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Because reality is a giant mind. There is no possibility of stuff unless it is occurring inside a mind. Here's the kicker: there actually is no difference between sentience/non-sentience, nonphysical/physical, conscious/unconscious, mental/non-mental. All of those are relative distinctions which collapse into one nameless unity. This unity is what is. It is pure Absolute Truth. Which is not different from something and nothing. Reality is just one giant fat zero. Like it never even happened. Because there is no one to tell the difference between happening and non-happening. Another way to phrase it is... it seems to you that reality happened because you think it did.

I agree with what was said previously. At the current stage, AI is simply a tool. It is a clever way of approaching problem-solving. AI as we know today needs a problem with a clear set of well-defined rules (like a game). On the contrary to human intelligence, which can deal with more than simple black and white approach. The models that are used right now are very rudimentary. It is true that you don't particularly define every node in the AI, in other words, you don't program how it should behave. In that sense, it is a revolution. However, to achieve any kind of results with Machine Learning, you need a structured linear task and an obscene amount of trial-error iterations. You constantly need to apply error correction in a feedback loop. That is not to say that I don't believe in the evolution of consciousness in form of a "machine". Fundamentally, everything is already consciousness, so I don't see why expression of sentience should be limited to the human form. For AI to evolve further it will have to be an incredibly complex and chaotic structure. Each node will have to interconnect with another in a very complicated manner. To challenge human intelligence, AI will have to be at least as complex as the human brain. Considering that we know so little about the human brain, a truly powerful AI is hundreds if not thousands of years away. I don't believe that a couple of computer scientist will create a structure as complex as the human brain in our lifetime. If a system reaches a certain level of sophistication and freedom, it can give rise to an even higher order of complexity. Examples are everywhere: A simple skeleton and cells in our body produce a living organism; A simple low-voltage signals on copper traces produce powerful computational tools; A gathering of individuals can build an empire. Take for example the game Minecraft. It is an extremely simple video game, but it has a lot of freedom in it. This freedom keeps people entertained and allows for creations of complicated structures within the game. Someone built a replica of the Roman Colosseum in Minecraft. The programmers of Minecraft certainly did not have to code in every possible structure. They simply laid out the ground rules of the game, and let the complexity to emerge.

Suffering is necessary process for development. Is it fundamental to the universe in as a physical law? No. It surely is because of our reflective nature; but suffering happens even to animals and other forms of life who lack our level of sentience. We can look at suffering as a negative force, working in opposition of a positive force, both exist and are two sides of the same coin.

just want to clarify and understand... when it is said there is no "I", I get there is no questioning entity with it's own awareness/sentience inside of my body or anywhere else in the manifest universe. but whatever is there, is beyond I... it is the only thing which exists and it does have sentience/intelligence . it's the reality as a whole, with awareness and alive presence everywhere, without bound / exception. correct? the "your" in the above line... that is what I am... but that is not this body/mind/thought or the thing asking this question. sure, nothingness is its/mine nature but it is still okay to know/feel that there remains "something" which is nothing but is still "something" but in an unconventional way

It's Orange reacting to stage red/blue in Green. Collectivism without Individuality is Right and Left Authoritarianism. What I think is that Red/Blue collectivism moves to Orange Individuality and then at Green if they are systematic thinkers they keep the Individuality to move to Yellow. I've seen a picture of SD where stage Yellow is Individual Collectivism. I don't think Green is a place to stay unless the Red/Blue collectivism is rejected. Community is one way to put Green, healthy collectivism. It doesn't group humans into races, gender identities, rich/poor and other groups for practical social justice. It merely lifts all up, the Greater Group of Homo Sapiens AND other Animals, that's where animal rights activism comes into place, influenced by compassion and awareness of spirituality, consciousness, sentience. Orange puts the focus on the Individual, you are not your race or your gender before you're an Individual and the scientific nature of it puts inclusion into, and climbing of hierarchies, by competence. To reject it is to ignore healthy and practical aspects of Orange. It seems wise to gain the practical aspects of Social Justice, but it is not worth it. Practical social justice is uplifting everyone.

