Carl-Richard

It's quite obvious actually.

There is really not. It's really only on this forum, purely a cultural artefact from Leo being edgy.

Go rate a sunset for me.

Depends where you draw the boundary.

It's not that there is some proof that somebody can give to you. People can point you in roughly the right direction, but it's hard to do with words, and they may end up sounding like a crazy person.

This is something I've mostly learned on my own but which is also in line with a concept called psychological flexibility. This actually happened to me today: I had planned to talk to a fellow student who needed help with something school-related. For some reason during the meeting, I felt a bit anxious and uncomfortable, and I felt that it made them feel the same way, and afterwards, I felt a mixture of depression and shame, which didn't seem to easily go away. The solution I've come up with is to ask myself "what is the lesson here?", write it down and commit to it, and then forgive myself. If you follow these steps properly, the emotions will quickly subside. If they don't, you probably didn't find the appropriate lesson or a lesson that you feel justifies forgiving yourself (or you just don't know how to forgive yourself generally). Anyways, we'll get to that later. So the method is simple, and if you teach yourself to do it regularly, you'll not only have an effective way of consciously processing your emotions, but you'll also fix the very cause of those emotions, something which spiritual bypassing very often doesn't do ("just let it go", "emotions are just an appearance", "nothing ultimately matters", etc.). I think there are legitimate uses for spiritual bypassing, but it should ideally be reserved for things you absolutely cannot change. Now, for the lesson in my example, I thought my feelings had to do with some negative thoughts prior to the meeting which I kind of just accepted and didn't challenge ("I'm not as well-rested as I could be, and that will impact the quality of the interaction"). I also thought it had to do with the place we were sitting and feeling like I had to lower my voice, cramming both our PCs on a tiny table and sitting awkwardly. So the lesson then became: 1. to identify negative frames and substitute them with positive frames before future meetings, and 2. try to optimize contextual factors when possible (e.g. "go to a different place where you can talk more freely and sit more comfortably"). Then, after being satisfied with the lesson, you forgive yourself for whatever that made you feel that way ("it's ok, you'll do better next time"). Often, the reason why the emotion persists and why you can't forgive yourself is because you're not attending to the problem that the emotion is trying to address (and your emotions aren't dumb: they're trying to show you something specific that you need to change; that is how they evolved). But if you're able to attend to it appropriately and you feel that this is intuitively true, you're signalling to yourself that the emotion has served its purpose, and then the emotion will most likely subside. This is more obvious for more basic emotions like anger: somebody repeatedly steps on your toe, and then anger arises to assert your need for bodily integrity and you push them out of the way. For more complex emotions, you need to be a bit more subtle when identifying a potential solution, but the mechanism is still the same: problem -> emotion arises -> solution -> emotion subsides. The method I presented above is just a tool for streamlining that process, and sometimes we need help with that, because life is indeed complex, certainly modern life. So to summarize: find the lesson behind the emotion, write it down and commit to it, and forgive yourself for whatever caused you to feel that way.

Release me

I'm so done with this forum ?

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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