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I still suffer from insomnia and restlessness to this day. This morning, I woke up after 12 hours of sleep, having been awake for more than 24 hours beforehand. Insomnia is pure torture and pure pain. If it lasts Long enough it can lead to suicidal thoughts but not suicide itself because eventually you will pass out and sleep or you take some sleeping pills. But insomnia is literally hell . My whole body hurts because of it, and I feel as though my head is going to explode. The reason I still suffer from insomnia is simply that my mind is not at peace. Not my conscious mind, but my subconscious mind. Because Even when I am in a deep sleep, I feel disturbed and never fully at rest, which I know might sound strange or difficult to believe. But there is a certain tension and restlessness going on in both my conscious and subconscious mind. That is the main reason behind my insomnia. And the main reason behind that tension is simply overstimulation, as I mentioned before. Maybe I need to go on a silent meditation retreat or something along those lines. I also ended up smoking a few cigarettes yesterday, just to help myself cope with the overwhelming stress and the aches in my body. Insomnia literally makes my body ache. My body itself turns into pure pain rather than a body, and this is not some cute, poetic way of dramatizing the situation. I don’t know who reads this journal, but it certainly helps to acknowledge that I’m still battling smoking and insomnia after all this time without giving in completely. It can be quite off-putting, too. I need to put an end to this. Here are some things I’m going to try: More meditation. Reducing my phone usage. Avoiding coffee, tea, and cigarettes close to bedtime. Establishing a bedtime routine, such as taking a warm shower and having a hot, caffeine-free drink before bed.

@Yeah Yeah all that about suicide comes from the societies where you are a slave, and a slave can't decide, has to obey. In tribes suicide was a admitted and sometimes a virtue. Old people committ suicide for the sake of tribe, young people could commit suicide for sorrow, shame or anything,

Thanks for the responses guys, but I'm just wishing like I could die or commit suicide and I had the courage to go through with it already as I've been like this for years daily and hate the human condition and don't want to reincarnate but unsure how to die or awaken from being human if I'm supposedly god then I should be able to just wake up from being human without having to die or commit suicide and I'm trapped I don't like being me I don't like humanity or society and I just want to be with God and not come back so I feel that the only way to escape myself and achieve this is through death since awakening only makes me have to adapt to being human and learn acceptance and surrender to things I hate about life and just want this to finally end already

I tried the guided meditation for God realization multiple times. It's been a while since I tried it, but I can't remember how many times I tried it. I don't see how I was supposed to realize I was God. I think he said I would probably need psychedelics to help with this or the meditation might not be enough. I did the forgiveness exercise many times over. I had a lot of pent up trauma and feelings. I needed a lot of tissues. I ended up taking action afterward out of concern for my sister, but it turns out she was fine and I was the one who was hurt. I ended up crying even more because of the reality of my isolated victimhood being made visible. I still don't forgive my mom though. The only reasonable answer I can see is to end my relationship with her. What she did was wrong, she repeats similar patterns, and she is not willing to reflect on her behavior. I'm scared of my mom because of her actions like opening a car door on the highway and threatening suicide. My least favorite series by far would be how to get laid. It felt like straight torture as I forced myself to sit down and watch it. It was agonizing, but I managed to sit through it. I find it painful to imagine treating women like that. It goes against so many things I believe, namely the fact that I am painfully aware of how sexualized abuse would impact the way in which women receive this kind of attention. I feel like you can't in good conscience do the pick up behaviors once you are very aware of how sexual abuse impacts the way in which people receive this behavior. In my experience, I was sexualized by multiple sources including my mother and father, and I do not like this kind of treatment at all. I don't want to treat a woman like a sex object, but it conflicts with my desire for sexual contact with the female body. My compromise is to focus on building compatible relationships with women instead. I am stuck on how to do this though.

Tuesday: November 10th, 2026. Harakiri as a suicide ritual is distinct from disregarding honor.

Dude, his life is literally on the line. He is still kidding himself. You have unreasonable expectations for very difficult things. Don't expect a man to tell you the truth when you have a gun pointed at his head. Just because he's made decent progress does not mean he's ready to suicide himself for you.

If solipsism is true, nothing happens to the apparent world of other people when an individual dies . It will just disappear from his experience. If solipsism is not true , then the world keeps existing after his death . And the closed ones to him will grieve his absence . So you’re asking do other people continue existing independently after one’s individual consciousness ends . The answer is maybe yes 50% and maybe no 50 % . So go figure that out on your own. But more importantly, figure out why are toying with the idea of suicide at all . adults are entitled to decide that they no longer wish to participate in existence if they are suffering horribly with no hope in sight and I’m with euthanasia in cases of hopeless unbearable suffering. society and religion historically treated suicide as something that must be prevented or morally condemned for the same reason they condemn homosexuality. Because it threatens the survival of humanity. But obviously people have homosexual relationships and commit suicide everyday regardless. So don’t worry too much about prohibition of society. Worry more about why are you thinking about suicide at all . Nobody genuinely knows what happens to subjective experience after biological death . You would have to physically die to know . That’s how death works .

