Scholar

@datamonster Infact, even my response falls into this trap in terms of the kind of language I used. Just notice it. "What I need to do instead is just Seeing it, not avoiding it, that's what I need to do!", your mind might think and feel. Now, notice that. Just observe it. That's all. Just let me See. Just let me See. Just let me See. When you see, you will come to see that Life itself is the ultimate Seeing. That there is nothing more to See.

No, this is infact the opposite of what you have to do. Your mind is so confused within it's morality that it cannot even recognize it anymore. You have once more created a judgement. What you need to do instead is to recognize when you use it as an excuse to be judgemental. You need to See it, not avoid it. If you wanted to avoid it, you wouldn't have created a World full of it. If you didn't want to suffer, suffering wouldn't exist. You are here precisely because you are supposed to See all of Creation.

You observe yourself being judgemental and be clear about you being judgemental. You will never stop being judgemental, if you were to become unjudgemental you would be a rock. Your job is not to stop being judgemental, your job is to clearly see your judgement, to see it for what it is. Meditation is not about stopping thinking, but clearly seeing it, not getting lost and absorbed by it. If you say "Man, I should stop being judgemental because that's low consciousness", that itself is judgemental. You haven't escaped judgement. It's like thinking about stopping to think. You will only further delude yourself if you attempt to do this. Instead, clearly observe the nature of judgement, let it flow through the lense of consciousness. This will change judgement, and maybe one day it shall be almost gone entirely. By clear Seeing, and by detached Awareness. Not by judging judgement. This is why the concept of low consciousness is a trap. It is the perfect way for your ego to trick itself. This is why you cannot observe high or low consciousness by the amount of judgement someone else has, or doesn't have. There are plenty of people around, on this forum, and in the spiritual community, to pride themselves to be non-judgemental whilst completely blind to what I am speaking of here. Don't forget, the Highest Consciousness is literally Hitler wanting to exterminate all jews. Your job is not to change content, but to See content. That is what meditation is about, about Clear Seeing. If your goal instead is to stop being judgemental, you are infact in a moral pursuit, not in a pursuit of Truth and Consciousness. This is fundamental to recognize. This will be true until you can clearly recognize how your judgement blinds you to the Truth. But by the time you see that, the answer to the question you have asked will have long revealed itself to you. If you stopped being judgemental, you would never come to truly see what Judgement is. This is why we must experience that which we seek to truly come to See.

This is an interesting video: He is very much like a small cult leader. He thinks murder and rape are natural and therefore aren't immoral. Somehow he brainwashed his girlfriend to believe the same. Apparently they have carnivore meet-ups, they get a sense of community from all of this. In the video there is this one guy that is not completely lost yet, and you can see him struggling a bit between his attachment to the community and the arguments. That's the kind of mind that is not yet beyond help, but most of the others are.

Look what I found: If his brain is dysfunctional due to neuroleptics then I would say that he has a mental illness, quite literally.

Nope, the guys eats raw meat. He was in a hospital multiple times due to malnutrition, infections caused by the raw meat etc. He is quite known in the vegan community for his insanity, he probably has some mental illness. Here he is eating 1 year old rotten meat.

This just popped up in my recommendations. Kind of shows how things degenerated in america. Bush was a complete clown back then, but I guess we didn't really know the full spectrum of insanity that could be the american presidency. Also, it will be interesting to compare this to how Trump will react if he loses. Even with someone like him being the leader, there was still prestige and respect around the title of presidency of the US. That's gone now. Biden will not change that, something died when Trump became president.

@Leo Gura But what about foreign actors? Is it not easier than ever before for foreign actors to influence ideologies across their own borders? China and Russia can directly influence the minds of americans. Make them so confused about reality, make them so angry at their own elites that they start to disintegrate the very institutions which uphold their own democracies. Why would foreign actors not do this? They can infact do this without worry for retaliation, because they are uniquely protected against this kind of warfare, due to control of information and journalism within their own countries. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/04/24/which-foreign-actors-have-most-gain-influencing-election/ Think about in 10 years, when china or russia might develope artificial intelligence that can on it's own accord replicate within the web and influence people in any way they please. Think about Russia and China creating their own platforms, their own silicon valley. They have already proven what they can do, and with their influence in the world increasing, how will the a western nation even protect itself against that? It seems like a limitation to our own democracy is almost necessary so as to protect the minds of the citizens against malicious and ignorant actors. I don't know if self-regulation will be enough, because the ideology is so prevelant it seems that we could have entirely new sectors of the economy opening up to the needs of those ideologies, further dividing the people, instead of unifying them. Don't forget, censorship only works when your platform is the only one around. Who is to say that Twitter, Google and and Facebook will remain nearly as dominant in the future?

