the father is proud and excited for what is happening to his child. I was really baffled as to why my father was happy over all of this.
The overarching pattern in parental sex offenders is that they generally do not realize the harm they caused and they see their behavior as loving. They have a distorted sense of reality in which everything is perfectly fine such that their map of reality has the child's reality completely backwards as the child's behavior is interpreted through the distorted framework. This is often relevant for victims in recovery who feel that their feelings of love make them unacceptable.
One the inside as I stayed silent, my logic was as follows. By following this victim logic, it often leads victims of parental sex offenders to suicide.
1. My father did something unacceptable.
2. I silently accepted my father's unacceptable behavior.
3. My acceptance of that which is unacceptable makes me unacceptable.
4. Therefore, I am unacceptable.
This line of reasoning is often tied to survivor's guilt such as "I should have turned my father into the police" (who in reality were corrupt and possibly complicit) or "I should have protected others from my father" (even though I couldn't protect myself). These are the surface level should statements that victims use to blame themselves, but the deeper should is "It is wrong for me to love my father because of his actions, therefore I should cut myself off from love to prevent love from enabling harm." (therefore I should kill myself.) This is a common pattern in how victims of child sexual abuse think and it often leads to suicide because they feel that their love is unacceptable and they should remove themselves from love forever as a consequence. The belief is that if a child molester is unlovable, and your parent is a child molester, and you love your parent, and loving someone is supposed to be unlovable makes you unlovable, then the victim is unlovable. This is why it is important that we don't demonize compassion and love for perpetrators as it is connected directly into the victim logic leading to suicide. children often stay quiet and cover for abusers as a consequence of loving them in the secret relationship the perpetrator established through grooming.
There is also an important distinction between "accepting" as in endorsing or consenting to my father's behavior, and "accepting" as in having a freeze response as a survival instinct and therefore incurring the cost of my father's actions.
The alternative frame for victims would be as follows.
1. My father did something harmful.
2. I accepted the harm because of my desire for love.
3. The situation was logically acceptable by virtue of the fact that is was accepted.
4. Therefore I did not accept anything that was unacceptable.
5. Therefore I am acceptable by virtue of the fact that I exist and I desire to love and be loved.
6. None of this is an excuse for harm.
The core point to this connects to spirituality in several important ways. Firstly, ego is not defined just by an individual human being. The ego is relational and defined relative to other. Therefore, demonizing other beings who inform the ego identity translates into demonizing oneself, as the relational nature of ego makes self and other entangled in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. In my case, hating my father translates into hating myself because he isn't actually separate from me. The same logic applies to all human beings, animals, and objects in the universe as all of them are ultimately part of me. In that sense, I am the universe and everything in it. Self is defined relative to other within the universe and the distinction is untenable. At the same time from another point of view I am the universe experiencing itself from the point of view of a human being within the domain of separateness which itself is illusory and not separate from unity.
Leo takes this further by saying that I literally created the universe, not just that everything is connected. Oneness is deeper than just connectedness as would be the case for the relational nature of ego in which self and other cannot be cleanly separated. Either way, there is ultimately no difference between loving self and other though.
This is also crucial for forgiveness which applies even in some extreme severe cases.
1. My father hurt me to some extent out of ignorance in that he could not distinguish the harm caused from implicit theories linked to the distorted alternative reality.
2. My father hurt me out of weakness and fear such as his fear of being caught leading to threats of disownment combined with his inability to exit the criminal lifestyle without permanent imprisonment.
3. My father hurt me out of selfishness. (no shit)
4. My father hurt me out of a need for love from his son which he sought through criminal exploitation framed as inclusion, protection, belonging, and bad ass gangster identity while being severely traumatic to his son.
5. My father hurt me out of a lack of consciousness in that his dense ego was prone to severe distortions and self-deceptions such that it could spin entirely alternate realities in which the behavior was good and justified.
In the end of all of this, I hope you can see why empathy, love, and compassion for perpetrators ultimately ties back in to empathy for victims as the two cannot actually be cleanly separated due to the nature of ego, self, and other. Additionally, there is more complex information in terms of cognitive empathy for sex offenders that can be used to inform prevention. This includes situational / opportunistic offenders which are the most common, grievance based offenders such as intimate partners who rape and murder their victims, and preferential offenders which includes pedophiles who impact a disproportionate amount of victims as well as sadistic serial rapists / killers and zoophiles who rape animals believing it is an appropriate form of love. By understanding the different types of offenders and the psychological backgrounds, then at minimum it can be used to inform prevention, especially sense social isolation and feeling like an outsider in society is a common problem for criminals who might seek belonging from gangs instead. This is a big topic for discussion, but it is important for correcting the conflation between pedophiles and child sex offenders. The truth is more nuanced, and the truth is necessary for there to be any meaningful love as without truth, any love expressed is ultimately based on falsehood. In that sense it is like loving nothing.