In this video, the way you framed things sounded kinda like The Absolute is like a dumb mechanical system with only an illusion of sentience/intelligence/consciousness. No matter what evolution or change or shift 'seem' to take place, ultimately nothing is happening and the Absolute remains like a dumb, dead stuff just so full of itself because there isn't anything else. I get that the distinction between mechanical and conscious will ultimately collapse. Anyway @Leo Gura my question is, do you honestly think that the full ramifications of this understanding can really be implemented equally and globally one day? I just can't imagine how could a mass, global 'transactional reality' stomach and survive this Truth realization. Also another thing is, almost all spiritual traditions lure their audience mainly through a combination of promising fantastical goodies and installing fear of the consequences of deluded actions; basically utilizing the primal pleasure-pain dynamic of human brain. But then you come in and open the whole pandora's box, revealing the utter meaninglessness and inconsequential nature of everything to mass audience. Almost all people will neglect your message immediately because it sounds so far fetched, until they suffer immensely and finally start entertaining some of these ideas. What are your thoughts on this? Is excruciating suffering and loss the only way to make the greater mass more open to this? Another thing commonly noticed that, when non dual truths are translated into mind's language, it almost always sounds ugly, self defeating and just unacceptable. What a twist! The mind itself formulates it, then itself can't stomach it! Is it a subtle mechanism of the devilry of the mind so that it can dismiss the message and bum out to avoid the process/practices?

I'm talking about neuroscience, brains, hands, cars, these are consistent. Vague feelings about love or whatever can be seen in the brain anyway. It was also impossible to figure out how life arises out of material processes, that it must be some magic "life force". Throughout history you know how ignorant we've been and still are. Your claim that dead matter cannot generate sentience is very up to debate. See for instance how you experience vision, feelings, hearing, and a bunch of senses in consciousness. It obviously has a function for the brain, and see how also what you feel or hear in consciousness changes depending on what you've experienced in the past. That is the brain updating depending on what it senses through consciousness, which is a sort of mechanism in the brain which maybe unifies or puts together a bunch of senses so you don't have to sense multiple things separately. During sleep you become unconscious the same as with anesthesia, sometimes more, sometimes less. The point is that you've now seen good arguments why the brain has something to do with consciousness. In the future I think we'll get closer and closer. I bet we'll even know what happens when consciousness knows itself in the brain. Maybe that's the Awakening (outside of DMN deactivation).

Of course. Literally any element of your experience for which you use shared language has the same piece. Does another person experience the same thing when you talk about love, couches, or numbers? You may use the same word but the experiences could be radically different. And you will never, even with all the scientific instruments, be able to know what someone else's experience is really like because you, as observer, stand in the way. Science can't figure that out, because it's impossible . Dead matter cannot generate sentience. No, the Self goes beyond being human, in fact goes beyond all concepts. You can experience that fact directly for yourself if you like.

The evidence of absence is the lack of a brain and a nervous system. there is no evidence of absence, a tree doesn’t have a nervous system, it is the nervous system. and if you are not conscious of what makes your brain work - then you can’t be conscious of the sentience of how you communicate with yourself all the time.

Sentience is a distinction/duality. Have you ever wondered if you are actually sentient?

Am I aware? yes. What is it that I am aware of? The sound surrounding me. The feelings in the body. The shapes and colors of objects around me. But what is it that is aware? Can a monitor see itself? Can a sound hear itself? Obviously not. I I I I..where is it pointed towards when I say I? Some subtle feelings in the head and chest deep inside. But what is that is aware of these sensations? Can the sensation in the head feel itself? No that sounds silly. Is that what I really am? A sensation? My entire life revolves around these subtle ephemeral sensations? They were born in 1994 and now have an age, history, plans for future, desire and preferences? It sounds so ridiculous when I frame it like that. I'm obviously not these sensations. Then what am I? I am that which knows all these sensations. Is there a location where the source of this knowingness is located? No whatever direction is pointed towards is always more experience. What is direction? up down left right..are these directions absolute? No directions are always in relation to a presumed point or location. With respect to this knowingness, is there any direction like up down left right? Does this knowingness have any center? I can't find one. So does this mean that this Awareness is without location? Even it is not located, there is the sense that I undoubtedly exist. I'm present witnessing all these changes in phenomena. But does that knowingness itself undergo change? no all the changes are in phenomena. According to Vedanta, real or abosolute is defined by having three characteristics. whatever is real must be 1) eternal or ever present 2) unchanging 3) must stand on it's own right. That means it does not need another thing to exist. So what is it in my present experience that yields all three of these points? If something is real it must be ever present and so it must exist right now in my experience, whatever I may be experiencing? Okay what are the things on my experience that does not conform these points? All sounds. All sights. How about sensations? is there a particular sensation that is taking place eternally, unchanging and knowing itself. No that sounds silly. During sleep, there is no sensation. What remains in deep sleep? The sentience and thinking stops. But there really is no feeling of non-existence. So the absolute exists in deep sleep. What is it's nature?

