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I think the alien-believing people are just smart when they don't believe that he's an alien. Because he isn't a alien.

So you think that he's an alien? @Vido How old are you?

But I am also pondering what Leo mentioned before Is it really true that if EVEN if an alien comes and talks about love, people would be like nah, Imma look for alien tech and government politics Seems too crazy? because if you are not pursuing truth (which would require you to be at least open-minded to this kind of stuff? I mean what's there to lose?) and you are pursuing alien tech (understandable) then what are the UFO people really seeking? I don't really know?

Probably the most challenging and the most rewarding book I have ever read. I am including excerpts that I have enjoyed the most. Enjoy! Foreword: For, on Hegel’s view, all dialectical thought-paths lead to the Absolute Idea and to the knowledge of it which is itself. The mind for Hegel, as for Aristotle, is thus the place of forms, a bustling Agora where such forms are involved in endless transactions and conversations, and though it is by the intermediation of such forms that there is a reaching-out to their individual instances, they none the less enjoy a relative independence there, a detachment in the thought-ether, that they never enjoy elsewhere. For absolute knowledge is simply the realization that all forms of objectivity are identical with those essential to the thinking subject, so that in construing the world conceptually it is seeing everything in the form of self, the self being simply the ever-active principle of conceptual universality, of categorial synthesis Preface: To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do. If, namely, the True exists only in what, or better as what, is sometimes called intuition, sometimes immediate knowledge of the Absolute, religion or being—not at the centre of divine love but the being of the divine love itself—then what is required in the exposition of philosophy is, from this viewpoint, rather the opposite of the form of the Notion. For the Absolute is not supposed to be comprehended, it is to be felt and intuited; not the Notion of the Absolute, but the feeling and intuition of it, must govern what is said, and must be expressed by it. The ‘beautiful’, the ‘holy’, the ‘eternal’, ‘religion’, and ‘love’ are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite; not the Notion, but ecstasy, not the cold march of necessity in the thing itself, but the ferment of enthusiasm, these are supposed to be what sustains and continually extends the wealth of substance. The power of Spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition. Moreover, when this non-conceptual, substantial knowledge professes to have sunk the idiosyncrasy of the self in essential being, and to philosophize in a true and holy manner, it hides the truth from itself: by spurning measure and definition, instead of being devoted to God, it merely gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it, and to its own caprice. In a proposition of this kind one begins with the word ‘God’. This by itself is a meaningless sound, a mere name; it is only the predicate that says what God is, gives Him content and meaning. The goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without the means. But the length of this path has to be endured, because, for one thing, each moment is necessary; and further, each moment has to be lingered over, because each is itself a complete individual shape, and one is only viewed in absolute perspective when its determinateness is regarded as a concrete whole, or the whole is regarded as uniquely qualified by that determination. Since the Substance of the individual, the World-Spirit itself, has had the patience to pass through these shapes over the long passage of time, and to take upon itself the enormous labour of world-history, in which it embodied in each shape as much of its entire content as that shape was capable of holding, and since it could not have attained consciousness of itself by any lesser effort, the individual certainly cannot by the nature of the case comprehend his own substance more easily. Consciousness knows and comprehends only what falls within its experience; for what is contained in this is nothing but spiritual substance, and this, too, as object of the self. But Spirit becomes object because it is just this movement of becoming an other to itself, i.e. becoming an object to itself, and