This was kind of heavy for me to type, but I hope you find value in this kind of work. In my case it also relates to abuse from my sister who likes to weaponize my trauma around my father against me by insisting he was "loving and caring like a father" while knowing the harm he caused me. Forgiveness in this context does weaken my sister's ability to weaponize this trauma.
Perhaps the next question would be in regards to child sex traffickers who are not the child's parent and who instead kidnap other children at airports to take them to the wrong plane, leading to a gang who turns them into sex slaves for profit. This empathy and love for offenders could be expanded on that front, but it seems more difficult in some ways. I have a hard time with sadistic offenders especially who torture their victims for sexual pleasure, including children which creates an alternative sexual motive for the assault aside from pedophilia.
You can see this in the case of Teal Swan. She had a lot of childhood trauma and her entire body of work is now about that. It's not wrong, but it is somewhat limiting to have your worldview revolve around trauma.
There cannot be a formula. You just need to want it bad enough, have a very open mind, and then roll up your sleeves and start doing research and experimentation.
Do lots of deep research and experiment until you eventually find the perfect thing.
You get what you care about.
If you care about money, you get money. If you care about sex, you get. If you care about fame, you get fame. And if you care about nothing, you get nothing.
I spend a lot of time explaining reality to myself. So by the time I have explained it to myself, explaining it to you guys is trivial.
I write a lot of bulleted lists and outlines of the key points for any question.
Whatever topic we are talking about or trying to answer, there is always a key question that is motivating it. For example, a question might be: What are all the limits of science? So I will focus on a core question like that, and then my mind will generate answers and I will write down a bulleted list. I don't write in long paragraphs, I write down the key insights. A key insight does not require a paragraph but a sentence. So I end up with long lists of key insights to any question. And then I spend a lot of time polishing and organizing the bullet points in the list, to create a good logical order to the points, because some points build on top of others and require coming first, and other points require coming last.
I also get lots of random insights throughout the day which don't pertain to any specific topic or question. I always write those down in a miscellaneous notes document. So I have thousands of pages of misc insights which I can always look over for inspiration or as the need occurs.
Organizing the insights into a logical sequence is the most time-consuming and laborious part of my work. Insights never come organized, you have to do the work to organize them.
My days are unstructured.
We can easily agree on the experience of chocolate because it's a tangible thing. The nature of experiences are not. With chocolate, we can point to the same object, confirm we're eating the same thing, compare notes with some confidence. "Infinite Love" has none of that.
Words cannot grasp experience of things in the abstract. So how can you know your experience of "infinite love" matches Leo's experience of it?
You can't, yet here you and many others are saying that you know EXACTLY what Leo means when he says "infinite love".
How do you know it was "infinite" and not just really big? Is it really big, "infinite" or boundless? These are different things.
For all I know, I've experienced it myself but never put a label on it, because I'm not gonna map Leo's labels to my own experiences - that would be a mistake.
I'm betting a high percentage of Leo's followers unquestioningly adopted the idea of "Alien Consciousness" as well. Saying things like "I can't wait to discover Alien Consciousness", as if they already know it's a real thing. Then, one day, you have a deep trip on 5meo and experience something that fits the label, then you show up on the forum talking about you know with 100% certainty you experienced Alien Consciousness.
"You'd know if you knew" is a great self-sealing epistemological bubble.
Concept introduced -> pre-accepted -> experience interpreted through concept -> reported as confirmation.
No different from religion and cults.
I'm not knocking anyone for making this error. I made it myself with Leo's work when I was younger.
I went from homeless for a month, to video game addict for 10 years. Couch surfed and mooched off others for 3/4 years. Unable to hold down a job of more than 1 day a week. Deep nihilism and black pill. Cut off family, burned bridges with everyone I know. Chronic weed night day, wake and bake 5 years.
Flunked University 3 times before I successfully earned a degree. Disregarded health to the extent I was landing in hospital frequently. Share housing until 33.
Now I run a construction business with my Dad, have enough for a house deposit. Searching now. Reconnected with family. Got a dog. Love the dog.
Did art, modelling and creativity all through. Hardcore spirituality put me straight, despite bad conditioning.
You can do it. I did it.
I am no one. Just some random chick who will live and die and love and end. To be forgotten. But life is just a beauty.
