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In normal day to day consciousness we think about other people as having their own separate experiences - their own consciousness. This sets the base for morality. Often, when I hear about enlightenment, it is said that all of my direct experience is a dream or imagination. So I imagine that other people also have direct experiences, but in reality they don't? The sentience of others is just a thought in the mind? Sometimes, when I take psychedelics, I feel like there is nothing else but this consciousness right now. But when I come back, it seems so crazy - there are clearly other people who seem to have their own experiences. Even when they are not in my consciousness they are doing stuff and experiencing stuff. Some of the implications of this whole 'everything is imagination' thing seem quite insane. So I am confused. Maybe you could help me to understand it better (or point out where I'm stuck). Are other people sentient??? Is it worth saving the planet for my children - or are they just non-sentient hallucinations? Could it be a possibility that taking psychedelics makes us just believe unreal things and that they are deceiving us in an even trickier way than our own psyche? Thanks a lot

The Truth of reality is that you have a mind and this mind is its own entity, it is as true as that you can sense you have a personal identity. In addition, you have a body, and this is the most obvious thing, it is something which critics rant about every time they say there is no supernatural origin. The body is like controlling a robot, your mind is in close attachment to it and as an illusion you might think it is you. Well, the mind and body are in a sort of merging even if they are two different things. If you would not have this mind of yours you would be a plain animal, you would never resist instinctive impulses and always just do the predictable, just like any animal. This is not life. But humans (can) have sentience for some reason, they can fight their own automatic drive and this conflicting force nullifies them as animals through logic. So if they are not animals what are they? A human can resist every instinct if they really would go obsessed about doing this, although this resistance can be very painful since the animal side is going against its own nature. The main lesson of this is to try to increasingly resist/rebel against the body and see what it does to the consciousness of the mind. I am all the time encouraging people to try the remedy and the result itself is the validation of my words If you cared to follow my teachings to the letter you would start to believe in me by default, it would validate itself by the result you experience in the long run. But if you are afraid of losing things, excitements of this world it might get in the way. You need to reflect on what exactly it is that you have in this world which is so wonderful and lovely and is the driving thing to why you love it. Hopefully in time you will realize the prognosis is utterly worthless, you work to die in a few decades for no more than some hormone rushes which have diminishing returns. A lost human cannot comprehend their own condition and why it is wrong and this is the main problem and why people cannot choose this path. This is perhaps why 'Children of Israel' are first most addressed, they easily fall into contemplation due to an already accumulated mental depth. You can contemplate my words objectively and your logic can at least make you uncertain of whether I am right or wrong, and then you might test my prescription for some time and experience the enhancements it gives. I do in fact give you a prescription and not a doctrine. I am like a doctor with vast knowledge within my profession who tells you what would heal your body. Unlike the doctor I am not a physician of the body but the mind. Perhaps you can call me a psychologist, although that is a human term for almost exactly what I am. Remember now that the body is not the mind and the mind is not the body. The mind of yours is something similar to a seed, it was like a seed in your body to begin with, like a mustard seed like Jesus said because it is so minuscule that you can barely see it but yet when it is full grown it is pretty impressive in size. It hope you some time in the future understand his parable because it is exactly what he gave, a parable. What he meant was that the seed of your mind is so mini it can be barely noticed but yet can such miniscule seed if growing become very prominent. Why he used the mustard tree is also considered how the tree looks with widespread branches which offers shade below its trunk. It does indeed protect itself by what it does when it grows, and shade on the ground is not good for other plants which like to grow strong there, such as weeds. The world itself is like weeds and that you need protection from and then you need to make sure the seed will grow into the magnificent tree. He also meant that this seed is the whole answer to what to focus on. His parable of that "God" threw seeds which landed here and there, weeds choked them, landed on rock and they burned by the sun, etc, this parable gives the reality which you observe when you behold the Earth. He gives actually a little answer to important life questions. That is, Elahem did just scatter the human souls to fend for themselves in a variety of conditions. It may sound like the human does not have themselves to blame, but it is also not true. The human was equipped with the mind seed, the image of Elahem in fact, just a blank being which has no attributes, particularly no attribute of a totally complete Being. It lacks growth of what makes a Being. This is what you work towards with yourselves, finalizing your own existence as beings. Surrendering to an automatic drive does absolutely not make you a Being, an independent life form. It does whatsoever not show of any power of existence on your own. Do you see? It has to do with the energy, willpower or will to exist you know. It goes down to a mysterious energy you do not know much of and this same phenomenon projects the universe in which you find yourself. So what do you seek? You seek INDEPENDENT FUNCTIONALITY! You wish to become what truly is conscious on its own and in command! When you can control and command your body that is when you exercise this mysterious abstract energy "organism" which might make who you are or become. Your energy level can increase with "time" and this is exactly what I try to make you see here by following the prescription which not only I came with but also predecessors like Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Abraham taught that people should seek soundness, soundness of mind, and it is exactly what the term "eslam" stands for! So it is YOU who are in the center, forget about me, I am just a teacher and the man Jesus did argue just the same. Unfortunately bad translations make it seem like he spoke of himself when he spoke about the "I" or self in a reflexive way. Bad grammatical knowledge caused misconception and even worship unfortunately. For example, when he said "I am in the father and the father is in me" he meant "the I is in the father/origin and the origin is in the I". "if you do like me you will all become related to the origin" (children of the father in tradition). Also in Genesis it was written "God made man in his own image". Moses was told "I am (being) who I am" regarding "God's" nature. These expressions are all related to each other. So what have you learned? You find "God" inside yourselves and nowhere else! What have you been thinking in your lives? Do you know what "God" is called in Persian/Farsi? It is called Khoda, and did you know "Khod" refers to the "self", the ironical thing is someone once upon a time among the Persians knew the truth and the nature of the human kind! What to blame why it became like this, that Khoda became an object of worship? This is among the reasons why humans make me tired and sigh. Merely thinking of it will only make me start in condescending ways to smear what you dislike me doing, so we leave it at that. Jesus knew "God" is in the self. Jesus also taught it, no matter what falsehood people say about him. Jesus did sarcastically utter that they called him a glutton and a drunkard because he did not act like their image of a pious person. I have not said that you have to fast or even stop eating! You will not stop living, it is a misconception, rather you will eventually feel more alive than ever! Do you remember the 10 Commandments given to Moses by The Elohim? Do You understand what is about now? Do You see that the 10 commandments give you a direct message to go against the instinctual programming of the homo-sapien body which You Mind is attached to? And that all these homo-sapien instincts are like weeds which choke/hinder the growth of your Unique Mind seed? Because Your level of Aliveness diminishes by You doing mindless activities just to please the animal body Your mind is attached to? 1. Be concerned about the Being 2. Do not take an image/stereotype and cling unto it 3. Do not heed the call to vanity 4. Keep contemplating (or be in reflection) 5. Care for/consider your neighbor (to be) like yourself (be against the instinct of family, nationality etc) 6. Do not dominate 7. Do not engage in vain sexual action/activation 8. Do not steal 9. Do not carry false testimony 10. Do not covet to have what your neighbor has (modern interpretation: his brand/model of smartphone, automobile, job, social position, wife etc). Do you understand what it is about?! Become Alive! Do not be under control, Be in Control! Do not be controlled by the mammal humans call homo-sapien that Your mind is attached to, But be its Master and Master of Your Mind. This Test is very difficult indeed, but Elohim are not after quantity but rather Quality of the Unique Minds they can get from this garden/Earth of ours.