What I worry about, and what seems to be relatively unique today, is that we are so protected from consequences that we don't experience them until the entire system basically fails. I mean what happens if you believe in flat earth or that elites are here to enslave us? People don't seem to have shame anymore, because they are growing away from stage blue, which means the primary way by which we have kept people in check is completely useless. What I also worry about is the way people handle consequences. I know people who I am very certain that if they got Covid19 and were literally dying from it, they would instead of admitting their fault, keep blaming the elites and tell me that they are being poisoned by the doctors. And most important, where will the sanity come from? Information is decentralized. In the past things might have been re-balanaced because the only major flow of information came from the established institutions. People can just keep reinforcing the idea that the suffering they are experiencing is not a consequence of their ignorance, but the consequence of the fact that they are awakening from the dream. That the elites are now doing everything in their power to stop the revolution. What I worry about is that the suffering will instead of leading to peace actually lead to more violence. Because once people suffer, they might be willing to go to war.

Leo what do you think about the future of the western nations? Do you think this will get worse or better over time? What are potential solutions to this that we can actually enact before some sort of critical mass is reached? Sometimes it seems to me like this could grow to become an actual threat to western societies if it continues the way it does. People live in such foreign realities that it's becoming less and less possible to actually have any kind of conversation that's based on common understanding.

Yeah I thought the same thing, am I missing something?

God's sense of humor.

Here is an easy way to make materialism look bad. Most materialist posit that Consciousness is the result of physical matter, more accurately a specific configuration of matter present in what we call the functioning brain. If the materialist doesn't deny consciousness altogether, which would be absurd in the first place, he will have a hard time to argue away this small, overlooked fact about his or her worldview. If we assume that a brain is unique in that it can give rise to consciousness, we basically have to admit the following. The universe started out as purely physical entity, nothing within it was akin to experience and consciousness. All that existed were physical motions, which over the span of billions of years gave rise to a lonely planet earth, which in all unlikelihood gave rise to physical motions so specific, so unique, that it would somehow give rise to a completely new substance unseen in the entirety of the universe. A substance unlike anything that has every existed before, a substance so foreign it cannot be even called substance. Consciousness was born, experience was born, because the wavefunction of the universe decided that this specific configuration was to give birth to that which might have never existed at all, and that which never existed anywhere else. This is so absurd, it's as if you were playing with your marbel set and then suddenly, just at the specific alignment of your marbels in the perfect and impossibly lucky way, a unicorn would emerge infront of you from nothingness. Not an usual unicorn that is, rather an interdimensional unicorn made from a substance existing nowhere else in the universe. A substance that is unlike anything the universe has ever held inside it. This is the current paradigm of western civilization, and everyone accepts it as if it was pure rationality, as if it was undeniable truth. As if any alternative was completely absurd and unthinkable. You live in a world in which the most sophisticated scientists believe in this absurdity. They think the universe is dead, void of consciousness, and that only matter ordained by the great, unconscious chaos of the universe to be worthy of giving rise to consciousness does so. It's interesting how the self-evident can be render to be obvious falsehood if you step aside and shift your perspective. The Truth is revealed not in one perspective, but rather in noticing that which remains between all perspectives. No Perspective is that which is contained within all perspectives. This is why shifting perspective is one of the most important tools to come to see truth. Not because the new perspective shows you what is true, but because the new perspectives shows you what has been so clearly falsehood. You shift your consciousness not to gain new knowledge, to see a deeper reality, but rather, so that that which you thought to be reality falls away, any only that which is True remains.