There is another question I'd like to introduce into this discussion, concerning individual autonomy, suicide, euthanasia and the philosophical assumption that human beings must continue living regardless of their circumstances. Are adults entitled to decide that they no longer wish to participate in existence? Why has society historically treated suicide as something that must be prohibited, condemned, prevented or morally judged, rather than examining the question of individual autonomy? Throughout history, religious institutions have often maintained that life belongs to God, that human beings have no authority to end their own existence, and that suffering must be endured rather than escaped. These beliefs have profoundly influenced cultural attitudes, legislation and the way people experiencing unbearable circumstances are treated. But what is the philosophical justification for compulsory survival? Is the preservation of biological existence automatically more important than an individual's subjective experience of living? Consider someone experiencing disability, chronic suffering, profound loneliness, sexual deprivation, grief, deteriorating health or circumstances they regard as fundamentally incompatible with the life they wanted. Why should society assume that continued biological existence is necessarily the best outcome for that individual? I'm interested in whether voluntary assisted dying should be understood as an expression of individual autonomy, and what ethical limits or safeguards society should establish. Should this remain restricted to particular medical circumstances, or does the underlying philosophical question extend further? There is also an enormous metaphysical uncertainty that I don't think we can simply dismiss. Can we actually know what death represents? Is it annihilation? A transition of consciousness? Liberation from the limitations of biological existence? A return to some more fundamental state of awareness? Or could our assumptions about both life and death be fundamentally mistaken? I don't think anyone can honestly claim certainty about what subjective experience, if anything, follows biological death. Near-death experiences, idealist philosophy, non-duality and theories of fundamental consciousness all raise questions, but none establishes a definitive answer. Alan Watts explored the peculiar human relationship with existence, including the anxiety produced by our attachment to the separate ego and the attempt to control life. One recurring theme in his lectures was the paradox of trying to justify existence as though life must serve some external purpose before it can be experienced. He challenged the tendency to turn living into an endless obligation or achievement project. However, I think another question follows from this: if life is not an obligation to achieve something, why does society so often treat continued existence as an unquestionable obligation? Shakespeare's Hamlet also explored this dilemma in a different context. In Hamlet, the contemplation of whether to continue enduring suffering becomes inseparable from uncertainty about what follows death. His famous soliloquy raises the problem that we cannot confidently compare the suffering we know with whatever might lie beyond it. The unknown is precisely what complicates the question. That uncertainty remains philosophically significant. Perhaps we are too confident about what death means. Perhaps we are equally too confident about what life is supposed to mean. We might be operating with an incomplete understanding of consciousness, identity, embodiment and existence. I'd like to hear how others reconcile individual autonomy, the ethics of suicide prevention, voluntary assisted dying, religious prohibitions and the uncertainty surrounding death. Can a society respect an individual's autonomy while still recognising that decisions made during periods of extreme suffering may be affected by circumstances that can change? And perhaps the most fundamental question is whether our understanding of life and death is sufficiently developed to make such absolute declarations about what an individual must endure.

I've been thinking about the relationship between suicide, solipsism, consciousness and near-death experiences, and there's a particular question I haven't been able to resolve. If solipsism were true, what would suicide actually mean for the apparent world of other people? We ordinarily understand suicide as the death of an individual within a shared reality. Other people continue living. They experience grief, confusion, sadness and the consequences of losing someone they knew. Their lives continue, even though the person who died is no longer participating in them. But what if our ordinary understanding of individual consciousness is fundamentally mistaken? If consciousness is more fundamental than the physical body, and what we experience as an individual identity is only a limited perspective within a much larger consciousness, then what exactly happens when that individual perspective ends? Do other people continue existing independently of that perspective? Does the apparent external world continue unfolding? Or is the entire question complicated by the possibility that our understanding of consciousness, individuality and reality is incomplete? I've also thought about this in relation to an NDE-like experience I once had. During that experience, I seemed to perceive people continuing to live with the consequences of my death, as though I had died and was observing the aftermath of my absence. I had the impression that there were people experiencing the effects of losing me, while I was somehow outside my ordinary life. There was also a sense that I could return to my life rather than remain in that state. I don't know how to interpret this experience. Was it an internally generated experience? Was it a perception of an alternative possibility? Was it something occurring within consciousness that our ordinary material understanding cannot adequately explain? I'm not claiming that it proves an afterlife, that other people are projections, or that suicide leads to some kind of liberation. I'm genuinely uncertain about what it means. What interests me is the relationship between the subjective experience of dying and the apparent continuation of everyone else's lives. If consciousness is fundamental, could individual death represent a transition in perspective rather than the annihilation of consciousness itself? And if so, how should we understand the people who appear to be left behind? I'd particularly like to hear from people familiar with solipsism, idealism, non-duality and NDE research. How do these philosophical frameworks approach the apparent independent existence of other people when an individual consciousness dies?

