Scholar

If God made the world impermanent so nothing could be seperated from God forever, then doesn't that mean that God denies some things from existing? In the "Understanding Impermanence", I haven't heard any metaphysical reasons for why reality must be permanent, rather it seems more like God intentionally created an impermanent world. If reality is impermanent necessarily for some logical reason, does that mean God is governed by logic? But what could possibly be that which limits God, if God is the ultimate? If God does limit Infinity, then how is Infinity to be understood? Does that mean God has preferences and biases? If not, what else would those things be? Does God only limit true permanence? For example, Infinity could be impermanent but still allow the emergence of forms of suffering and separation from God that could go on for trillion and trillions of years. Let's say humanity evolves technologically and we can create artificial consciousness that can sustain itself until the heat death of the universe, you can conceive that someone, either an individual or a government, might create a being that will experience ultimate pain for this long of a duration. If Infinity is Infinity, such experiences must exist infinitely. Even if they are not permanent, the existence of such experiences would make it hard to justify the existence of anything at all. Would God also prevent such forms of existence? But if that was true, where would he set the limit? Would he allow a form to be separated from God/in ultimate suffering for centillion years? Maybe sextillion years? Or a million years? It seems arbitary to set a limit. And if he does not set a limit, then it must be the case that there are forms which experience incomprehensible amounts of suffering for what from a human perspective would be indistinguishable from infinity. Or would you say it is biased of someone to consider that such experiences ought not exist? That they must exist because God's love must include all things?