of suspending this otherness. The disparity which exists in consciousness between the ‘I’ and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their soul, or that which moves them. INTRODUCTION But the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. The experience of itself which consciousness goes through can, in accordance with its Notion, comprehend nothing less than the entire system of consciousness, or the entire realm of the truth of Spirit. CONSCIOUSNESS A simple thing of this kind which is through negation, which is neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That—such a thing we call a universal. So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty. Now, there also occur in the perception various properties which seem to be properties of the Thing; but the Thing is a One, and we are conscious that this diversity by which it would cease to be a One falls in us. For us, this object has developed through the movement of consciousness in such a way that consciousness is involved in that development, and the reflection is the same on both sides, or, there is only one reflection Our consciousness, however, has passed over from the inner being as object to the other side, into the Understanding, and it experiences change there. We see that through infinity, law completes itself into an immanent necessity, and all the moments of [the world of] appearance are taken up into the inner world. That the simple character of law is infinity means, according to what we have found, (a) that it is self-identical, but is also in itself different; or it is the selfsame which repels itself from itself or sunders itself into two. What was called simple Force duplicates itself and through its infinity is law. This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none. This self-identical essence is therefore related only to itself; ‘to itself’ implies relationship to an ‘other’, and the relation-to-self is rather a self-sundering; or, in other words, that very self-identicalness is an inner difference. These sundered moments are thus in and for themselves each an opposite—of an other; thus in each moment the ‘other’ is at the same time expressed; or each is not the opposite of an ‘other’ but only a pure opposite; and so each is therefore in its own self the opposite of itself. In other words, it is not an opposite at all, but is purely for itself, a pure, self-identical essence that has no difference in it. We see that in the inner world of appearance, the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing else but appearance, but not in the shape of a play of Forces, but rather that play of Forces in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement; in fact, the Understanding experiences only itself. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, i.e. through a consciousness whose nature it is to be bound up with an existence that is independent, or thinghood in general. Consciousness, therefore, can only find as a present reality the grave of its life. But because this grave is itself an actual existence and it is contrary to the nature of what actually exists to afford a lasting possession, the presence of that grave, too, is merely the struggle of an enterprise doomed to failure. The fact that the unchangeable consciousness renounces and surrenders its embodied form, while, on the other hand, the particular individual consciousness gives thanks [for the gift], i.e. denies itself the satisfaction of being conscious of its independence, and assigns the essence of its action not to itself but to the beyond, through these two moments of reciprocal self-surrender of both parts, consciousness does, of course, gain a sense of its unity with the Unchangeable. REASON Reason is the certainty of being all reality. This in-itself or this reality is, however, a universal pure and simple, the pure abstraction of reality For its freedom or its being-for-self is just this, to treat the necessity [of the relation] as of no importance. Consequently, the way in which difference, qua inert, expresses itself is just this, that it is an indifferent difference, i.e. difference as magnitude The infinite judgement, qua infinite, would be the fulfilment of life that comprehends itself; the consciousness of the infinite judgement that remains at the level of picture-thinking behaves as urination. The realization attained by this individuality consists therefore in nothing more than this, viz. that it has cast forth this circle of abstractions from