@Carl-Richard We gotta replace the force that controls the leaders of the world with a different force. Or we have to wait for biology (read DNA coding) to do its job and hope they don't figure out a way to disable the telomerase that shortens the DNA every-time the cells are copied. Once they figure out a way to stop or reverse the aging-problem, we are utterly fucked, forever. The world leading-systems, read capitalism, communsism, even the old and tested king | autocracy | dictatorship doesn't work anymore, because people have unfortunately learned that they can rebell against tyranny. Soooo the problem is really that people don't like being controlled anymore. And I also don't like to be controlled anymore, not by programming from you guys (actualized.org members, any human being, any breathing being with a heart, anything that tries to influence me). I am utterly done with it. I reject any form of control, be it mind-control, biologic control and everything that tries and prevents me from being myself uncensored. Any if that has the effect that I have become completely and utterly schizoid then so be it. I also accept every-label, psychopathy, sociopathy, complete and utter schizoid-ness, complete and utter autism in its purest-form (read schizoid-ness in its pure form, being I am completely and utterly uncontrollable and if I decide to kill something and I will do that within a split second with no hesitation). In my mind I am completely free and if I decide to accept a bit of morality, because it serves me well, I will do that and might reject any form of morality (good vs. bad) in the next second. I just do what serves me and the rest of humanity (read you or WE) well. I just flip-flop back and forth, however I want to. The problem with complete schizoid-ism is that you will believe everything your mind tells you to believe in. Yesterday I came to the complete and utter undeniable conclusion that the only way out was suicide. Not a maybe, not a I'll think about it and then I went to bed and just hoped that my brain would repair itself. I just hoped and prayed to God that when I awaken that my brain comes to a different conclusion. And it did. I don't know how many warnings I have received from different moderators here on actualized that I shouldn't post when I am high. I never was high when I posted that. I was just high on dopamine, natural-dopamine, speed-dopamine, any dopamine. High dopamine leads to schizoid behaviour. It doesn't matter if the dopamine comes from crystal-meth, cocaine or just because your life is so amazing. It is all the same. Also high-dopamine leads to seeing things that are not there, hallucinations that feel real. Because what you are seeing is real. High-dopamine also is usually referred to as psychosis. Because from the outside it looks psychotic and schizoid. The problem with being fully aware that you are schizoid, psychotic an psychopath and a sociopath is that you can commit murder without any repercussions. You can technically claim that you are insane and get away with it. Many people have tried that defense and it falls apart. Every-time. I have seen many many many videos of mass murderers and how they try to defend themselves. It never works. So I will not try that - ever. Because I know. I also know that self-murder (read suicide) doesn't ever work. So I am not going to try that ever and just let biology do its work. I have learned to ride the waves of schizoid-ism, aut-ism, psychos-ism, sociopath-ism, psychopath-ism and just the general human-condition in all its aspects... Please note: The usage of the word "we" is completely undefined in this post. We can mean anything, anybody, anything or any-thing, or any-xyz. (Get it? Get it? XD). And no I am not high. I am completely sober and if iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii use letters wrong on purpose iiiiiiiiiii don't care, because I have stopped pretending and I|I have stopped giving a fuck.

I live in Newport Kentucky. It is located by the Ohio River. If you have suggestions about where to go to meet women, that would be nice. I tried checking Google maps to see if I could pick a place, but I'm not sure. I'm across the river from Cincinnati. I'm a decent walker. I nearly made it to Cheviot Ohio by walking, but my family panicked and had me get picked up. In any case I walked to the riverside park. When I go for walks I often see women jogging that I like. They often have headphones in so it's hard to talk to them. I managed to get one to stop this time. It looks like you can wave at them and ask "what are you listening to." From there we discussed audio books and it turns out I'm hilarious. My idea was to get an audio version of the Bible, but have Goofy from Disney be the cover voice reading it. It turns out that I have a good impression of Goofy too. She wanted to hear Donald Duck voicing Leviticus, but I don't think my impression is as good. I need to record myself first to check. I'm unable to upload my impression of Goofy reading Noah's Ark. My favorite part was the animals on the Ark asking "are we there yet" because they were stuck for 40 days. Regarding Donald Duck, I tried to sound angry while saying "men shall not lie with men! Rahrahrharah!" She said she would pay money to listen to this kind of audio book. Judging by her body language she seemed uncomfortable or in a hurry. You can let me know if I'm reading too much into this, but my impression was that she liked women. Judging from what appeared to be signs of discomfort paired with making Leviticus sound stupid and bigoted, it seems like how I would imagine a Lesbian would think and act. She was probably afraid that I found her attractive and wanted to have sex with her as I would imagine lesbians would be. Of course I would need more information to know for sure. She left without giving any information like how to contact her. So far I haven't hit on anyone though. I'm not sure where else to go to meet women other than when I'm out walking and see joggers who often have headphones in. I generally stay in friendly mode. Otherwise the only method I found for meeting women works be through dating apps. The problem with those apps are the prices and the fast paced nature of the relationships. I felt like some women were trying to lure me into a trap or that they weren't even women. I became afraid of the possibility that they might murder me, so I felt it natural to ask the forum about relationships and murder with no luck. In my experience the best way to handle fear and anxiety is to accept the risks knowing that some risks are unavoidable. For example, if I'm afraid to leave the house, I would never have time away from my family or I might be murdered by a burglar or the house might catch fire. My therapist seems okay with this relationship with fear. If I go outside I accept the possibility that I will be killed by drunk drivers, meteors, mass shooters, or perhaps terrorists who highjacked a plane and are attempting to strike the white house but the passengers are aware of this plot so they attack the perpetrators and cause the plane to dive toward the ground, causing it to land on me instead of the president. And of course if I go on a date with a woman, it is entirely possible that she will pull a gun on me and demand my social security number, or she might be an incest victim who now believes that men are pigs and she wants to kill symbolic targets that remind her of her father through intimate relationships, or she might mistaken me for a man who actually raped her due to my similar appearance and have a panic attack leading her to kill me, or maybe something else. In my case, a woman actually did panic because of a similar appearance to an abuser. I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything. I didn't approach her. I didn't touch her. I was just walking home and this woman freaked the fuck out, screamed, and hid in her car. Luckily she didn't try to run me over afraid that I might rape or murder her. All I did was look to my left and notice her and then kept walking. There was absolutely nothing I could have done. If this woman had a weapon, I would be dead already and all I did was briefly notice her presence. Sometimes there are cases of mistaken identity due to similar appearance to a perpetrator who randomly attacked a woman on day, though this is uncommon. When I am out walking, a lot of people come to me asking for cigarettes even though I don't smoke. Apparently, I have a look on my eye that makes me seem caring, but one day I was wearing shaded glasses when that woman freaked out. At least homeless women generally feel fine with me and they think I'm a good person. I don't think it's appropriate to hit on them though. Instead I just help them make phone calls and direct them to crisis resources. This included a victim of identity theft that wanted to commit suicide. I found some men in situations like this as well such as homeless veterans who either poison themselves or jump off of a bridge by the Ohio River. I had a few cases where I needed to call the police over things like this, including an abandoned three year old girl who was separated from her parents. I encounter all kinds of things when I'm out walking including alcoholics, criminals, sex offenders, and so forth. One of the alcoholics hit on my underaged sister. How do you think I should go about meeting women? I live in an area with a statistically high crime rate. This is where organized criminals like my father like to hang out because of the jurisdictional gaps that can be exploited between Ohio and Kentucky as they traffick drugs and prostitutes. Some of these homeless women were also sex workers. They probably don't like being hit on because they already feel degraded as is and they don't need men making them feel like whores. This is why men shouldn't treat women like sex objects as they will lose attraction and distance themselves from you because you show similar attitudes to men who abused them. I felt this too when people reminded me of my abusers through there attitudes around sex. I become very closed off when treated this way and being portrayed as a slut. I had some policy recommendations for the mayor, but the government isn't very helpful for my purposes. I have decent conversations with women at the gay pride festival, but they're lesbians too.