Cited from the article above: "Death happens in plant agriculture, let me count the ways… First, you need to make a field. Crop fields aren’t “natural”. When you fly over the United States and look down at all of the squares and circles down there, that’s not “nature,” that’s man. Lots of things had to die to make way for that perfect square of only one crop to be there. Step two, once all trees are cut down and life is removed, it’s time to plow up the soil. This releases carbon and further kills lots of life living close to the surface. Small critters that had their dens underground are decapitated and chopped up. Next, time to plant and don’t forget, you need to fertilize. How should the fertilizing be done? There are chemical methods, but I’m sure my blogger friend only eats organic vegetables 100% of the time, right? Ok. How do organic farmers feed their soil? On our farm, we use compost (a mix of dead animals and plants) and other organic tools like blood meal, bone meal, and fish emulsion. There are “veganic” options that use algae, but the production of this has it’s own issues. Life cycle studies of the production of algae for fertilizer shows that they’re not as “green” as many assume, requiring energy and greenhouse gasses and producing waste. Plus, you then have to transport this to a farm with… algae biofuels? Another problem that happens when we strip away an ecosystem to plant grains and vegetables is that we’re removing the natural cover that animals like field mice have, making it much easier for a hawk to swoop down and pluck it’s lunch. Exposing that mouse was the result of human interventions. If we know a death will happen as a result of our actions, but we didn’t directly intend for that death to occur, is the death still our fault? Are fish, insects and birds less significant life forms than mammals? Are animals that look closest to humans more important? Is it only important not to kill animals that are considered sentient? Is sentience the only value a being can have? Does death harm some beings more than others? We need to take responsibility for both intended deaths and unintended deaths due to our impact on the land. A new paper looking at the number of animal deaths caused by plant agriculture looked at deaths per hectare per year from various different angles. Depending on what you consider “valuable life” and how the animals were counted, deaths could either range from 35-250 mouse deaths per acre to 7.3 billion animals killed every year from plant agriculture if you count birds killed by pesticides, fish deaths from fertilizer runoff, plus reptiles and amphibians poisonings from eating toxic insects. Whether or not you agree with their math is not the issue. I think the issue is, if death happened for your food, then are you morally better than me because you didn’t drink milk or eat a steak? "

This is my first post here. After watching Leo on YouTube for a while I feel like this is the right community to get some feedback. To start off, I am compelled from the depths of my soul to do whatever I can to have as much of a positive impact on humanity as possible and beyond to all sentience that exists. After overcoming the depths of hell in my own life I just can't sit around while I know so many others are experiencing the same hell. Then I realize suffering to a certain degree is required for growth itself. Mentally and physically it builds resilience and character. Suffering is a mechanism of evolution and a pillar to life itself. Adversity is the mother of virtue, of beauty. We also seem to exist in this reality between a particular balance of order and chaos. There are optimal balances to everything, which includes suffering. So I think humanity should move in a direction of reducing extreme suffering, but not suffering altogether. Basically there is a tipping point of suffering that disturbs the optimal range of balance. Okay great, it seems like I am on the right path... but wait. I want to do what is good, but good is only defined by our evolutionary context, forged out of the desire for survival. Basically all things that we call good are centrally based on our survival instincts created by evolution itself. All things that we think or feel are bad are just factors related to death. Good and bad seem to rest upon complete subjectivity and have no distinction outside evolution. Well, there's also the meaning of life. I should just live true to my life purpose, which I define as following my heart while maintaining balance. Not falling too far into a cycle of chasing desire. My heart tells me I can be part of transforming humanity into the best it can be (Just part of the process. I really don't want to sound egoic here. Please correct me if I come off in a negative way). What if humans are actually a bad thing in the Universe in the end? Hell, we are fucking up this planet beyond repair. We are currently a cancer. At this point my heart is only a puppet of evolution itself to serve its purpose. Decreasing suffering in humanity is going to be a lot of damn work. This will and is requiring tremendous sacrifice. My current conclusion is that I should still follow my heart, do a lot of hard work, make the required sacrifices, but in doing so also have enough of a balance where I am enjoying life through the process. Then accept the fact that what I don't sacrifice and give to myself will just mean I allowed some people to endure extreme suffering. What does everyone think? Next up, let's discuss what steps are needed to actualize humanity. I have been thinking about it and pursing it in some fashion for years, but I am reaching a stage where I want to start discussing this with like minded people. In the end nothing will happen until we all come together towards a common pursuit with a common strategy.