@Natasha Tori Maru I am more interested in the dude if he can take honest feedback in bed and not shrivel into mincey balls baby ego mode.
^^^ why can't people be brutally honesty anymore, I find almost nothing more attractive. Its the highest intimacy !
The biggest impact is the tone of your thoughts, and the tone of your inner voice and the tempo of your inner voice.
Right now you're reading this and you're reading it with a specific tone of voice, but you could choose any other tone of voice and rhythm and it would have a vastly different effect on your physiology.
Try reading while rhyming in a kind of child's game, or reading it whimsically as if to exaggerate the lows and highs for every word, or reading it with a loving tone of voice like a feminine voice. You could change your inner voice to be a womans voice.
There are a lot of studies where they analyzed people's inner voice, and they found that there's a huge correlation between inner voice and anxiety, level stress level levels, and the quality of the person's life.
And the thing is, this is fully controllable.
You could impersonate a highly loving, caring, gentle woman's voice, and you use only that as your inner voice to do all of your thinking contemplation or reading or daily operations.
Also, the rhythm of your inner voice place a huge role, if you start off with a whimsical rhythm, you quickly find that you'll enter into a play state and your whole physiology will change into a play physiology and it allows you to enter into the zone much easier.
Your inner voice directly correlates to how fluently you enter into the zone.
This is where mantras are actually useful, a mantra has a specific energy. If I say the word. "My love" internally, it invokes the vagus nerve and warms the solar plexus with good feelings. It's similar to the inner smile, simply smile internally, and you could feel it changing your physiology. There's also the word "control" which facilitates a pause for about 10 seconds, and then you could repeat that word to facilitate another pause and another resenting. Each of these words has an energy that directly affects a physiological response because there's associations you're making to all of these things.
All of your inner words, tempo are directly associated with your physiology.
And it could all be designed where you self explorer the correct tempo and we have operating and then you simply practised it until it becomes your default network.
You could read in "slow motion", it's all an act. But your body makes it real.
The simple formula for Success (Success meaning Happy, Healthy, Fulfilled within, and outwardly successful by doing what You want, when you want), is this.. First Establish Your BEING, you haven't done this at all it seems, BEINGNESS is I live NOW, ACCEPT NOW, and engage my Free Will by determining how I want to be within..
The above is the main reason why so called Successful ppl are really Failing in life by being miserable, and/or drug addicted or lost!
If You don't establish your BEINGNESS, and then just go out and DO or HAVE like You and most of us have done, you eventually end up suffering. In the beginning of DOING you feel okay, like "Hey I am going for IT, heading towards my Dream, I feel Good", and then You may actually get something out of it (HAVING), and this makes You feel a bit more better, but it doesn't last long, sooner or later You feel down again, because You haven't established Your BEING.
Do that first, then everything will work out fine, I am working on this right now..I have a job I do not like, it does make me angry and frustrated but I've established partly my BEINGNESS and those feelings of frustration and anger go away very quickly!!
Dude go out and do serious rigorous epistemological study. Once you have spent 10+ years learning stuff contrary to your worldview come back and preach Jesus to us all. You're living in your comfort bubble and aren't questioning anything seeing everything through your Jesus lense because it's safe and you don't have to deal with the difficulties of understanding life for what it really is. All this Jesus content is sickening honestly. Grow up.
This is the illusion and the very reveal that exposes the trap.
This is where the ground and the earth from which you stand is disregarded and you are swept of thy feet with an invisible power that never delivers, rather only provides a false mental bliss, no different than those who abuse psychedelics.
Here is the truth and words of Christ, your heart will reveal unto you what is true (by how it feels) in your being.
"Teach the people to work on the base of their beings,” he was
saying, in a voice that was like a chant. “You would like them to
have wings to fly, while in reality they have yet to find their feet.
If they do not recognize the Earth as the Mother who feeds them,
who nurses them, you may expect that they will spend their whole
lives desperately seeking my Father."
If we deny the Mother (the earth), we deny the very *medium* that allows the Father to be known. In essence, you cannot reach the Father without the Mother. The Divine is immanent in the earth and body; we experience God through life, matter, and presence.
This is more related to connection I think - you perceive you can attain happiness through the connection with a partner.
But in reality - it is the true connection with yourself you require that you cannot feel.
Once you connect with yourself, love springs from the seeds of experience shared with another. Without the neediness of thinking they can supply what we do not have. What ends up being created between - experience - is the font of love.
Stems from society telling us we are not enough. We need another to be whole. So you end up with broken pathological attached love being represented as the aim. They sell you something by creating a percieved lack. Insidious.