I was sitting behind my computer very high, smoking hashish. I was contemplating Leo's vids and the extreme claims he made about consciousness. Many of the things he said were ideas I have had, but only vaguely, and here there was this guy (that I'd been watching since i was 16 in 2016, which started out as personal development videos) seeming to go on this increasingly crazy, yet hyper-rational contemplation and adventure into the nature of Reality. He had already convinced me that naive realism isn't real - and this was something that I kind of knew and contemplated myself, but was never too confident about. And here he was, laying it all out in the most rational of terms, and going even further. The videos became more spacy, intricate and profound. Mind-baffling vids during that time I can think of were "Infinite Intelligence" and "You are not your brain". Leo's vids, however crazy, were so rational. But still, I realized I had never experienced any awakening myself, even though I tried once with the Neti Neti method video. So I was contemplating this behind my computer and thought to myself - If this is really real, and this is all through consciousness - I can find out myself by just seeing what this consciousness is, and witnessing myself. After all, All that I am seeing, every object is in my Consciousness. There is nothing outside of it. As I started observing my consciousness and my thoughts, It became more and more clear that the thoughts were pretending to be the ones doing the observing - but that this couldn't be real, since my thoughts are being observed. This started becoming more loopy and panic was rising, because "i am my thoughts, right?" It started to become more and more clear that who "I" am, this entity, was only there because of the thought forms. I backed off because I didn't like where it was going. Feelings of panic arose. But I realized something. This was real. There is some shit going on here that I do not know about. Things are not the way they seem, and I was becoming conscious of them. I immediately realized that this was the real Hero's journey. This was the threshold. This is where it goes down. For the first time in my life I actually felt like how I imagined the characters of stories to be, who muster the courage to go on their adventure. I decided that I will answer the call and go through with it, scary as it may be. I started observing again. Again, my thoughts were being exposed. They started to become like squirming worms, exposed in the light, being burned away, screaming. Everytime I thought "this is too much" I witnessed that that was yet another thought. "There wont be anything left of me if all I am is thoughts" and it was witnessed. all thoughts burned. My heart started pounding. It was so scary, Yet I knew I was the observer, since I was still there. it started becoming more and more clear that I was not these thought forms, even though they were pretending to be me, like parasites. This increased to such a degree where I saw, for the first time in my life, what this "self" actually was. A deeply profound mechanism of illusion that Consciousness/mind was executing. So self-reinforcing, so crazed. I thought - This is an absolute monstrosity, and was absolutely horrified. I am a monstrosity. I thought I was going insane and tried to snap out of it. My heart still racing, I closed my computer and went to bed. I was in panic. My field of vision was almost recontextualizing. I was confused and afraid, and disgusted. It was like my field of vision got black/red borders, although that wasn't the case. It was like looking at a painting. I walked downstairs to my room and started laying in bed. My heart was pounding and racing, and I was still in the trip. I was too deep now. laying in bed, it started increasing more and more and I became more conscious of myself and it was getting so fucked up. My heart was racing faster and faster - and Consciousness was revealing itself more and more - not as "my" consciousness, but as an absolute unit. As something that doesn't come out of "me" but that "I" come out of. This increased and increased and I couldn't handle it anymore until I felt a word coming out of my chest - "Surrender." Everything snapped, like my ego, which was holding on for dear life, being snapped away from its illusory position behind the eyes. There was no behind the eyes. It's all plastered on Consciousness. I saw suddenly saw that my consciousness is not my POV, that it is not something that I am seeing as an entity behind the eyes, but that it is like an infinite crystal ball / ball of light(of course it had no borders, but it's the only thing I can think of), and that it is God, that it is Life itself. I suddenly saw that my "entity" is not apart from it, witnessing it, but just thought forms that are just forms on this crystal ball like shapes on a tapestry, no different than the other forms that are on the crystal, like outside shapes like trees and objects. all internal phenomena became equivalent to the external phenomena, all just rendered in this infinite field of Consciousness. My entity reacted like "This is not mine, I am tethered on it!" in horror. The true self, what I actually have always been, was revealed, it was this Consciousness, and it was God. What shot to my mind instantly were visions of muslims praying in Mecca and for the first time I understood them. What I was witnessing right now was it, and I was groveling to it. This thing was so utterly complete, so utterly Infinite, so utterly Omnipotent, so utterly Invincible. I was at the whim of it. It had always been imagining me and that's the only thing that kept me alive. While my ego thought forms were still suffering and my heart was pounding, at a point my ego surrendered - the idea of the entity behind the eyes fell away and it was paradoxically like that very surrendering into non-existence was also that very entity falling into a pure warm bath where all suffering went away, everything was washed away. I remember saying "I will always serve you", purely because I saw it was so Good, so beautiful. (Looking back on that, I utterly failed. In the months and years after it I made a conscious decision to pursue my ego. And that's okay, in some ways, even though I did a lot of stupid shit - I was a 20 year old in a city with nothing to my name having never felt romantic love, who can blame me) this oscillated between surrender and the ego trying to come back, which resulted into more panic and heart poundings - and after I sobered up more, and realized I had to go to the doctor that morning after, I suddenly realized that everything in my life was imaginary, that my parents were imaginary. This was utterly shocking and distressing. The months after this my ego backlash was so insane, I thought I went insane, I had months of derealization, anxiety, and I remember laying on the couch while my parents said "Bye!" because they were going grocery shopping. I realized that the moment they went away and I heard the door close, they were gone, literally. I cried my eyes out, and I couldn't believe it, yet I knew it was true. I was so utterly distraught that they were not real. It was like being in a horror movie - My parents are acting as if they are real but they aren't and simply disappearing even though they're acting like they're not. During this time (2020) I was also starting to read the forum and Leo's posts. Sometimes he'd say solipsism isn't real and sometimes he'd say it's real, which was very distressing. I was so utterly mad at Leo for leading me towards this - I realized it was actually real and I shouldn't have done it. I prayed to God, going as far as saying "I've been brainwashed by the chemicals and Leo's teachings, please God bring me back, release me from this falsehood" - basically larping as if there was a dualistic God - All I wanted was for the world to be real, for solipsism to not be true. Looking back, the funny thing is that my wish was granted since I fell into delusions of religion - This was two years later, where other mental and physical problems brought me to a point where I actively wanted to kill myself. I knew that Life was everlasting, since Life is Consciousness, and even though I wanted release from my situation, I was utterly paranoid that suicide would bring me to hell realms. After all, I had become conscious of God's omnipotent dreaming; he could dream up a hell for me if he wanted. This paranoia and life pressures lead me to religious beliefs later down the line - and looking back it might have also been a sneak tactic for my ego to get away from solipsism. but thats another story. All in all, right now, I am not conscious of those things, although I know rationally and from my experience that Solipsism is true (or is it?) - but these days I almost wish for it to be true. whereas I first cried because my parents were not real, right now the idea of them existing and suffering after my suicide has kept me going and suffering through it and not giving up. And that's probably a good thing. If I would really know right now that they don't have experience of their own, I'd have probably killed myself already. My fear of their suffering and the fear of hell is much bigger than whatever horror I had with solipsism. I am still actively struggling with the idea that God can send me to unimaginable realms of suffering. But here we are.