its confinement within simple self-consciousness, into the element where they are for self-consciousness, in other words, are expanded into an objective existence. The individual, therefore, knowing that in his actual world he can find nothing else but its unity with himself, or only the certainty of himself in the truth of that world, can experience only joy in himself. This is the Notion which consciousness forms of itself,... It has the value of the Absolute, for self-consciousness cannot and does not want any more to go beyond this object, for in it, it is in communion with itself: it cannot, for it is all being and all power; it does not want to, for it is the self or the will of this self. The object is in its own self real as object, for it contains within itself the distinction characteristic of consciousness; it divides itself into ‘masses’ [Massen] or spheres which are the determinate laws of the absolute essence All that is left, then, for the making of a law is the mere form of universality, or, in fact, the tautology of consciousness which stands over against the content, and the knowledge, not of an existing or a real content, but only of the essence or self-identity of a content. But this self-consciousness is the actuality and existence of the substance, its self and its will. SPIRIT Both worlds, however, when grasped by Spirit—which, after this loss of itself, withdraws into itself—when grasped by the Notion, are confounded and revolutionized by the insight [of the individual] and the diffusion of that insight, known as the Enlightenment; and the realm which was divided and expanded into this world and the beyond, returns into self-consciousness which now, in the form of morality, grasps itself as the essentiality and essence as the actual self; it no longer places its world and its ground outside of itself, but lets everything fade into itself, and, as conscience, is Spirit that is certain of itself. This world is, however, a spiritual entity, it is in itself the interfusion of being and individuality; this its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but it is also an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself. The Spirit of this world is a spiritual essence that is permeated by a self-consciousness which knows itself, and knows the essence as an actuality confronting it. But the existence of this world, as also the actuality of self-consciousness, rests on the process in which the latter divests itself of its personality, thereby creating its world. On the other hand, the individual, through the enjoyment of wealth, gains no experience of his universal nature, but only gets a transitory consciousness and enjoyment of himself qua single and independent individual, and of the disparity between himself and his essence It stands on the very edge of this innermost abyss, of this bottomless depth, in which all stability and Substance have vanished; and in this depth it sees nothing but a common thing, a plaything of its whims, an accident of its caprice. In the will of the self that is certain of itself, in this knowledge that the self is essential being, lies the essence of what is right. The reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge. RELIGION Absolute Being is, in the latter form, indeed the self and present, since other than present the self cannot be Absolute Spirit is the content, and is thus in the shape of its truth. As essence it is only in itself or for us; but since this purity is just abstraction or negativity, it is for itself, or is the Self, the Notion. it is said that the eternal Being begets for itself an ‘other’. But in this otherness it has at the same time immediately returned into itself; for the difference is the difference in itself, i.e. it is immediately distinguished only from itself and is thus the unity that has returned into itself. ABSOLUTE KNOWING This last shape of Spirit—the Spirit which at the same time gives its complete and true content the form of the Self and thereby realizes its Notion as remaining in its Notion in this realization—this is absolute knowing; it is Spirit that knows itself in the shape of Spirit, or a comprehensive knowing [in terms of the Notion]. Truth is not only in itself completely identical with certainty, but it also has the shape of self-certainty, or it is in its existence in the form of self-knowledge goal is the revelation of the depth of Spirit, and this is the absolute Notion. from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude.

