Carl-Richard

The brand thing was not to imply it was financially motivated. It was a cheeky way of saying that he found his calling. It plays to his strengths. It also just happens that it distinguished him from the larger non-duality sphere. "Psychedelic mysticism": it's not just non-duality, and it's not just psychonautics, but it's a weird hybrid. It allows him to have more authority on the subject, which would be useful if he was indeed motivated by the things you mentioned. Besides, you don't need an overt cult to get any of those things. If anything, it would be a good strategy to give his followers good reasons for why they're exactly not in a cult.

Back when Leo used to be based: What happened? Did he get sloppy with his language? Did he stop giving a fuck? Did 5-MeO fry his brain? Did he become AWAKE? Or did he conclude that he couldn't achieve persistent non-dual awareness and instead opted to remake his brand into psychedelic mysticism ("God-realization") and started shitting on classical non-duality, other spiritual teachers and Buddhism, effectively separating himself from the traditions that make these fine distinctions between awakening and solipsism? That's a rhetorical question. I wonder if that will be in Leo's biography

There is no individual thought, perception or feeling you can point to that encapsulates God. God is the totality, and you can only be the totality by being it. Mind can mean a lot of things. That is why I tend to literally state the distinctions I'm making (e.g. Infinite God vs. finite human) and qualify what I mean with examples (although in this case, I did that in another thread).

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If you're going to make distinctions, make good ones or don't make any. If you're going to help people, consider their needs and not just your own.

Yup.

You do use the term imagination though, right? Imagination and mind go together.

Mmm, God's infinite mind ≠ your finite human mind? ;D You can't think God, you can't perceive God, you can't feel God: you can only be God.

@LSD-Rumi I think an explanation is when you reduce something to something else. So all the examples I gave above are explanations, just different kinds. Another example would be "the sun rises because the Earth spins on its axis". Anyways, if you want to explain God, you would have to reduce God to something that is not God. But if God is everything that exists, then you can't reduce God to something that is not God, i.e. you can't explain God. There, I just explained how God can't be explained

I have always wondered if that could ever be explained in a satisfactory way. What I consider not a satisfactory explanation is "oh this is what the brain activity looks like when you see psychedelic visuals". Because that doesn't really tell you why you see what you see and not say pink elephants. But I also have no idea what a satisfactory explanation would look like.

Do you consider "the sun shines because of nuclear fusion" a logical argument or merely an assertion? What about "molecules consist of atoms" or "life is like a river"? Are these explanations?

What do you think an explanation is?

As long as you understand the difference between God's infinite mind and the finite human mind, that is most of the job done. Other words for God's infinite mind is reality, Consciousness, transpersonal consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, Qualia, awareness, emptiness. Other words for the finite human mind is the ego, thoughts and experiences, perception and cognition, feelings and sensations, private conscious inner life, personal mind, localization of consciousness.

But suffering and non-suffering, human and non-human, are dualities that don't even exist. Why are you denying the absolute? Just keep in mind that when you use the conviction in your own perspective to justify being an asshole to people who don't agree with you, you come off like the Westboro Baptist Church to those people.

@Yimpa Thanks Now you have no excuse to miss it

I would have to see the context in which that was said, but even on its own, this only goes to show that using the language of solipsism is highly ineffective for communicating the message, which is that everything is occuring within One transpersonal consciousness. When even people who have had mystical experiences are misunderstanding what is being said, that should tell you something. If you want to talk from the perspective of transpersonal consciousness, you firstly shouldn't talk at all, because that will be untruth. Secondly, it's not that others don't have a separate reality: it's that others don't even exist. "Others" is an arbitrary carving out of reality based on human biases and perceptions. From this perspective, suffering doesn't even occur, not even to "You", because "suffering" and "occurrence" is again an arbitrary carving out of reality. Now, if you want to skip these trite non-dual truism and want to concede to using concepts that can make sense of our human experience (like suffering), within that frame, you can start to introduce concepts like "others", "pain", "suffering". But then you also go beyond the idea that there is only One being, and therefore to make claims like "there is no other people that suffer, only me" is either to practice severely haphazard styles of communication (which is arguably what Leo is doing) or to actually confuse the two frames (which is what you seem to be doing). I know Leo doesn't care much about this, but some people do care about how words are being used and whether they carry cultural baggage that is bound to cause confusion, and two great examples are Rupert Spira and Bernardo Kastrup. Listen carefully to what they're saying when discussing how solipsism is distinct from idealism/non-duality and maybe you'll understand the distinction I just made above. 24:46

@Razard86 I've tried to unpack this many times, but all I can be bothered to say is that solipsism is a bad word to describe what Leo is describing. Try to not use such a culturally loaded term if you don't want people to misunderstand what you're saying. This fact and my request for you to tone down your flaming goes back to my previous post earlier today about miscommunication and not understanding someone's perspective. Instead of dropping such charged language as "lies, untruth", try to actually understand where the person is coming from, and try just a little to not make them feel bad. It's ugly how much inhumane behavior gets justified by this spiritual "holier than thou" attitude.

@Razard86 Stop making everything so god damn personal all the time. If you feel the need to make a point, do so respectfully. Think about it like this: if you have to go to the toilet, either do it discretely or keep it in. Don't just shit all over the floor and say "it had to be done".

Maybe he meant that images on a screen don't have a private conscious inner life (like biological organisms) or are meta-cognitively aware (like humans and maybe some animals), which you can make good cases for. The idea that "everything is consciousness" can be described by a different concept: phenomenal consciousness or transpersonal consciousness. Sometimes, thinking that someone is stupid is just a result of miscommunication or an inability to understand their perspective.

There is no worse trap than taking somebody's words as gospel and not discovering the answer for yourself. Find out why it's a supposedly a trap. Try to understand why Leo is saying what he is saying and see if it even makes sense to you.

Psychedelics don't get offended ?

Like I said, you can raise your consciousness and increase your ability to regulate your emotions. I remember when I was in the Rali cult, I would sometimes watch this video while trying to pour as much love into it as possible: It certainly had a powerful effect on my mental state. So that is definitely possible. But then the next day, I could be crying because I got a bad grade on a test despite trying very hard. These things are not mutually exclusive I can notice that some days, I'll be more conscious and I can "catch" an emotion as it occurs and consciously drop it, and it feels much better that way. But that is usually just for small annoyances like dropping something on the floor. When it comes to bigger things, you need much more stability to do that, and there is a danger in mistaking your ability to drop small annoyances for the ability to drop all emotions, while in reality you're unknowingly repressing an ongoing emotional response instead of working through it. That too I've experienced. So it's a tricky territory to navigate, and I'm just providing one perspective on how you can avoid these kinds of mistakes, and in this case, I'm focusing more on embracing the raw and maybe surface-level reality of the emotion rather than focusing on the subtle meta-levels, i.e. how emotions appear as pointers towards problems you need to solve, rather than how you can choose to drop emotions or create positive emotions for yourself.

It depends on what emotional issues you're talking about. Am I to blame for being brought up a certain way that created a lot of emotional issues? More no than yes. Am I to blame for not going enough out of my way to expose myself to new challenges and stagnating my emotional development? More yes than no.

That's not nice.

OMG why is this so good?