I was in the same position. The problem and suffering you are facing now is the key to your liberation, it is a great gift you have received if you can recognize it for what it is. A challenge which, if you face, will lead to your freedom. I am not exaggerating. Firstly, you are uncreative because you are disconnected from your true self. You wanting to be an artist, you wanting to create great art, you wanting what IS to be anything other than what IS, is literally the reason for why you are uncreative. True creativity occurs spontaneously when your experience lacks resistance. As a left-brained, rationally minded person, the way your mind operates by default is by attempting to control the world through thinking. Every moment you are in this state, you are resisting the moment as it is and striving towards a "future moment". You are using the moment as a means to an end to actualize some sort of outcome. But the future literally does not exist. All that you will ever experience is this moment. Wanting something in the future means that you fundamentally want this moment to be something other than it is. This is resistance. Notice this right now. You never in your life ever experience "the future" or "the past". What you consider "the future" is literally just a thought. A thought that is occuring right here, in this moment. The same applies to the past. Here is the crux of the problem and why you suffer: You are trying to find your Self in the future, which is just a thought. So, you are trying to construct an identity out of a narrative of what you are. "I am a talented artist!" If your experience does not match that narrative, you suffer. The essential realization to take from this is the following: Your identity determines your suffering. If you didn't want to be an artist, if you wanted to be a computer scientist, you would be happy. You believe that your existence has to have a purpose. What exactly does that mean? It means that this moment right now, your experience as it is, has no value in and of itself, and has only value in relation to accomplishing some future goal. A future which is an illusion and does not exist. So your mind is completely conditioned to trivialize this moment, the moment in which every experience you will ever have will occur, and to value something that is completely ficticious. The process of art literally IS connecting to this moment, to not want it to be a certain thing, but to be immersed in it fully. The more you try to control this moment, the less free it can be. The left brained person struggles with this because they live in the realm of thinking. Thinking is fundamentally linear, it views the past as necessary for the present and the present as necessary for the future. It is constantly looking forward or backward. Looking at what is now has no "purpose" to the intellectual mind. But now is ALL you will ever get. Not only is it all you will ever get, it is your true nature. You are not an artist, you are not any narrative you will tell yourself. You are not a "low iq uncreative person". You are this moment, eternal, unbound. This unboundedness has given rise to all things. Your creativity is infinite. You just cannot recognize this because your ego has hijacked your nature. An artist literally is someone who escapes the bounds of identity. To make being an artist an identity is an oxymoron. The moment you would define yourself as an artist, it would mean you are defining yourself as a particular thing. The whole point of creativity is to be free. Which is precisely why your true nature is infinitely creative, because it is no particular thing at all. Life purpose is an egoic attachment. Egoic attachment is the opposite of true artistry, creativity. The moment you say your life purpose is to be a good artist, you have disconnected from your true nature, this very moment, your own being and essence, and instead attached your identity onto the constant narrative of the egoic mind. The part of your mind that wants to control, manipulate, resist. "Why am I living?" Why is anyone creating art? The whole point is that there is no purpose to it. It is a celebration, an immersion into what is. Into this moment, into your own nature. The purpose of dancing is to dance, the purpose of beauty is to be beautiful. And your purpose is to exist. Only once you realize the beauty of this, and are capable of celebrating this moment, your own nature, as it is, as it always will be, as it always has been, will you be a true artist. The notion that you could be a good or bad artist will be laughable to you once you realize. Only an ego could create such lies. Not only are you not an artist, what you consider your self is itself art. Art that is displayed on the screen of your true nature, which is this moment. Another, more meaningful way to frame this is this: You are not living right now. You are trapped in thinking, disconnected from the essence of life. Thinking is supposed to be a tool which you employ to solve problems in a targetted way, yet you reside every waking moment in them. You are immerse in them, which is why programming is so easy to you. All it is, is just conceptual thinking. This is not life. Life is when you are immersed in anything other than your thinking. If you want to connect to the process of art, you have to learn to live. Here is the practical solution: Listen to Eckhart Tolle and do exactly what he tells you to do. Do it every waking moment. Meditation is not something you do 20 minutes every day. Those 20 minutes of sitting down exist so you connect to your own nature, to this moment. You want to spent every waking our in that state. There is literally no other point in life. That is what life is, complete immersion in sense perception, and in the underlying invisible ground that is your true nature. When you are fully immersed in it, you will notice that you don't need an identity. When you accept thm moment for what it is (which is what immersion is) you don't need to be an artist, or do anything, to be completely at peace. Life itself is the purpose, everything else is just extra. You want to disidentify with your thoughts and emotions. What this means is that when a thought arises, notice it without getting caught up by it. When an emotion arises, like you feeling your life is purposeless, you allow that emotion to exist. If you resist it, you disconnect from the moment and therefore from your true nature. You allow the emotion to exist in you, fully immersing yourself in it without it rising into your head and taking control over your action and behavior. You do this always, every waking moment. When a thought comes and you notice you are taking it seriously, you think it is "important", you do the same. You take a step back, and you just let it fade away. And while doing all this you need to return your focus and attention to "the moment", to the container of your consciousness. You want to reside in that as much time as you can. It shouldn't be forceful, but simply relaxing into it. If you have no sense of "this moment" yet, you can simply focus on sense perceptions instead. Like the sounds you hear, the sights you see, the presence feeling in your body. You can arrive and connect to "the moment", to the "container" by putting your attention to that in which all of these experiences are occuring. The way it feels is like eternity. You sort of grasp what the moment is, that literally your entire life happened here, right now. It will feel like your birth happen right now, in this moment. "It was actually here that it happened!" No matter where you were, it was here, right now. A very visceral sense of this. "Here" and "Now" are there same thing. Time and location become illusiory. That's what eternity is. That's your true nature, you reside in that as much time as you can. From that position, you can act effortlessly, without resistance. Learning to not resist anything is fundamental. Every challenging emotion and thought ought to be considered a gift that allows you to transcend part of your egoic mind. The feeling of "I cannot live with myself" is essential to all of this. If you could live with yourself, your ego would have no reason to take the actions I described above. It wouldnt be motivated, the chance of liberation would basically be zero. The gift is that your ego cannot live with itself anymore, so the solution is to subdue it. The more this sense of "I cannot take this anymore, I CANT LIVE WITH MYSELF!" is, the more chances of liberation you actually have. If you do what I say, you will probably find yourself no longer suffering, in which case you will let your guard down again, because the motivating force to maintain high awareness will be gone. Then you go unconscious again, suffer, and the cycle continues. Ideally you will improve in each cycle. But you should garner a sense that life is about that moment. Being immersed in what is. That's the whole point, there will never be anything beyond it. When you are not in that moment, you are not actually living.

I am not sure if this is sarcastic but I would be careful with such assumptions. I have not achieved what would be considered traditional enlightenment, and I did not have an experience of God consciousness.