@Vido Because people don't believe in it. Rightly so, in my opinion. It's interesting that you say "Bashar is an alien". How do you know that? Because he says that he's an alien?

Yeah... I think it's only Darryl? you don't have to be an alien to talk about the good stuff The simplest explanation is probably the correct one (Ockham's Razor).

@Stovo 2 things. When you look into the mirror for a while, you're going to experience mild hallucinations, your face is going to look really weird, for example my beard merges with all of my face and it looks so Alien. I've done this so often that jt doesn't freak me out. What also happens is the collapse of a "here-me" and a "there-me" in the mirror. That's what kind of freaks me out. Unfortunately the hallucinations are kind of distracting, but if you manage to switch your awareness from here-me to there-me back and forth once in a while it's going to collapse. Try to find out if you're in front or behind the mirror when you look at yourself. This happens to a lot of people, especially if they smoke weed.

@Nahm There is obviously a technique for that. If you see an alien and the alien asks you how to ejaculate up the spine, saying "it's about letting go of thinking" doesn't help as it is not the way. From what I understood it involves the pelvic muscles and breathing up the spine and some shit like that, but it's messy in my head

Okay, so at 3:43 in the interview, Leo has just talked prior about going to fortune tellers/ reiki healers. He goes to 5 different healers, each who give him different explanation as to why he is having the problems he is having. Then he spent four hours with a dark energy healer. He went to these 6 individuals with no results and yet he doesn't consider them delusional, only that they are in different realities. Sure they live in different realities. Leo also went to many doctors in the western model to heal his stomach issues and none of that works. Yet, we don't consider doctors delusional. If I went to 5 western medical specialist about my stomach issue and they all have me different reasons I would consider them to have different expert opinions, or some to be wrong or some to be right. But, I wouldn't consider them delusional as I would if I went to different mystics and had different opinions. This whole truth thing is very challenging. I am personally of the opinion that healing energy work and things like reiki, Qigong, yoga, breath work, chanting, listening to music, tuning forks etc have a positive affect on aspects of the body. These practices promote health, relaxation and the spiritual aesthetic needs of humans. Yet, they are not the same of getting a vaccine or something like that. I guess, whether its western medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, mysticism, science etc that we as humans embody so many aspects of reality that each of these schools of thought address different aspects of the human experience. But, we need to be honest and clear with ourselves about the validity or intent behind using these professionals. There should be no bias given to one or the other, except in that we are being intelligent in our approach and usage of these schools. It's not black and white as far as I can tell. Its not like, western science good mysticism bad. There is truth and falsehood and varying degrees of effectiveness strung out through all domains of human existence. I have had deep mystical experiences under the care of a tantric priestess while at a sexual shamanic online festival. But, I would like more to confirm it. For example, I know first hand that Qigong is real as I practice it everyday and have first hand experience of Qi energy and am intuiting my abilities in the next 20 years. Yet, someone else could just be some asshole who took too many mushrooms and now thinks he is an alien who is a light worker who has to tell heal the world. He may think he can cure cancer, while all I am doing as a Qigong teacher is helping people to stretch and circulate their life for energy better. Two seemingly woo woo things to most people yet I think Qigong has validity, while the alien light-worker is smoking something. Like, the field of nutrition: So many different opinions. Are most nutritionist completely deluded in the same way, or similar ways as a dark energy healer who sees demons and energies that don't exist? I am really only interested in what is true so I can build a business that helps people and is based in truth. Listening to Leo's explainations about his energy healing and that he doesn't consider them delusional I felt like he was in self deception territory. If I went to a doctor who was a quake, not follower professional protocol which was leading to chronic deaths and spreading of disease we wouldn't say he was just living in a different reality. People may live in different realities in their mind, which in some context is fine imo when it comes to aesthetic and spiritual experience. But, when it comes to healing and domains of life that pertain to healing we need the tool to actually address and fix the problem. An artist's cognition may be allow for more aesthetic loosey goosie ness, but surely healing must actually work or it's a scam and self deception, or simply not the right tool for the job. If I went to an energy healer who made bold claims about the results I would be upset if I didn't have results. I remember someone on the forum a few weeks ago who was claiming to have healing powers and was 'healing people' on the forum. Which he wasn't he was full of shit and Leo banned him. So, is this medicine actually poison and snake oil? Is this spiritual healer actually a quake and self confused? What are their motivations? Proof? Reasons? Results? I am just noting here that every single external authority I come across has varying degrees of accuracy. I need to be able to take actualized.orgs model as a subset of a larger model I am creating. There is too much risk for Leos self deceptions here. I don't think he is wrong about infinity, and I love his passion and am very grateful for the immense amount of wisdom. But, I just need to always realized I can be self deceived and that I likely am. And, therefore, I cannot gauge accurately the self deception of another. So he question is: When it comes to healing, is it not important that the act of healing actually creates a tangible result in person. If not, what are the implications of the method? Was it the wrong method for the problem? was it a pseudo claim and the person was a scam artists or a self deceived hack? How do I reconcile that some modern medical practices are limited and problematic, while many work.... The same seems true of spiritual practices such as journaling, meditation, body scans, visualization, some energy work practices, Qigong, yoga, breathwork, pschedelics etc What is the difference between Aesthetic cause-play and science? or, Art and science? They both exist, but have different relative applications and are not mutually exclusive. Honestly, Arcadefire is right in their song "Powerout" -"Growing up in some strange storm... Nobodies Cold nobodies Warm.. So I went out into the night... I went out to find some light (to pick a fight with anyone)" I will absorb all this material and I will transcend falsehood and delusion more and more. I sense Leo may have a high degree of accuracy. But, I am making sure I continue to go meta beyond him and ground myself in something that is both spiritually aesthetic, practical and that is true and works.