The damage rapists do is even worse than just to direct victims. Firstly, people have to fear being raped even if it doesn't happen to them. Secondly, family members become divided and destroyed over a family member who raped a child. There are also problems with proof standards such as he said she said. Too often rapists get away with it which undermines faith in criminal justice. Even when you end up in prison there is still a lot of prison rape, not to mention juvenile sexual abuse in the justice system or even within a religious institution. Even if your child wasn't raped, it can cause a crisis of faith for a Catholic. You also have to worry about the two tiered justice system for those with money and power. While it is definitely true that rapists cause a ton of harm to the direct victims, the true harm to society overall caused by rapists generally extends far beyond just the direct victims. It easily extends to those who have a relationship with the victim and throughout various institutions such as schools which now have to ban private lessons precisely because of this problem. There are even some cases of therapists sexually abusing people who go to therapy for being raped, if you are concerned about how to recover from such a thing. Now add to that the harm caused by psychological warfare in the military such as mass public rapes to terrorize populations like in the Rape of Nanking. Militaries commonly use rape as a torture method while demonstrating impunity. The problem doesn't stay overseas. After everything soldiers have been through, including sexual abuse by their own military personnel, sometimes they come back home with untreated PTSD, resort to alcoholism, and go to commit more sexual assaults against people back in their own country. Rape overseas against our enemies doesn't stay with just our enemies and it does make it back to us if a soldier's head gets messed up so badly that now he develops a taste for children, leading veterans to position themselves in schools where they can access minors in private lessons. Add to that child pornography which human traffickers profit from. Add to that the toxic masculine attitude of domination which rape reinforces. Add to that the suicide rates exacerbated by child sexual abuse. The list goes on and on. The point is that while the harm to direct victims is severe, it is by no means anywhere near the end of it when discussing how rapists harm society overall.

The most interesting thing about rape as a crime is that it's unjustifiable even to the people committing it so the vast majority of rapists refuse to believe they're rapists. Criminological and psychological studies estimate that approximately 50% to 60% of convicted sex offenders (including rapists) minimize, justify, or deny core elements of their offense, with 15% to 25% remaining in full categorical denial (claiming they did not commit the act or that it never occurred). Research indicates that only 5% to 15% of convicted rapists fully acknowledge both their actions and explicit intent without using cognitive rationalizations or self-justifications. Brings me back to Leo's point that if most people that commit evil acts really had the full consciousness of what they're doing a lot of them would commit suicide in shame and guilt. It brings a lot of of credibility to the point of feminists saying to teach men not to rape. Enthusiastic consent is an important concept to understand if you're gonna have casual sex with strangers. Some of the advice that I see from men online and even on this forum seems to land them in a murky grey area and you should definitely air on the side of caution when it comes to these things.