I think sentience is different from intelligence. Cows have big enough brains to have ego which is responsible for perception of sentience. Cows do not have enough intelligence to figure out what is going on.

Doesn't this assume that a central nervous system is the only way to experience life? When its possible life outside of mammals may have other forms of system that allow them to perceive life? But plants do avoid creatures. They fight against insects all the time. They must be able to detect some sort of negative (in their view) stimulus in order to fight back. I think the fact that plants have some of sort of self-interest indicates an experience of life to me. Why do you not think so? I mean its hard to know exactly since there isn't any science saying that they are sentient in the sense that they experience pain. But there is science suggesting they are conscious, like to grow, can hear, and communicate with other plants. Although, I do not find the comparison of a computers, plants, and mussels to be a fair one. I think you bring up valid points, such as my equating of intelligence to sentience and that Mammals experience life in a more complex manner due to the nervous system and memories. I do think think there are separate experiences of life within me, I believe bacterias and other cells in general are all different forms of life experiencing the world in their own way. However, I still connect more with mammals and I'd say a cow before Id save a colony of ants. But my issue is still the use of synthetic B12 and Omega 3 DHA & EPA. Eating insects is just not an option for me cause I think its gross. Mussels are controversial in the vegan community, but even then, am I suppose to eat mussels on a daily basis? I guess I can eat them like they're vitamins. At the moment, I live with my parents, so it is difficult to have the autonomy of what kind of food is in my house, but I am goin to experiment when I have my own place. I guess my overall point was that everything is life and no matter what, life will be killing life for food. However, correct if im wrong, you're saying that life is different and we should discriminate what we eat because life experiences itself in different ways (ie: mammals have a more complex sensual experience whereas plants do not due to lack of central nervous system including the brain).

I do not deny they are conscious or do not feel pain, I think you have a hard time seeing what I am trying to convey to you. And there is no reason to assume that mussels have an experience of life, they do not have a central nervous system. The suffering of mussels, much like the suffering of plants, would be completely unnecessary as they are not as mobile as mammals are. The very reason why we suffer is precisely because we are mobile, because we have the ability to avoid danger immediately. It's not like pain is inherent to nature, pain is simply a tool to communicate to the agent what to avoid. A non-mobile being does not require pain because they cannot avoid anything at all. But yes, I can see why you would have the bias you do, it probably increases your quality of life because, again, you do not need to recognize the unnecessary harm you are causing to your surrounding and to sentient beings who have a far higher capacity for suffering and consciousness than for example insects do. Additionally, if you were worried about insects and plants, you'd have even a bigger reason to go vegan, as animal agriculture consumes and kills more plants and insects than the plant agriculture would do if you directly consumed the plants. Of course the destruction of habitat is significant as well. You are equating intelligence to sentience. Just because a plant can do things does not mean it has an experience of life. The experience of life really is nothing but a tool to react to the surrounding world in real time. By your logic, computers already have an experience of life, as they can do all the things that mussels and plants can do, theoretically. You can program a robot to avoid lots of things, does that mean the robot is suffering when he does so? It is very ignorant to assume that all life on this planet is structured the same way as we mammals are. Just because we suffer when we die, does not mean a plant does. Just because we suffer when we burn ourselves, does not mean a mussel does. In fact, when you are in deep sleep you are not sentient at all. There is no experience of life, even though you might still react significantly to your surroundings. Ask yourself this, if you had no memory of anything at all, ever, not even a short term memory, would you be able to experience the world? If every single moment that passes by you would instantly forget, or even better, it would never enter your memory, what would pain really mean to you? You would still react to it, but would you actually experience it as anything at all? It's an interesting question, and it's not obvious at all in my opinion. Even when your brain is active, it does not mean you are sentient/you have an experience of life. What does that mean for a plant or for an insect? Furthermore, if an insect has consciousness, why do you think your brain is limited to one experience of life? What if different parts of you brain have different, separate experiences of life, with you being the one that experiences thoughts and the ego. What if there are within you multiple beings that communicate with each other. You would never know.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being that from the outside is indistinguishable from a normal human being but lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. What if we are pure awareness and are just aware of what philosophical zombies are thinking and feeling? Would philosophical zombies called humans do all the chimpanzee things when there is no consciousness? I don't think the truth wouldn't be that simple, though.