Semi realism of Alien.

Sorry But the "super inteligent alien" was narcissistic ....

My little sister sends this message to our Whatsapp family group: "I fear you all. I wish I would die tomorrow to relieve myself from you and you from me." Turns out, my parents are giving her a hard time because of her hygiene OCD. It's exquisite! I told them yesterday that everyone has an OCD of some kind and explained to them what it is and how all people have it in some form. I told them that it's just that certain forms of OCD are marginalized and demonized by society while others are accepted and even encouraged; e.g. Society praises people with high ambition, even though technically ambition is a form of obsession. I showed them examples from their lives how they have OCDs too; e.g. My mother is super concerned about what other people think, and is super overly-protective of her possessions, and she considers her children her possessions, and that's why she's way too concerned about my sister's OCD. She wants to have everything under her control. She's way too judgemental. Overall, I was completely understanding of my sister and supported her fully against our harsh parents. The message came as shocking to me, though. She fears me? I understand how she must be feeling, but to throw away my efforts like that, why? I guess people, and especially women completely stop seeing nuance when they're in fear mode. I wonder: What more could I have possibly done?! I guess I shouldn't give it too much thought. I actually hate my parents to begin with, but what can I do? They're still my parents. They've raised me and everything. I have debts to them that I can't even begin to count. But also they're abusive. It's complicated. But even in my worst times, I always had the sense that I would take care of them when they're old. Not even once have I thought about abandoning them. My brother will move to another city in two years. My mom will feel torn apart. They're all unconscious. I can't have an intelligent discussion with them for the most part. When I talk, they think I have some alien knowledge. They don't know my real place among others. My best friend is a lot more intelligent than me. Most of "my intelligence" is borrowed from him actually. Otherwise, I would have just been another chimp. Bad genes. Bad luck. But things will change.

@RMQualtrough Can you describe what traumatize you really? Is it the alien-like weirdness?

NOPE. I don't care what people do out there, falling sexually in love with a tree or marrying an alien. but engaging with dick for me is a big red flag for losing my male identity (you might tell it's just an identity but I'm totally okay identifying or overidentifying myself with that as a male role) PS: didn't see "as a female" part of your question but still you can see some humans looking like females but having dicks

Tuesday 31/08/2021, +1 01:33 I couldn't find the difference, but now I'm only filled with sorrow. What difference is there between killing an insect and killing a human? How was me killing that moth any different to my own mother? I couldn't see one. Still can't see one. The question marked a turning point. Particular narratives of freedom prior to this point are alien, requiring translation. Heart grew cold. Crazy by the intense nihilism, as well as solipsism. Fuelled by extreme cynicism of the social matrix I see everyone around me living -- Whether by randomness or fate, my Lucifer possession invoked me rewatching Yu Yu Hakusho. The aesthetic, the colour, reminded me of the "light" which was in me. Almost finished it now, after going from ep 30. Got to the Shinobu Sensui arc at perfect timing. Forgot these synchronous things until I got to them. The villain had multiple personalities by virtue of dissociation. Was hoping for divine wrath to be enacted on mankind, and I could only agree Found myself wishing for the slaughter of all mankind, which includes myself by extension. I sat outside in my garden, forced to watch as veils and walls closed in around my heart. Watching myself sinking and sinking, feeling more and more deathly. What a terrible sight to behold. {The track playing your head, ghost shriek noises, yyh. Maybe kinpaku? Not sure} From merely sitting alone with the darkness in my heart, I gave myself emotional chills. But watching Shinobu's death and learning his true nature, I was instead filled by intense sorrow. A warm, empathic kind of sorrow for existence. Right now, I am filled with that sorrow. The tragedy of it all Compared to this sorrow, the death of a relative is insignificant. Now I don't know who I am, where I am. Do I yearn for the slaughter of mankind, women, children and the elderly, or am I so sensitive as to not step on grass? An insect flew on my forehead just now and I killed it by reflex. It was beautiful and white. Why God do you torture me like this? What's the point and meaning of this sorrow, just end it all already, please. Summon more will from dV air? Continuously, without break.* Is that the only answer? What's the point of all these cycles, phases? Will I once again have my heart close? FUCK NÎGGER SHIT -- *Strike the sun if it insulted you. Pick up the sword. Throw away everything and think one thing; further. There is only one enemy, fear. Edit: After writing all that, I dreamt of that white whale. An intimidating shadow looming over me.