I've read your replies, and I appreciate the different perspectives. However, I'd like to continue developing another criticism of the spiritual teachings I've been examining, particularly those concerning suffering, reincarnation, pre-birth planning and the supposed necessity of spiritual lessons. Something I've increasingly struggled with is the assumption, repeated by several spiritual teachers and some Near-Death Experience accounts, that human existence is fundamentally an educational curriculum. The general narrative seems to be that souls choose their circumstances before birth, deliberately select difficult experiences and relationships, and enter physical existence to learn particular lessons. Suffering, trauma, disability, addiction, abandonment, poverty and bereavement are sometimes interpreted as opportunities for spiritual development. Some accounts even suggest that suicide doesn't allow someone to escape these lessons, but instead results in another incarnation in which similar challenges must eventually be overcome. Robert Schwartz and other proponents of pre-birth planning seem to draw upon this general framework. Other accounts describe reincarnation as an accelerated way of completing spiritual lessons, while remaining in the spirit realm supposedly allows the same development to occur more gradually. But why? If the spirit realm is supposedly an environment of unconditional love, expanded consciousness, peace and greater understanding, why would spiritual development be slower there? Why would entering a limited physical body, forgetting one's previous existence, experiencing illness, financial insecurity, psychological trauma and potentially horrific circumstances be a more efficient educational arrangement? It seems almost backwards. If consciousness already has greater clarity and understanding outside physical existence, why would it need to repeatedly enter a condition of limitation to acquire something it could presumably understand without suffering? And if God is infinite, omniscient, complete and unconditional love, what exactly does God need to learn? Why would an eternally existing divine consciousness need to educate itself about compassion by experiencing abuse, or learn about love by experiencing abandonment? Why would it need to become temporarily ignorant, vulnerable and limited in order to rediscover qualities that are supposedly already inherent in its nature? I can understand the idea of voluntarily exploring a challenging experience. For example, consciousness might choose to experience creating music within a particular historical period, learning an instrument, developing new technologies or exploring a reality with physical limitations and finite resources. There could be genuine creativity, discovery, experimentation and adventure in that. But this is very different from suggesting that suffering is necessary for spiritual development. Why would someone need to experience sexual abuse, rape, homelessness, disability, torture, addiction or the suicide of a family member to learn something about compassion? Why couldn't consciousness explore, create, develop relationships and experience novelty without requiring those things? I've experienced homelessness and housing instability multiple times. I've experienced abuse and displacement. Yet these experiences haven't somehow educated me into a condition where I can no longer encounter difficult circumstances. I can move into another home and still encounter mistreatment. What exactly was the necessary lesson? How many times does someone need to experience homelessness before the curriculum is considered complete? Sometimes suffering doesn't produce wisdom. Sometimes it produces further suffering. I also question the idea of pre-birth soul contracts. If someone supposedly chooses to experience abuse or trauma before birth, but then enters physical existence without remembering that agreement, what does that agreement actually mean for the person who has to experience it? And how can we establish that such an agreement ever existed? Some NDE accounts describe people supposedly discovering that they chose their difficult lives, or that they and their abusers arranged to exchange roles for spiritual development. I find these interpretations particularly difficult to accept. I don't necessarily dispute that someone might have had an extraordinary experience during an NDE. But I question whether their interpretation of that experience is necessarily an accurate description of objective reality. Perhaps people interpret unusual experiences through their existing religious, philosophical and cultural frameworks. Someone who already believes in karma, reincarnation, soul families and pre-birth planning might interpret an experience through those concepts. There is another possibility worth considering: human beings spend much of their lives inside educational and bureaucratic institutions. School, university, employment, examinations, qualifications, performance assessments, progression and continual self-improvement dominate much of human existence. Could some of our expectations about an afterlife simply reflect the conceptual frameworks we've become accustomed to during physical life? Why do so many spiritual descriptions of the afterlife resemble another educational institution, complete with lessons, assessments, spiritual advancement, guides, contracts and compulsory progression? Why should existence itself be organised like a school that nobody is allowed to graduate from? I find myself much more attracted to an alternative conception of divine existence. Suppose God is already complete. Suppose consciousness doesn't need to learn how to become loving, compassionate or whole because those qualities are already inherent in its nature. Creation could then be an expression of abundance, creativity and exploration rather than a response to some deficiency that needs correcting. There could be countless forms of existence, different environments, different experiences and different expressions of individuality. There could be physicality, adventure, romance, humour, exploration, creativity, novelty and pleasure without making suffering, death, disease, abuse and compulsory reincarnation necessary components. A challenging experience could be voluntarily explored without requiring trauma. Difficulty could exist without cruelty. Individuality could exist without requiring someone to lose their identity or merge into an impersonal state of consciousness. This brings me to an interesting contrast with the teachings attributed to Jesus. Jesus doesn't appear in the Gospels to present existence as a compulsory reincarnation curriculum. His teachings repeatedly emphasise God's mercy, forgiveness, compassion and the availability of the Kingdom of God. Consider the parable of the prodigal son. The father welcomes his returning son rather than demanding that he complete another series of lessons before being accepted. Consider the thief crucified alongside Jesus. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus promises him that he will be with him in paradise. There is no requirement to complete another lifetime, repay a karmic debt or demonstrate that he has reached a particular consciousness level. Jesus also repeatedly challenges religious authorities when he believes they have prioritised legalistic observance over mercy and compassion. His statement, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," is particularly relevant here. I'm not suggesting that Christianity has no teachings about judgement, repentance or eternal destiny, nor that Jesus explicitly outlined every aspect of the alternative metaphysical model I'm proposing. But the emphasis on divine mercy seems quite different from the idea that souls must repeatedly return to physical existence until they have completed their spiritual education. The distinction I'm interested in is this: What if divine love isn't something that has to be earned through suffering? What if compassion doesn't need to be learned through cruelty? What if someone doesn't need to experience abandonment to understand love, or abuse to understand kindness? What if divine mercy is already available rather than something granted after completing an enormous spiritual curriculum? And what if death doesn't automatically mean another assignment, another examination or another incarnation? I particularly struggle with the suggestion that someone who dies by suicide must return to experience similar challenges again. I don't see how that can simply be presented as an expression of unconditional love. It seems to introduce an enormous amount of speculation about the afterlife while potentially making an already painful human experience sound like a spiritual failure. I find the idea that a spirit must now return to repeat difficult experiences deeply troubling. There is no reliable evidence that this happens, and I don't see why I should accept that interpretation simply because certain spiritual teachers confidently describe it. I'd much rather consider the possibility that consciousness can be welcomed into peace, love and freedom without being subjected to another compulsory physical existence. Ultimately, I keep returning to one question: If God is infinite, complete and unconditional love, why would suffering be a prerequisite for experiencing existence? Why must the universe be a spiritual classroom rather than an expression of creativity, freedom, exploration and love? Perhaps spiritual development can be voluntarily explored, but it doesn't follow that it must be compulsory. Perhaps existence doesn't need to be an examination. Perhaps we don't need to become worthy of returning to God because we were never separate from divine love in the first place. I don't claim to know precisely what happens after death, or that my alternative is an established description of reality. But I do think the spiritual curriculum model deserves considerably more scrutiny than it generally receives. I'm not convinced that suffering is a necessary educational tool of an infinitely loving God. And I'm certainly not convinced that compulsory reincarnation is the only, or even the most compassionate, way to understand existence.

