Carl-Richard

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?

The alleged Leo quote in question was taken from one of his videos out of many 100s of videos, so I don't see why this should be reasonably different. I'm talking about Rupert Spira now. It's pretty much in your face.

I once posted a chain of 10+ videoes of Rupert Spira delegitimizing the concept of death. You can probably find something problematic in there if you dig for it. Anyways, I'm actually supportive of the idea of having all spiritual teachings under lock and key by carefully picked student-teacher relationships to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings. This postmodern Wild West era of spirituality is not good for anyone for a myriad of reasons.

There is more to spirituality than "death is an illusion". Existential topics like aging and death of loved ones touches on deep notions of self beyond the mere material.

Emotions often correlate with immediate external events, but often they don't (like when daydreaming), but the content of the emotion still addresses some externality, immediate or imagined. I guess when you're in a plane crash, you're handpicking which adrenaline molecules go into each cell in your body to generate panic? Generally speaking, emotions seem to correlate with circumstances, and it's possible to weaken that correlation (through raising your consciousness), but the correlation still exists.

I'm just pointing out how trying to single out Leo's use of communication in this instance as irresponsible compared to the larger sphere of non-duality is not well-founded.

@SeaMonster I think splitting hairs between grammatical cases is a bit of a stretch. Besides, you have people like Sadhguru and Osho who say the best thing you can do is to "die consciously", you have buddhists lighting themselves on fire and performing automummification, mahasamadhi, rainbow body. How is that for NLP?

I'm simply inquiring into the emotion and asking "what is the emotion for?", like you recommended in your previous post. Through that, I discover that emotions allocate attention and energy towards a particular goal. If that is inherently victimizing, then I guess it is, but then you're just as much a victim of your hand picking up a coffee mug, which sounds a bit silly.

Weed. I tried mixing it with alcohol, but I didn't like how it impacted my mind. I wasn't just trying to escape myself, but I was also deeply obsessed with existential questions, and weed fuels that in a particular way. It allows you to hyper-focus on your interests while also dissociating yourself from uncomfortable realities. It's a drug of distraction, meanwhile alcohol numbs everything pretty equally. You tend to suffer the same things over and over again. Your fears, anxieties, worries, insecurities; they're endlessly stuck on repeat. If they only occurred to you once, you wouldn't be suffering them anymore. On the other hand, pain is often due to something immediate or unexpected. It's more like a one-off thing, because you'll learn to avoid the source of the pain (although chronic pain is a bit different). I think you're thinking of choice as being 100% of your making, which is never really the case. But some things are more under your control than other things. There is a difference between being struck by lightening and sticking your fingers into a socket. Neither of them are either fully in your control or outside your control, but one is more than the other. Suffering is generally more in your control than being exposed to pain. Again, pain is very much a reflexive response generally to something unexpected, while suffering is something you're generally familiar with and which can be greatly reduced by making some conscious effort towards that.

Anxiety, substance abuse. Pain is more concrete and immediate, suffering is more abstract and cyclical. There are points to be made on both sides. There are many things largely outside your control, but some things can be said to be more under your control. For example, many substance addicts develop a self-destructive doom mindset: when things get hard, they revert to "fuck it, I don't care anyway" and it magnifies their problems 10x. A mindset like that is something you can change, and while it's not necessarily easy, it's a choice you can make. That doesn't mean it's 100% under your control. You can for example go to a therapist which will help you to make that choice.

I can talk as somebody who comes from a very privileged background in terms of material things, yet I've suffered a lot. Things tend to balance themselves out.

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@UnbornTao The very word "emotion" stems from being put in "motion", hence the expression of "being moved", and also "being motivated". Whether it's mostly a reactive or proactive emotion, it's still directed towards something, and this becomes very clear if you introspect about your emotions experientially. So I see a strong case to be made for the idea of an external cause or impetus for emotions. Now, you can be daydreaming about something and feel emotions based on that, which in that case, sure, you can't point to any immediate externalities (and it's just "created by you"), but still, the content of the emotion will direct your behavior towards something. Likewise, in a roleplay scenario, the emotions may be "manufactured", but if it's indeed an authentic experience of emotions, the emotions will still have directedness to them. You can also be highly conscious of your internal state and be better at adjusting your behavior with respect to emotions, while an unconscious person may linger more on the emotions or be wholly unaware of them and how they might be perpetuating them, but still, you'll unavoidably experience the directedness of emotions. I will also concede that you can be so very conscious to the point where emotions might seem almost non-existent or irrelevant from an outsider's perspective (as with some gurus or saints). But I would propose that these people are not "devoid" of emotion (or that they have decided to "not create emotions for themselves"), but rather that the intensity, duration and frequency of certain emotions is much lower compared to the average person. They still experience emotions, and the emotions still have directedness to them. My point with this topic is that often the directedness goes unaddressed and you're stuck with either wallowing in not feeling good and not finding a way out, or you find a way out but in a way that doesn't actually address the directedness and instead short-circuits it (like with "letting go" or many other spiritual approaches, or something like distraction or future avoidance of associated activities) which enables the emotion to keep repeating itself or become worse over time. And even if you are able to address the directness and the emotion subsides, merely writing down the lesson will firstly increase the chance that you'll remember it, and secondly, you'll have the lesson crystallized in text format.

It's not merely implied. It's evident in the emotion itself. If somebody steps on your toe and you get angry, you don't just "get angry". You get angry at the person who stepped on your toe. The emotion has a directedness to it; it allocates attention and energy towards a particular goal. For more complex emotions, it's often harder to identify the directedness, but it's there.

If I ever meet a non-duality person or Guraite person in real life, I'll be so bored.

Ignoring your human conditioning because "it doesn't exist" — that's spiritual bypassing.

If I could change one thing about this forum, it's the way solipsism is conflated with non-duality.

I watched that entire train wreck. I could somewhat understand Rollo if that tweet was actually not posted as a serious thing, but the thing I don't understand is why he can't just give his own definition of a high value man. He did it on another podcast from 7 months ago: "maximizes money, muscle and game".

I'll try to make myself more clear: If the emotion signals you to change your behavior in a way that is ultimately in line with your higher self, and you somehow manage to keep neglecting the signals using acceptance and mindfulness, that would be a form of spiritual bypassing. And again, relying on intuitive solutions can of course be sufficient, but also writing it down can amplify those solutions. There are competing forces within you, and your cognitive capacity is limited (memory, attention, etc.). Over a large sample of situations, sometimes the lower forces win, and sometimes you forget about prior solutions when faced with a situation where they're relevant. Writing it down provides you with a structure that crystallizes your commitment to your higher self. In that sense, merely relying on intuition could be more "spiritually bypass-y" than also relying on text, but that is of course stretching it (but also, intuition is just another tool just like text, so why limit yourself?). And I know I'm using the term in a very broad sense, but I think you can still follow it Damn that's some good stuff Ok I admit I'm very sloppy with my use of the term. There I was just thinking about it as neutralizing worldly matters by zooming out to a larger spiritual perspective. It's not a particularly scientific term with a strict definition, but I guess we're making process