Carl-Richard

@PurpleTree Why so many benches? Where are the bench press pics?

They use CO2 to make organic compounds (carbon-based compounds) for their bodies (it's their food), and when you burn them, you get some of that out again in the form of e.g. CO2 and CO. But you are smoking tobacco, you care about what's in the smoke.

You can't conceive of CO being a product from the combustion of a plant but you can conceive of CO2? CO is what happens when combustion of organic compounds happens without sufficient oxygen. CO2 is also a poisonous gas.

The trouble begins when you begin favoring any configuration of objects and forms over others, because you cannot ground such a move in the absolute. If solipsism claims "only these objects right here exist, any other objects that are not right here and could potentially be elsewhere, do not exist", you're outside the realm of the absolute. What is mistakenly labelled as "direct experience" by most solipsists is favoring a particular configuration of objects ("right here") over others (e.g. "not right here"). Had they instead treated direct experience as whatever exists before you try to divide reality into what is real and what is not real, then you're in line with the absolute.

Ok, so reality is absolute, reality is One, yes, but does that mean the objects you carve out on the screen of perception are absolute? Does you drawing a line in the sand and giving it a name make it absolute?

Ironically, objects are defined by things external to themselves, just like the internal world is defined by things external to it (the external world). In fact, the external world can be said to be an object to the internal world. So why can't the external world exist absolutely if objects exist absolutely? Nevertheless, you are invoking the same fundamentals for making an external world by invoking the existence of objects. You are invoking relativity. And the relative is not absolute. If not, find me the absolute boundary between the beach and the ocean. Subject and object are one, internal and external are one. Yet "there is no external world". So why not "there are no objects"? In both cases you are defining something external to yourself, external to what is already the case.

Why do objects exist and not exist at the same time, but the external world does definitely not exist?

It might also be his duty to act on his worry. There are smokers who quit and they manage to quit for good.

"The external world is real and unreal at the same time. I don't know how you don't know this lol"

You also say objects exist (as you said in a previous post). Objects are relative. They are defined by limitation. And when you say objects do not exist in an external world, you are imposing more limitations on those objects, which is also relative.

Think about this again (I made a slight edit that was more accurate and less likely to offend you):

I know you like Leo, and I know you just took some LSD, but said tongue in cheek, the world didn't come into existence yesterday, us "skeptics" have been following Leo for a long time, done a lot of LSD, even meditated quite a bit. Thinking differently about things is still possible despite that. So now, what is your thinking on the topic? You don't need to tell anymore that you had an experience. I can trust that you had.

I shoot Buddhas for a living. I think solipsism is more like materialism than idealism, partially by you being unwilling or unable to argue for your position, partially by it being, well, stuck in the relative rather than taking absolute reality for what it is.

The versions of idealism that are consistent with non-duality as the ultimate reality claim that whatever you perceive in your mind's eye is limited, while non-duality is unlimited. When you start claiming things about perception in your mind's eye, what it is, what its boundaries are, what its limitations are, you are outside the domain of non-duality and into the relative. In other words, solipsism is relative, not absolute. The absolute exists beyond all limitations, beyond any notion of a boundary, internal and external, it's all relative.

So solipsism is true and not true at the same time? The objects are there, they exist, but they also are not there, they don't exist, at the same time?

Does an object exist or is it a carving out that you do with your mind? Where does the beach end and the ocean begin?

Consciousness transcends forms, objects, perceptions, people, beings; illusion, Maya, the dance of Shakti. Consciousness transcends (and includes) the illusion.

There isn't much data on this though, or?

Where is Rupert Spira wrong here?:

You missed the important part of the sentence: routine. The more often you smoke weed and associate with masturbation and crackers rather than shamanistic rituals, the less consciousness expanding you should expect it to be. Also, I'm for legalizing weed, but in a civilized society, I'm for people keeping their psychotropic substances outside public areas. If not a law, there should the very least be a norm for keeping weed smoke far away from places where you would expect to run into other people (or where the smoke makes contact with other people).

And soon we'll evolve past people needing to numb their consciousness with routine weed use.

If you can't feel any influence from a microdose exposure to a psychoactive substance, even tobacco, you're either interoceptively inept or you're so used to dulling yourself with drugs that you can't feel any subtle change. And I'm going even more radical than that. In the gym before, I've been in the same room as somebody who was high, I didn't know that they were there initially, but I felt something was slowly creeping up on me. I was getting the kundalini rush sensation in my spine that I get from weed. I was like "why am I getting high?", so I looked around, and then there is this guy with extremely blood shot eyes who smells like weed. In fact, I think this guy could probably be the cause of what happened with the ventilation system that day. This is almost a placebo-controlled experiment, because I felt I got high before I saw the high person and before I noticed any strong smell (I did maybe notice a subtle smell straight after). It wasn't that I smelled a strong weed smell and then I thought I got high. The first thing I noticed was the kundalini rush and altered perception. And then I saw a high person which corroborated the theory that it was a weed high. You can only doubt it by saying that the sudden peculiar changes was something else and that I either didn't see a high person or that their strawberry eyes and subsequent weed smell was a coincidence.

What stops this from being true? But also, what is the evidence?

"And some people believe [...] that for example idealism is in line with that. But actually, it's the other way around: that materialism is more in line with that than non-duality".