I agreed and resonated with this point deeply. First of all, my high school teacher told me that I was wasting my education if I didn't go to college such that I may as well drop out now and work a dead end job. The goal of education is to get a higher paying career which if you don't get, then you wasted your time. Additionally, when I learned about how Americans live paycheck to paycheck, I remembered how much purpose meant to me. The economic system is designed to crush your dreams and passions while pretending to support them. In my case I wanted to be a chess grandmaster, but the economy makes this infeasible and college is irrelevant to this goal. The economy is therefore designed in such a way that it prevents most people from achieving such goals while calling it a problem of effort and talent. Given that my family wasn't worth living with either, the outcome is that I would be working a dead end job until I get old and die. I will be suffering meaninglessly for the rest of the foreseeable future while calling it opportunity on the belief that I might one day get to retire. My grandpa also told me I was worthless and end up at a dead end job like Kroger. I agree with Leo 100 percent. I would rather commit suicide because this life is pure resignation and no reason to exist other than being someone else's pawn for profit and exploitation. I have been taught since childhood that working such a job is dehumanizing, degrading, and a representation of how much your life is valued when you scrub period blood of public toilets. Yet we wonder why Americans don't want to do certain jobs given this messaging about what it means to work a normal job by our culture. There are therapists who call this sentiment crazy, but I think my therapists are idiots if they expect me to resign myself to such a life rather than commit suicide. Therapists would probably call Leo crazy for that, but I already felt this way anyway. I need a reason to exist other than being a drone. Otherwise you may as well erase my entire inner world and disregard everything I ever think or say as though I were a mere animal to you. This is way capitalists have also made explicit that you are like a dog who needs to be starved and kept desperate or else you will get complacent and refuse to work if not for constant fear of homelessness and starvation. This is literally how capitalists think about these jobs when you go to work in the morning. It is about controlling your entire life while calling it opportunity. Why would this kind of outcome in life be acceptable to you? I don't think our system has a real answer for why I shouldn't kill myself in this scenario. Therapists and the mental health system are in complete denial of this psychological abuse and character assassination through dehumanization designed by the capitalist system.

While the training was in "performance art" more specifically, it anesthetized me to public performance through exposure therapy - I guess? The training was in movement and dance, but also illustrating a narrative without spoken word. Methods of connecting with audiences through non-verbal communication. I did a lot of opening shows for local avante guard artists - for galleries and exhibitions. I worked with a troop of girls for various shows. Sometimes fashion, sometimes jewellery, photography, painting etc. We would perform for a live audience wearing designers originals. I loved it! It was an artists commune officially - lead by a photographer. Disbanded when the man who headed it committed suicide. We came up with choreography and worked with him (Terry was his name) and we were also his muses. I did a lot of photography and performance art with the commune. Is it a nudist festival?!! The last time I went to a nudist festival I recall a man who had busted open a glow stick, smeared it all over himself - paying particular attention to his unspeakables - and literally gyrating. Helicopter wang style Being naked around strangers will erase shame quick...

Some reflections from a message from a Doctor who I follow. He deals with mental health but dont ignore systemic causes. Here is go: Recently someone told me I've been "politicizing" my profile because I've been talking about salary, working hours, and inequality. I thought about it for a few days and concluded that the criticism, without meaning to, raises a very interesting and very old question: where, exactly, does an illness begin? The most intuitive answer is that it begins in the body: in a gene, a neurotransmitter, a cell that stopped working the way it should. That's true, but it's only part of the story, because the body doesn't float in empty space. It lives somewhere, works a certain number of hours, and carries the worries of the person who lives in it. Think of a person who sleeps five hours a night because they spend three commuting, who eats lunch standing up because the break is short, and who goes to bed wondering how they'll pay the month's bills. If they develop anxiety, is the problem only in their brain, or also in the life that brain has to get through every day? It's curious that nobody accuses me of politicizing when I talk about sleep, exercise, or nutrition. Yet sleeping well, having time to move, and eating properly depend, in large part, on how much you earn and how many hours are left in your day. The discomfort only seems to appear when the conversation moves from the person to the conditions they live in. One of the best-known studies in medicine followed civil servants in London for decades. They all had jobs and access to the same health system, and still those in the lowest grades died about three times as often as those at the top, with smoking, blood pressure, or weight explaining only a small part of the difference. That study stayed with me because it shows it isn't only extreme poverty that makes people sick. Spending your life with little control over your own time, taking orders, and not knowing quite what's coming next is something the body registers little by little, in silence, like someone keeping a tab that will eventually come due. In mental health, this is even clearer. A review published in Science showed that poverty and depression feed each other: lack of money raises the risk of illness, and illness takes away work and income. That's why both treatment and income can break this cycle, each from one end. Here in Brazil, a Fiocruz study followed more than 100 million people and found something that should make us think: among families receiving cash transfers, the suicide rate was about half that of families who did not. Sometimes, prevention also means making sure someone can make it to the end of the month. So yes, this conversation is political, but in the oldest sense of the word, the one that concerns how we choose to live together. It has nothing to do with party politics. My job is to show what science has found, even when it makes someone uncomfortable.