I want you to consider a few things before we continue this engagement: Consider the relevancy of bias in relation to animal exploitation. We live in a culture that normalizes speciesism and violence towards animals, and there is a sophisticated machinery around the rationalizations for why that exploitation is justified. Remember how before you identified as a vegan, you might have thoughtlessly accepted those rationalizations. You would have argued that eating meat is moral and necessary, and you would have defended the current cultural norm. Now it is blatantly obvious to you how biased those arguments is. I want you to keep an open mind to this being possibly the case with discrimination against consanguinamorous individuals, too. When we consider our own biases, we can ask questions like: "Could I be subject to certain biases that are culturally or even biologically reinforced? And could those biases distort my ethical thinking in a way that cause serious suffering or injustice to others?" How exactly do we know if we are biased or not? I think there are a few good measures of that: 1. Do we live in a culture which reinforces certain biases? 2. Do we make arguments that under scrutiny are inconsistent with our own moral values? Let us examine question the first question. Does society reinforce biases against incest? Almost every depiction in media surrounding consensual incest is profoundly negative. Usually individuals who participate in it are villains, morally depraved, highly dysfunctional or evil. Especially abrahamic religion has a long track record of demonizing incest. Not only that, but we seem to have an inherent negative predisposition towards incest resulting from evolutionary pressures. Positive depictions of incest are demonized and prohibited, and individuals who participate in such relationships in a healthy manner are never exposed to the public because of both the criminalization and the severe stigma. Given this is true, you should already be careful around how your mind might distort this issue. Let us move to question to and examine the arguments you have provided: Yes, but many things are normal. Xenophobia, misogyny, queerphobia, speciesism. Many of those are perfectly normal, which of course doesn't mean they are good. Be careful with conclusions like "Incest is taboo everywhere, that means there must be a good reason for it!". The reason might be that evolution simply reinforced a strong aversion against incest because of the effects of multigenerational inbreeding. The presence of the taboo itself might be driven more by that aversion than any functional reason. We don't need a taboo if we already have an aversion towards it, because the aversion itself is what fulfills the function on the population level. This is simply not true. Consensual incest is criminalized in most US states. Criminal prosecutions of consensual incest are rare, but still happen. Homosexuality was also not prosecuted often when it was criminalized. Proving private consensual acts is notoriously difficult. The harm of such laws however extend beyond prosecution, as individuals who live in such circumstances do live in fear of being caught. Usually individuals who are already marginalized in some manner have to worry that exposing their relationship will lead to criminal consequences. Additionally, anyone who does have children (even if they are not the result of incest), will be deprived of their parental rights if their relationship is exposed. This has the effect that individuals who find themselves in domestic abuse circumstances might fear reporting it to their family or authorities because exposing the abuse threatens to expose the relationship. Incest is a strict liability crime for both participants, if coercion cannot be proven. There was a case just a few years ago where a woman was arrested for incest after she gave birth and her doctor found the child was a result of close inbreeding during genetic testing. There is a few problems with this argument. Incest and Inbreeding are not the same act You can be in an incestuous relationship without ever having children or even risking to have children. Same-sex couples, couples who underwent sterilization, couples who are too old to procreate or couples who simply don't want children. You don't have to make incest taboo to make inbreeding taboo. And you certainly don't need to make all incestuous acts taboo, when children can only result from vaginal intercourse. A couple can be in a loving relationship without ever engaging in vaginal intercourse, or more specifically, unprotected vaginal intercourse. Inbreeding risks are not absolute risks This is important to note. Inbreeding risks are not absolute. Not all siblings have a substantially elevated risk of birth defects, it completely depends on their particular genetic make up. People can get tested to ascertain whether or not significantly harmful recessive gene alleles are present in both individuals. It is more likely that two siblings will have such matching recessive alleles, but not at all guaranteed. From the calculations I saw, around half of siblings will not even have a significantly elevated risk for this reason. There is no fundamental reason to treat consanguinamorous couples any different from other high risk groups. Inconsistency with how we treat other high risk groups This is where bias becomes pretty obvious. We simply do not treat any other high risk couples the way we treat consanguinamorous couples. People with conditions like Huntington's Disease and various other conditions are not prohibited from having children. Many people don't know this but the most common form of dwarfism is achondroplasia. If two individuals with achondroplasia have a child together, there is a 25% chance that child will suffer early fatality. Inbreeding does risk disabilities and even fatal afflictions, but even the risk of sibling inbreeding doesn't come close to matching that sort of risk. We are talking about a child who will live a life not worth living. Do we condemn people with dwarfism for being in relationships with each other? No, we don't even condemn them for having children. We even support them in their endeavors to have children via community education and things like reproductive counselling. We have deep respect even for people's reproductive choices, no matter how high the risk to the offspring is. Yet, a brother and sister who are in a relationship and don't even want to have children are treated as disgusting and extremely selfish? We don't even apply remotely the same amount of stigma to women who smoke and drink during pregnancy. Obviously irresponsible reproductive behavior is something that should be discouraged. But the idea that a high risk couple cannot engage in responsible reproduction, or simply choose not to reproduce, and must be shamed for the greater good of society, would be a fundamental violation of people's autonomy in any other case. In one case we have sympathy for and actively support the individuals, in the other we condemn them. Taboo is trivially unnecessary In the case of other high risk parents, we recognize that we don't need to enforce any form of stigma against such relationships