@impulse9 I also had a crazy alien story. I think I have a couple or at least a few but I also saw something disappear. It was a lever at the top of the ceiling which disappeared after I came out of my room. I think that it was alien technology. I also wasn't under the influence of chemicals or hallucinations. I know that I was awake because I know that I'm awake right now.

My point is that things at this point are not being imagined randomly: you are not suddenly morphing into some 8-legged alien then into a cat, then into a tree, etc, because what "adds" to infinity so to speak is for it/you to be Leo. This doesn't mean there is no room in that for waking up from the person and becoming the creator, far from that, but this too is just a (necessary) step. Here is a quote from Nisargadatta that will perhaps make things clearer: "Donating the self you get brahma, donating brahma you get parabrahman" (Brahma in Hinduism is the creator god, or the creative principle, parabrahman is a term used to point to the absolute)

@hamedsf It blows my mind to think how small and not important we are compered to the infinite universe. @Leo Gura What if our MAGA isn't aliens MAGA? Their MAGA may refer to something higher than ours @Pateedm What it looked alike? was it close to you enough to see details? @m0hsen I can understand why they don't want or interested to have contact with us. But one or two formal visits just in order to shock us a bit would be nice @Loving Radiance We are aliens, to other aliens @Waken Do you mean to Bashar Al-Assad the villain alien?

Sometimes there is an energetic shift in perception and it is recognized that all these human states of being that are pointed to with words like love or music are alien. Out of this world stuff. ? You'd imagine it is somewhere out there, but it's here.

You sure you talkin about us? If they are like us I don't want to meet them. Imagine you meet an alien and he's wearing a MAGA hat.

You can meet plenty on a strong psychedelic. I've always found this notion that aliens should be of flesh and blood like us and bound to material existence a little cocky of us humans. And even if flesh and blood aliens exist (they probably do), the scientific part of my mind is telling me that space and time are simply way too big and physics too restrictive for us to ever meet. Unfortunately warp drives, wormholes and other types of FTL travel break causality which is kind of big in physics. It creates information paradoxes like being able to tell yourself where you're going to go before you decide to do so. So either these completely paradoxical technologies can actually exist, or, practically speaking, we can never meet a flesh and blood alien because it would simply take so much time to travel. Not to mention that even finding a populated planet would be like a needle in a haystack problem but with the haystack being so enormous it would literally take you to the end of time and you still wouldn't finish searching. All that said I did actually saw a UFO one time. I was with a friend and we both saw the same thing, and we weren't under influence of anything strong enough to give us hallucinations like that, so who knows, life is strange. I'm not sure what that was, it was rectangular, made no noise, and just floated in mid-air. It had some lights too, all around it. After a few minutes it just suddenly disappeared, almost like it took off into one direction away from us. But it was too fast to really notice. I never saw anything like that again.