I've read a lot of your responses, but I'm going to continue my argument against suffering, reincarnation loops, and the idea that we must repeatedly incarnate to learn lessons or develop spiritually. I want to expand on why I find these explanations fundamentally contradictory and morally troubling. My central argument is that if ultimate reality is supposedly infinite, complete, unconditional love, and absolute freedom, why would it require suffering, trauma, abuse, deprivation, or terror to know itself? If consciousness is already complete, what is supposedly missing that requires billions of people to endure lives of misery? Saying that suffering provides “contrast,” “growth,” or “expansion” changes the terminology, but it doesn't explain why the suffering is necessary in the first place. This problem appears across various spiritual teachings and near-death experience accounts. Some NDE narratives describe overwhelming love and peace, yet other interpretations suggest that souls choose difficult lives, review their experiences, return to physical existence, or continue developing through further incarnations. Bashar's teachings about reincarnation and unresolved themes raise the particularly disturbing possibility that even death by suicide might lead to another life intended to address the same issues. Teal Swan's discussions of core imprints, pre-birth experiences, and understanding love through its opposite raise similar questions about whether suffering is being presented as something a soul supposedly needs. Abraham-Hicks' emphasis on contrast and ongoing expansion also invites the question of whether satisfaction or peace can ever be final. And Leo Gura's discussions of consciousness, selflessness, and enduring obstacles as part of spiritual purification deserve the same scrutiny: does suffering genuinely reveal some necessary truth, or are we interpreting suffering through a framework that makes it seem cosmically justified? I am not claiming that every teacher says precisely the same thing. My criticism is that these frameworks can converge on a disturbing structure: suffering becomes a lesson, a choice, a necessary contrast, or an opportunity for expansion, while the possibility that suffering is simply destructive and unnecessary is pushed aside. The system risks becoming impossible to challenge because every objection can be reframed as another lesson the individual supposedly needs. The idea of pre-birth consent creates another problem. What meaningful consent exists if a person cannot remember agreeing to their circumstances, cannot review the terms, and cannot withdraw that agreement while enduring the consequences? It risks turning victimisation into something the victim supposedly selected, while obscuring the responsibility of those who inflict harm. Likewise, if souls must experience both victimhood and perpetration to obtain a complete perspective, are atrocities being presented as necessary components of a cosmic curriculum? Most importantly, what does freedom actually mean in these systems? If reincarnation is compulsory until some lesson is completed, then freedom only determines how someone fulfils an obligation they cannot refuse. Genuine freedom would have to include the possibility of saying, “I have experienced enough. I do not want another life. I want permanent peace.” Otherwise, what is being called liberation? My objection is not merely that suffering exists. It is that spiritual explanations can turn suffering into something supposedly necessary, chosen, educational, or beneficial to a larger cosmic process. I see no demonstrated reason to assume that trauma is required for wisdom, that agony is necessary for love, or that consciousness must endlessly reincarnate and expand. Suffering can damage people without making them wiser or more compassionate. It can destroy their capacity to enjoy life rather than teach them some profound lesson. If these teachers believe that reincarnation is voluntary, that souls can permanently refuse another life, or that suffering is not actually necessary, then they should explain how those claims fit together with their other teachings. If they cannot establish that reincarnation, pre-birth contracts, or compulsory spiritual lessons are real, they should not present them as established truths. A reality described as unconditional love and absolute freedom should not need to justify endless suffering. And if there is no final freedom to stop, no right to refuse another incarnation, and no possibility of permanent peace, then the claim that this system is ultimately loving deserves to be challenged rather than accepted on spiritual authority alone.

@Natasha Tori Maru You girls have no idea how many men commit suicide because they aren't getting sex.

Nah Ill consider it for what it actually is. Hostility masquerading as something else which seems to be a thing with me and a mod or two. If people want to go public with their incorrect assumptions and defend them with the religious fervor of a suicide bomber someone should probably try talking sense. My use of profanity punctuates my very valid criticisms of being labelled a demonic semen slurping cultist because Im not a card carrying member of the Holy Church of Anti Solipsism. A very mature, serious conversation that obviously deserves my very best behavior. Just perma ban me now. Who wants a mod on the truth > * epistemic rigor conformity examples mega thread forum flexing on them like Im the one that needs to do better? Not me.

Seems like Judas didn't consider the wider picture in his actions and when he found out that he'd made a grave mistake tried to make things good by giving back the money and forfeited his life. I mean the bible is full of overreaction, so the suicide was written in for moral effect. But it does prove that Judas was ignorant.

I think the moral of the story is that betraying God for earthly things (how judas betrayed jesus for money) leads to hell (the terror and madness that lead to the suicide of Judas).

men in the West are having it hard right now. Loneliness, suicide, fatalism, burnout.

Because Trump was still 10x worse than Kamala. When the choice is so clear, not voting is political suicide. It hurt Gaza too. More Gazans and Ukrainians are dead because leftists refused to vote for Kamala. I warned about this at the time. This was all very predictable.