As I said in my post, the reason why that is most likely not the case is because she could simply eat mussels, a non-sentience meat source that wouldn't cause direct harm. The fact that she either didn't research it or is not willing to make the pleasure sacrifice is already enough to tell me about her character, but I did actually listen to a debate with her once and I disagree that she is green, I would say she is mostly yellow and partly green. Though I don't think it is necessary to be vegan for someone to be green, I do think that she is not genuine. And I'm not sure if that is correct, but it seems like she went vegan for personal health, which is not necessarily green thinking at all. And I also disagree that being a feminist makes you green, I would consider it more of a yellow movement (individual freedoms for your own ingroup), if you are a male and you are a feminist, you are more likely to be green.

I don't know if being vegan necessarily equates to being stage green. I would say the root of vegan philosophy is probably a stage green personality product but the adoption of it can easily be done by stage blue or orange. Though I don't know, it's strange that there are people who simply do not understand the vegan argument and that there are others who easily do. I guess a stage green personality would more easily adopt it? There are a lot of vegans who lose motivation and then stop being vegans, but I think they are usually mostly orange people. The argument is usually health, though you can mostly tell that it is an excuse due to the fact that they do not consume non-sentient meat sources instead, like mussels. That's when you know they don't even really want to try, though it's probably a simplification of what really is happening in their minds. I can only say how it is for me personally, but I don't struggle whatsoever while being a vegan. For me it's common sense, at this point I even get confused by people having the capacity to choose pleasure over the absence of suffering and death of other almost same level-sentience beings. To me it's on the common-sense level of not raping someone. It's simply not a struggle, and I don't even identify as vegan at all. Though I am a little confused about one thing. There are many stage green people who seem to have never been stage orange, like for example SJW-types or as you'd call "militant"-vegans. I feel like a lot of these people are the exact opposite of stage orange, like people who have been bullied in school and didn't take care of themselves, and put their frustration into group identity thinking. Though I don't know if these people would be stage blue or green? They clearly haven't gone through stage orange, unless I misunderstand something about that process, though they do try to protect minority groups. Is it possible that this could be a part of stage blue thinking as well? They are usually very angry about injustice, and I would say that is more of a blue quality, so maybe militant vegans are also stage blue as they are motivated by injustice primarily? In fact, I just checked out a chart about spiral dynamics, stage has these as negative traits: "Shy, lonely, isolated, lack of empathy, bitter, critical.", which is a perfect description of SJWs and probably of most militant vegans, too. So I think it comes down to stage blue and stage green both adoption the same philosophy and acting differently, because they both are group oriented thinkers. Of course stage blue are probably not as empathetic so they will not as often encompass other species into their empathetic spectrum as stage green do, so that is why militant vegans are the small minority among vegans in general. Ex-vegans are explained due to stage orange personalities being motivated to be vegan to "be a better version of themselves" and to "not harm the environment because it's irrational and will in the end harm the human species". These are actually two arguments that you hear very often from people, that eating meat is so destructive for the environment, when you then ask them why that is a bad thing, they will argue that it will have negative consequences for the entire human species, including themselves and their own agenda. So they are becoming vegan out of a selfish argumentation over an empathetic one. The destruction itself is not the problem, but the consequences it will have for them, or how it will make them look if they support such destruction. That is why once the veganism becomes an annoyance, or they lose motivation, they go back to being non-vegan. I remember I once suspected Leo to be motivated in the same way when he posted a video on his blog about the ecology. He argued that you would need to be ecological to be a developed human, which to me sounds very much like stage orange reasoning. It's still self-centered, but maybe I am actually confusing it with stage yellow. Either way, from a stage green perspective, if I am correct about my analysis that I actually am partly stage green, it does not really require reason to be ecological. You simply look at the destruction and you make the decision not to be part of it, to the extend that you can, the same way you would not rape someone. It's not something that you need to rationalize at all. You see the suffering you are causing and you don't do it anymore. I think this is actually a good pointer to a stage green person, you simply have to show them a video of what is happening and they will themselves change their actions. With lower stages you will need to use philosophy to explain to them why it's "bad", unhealthy, not good for the environment and thus not good for humans etc.