because it is obvious to everyone that any parent already has every incentive to reduce the risk of disability or suffering to their future child. For this exact reason we also don't universally criminalize late term abortions. We employ education and medical guidance because we know that parents don't want their children to be disabled and suffer. That is sufficient to discourage individuals from engaging in irresponsible reproductive behavior. When people engage in inbreeding, in virtually all cases it is because the individuals involved were uneducated about the risks involved. We have an inbuilt aversion towards close-family inbreeding, which trivializes the need for a social taboo as well. The invisible harms of the taboo The taboo, on a societal level, discourages education around healthy consanguinamory. You don't need to teach people the risks of something nobody is supposed to engage in in the first place. On the other hand, the stigma (and laws) around incest makes it unlikely that couples do seek counselling from family, friends and medical experts. When there is a pregnancy, they might not inform the doctor of the nature of the pregnancy, which could be essential to preventing further harm. Taboos such as these lead to social isolation which becomes it's own vector for harmful behavior. We recognize this for drug users, teen pregnancies and so forth. Identity Problem The idea that it is actually immoral to give birth to a disabled child itself is hard to defend philosophically. It's not as straightforward as you would think to say that a couple who has a high risk of giving birth to a disabled child is actually harming that child. The alternative to that child being born is for it to not be born at all. Even individuals with significant disabilities tend to live lifes that they consider worth living. A woman who drinks alcohol is different because the child born with a disability in that case would otherwise have been born healthy. But even then we don't even apply an ounce of the stigma we apply to non-reproductive siblings who are in a romantic relationship. This does not translate to modernity. Royals engaged in forced arranged marriages to maintain positions of power and wealth. This lead to multigeneration inbreeding, which compounds risks significantly. Even in countries like Pakistan, the issue arises as a result of cultural norms and lack of education. Arranged/forced marriages, a culture that encourages marriages within extended families and no education around the risks of inbreeding. None of these are applicable to modern, western societies. This is simply demonstrably not the case. People had no awareness of the risks of inbreeding until fairly recently historically speaking. The bias against incest was driven by an instinctual aversion towards incest, which is driven by our evolutionary legacy. This instinctual aversion caused profound harm to individuals. In scandinavia even in early modernity the punishment for participating in incest was execution for everyone involved. A woman, or little girl, who was raped by her father in law would be executed with him because incest was considered such a profound violation of the natural order that all traces must be eradicated. It extended far beyond just closely blood related individuals. There is a deeply primitive aversion residing in us that erases our empathy towards those who violate the "sacred" order of family and replaces it with pure disgust and horror. Apparently, this aversion was necessary to keep our prehistoric ancestors from engaging in inbreeding, but that doesn't mean that the hallucinations that result from this feeling are justified or necessary. The aversion assert and reinforces itself culturally. Animals don't kill their fellow animals because they engage in incest. Inbreeding happens sometimes, must mostly is avoided. Humans however turn this aversion into a sacred order that must be maintained and protected, to avoid the corruption of the entire community. That is precisely the mythology you find across cultures. It's not a result of necessity, it's a result of primitive emotions guiding our actions and belief systems. I hope I demonstrated to you why this taboo does not make as perfect sense as it at first seems to make. But I also want you to consider how you trivialize the actual nature of this taboo. It isn't just people finding incest icky, or people disapproving and being judgemental. If a twin brother and sister engage in sex, or even identical twins, independent if they can have children or not, the degree of shame and stigma they face is basically equivalent to a child rapist. A woman could be guzzling down alcohol every day while pregnant and she would not face an ounce of the same stigma. And this is the truly perverse thing. Siblings who do end up in relationships tend to come from backgrounds of childhood adversity and marginalization. People who had neglectful or abusive parents, people who felt like outcasts in society. The guilt and shame they experience, the lack of mercy society has for them. And these individuals are then forced to live a life of complete social isolation because somehow we cannot come up with a more reasonable and targetted approach than blanket stigma against the relationship itself? Remember than these individuals had no choice in how they grew up, the feelings they developed for each other over the span of two decades being raised together. We have issues of enmeshment, codependency, trauma-shared bonding, coforming identities. I want you to notice that you probably never even considered any of what I just said. You don't care to mitigate their suffering, you already are steadfast in the idea that this taboo is necessary as it is. And actually, it isn't that bad. It's just a little bit of social disapproval, we don't even imprison people for it anymore in civilized countries like the US. Actually, the animals don't suffer that much when I buy free ranger meat. You know, we need meat to survive, every society in history consumed animal products. Society would collapse if we considered animals equal to ourselves. It would lead to people recognizing that animals death and suffering is unavoidable, and that would normalize the death and suffering of humans as well. Because we can't avoid killing animals and inflicting severe suffering on them completely. Society needs to consider animals inferior because we are not ready yet to adopt responsibility for all animals and give them actual rights. We need to consider non-human animals as inferior to us for practical reasons, otherwise people would have an existential crisis whenever they accidentally killed an animal. Having restricted identities is actually a very important thing. If you agree that the arguments you provided here are weak and not at all sufficient to justify the taboo in the way you claimed it was, before you move on to new arguments (preserving family roles, power dynamics, coercion risks etc), I want you to note that you did find this argument compelling. If to me the flaws of the arguments are so transparent, I suggest that it is not because I am more intelligent or even more informed, but because I don't share the same set of biases as you do.