Disclaimer: This is my favorite essay by Ken Wilber. The aim is NOT to convey any absolute notion of self, but to give a more practical and integral perspective on the ego. I believe that a lot of seekers in todays spiritual community tend misunderstand the transcendetal nature of things. This will ultimately lead to suffering. We try to "get rid" of our egos but thats the wrong approach. We try to see through the illusion but we fail to realize that as long there is a body, there will be some ego. This is how spiritual shadows are born and you can become directly concious of this process. Be aware. Egoless Means More Precisely because the ego, the soul and the Self can all be present simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of egolessness, a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self (that’s a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no longer exclusively identified with that self. One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of egoless is that people want their egoless sages to fulfill all their fantasies of saintly or spiritual, which usually means dead from the neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with money, food, sex, relationships, desire they want their saints to be without. Egoless sages who are above all that is what people want. Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it. In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be less than a person, somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex, pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We expect our sages to be an absence of all that drives us! All the things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence, that vacancy, that less than personal, is what we often mean by egoless. But egoless does not mean less than personal, it means more than personal. Not personal minus, but personal plus all the normal personal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints and sages from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so not because they avoided the physical, emotional and mental dimensions of humanness and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self) the ultimate source of their power but they expressed that power, and gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in terms that could be heard by all. These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego (the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle of the causal). To the extent these great teachers moved the gross realm, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that’s a narcissist), they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure atman (the pure I–I) that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God. Saint Teresa was a great contemplative? Yes, and Saint Teresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it). Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations. Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lao Tzu, Plato, the Bal Shem Tov these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim. And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down. No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God. There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of transcending ego : it doesn’t mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger. (As Nagarjuna put it, in the relative world, atman is real; in the absolute, neither atman nor anatman is real. Thus, in neither case is anatta a correct description of reality.) The small ego does not evaporate; it remains as the functional center of activity in the conventional realm. As I said, to lose that ego is to become a psychotic, not a sage. Transcending the ego thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not get rid of the small ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions and mind; they do not erase them. Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live it with a certain exuberance. When identification spills out of the ego and into the Kosmos at large, the ego discovers that the individual atman is in fact all of a piece with Brahman. The big Self is indeed no small ego, and thus, to the extent you are stuck in your small ego, a death and transcendence is required. Narcissists are simply people whose egos are not yet big enough to embrace the entire Kosmos, and so they try to be central to the Kosmos instead. But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want them to display a manifest dimension at all. Anytime a sage displays humanness in regard to money, food, sex, relationships we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. We want out, we want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs it to the end this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us, because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of luminous ether. We do not want our sages to have bodies, egos, drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships, or life, because those are what habitually torture us, and we want out. We do not want to surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away. We want vaporware spirituality. The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as tantric, these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion. They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste. Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display. In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you? - Ken Wilber

From when I was about 6-8 years old, my older brother and neighbor would tease me that I was going to get abducted by aliens. When I was 8 years old, I had a dream that I was abducted. I do not have the same abduction dream, but every few months or so I have a dream with a single alien in it. These used to be nightmares until I discovered how to escape the dream immediately which is to run at the alien and decide I’m just going to beat the absolute living fuck out of it lol. It’s kind of funny that my subconscious has remembered this way out of the dream every time, but I feel like this subconscious fear of the alien and anger toward it might be keeping me from being able to experience more love and be happier. Ive heard that dreams which recur have a message which is not being understood properly which is why it keeps coming. How would you suggest I resolve this? I’m thinking about trying to go to sleep with the intention to try to communicate civilly and accept the alien in my dream rather than try to fight it. I think this might take a lucid dream as in normal dreaming the pattern which wants to see the alien as an adversary is too strong. Any advice would be appreciated.

Yeah I don’t really have an issue with the dream. It is kind of cool to kick alien ass every once in a while. It doesn’t produce any overt suffering in my life or even in the dream as I know they have no power over me in my own dreams anymore. I’m just suspicious that the subconscious anger and fear could be affecting my life in some subtle way.

I was primed with fear of alien abduction by my brother and neighbor for a couple years. My brother always said that the aliens would abduct me when he wasn’t there. We shared a room, and he stayed at his mom’s house on and off. I think we should revoke his CPA for this. This fear was naturally expounded by seeing aliens discussed in pop culture and my idea that living in the country isolated from people would make abduction more feasible.