But hydrogen atoms didn't pop into existence from nothing at all, we can clearly explain why what was before hydrogen atoms came to become hydrogen atoms. There is no new substance suddenly existing in the universe. It's not like suddenly all this material popped into existence from nothing at all, it's more that the parts of the atoms finally decided to come together to form an atom. Emergent phenomena to the materialist aren't really emergent, it just means that something on a higher, more complex level is unlike what it is made out of viewed from a less complex level. For example the emergent wave is different from particles that make up the wave, but the wave is still made from the particles, and we can clearly understand the wave as nothing but an accumilitation of particles. This is fundamentally different from consciousness. Consciousness isn't made out of atoms, otherwise atoms would have to be experience, which the materialist would of course deny. And even more importantly, the emergent phenomena aren't non-physical. Notice that they all are physical in nature, they all decribe motion. Because fundamentally, we have come to understand the world through our perception of motion. So everything we can possibly capture to be real in the materialist framework must be reducable to motion. Everything is nothing but potential motion. The entire idea of materialism is to reduce everything to causal, physical states. Anything that seems emergent might only seem so because we have not yet come to understand the full causal link between the cause and the effect. Emergence is when a group of physical parts give, through their interaction, rise to a new behaviour not observed in the individual parts. There is nothing mysterious, nor non-physical about it, from the materialist POV. What is important is that we can clearly come to understand the emergent behaviour as nothing but the interaction of the parts. This is reductionism, meaning everything can be reduce to the behaviour of it's parts. I don't see how any of that can explain consciousness, so I think my initial critique still applies. Consciousness cannot be the sum of it's parts, because if it were, the parts would have to be consciousness. Much the parts of anything physical must be physical. It wouldn't make sense, from the materialist POV, to just have a magical switch into a new substance.

Watching the fall of an empire. It's interesting, Trump cannot really lose in these kinds of debates. He can deny everything, and usually only people already motivated against him will make the effort to check whether he is lying or not. Additionally he can play completely outside of the rules of decency, because he is Trump. He will not get damaged at all by disrupting Biden or arguing with a moderator. He can go for the lowest blows, and he was probably holding back for the future debates aswell. I think this is a perfect manifestation of the failure of the american political system. Your system is a relic of the past and you seem to have lost the ability to reform. It seems like your system is not equipped to handle 21st century market forces and technology.

Seems like Sadhguru already takes it for granted that they are here.

Another thing to consider is how it could be that our perceived duality between life vs technology ceases to apply to the beings at question. It could be that their vehicles aren't actually vehicles, but rather extended parts of their bodies and minds, and ultimately consciousness. The UFO could be part of the body of whatever is controlling the UFO. It could be that the surface of the UFO has receptors for all wavelengths of light, so it could be like a spherical eye that communicates information directly to the mind of the alien. Maybe the UFO itself is sensitive to hundreds and hundreds of different aspects of reality, expressed within the alien mind as hundreds of different perceptions. If we were to say that we have a 100 sense perceptions, the UFO could have millions. Even stranger is that the mind of the alien might be so organic and adaptive that it could experience different kinds of information expressed within different dimensions of perception. You know how some people can "see" music? It could be that a single kind of information, like for example different wave-lengths of light, could be expressed within the alien mind as thousands of different perceptions at once, all giving it different kinds of insights into the nature of what it is experiencing. I just want to hammer down the idea that the kind of mind we are talking about here could not even be remotely comparable to what a human mind is. It wouldn't be a brain, determined in it's structure and function. What you perceive to be an ultimate reality, is not an utlimate reality. Everything about you as a human being, about what you deem to be logical, possible, coherent, all of these things are biological limitations. Your perception of Self, your sense that there is a world, a universe, other entities, time and space, all of these might be confines which the mind of the alien is not subjugated by. What you think is self-evident and what is so mundane that you do not even notice it, that might be nothing but a limitation which an advanced organism might have long abandoned. By long I mean that they might have abandoned it millions and millions of years ago. So from a point which is already so foreign to us that we could not even imagine what it would be like, it could be that they have spend millions of years advancing and becoming more and more foreign.

Could be interesting to some of you:

I think we would not benefit whatsoever from shooting down the aliens, as I elaborated on in my previous posts. And I don't see any reason why I would need to point to a species more intelligent than us to call us primitive. I can use a hypothetical species to compare us to and call us primitive compared to that. I think there was more substance to what I said than just the semantics of what we can determined to be primitive or not, so it would be recommended to actually respond to the substance and meaning of my posts, not the particular words I used.