That's not really the argument. Those who have an identity tied to being logical and ethically consistent, which to some degree most people do. However, see next point. Rational thinking is a tool deployed by identity. In this case, I pointed out how identity engaged in rationalization of it's own behavior. We don't really start with a set or ethical premises and then work out from that all conclusions that follow from that, and then abide by those rulesets. We constantly adjust our own moral rationalizations to fit moral intuitions (which are tied to identity). Of course, logic can be a great tool. I used logic to elucidate the process that has taken place here.

It seems to me like there is rationalization going on here. The obvious answer is that humans are selfish. The idea that we actually don't help starving people in another country with our money because otherwise the world wouldn't be worth living, or some other deeper philosophical reality about the nature of ethics, is I think kind of hilarious if you truly look at how absurd that actually sounds. No, you just don't want to be bothered to spent the money. It takes time, effort, sacrifice. Humans are driven by emotion, not reason, or philosophy, or the consequences of moral systems and principles. They don't see the suffering, they don't act on it. If you were sufficiently horrified by what is going on another country, you would be motivated to do something about it. Not because you realized the true nature of morality, but because for whatever reason your identity was tied to that thing and you were driven to act on it. There is no "ought" here. What seems to be happening actually is this: You have engaged in some moral thinking, and that lead you to the idea that there are people in deep suffering that you could help substantially with a fairly trivial sacrifice to your life. We live in a society where nobody will peer pressure you into actually donating that money, and you really don't feel like donating that money. But you also have enough ethical sensibility that you realize the choice that you are making: You are choosing to go to the cinema instead of saving another human beings life. And in your mind, a person who prioritizes their own, trivial pleasure (you could easily do something that doesn't cost money and have just as much fun as whatever you spent money on) over another human beings life and suffering, clearly cannot be a good person. Not only are they not a good person, they are a horrible person. But you are a good person, not a horrible person. So now here we go, we have to explain why it actually is not horrible to make this choice. In the end, no matter what you come up with, the reality will be: If it was your brother or sister who needed 100€ not to starve to death, or die by some horrible disease, you would immediately give them that money. There would be no question about it. You would never say "Well, who is to say I need to give my sister this money? Why ought I use 100€ to save her life? What would life be if nobody could enjoy art, music?". Everyone would know this is bullshit. You can enjoy life and music and everything else while still giving your sister 100€. You would help your sister because your identity is tied to your sister. Even if she lived on the other side of the planet you would still give her that 100€. You would be highly emotionally driven to do so. When we talk people in africa, they are an abstraction to you. You could sit down, watch videos, maybe even contact a person and befriend them from that region via the internet. And maybe your identity would get tied to them, or that issue in general. And then, you would be motivated to act, because your emotions drive you to do so. You are sensing an issue with the problem of identity in general. Expanding identity is burdensome. Even just loving your own family can be burdensome. When they suffer, you suffer. You feel obligated to help them if they are in need of it. "Feeling obligated", just means there is a strong emotion driving you towards that. Now, the more people you include into your identity, truly, the more burden you would have to carry. Everyone's suffering who is included into your identity becomes your suffering. Identity means self. So that is the reason why your psychology resists this idea. This is why identity is highly selective. Notice there is no morality here. Morality has a profoundly small role in actual human behavior.

But couldn't we say the same about incest? (I am drawing from a conversation we had some time ago) As long as society is capable of condemning and imprisoning two siblings who were abused by their parents, or rejected by society, and therefore developed a romantic relationship, that this kind of mentality will open the door to do the same to other sexual minorities? The reason why we do it is almost exclusively motivated by our emotional predispositions towards incest. By continuing to do so, and allowing bias to shape our evaluation of such acts, we also enable a paradigm that encourages moral thinking that is shaped by primitive emotions and allows for the stigmatization and persecution of innocent individuals. Valuing our preconceptions or feelings of disgust over the actual lives and suffering of other individuals. The response I remember was that "society is not yet ready to abandon incestophobia". But why is society ready to abandon speciesism? Why is it the case that in this instance, the lack of moral development is a hinderance to social development, but in the case of incest, the lack of moral development is actually something that is either independent, or even conducive, to social development?