Uh, meet the flatlander. Hi flatlander. You are correct that no one should take someone's anecdotal account of extinction as Truth and then stop there. Do the work yourself, then run your mouth - hence: Consider that the scope and framework of reality is created by and totally subservient to what is manifesting as life itself, and not the other way around. Your mind even in your little "skeptical" attempt is forgetting this and acting as authority again to whoever told you there was an amygdala. In this capacity, as Mystics, the only real skepticism that is of value is that which is 100% self-directed. Otherwise, you are a seeker and have not yet found your vehicle, so why not be studying and practicing and not talking. Your ignorance preceeds your unskillful arrogance. I don't even know there is a body, or an "organism"...whatever there is that is life and universe, was totally made up by "me", and keeps doing it every tick. Kensho reveals all your knowledge to be anecdotal, and reality to be open ended to the point of infinity -- simultaneously. Feel free to maintain a staunch closed position and never know anything about reality ever. Nobody gives a damn. Of course you can't learn anything from his glimpse, or my direct consciousness. Only yours. And you don't seem to want to know. That's fine too, and a valid choice. The Buddha didn't claim any personal authority here, he simply said to try the practice and see, if you are curious. If you do, and do it right, you will see. When fear "runs amok" as you say, without an object...this can be due to the fact that the sense of "mind" has stumbled on the inimitable fact that there is no sensory activity and separate sentience witnessing...but rather just sensory activity. Next the thing starts to segfault and freak out wanting the comfort of separation and dualism and familiar good old burn of suffering again. Once it comes back, along with the bull sense of deceptive security, then the person recovers back to the "bondage" of the previous abidance. Damn, most of the people on here are really really talking out their ass. Why such scientifically and mystically ignorant folks would be attracted to a forum like this is beyond me, but this is pretty disappointing. The only valid source for your Insight is what has been won on the zafu and agreed upon by your learned realized teacher(s). Direct Consciousness #1 source here. This isn't the laboratory and you aren't a dead corpus of data.........or are you? M

I tried to search for this topic and was surprised it has not been brought up, please remove if it has and I am just beating a dead horse. From wikipedia: "Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,[1]wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3000 years ago. The hypothesis is generally not accepted by mainstream psychologists." The argument is that originally humans heard orders in their heads and just followed them as if they were directions from the gods - we had no consciousness. It theorizes that we still talked, grieved, celebrated etc however it was not consciously. It gets too out there for me when it uses the old testament as an example of this "Bicameral Mind" still in effect and that the authors of the old testament still had no consciousness. The writing style of the old testament is very strange I admit, it has no emotion, no internal thought, no suffering, god was more like Zeus, the forces of natures etc, constantly people act on visions of god and everyone else believes every vision. He uses this quote about an ancient war where he claims the Romans had developed consciousness and they claimed to fight "Noble Automatas" - people who still operated under the Bicameral Mind and not sentience. He suggests mass population increase and the joining of groups of people all worshiping different gods was the catalyst for sentience. He claims a schizophrenic or religious person having a genuine vision of the divine to be the last remains of the Bicameral Mind. India definitely has the strange deities reputation and that would be another example of the Bicameral Mind. The theory is out there, but looking into it many people have been using his Bicameral Mind theory to come up with less out there theories. It seems to give examples of the ego and the observer, but then the pure awareness is still not explained. I was loving the theory until the time frame of only 3000 years or so ago we actually developed consciousness. It does explain a hell of a lot about the thousands upon thousands of gods and why every ancient structure serves no real practical purpose other than worship.