You are wrong. There are not some idiots, this is the very foundation of what it means to be a human. As a species, our desire to be with God, our desire for Love, is the best indicator of how primitive, undeveloped and childlike we are. To expect such a species to be given the ability to become gods among mortals is utterly absurd. The prerequisite for that kind of technology might be a mind that is conscious of the Love of God in every second of it's being, from it's creation to it's dissolution. A being that is in a 5-MeO-DMT state from the very conception of it's mind, a being that could operate from such a place with ease, not one that would completely break down crying in utter terror and joy. Any such species would look at us and see microorganism fighting desperately for survival, utterly ignorant of their place in this reality and where they are moving towards. I mean we are so primitive that we physically can barely take the Love of God. Our biology is so badly designed to embrace Love that we literally cannot operate if it gets dialed up enough. A species that has a million year old ego embedded in it's mind. Such a species cannot be given the ability to become gods among mortals. You have to grasp this, the mind of an ant might be closer to the mind of a human than the human mind is to that of an advanced alien. We might be so far removed, we might be so primitive, that we cannot even conceive of the kind of selflessness these beings can embrace completely effortless, because they have been design and made to do so, outside of the constraints of survival. We are our limitations, that is what makes us humans. Our evolutionary legacy is what makes us what we are.

Ask yourself honestly, and look at mankind. What do we want? Could a mind like ours be given technology that would give us reign over the entire universe? I don't think we could learn much from it other than understand what it possible. I think that technology might be so advanced, it might not even be manufactured. It might not even be technology, it could be so different that it would have to be classified as something else. Humans are exceedingly primitive. If you do not see that, I recommend studying your mind. I recommend studying your mind until you understand that if you were tortured enough, you would condemn all of your family, all of mankind, all beings in all of the universe to eternal suffering if it would eleviate that suffering. If you cannot see that, I don't even know if you are conscious enough to have this conversation at all. This is what your mind is, to go beyond this would mean to not have a human brain. If you cannot see the very limitations of your mind, how could you ever hope to look past them?

Give ants what they want? You should give them devices that kill all their competitor ants, that can enslave all other insects to serve their colonies, that give them the ability to procreate into infinity and subjugate all of reality so that more ants are created. Because that's what ants want, that's what they are made to want. Now ask yourself, what do humans want? What are we made to want?

The technology described seems to be so advanced, to assume that we can shoot such a thing down is to me quite unrealistic. From the speculation we are hearing, this thing might not even be travelling at all, instead it is pushing through space itself, sucking itself through it so to speak. It's not actually moving, in other words if you were to be inside that thing and it was moving with 10x speed of light, you wouldn't feel a thing. It would be as if you'd stand on a non-moving object. When it is moving through the air, it is not actually interacting with the air, which is why it doesn't seem to cause a sonic boom. It doesn't actually push any molecules while it is travelling, because it is not actually travelling. I don't understand the hypothetical physics of this, but I am not sure if it couldn't just fly through a wall. That's how advanced that technology might be. Also to think that giving us this kind of technology would be in any shape or form a good idea is very naive aswell. It would be like giving a bazooka to a chimp. Humans can barely keep up with the technology they themselves are creating, just think about if nuclear weapons had been invented a decade earlier, in another part of the world, like for example Nazi Germany. You don't try to teach a 4 year old to drive a car, the mind of the 4 year old is not ready. The same is true for us as mankind. We might not even be biologically capable of responsibly using that kind of technology. It might be that we will first need to actually change the structure of our brains and minds for us to deal with it on a larger scale. Don't forget, at some point technology might become so advanced that a single dysfunctional mind could annihilate all life on a planet. A single "school shooter" type could destroy all life on earth, if technology was advanced enough. This kind of dysfunctionality cannot even be given a chance to exist before a certain technological point has been reached. It cannot even be 1 out of a trillion people. It has to be a mind completely alien to ours, a mind that has no capacity for primitive desires like jealousy, hatred, fear and so forth. The fact that there are people who would ever shoot down an alien aircraft to gain an imaginary benefit is all the reason why the aliens would deem us far too immature to do so. They might deem us so unadvanced that giving us any kind of advanced technology would be like giving ants nuclear weapons. And equally, any technology that we might be given could be equally incomprehensible as a nuclear reactor is to an ant. A human mind might not even be capable of comprehend any type of understanding of how and what that technology is, or how it has been created. That's how advanced they could be. Don't forget, if a species reaches a certain level of development it might be capable of intelligently "evolving" a structure that gives rise to a mind that would not be created in trillions and trillions of years of natural evolution. The wisdom of nature and all it's organism would seem like a child building something out of legos.