He is repeating Leo. Leo has been on the "liberals are too soft to see the harsh realities of the world" train for a while now, including talking about how the death penalty is actually good. You guys need to watch out for your reactivity. Outrage and moral condemnation means your ego has been hijacked by the level of consciousness of society. You are getting pulled down, you aren't pulling anyone up. What you should do is learn what is happening. And while doing so, study how your own mind is reacting to the things you are exposing yourself to. Otherwise this discussions is just an extention of the internet brainrot. The whole point of the forum is elevation of consciousness, the conversation taking place here are on par with discussions taking place on social media. That's not good.

If you inspect in your own experience what "Realness" is, the sense that something is real, it essentially boils down to how impactful it is on your ego. When I had my first psychedelic trip using LSD, I tripped alone and had a panic attack before the trip even started. Throughout the trip, I was holding onto sanity. I quickly noticed as the trip intensified that my thoughts became terrifying. Each thought I have appeared to influence my entire reality, they came "too real". The thoughts themselves became profoundly intense, the only real thing at the time. I was terrified of a horror trip, so to avoid ending up in a hospital I tried to trip-sit myself by writing words down on a paper that would prevent me from drifting into a negative state. Each word I wrote completely consumed me, it became reality itself. Looking back at this experience, the question becomes, what exactly does it mean for something to become "more real", or "reality itself". It is very clear to me now that any sense of realness is something that is essentially illusiory. What realness actually is, what is "reality", simply means how influential an object of consciousness (any given experience, such as a thought, sense-impression and so forth) is to the ego. What is real essentially just means what is important to the ego, what influences it, what it focuses on, what consumes it. To understand this more deeply you can look at the nature of psychosis. The first time I heard it explained this way was by Dr K. Basically, Psychosis simply means that a mind takes it's thoughts to be real. What is the difference between a psychotic paranoia and a regular person? It's not actually the thoughts that fill the psychotic person. A regular person might walk across the street, and a thought might occur in their mind "What if this person wants to rob me?". The regulated person knows that this is just a thought, that there is a distinction between reality and that thought. They might not react to it at all, or get some anxiety, but eventually they realize "Well, I'm just being paranoid, it's just a thought.". To the psychotic person, the thought they have immediately becomes their reality. They do not recognize it as a thought, to the ego, it becomes total reality. So essentially, psychosis is a spectrum: The more you believe your own thoughts to be real, the more psychotic you are. If you recognize the unrealness of all thoughts, you would be totally free of psychosis. This is why ego death reveals that reality is an illusion, a dream. The word illusion in this sense is meaningless in and of itself, it simply means that the content of consciousness has no impact on the ego, because the ego no longer exists. It is as unreal as a dream, not because it loses it's Isness, but simply because it isn't important to the ego. A dream is an experience which holds no importance to the ego once it realizes it had no relevancy to it's survival. Dream just means "It's not relevant to my survival.". Redness doesn't stop to exist, or be any less real than it was before, it just means there is no ego to take it seriously, to prioritize it, to assert it to be part of itself. I invite you to truly inspect this idea of Reality, or "Realness". How does it make sense for something to be more or less real? And truly, if you inspect your sense of "realness", within your own experience, what is it truly? If you take psychedelics and have an impactful experience, it is no accident that the most real thing you will end up asserting to exist happens to also be the most meaningful thing that exists for the ego. Meaningfulness just means something drives the ego, something is essential to the function of the ego. In this way, psychedelics induce psychosis in all those who consume it. If you end up with an ego at the end of that experience, you will have just amplified it's psychotic attachments to various thoughts and contents within itself. This is why psychotic people are indistinguishable from long term psychedelic users. If you trip, and you have the thought "I am an alien", that becomes your reality, your psychosis. And because consciousness can take on infinite forms, your ego can get psychotically attached to it in infinite ways. Notice that essentially, the meaningfulness of an experience is equal to the realness of an experience. I could put an electrode in your brain, stimulate the neural network that is responsible for attributing a sense of meaning to an object of consciousness, and you would come out of that experience saying "This thing is more real than anything I have ever experienced!". That just means it's more important to your ego than anything you ever experienced. That's why you start shitting and crying, because it overstimulates your egoic structures. Isness itself doesn't have degrees of reality to it. Isness just is, every other assertion is just more evidence of your psychosis.