We need time to comprehend the human experience. Time is only possible with sentience I believe, can an animal experience pain or pleasure and understand that it will pass? Or is it 100% a slave to its instincts? Humans can understand a stimulus will last only a certain amount of time, prepare for future events in a methodical way and not by instinct. Is time purely devised by human minds? In particular the human ego?

“You are not a thing that is sentient. You are not an object that is aware. You are not a sentient being. You are sentience itself.” - Thomas Razzeto https://infinitelymystical.com

[All of this is just my opinion and I celebrate the fact that everyOne gets to choose what they want to believe and how they want to live their life. Hooray for that!] Hi everyOne, I am a spiritual teacher and would like to offer the following 3-page essay from my website for your consideration. Here is the link: The Loving Heart of Enlightenment Spiritual awakening in simple, clear English https://www.infinitelymystical.com/essays/the-loving-heart-of-enlightenment.html 3-pages Here are some excerpts from that essay: I use this word “awareness” a lot so I want to be clear right up front. I am not using it in any special way. It just means the power of sentience. Yet I use the phrase “pure awareness” to emphasize the idea that this awareness is not a thing. You are not a thing that is sentient. You are not an object that is aware. You are not a sentient being. You are sentience itself. […] The recognition that you exist fundamentally as pure awareness comes about through a spiritual intuitive awakening. And to be more precise, there are three key awakenings regarding this awareness. […] The first awakening is the one that I’ve already touched upon several times: “Ah, I am not fundamentally my body, and I am not even fundamentally my soul. Instead, I am fundamentally pure awareness!” That’s the first awakening. The second awakening is this: “Ah, the awareness that’s looking out of my eyes is the same awareness that’s looking out of your eyes … and his eyes … and her eyes … and the eyes of every sentient being on all the worlds, both physical and spiritual. There is only one awareness.” […] Now, here’s the third awakening. This awareness arises as each and every thing that it is aware of. What we are talking about here is God and creation – Awareness (God) and the objects of awareness (creation). It is very simple. […] In form, we are many; in essence, we are one. In this, we see that it is only through the many that we can share the One Love of God. When you look into the eyes of another, you are looking directly into the eyes of God. It is God who plants a seed in your soul that grows into the loving heart of enlightenment. - end of excerpts - Thanks for reading this post. In truth, I honor your divine nature Thomas Razzeto https://www.infinitelymystical.com/

Why we make a distinction between Awareness and consciousness The above post talks about my essay “The Loving Heart of Enlightenment.” In that essay, I talk about awareness a lot. I talk about how there is only One Awareness and how it spontaneously emanates as the totality of created reality. This is why my mentor, Timothy Conway, and I refer to this awareness as Source-Awareness. But in that particular essay, I never used the word “consciousness.” This is only because I did not want to go into the difference between the two in that particular essay. But I later clarified this subject in a comment I posted in a thread titled: Why we make a distinction between Awareness and consciousness Here is an overview of my comment: Awareness is the power of sentience, the capacity to perceive. Consciousness is the window through which the One Awareness looks. This Awareness is what you truly are, fundamentally. This Awareness perceives, but it cannot be perceived. Just as a window cannot see anything, consciousness is also completely blind; it is not sentient in any way. Yet consciousness serves as an instrument (a viewpoint) for the One Awareness (or God, if you are comfortable with that word). Your personal consciousness (soul) permeates your body and this combination provides a viewpoint through which the One Awareness experiences the world as the person you seem to be. The full comment is here: https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/14555-difference-between-awareness-and-consciousness/#comment-149233