Most humans aren't developed enough to grow a conscience knowing that hundreds of millions of individuals are tortured for their convenience in their own countries. This applies to you as much as it does to Netenyahu. Expecting the Israelies, under the given survival pressures, whether self caused or not, to behave any other way than they do, is simply ignorance and lack of acceptance of the reality of the human condition. It has nothing to do with moral failing. Morality doesn't exist, humans are predictable animals that will act according to the conditions they were raised in. All of you are like vegans screeching at meateaters for causing unnecessary suffering. But then you turn around and flop your meaty fingers at the judgemental activists who by your account only harm the their own cause with their immature behavior. This is in essence what Dave is. It's pure unconsciousness. You and Dave can't even stop a habit that would mildly inconvenience you to prevent someone from being put through literal torture. In fact, Dave would mock any vegan who would point this fact out to him. At least Destiny is an actual sociopath. He has an excuse to behave the way he does.

It depends on what you mean by real. I am speaking of a sense of realness any given person has, which is in essence completely removed from causative narratives within your experience, although of course correlated. But yes that is a psychosis, on both a psychological level and an existential level, because causation itself is an illusion.

Incest rape victims*

Not in the clinical sense, I was being a bit cheeky. He basically still hasn't properly distinguished thoughts from reality, or rather dissolved the illusiory sense of reality. I say this because it is transparent to how attached he gets to various thoughts he has about reality, or things like believing he was an alien and learned an alien language. Psychedelics tend to reinforce the confusion between thoughts and reality because the experiences are so intense the egoic sense of reality gets hijacked by it.

This is the opposite of true. Realness is a sensation that exists completely outside of the Isness of things. It's not a profound realization at all, it is psychosis. There is no you to give anything meaning and realness in the first place.

I don't know how the narrative emerged, but people tend to confuse awareness with egolessness. Both concepts are connected, but a being can be without ego can lack self-awareness, and a self-aware being can still have ego. An enlightened teacher can still act ignorantly even if he has attained a cessation of ego. Sure it's basically the survival apparatus of the mind, although when I talk about ego I refer specifically to the identity-forming parts of the mind. Really, it's just models to communicate the ideas, when I look in my own direct experience it becomes too complex to accurately describe.

This is the confusion that plagues these sorts of communities. You don't have to be without ego to realize what is happening within your own experience. I am aware of what my ego is doing, to the degree necessary to assert the claims I did. Being egoless will not fundamentally shift the awareness of what I speak of, it would just change the quality of this experience.

I just made a thread about this: What you are describing sounds like Derealization. Essentially, the core of your ego is still intact, but your ego has withdrawn itself from some parts of your consciousness to protect itself. This is very scary because now your ego is stuck with the reality of your thoughts, while viewing your sense-perception as unreal. It's basically the worst of both worlds. What you need to do is connect back to your sense-perception and step away from your own thoughts. Ideally you want to work with a professional because Derealization is quite a serious thing. It is called The Dark Night of the Soul in spiritual circles, although the term has been appropriated recently in the mainstream to basically just mean depression or other negative states. If your egoic structures unfold and dissolve in the wrong order, essentially, you can end up in states that create significant uncomfort such as your describe. Step away from Leo's content for now. You need to ground yourself in sense experience. Every word Leo utters is just a thought. It isn't reality, but your ego does take it to be reality. Doubting is a process of thinking, it essentially is delusional. Look at redness and simply realize it's Isness, it's indisputable existence. Sit down and try to think redness itself away with your thoughts. It will never happen. Yet, you can convince yourself that redness doesn't exist even if it's right there in your experience. That's psychotic, and unfortunately it is how the brain operates by default. Leo's content won't help you because he is trapped in psychosis himself.

A sad situation, Connor Murphy seemed to have the heart in the right place. And in his last interview he seemed to have been on a better path, although I still feel he was lost in some profound way that he was coping with. Yes, Leo is psychotic, and most psychedelic users will fall into the same trap because psychedelics have an ego-amplifying effect (which is indistinguishable from psychosis inducing, given both are the same thing). Psychosis just means that you confuse your own thoughts to be reality. And reality just means how important something is to your ego. I made a thread explaining this idea further:

Feminist did fail young men, if they had not, young men would now be healthy individuals who love feminism. If you want to be a progressive movement, you have to take responsibility for your failure in inclusion. You are the future, if you have failed to integrate young men into your movement, it is on your movement to correct that. Blaming men more will not help. Feminists already do, and young men are disgusted by it. Why would a young man listen to a feminist who blames them for all the problems in the world rather than an Andrew Tate type who will give them free reign and actually get them results in life. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, as sad as it is, give young men advice that gives them at least some results. Feminists do not do so, they are more interested in moralizing and intellectual circling jerking. Why do you have to repeat the mistakes of former institutions. Did shaming and blaming work out for Christianity in modernity? Nobody wants to be shamed, it doesn't work anymore because everyone can simply choose their ingroup on the internet. You can't stop patriarchy if you don't understand young men and boys. If your society has no resilience against people like Andrew Tate, there is something seriously wrong with your society. If you want men to act more responsibly, you have to integrate their identity into the collective. Shaming and blaming will not do anything. Imagine you were a mother and you treated your boy the way feminists treat boys. "You are to blame for everything, it's your responsibility! Don't be a disgusting pig!" This is pure toxicity. If you want your boy to be a good person who cares about others, you need to actually nurture those virtues in him in such a way that it becomes part of his identity in a positive way. You encourage him, you built his character. It takes a lot of work. You can't circumvent this work by just blaming the boy and shaming him for acting out.

Patriarchal society isn't built for men, it is built for a select few men. Most men are exploited by partiarchy just as much as women are, just in different ways. The various asymmetries that exist between men and women do not make it any more healthy to frame the issue the way you do. It doesn't help men to shame them, to blame patriarchy on them. It leads to resentment, it leads to us neglecting the help young men need to actually be functional members of society. Feminism has completely failed men, if it had not, people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson wouldn't exist. The approach you are suggesting has in my view proven itself to be ineffective.

As if anyone in our society would listen to an ex pornstar spiritual teacher. If someone did it, their career in porn was most likely anonymous. I mean even Leo keeps how he earned money before actualized.org a secret. I'm sure if you google around you will find some. The point wasn't that people will do an actual actualized.org 2.0, most youtubers also won't be doing that. The point is that you can still have a life purpose while being an OnlyFans model or a former model. The stigma makes it more difficult, but there are plenty examples of women transitioning into various meaningful things. I'm too lazy to provide examples, just ask ChatGPT and it will give you a list.

I don't believe it's healthy to make this about gender and exploitation. Human beings are animals, in the end, if you blame men, you blame individuals who have not be raised and educated correctly. A gooner in the end is a victim of a lack of proper integration of his sexuality because society doesn't even view that as an important part of raising a child. But sexuality is associated with so much shame (partly because we shame men for their lust and sexuality) that nobody is even capable of talking about these topics without it being extremely awkward to everyone involved. And the reason is because sexuality is viewed as inherently corrupt and shameful. It's the one of the reasons why sex-work can be traumatizing and damaging to women. Not because showing your naked body inherently is psychologically damage, but because the mental constructs society has built around sexuality affect women even if they are convinced they do not care. Just think of how absurd it is that we have so much concern for women and men in regards to their sexuality when the overall harms is almost entirely caused by actual exploitation and violation of peoples autonomy. The harm caused by the psychological effects of being a sex worker itself is minimal, negligable, if we compare it to something we consider completely trivial like obesity. TikTok alone is orders of magnitudes more harmful to people's psychology than consensual, online sex work is to women (even if it is done entirely for money or attention). People just obsess over the most sublte of negative psychological effects in regards to sexual acts, but then completely neglect things that actually destroy peoples lifes and health in irrevocable ways.

I am pretty sure there are more OnlyFans and Pornstar spiritual girls than there are spiritual girls working at walmart.

Another issue is that, the societal attitudes required to maintain the stigma that we apply to sex-workers like OnlyFans models (people calling the whores and whatever) already have a higher cost on consciousness/development than the sex-work has on those models. You are dehumanizing other people, shaming them, treating them cruelly. A society that just does this for some supposed utilitarian gain (in the end it's actually just motivated by ignorance and fear) is a society that is unconscious. A conscious society doesn't treat sex-workers like this, a conscious, mature society would view that as untenable. What is so perverse about society is that it the proposed mechanism of protection becomes the very mechanism that harms and dehumanizes the individuals who are framed as the victims. We have to maintain the purity of women, so we have to shame them for being promiscuous, because it's bad for their psychology to be promiscuous. But the solution is more harmful than the problem it tries to solve.

The point is: If an unconscious person did what you did, they would have as toxic consequences from that as an OnlyFans model. If a conscious person does what you did, they can achieve their life purpose that way. And the same is true for an OnlyFans model. If you are an attractive, conscious woman, then you can easily enable your life-purpose, including actualized.org 2.0, with an initial career on OnlyFans.