I hope the following helps others, please feel free to discuss as reflectively as you can. All the best: In the context of at least some aspects of us possessing the desire (see previous comments) to survive, we’re all victims, however in the context of our survivability victimhood is optional relative to our awareness of circumstances that contradict our capacity to survive. In so saying as much we’re a victim in as much as we’re unaware of what’s happening in any moment, aspect, interaction or experience. Thus victimhood here literally just means lack of awareness. Awareness begets knowledge, knowledge begets reformation, reformation begets the means of discovering purposeful action. The origin of purposeful action is awareness, in particular, informational awareness. This term is used to replace the idea of self awareness in an effort to remove this false single object and tend to the multiple competing objects that contribute to this sense of sentience. Informational awareness is strongly positively correlated with the layers of instructed meaning placed on individual action, and in doing so, it’s re-configurement to more defined and competitive (with respect to competing influences) ends. Thus self aware definitions (self pertains to the abstractions not self aware consciousness, the latter connotation I’ve as noted excluded from observation here) are proportional to the amount of purposeful action and in doing so, strategic action. In this light, strategic action is evidence of and proportional to informational awareness. The balance between predefinition and foresight is therefore the name of the game here. You’ve read the manual to life and now you’re with pin point precision (or just to your limits) manoeuvring yourself between those limits that you’ve so carefully defined. This is the only position by which freedom exists, the exacting definition and operation within the limits of the rules of reality. Rules beget strategy to operate best within, hence why the lack of recognising limits is proportional to either poor strategy or no strategy at all, and the incapacity to formulate strategies that mitigate harm are proportional to the level of trauma that someone will experience and in doing so, the likelihood they will become a victim to the forces of life. Physically and syntactically it’s inevitable, psychologically however it depends on someone’s unconscious strategies (i.e. various kinds of brainwashing they may have) in terms of how they respond to loss, harm and or suffering. What are some of our limits? The following is a brief attempt at describing such and as a result, something that can instruct freedom within those limits. Otherwise Leo made mention how there is no such thing as freedom but I disagree, in the literal sense absolutely, however with respect to the consequences of understanding and strategy therein our freedom is proportional. Thus freedom is proportional to informational awareness because based on the above it’s proportional to freedom of action, the origins of which, as noted, are based on the ability to accurately determine constraints and the means of maximising operation within them. Here is that brief list: 1. We need to learn about cognitive biases 2. We need to seek an understanding of our past and build a narrative of the future for ourselves otherwise it’s direction will be impure 3. We need to ask ourselves who we are, define our values and desires that are truly our own and not someone else’s 4. We need to seek to investigate and understand our environment from both a past and future context 5. We need to define our social environment and move closer to those that better relate to our values otherwise others we’ll be unintentionally misdirected by others 6. Etc 7. Etc Feel free to add to this list at your discretion.

That ''oh my god'' factor happens even if you just ruminate about the significance of such a discovery about BEing. There is this thing called BEing. Right now. Totally complete. You can't improve on it even a bit. Which absolutely knows nothing other than itself. A place completely devoid of mystery, confusion, movement, stages or any such category. It's not about being EVERYTHING. It's a place where even the notion of EVERYTHIING or NOTHING ceases as they are all alien concepts. It is literally the completion. Right here and right now. The heart, the sentience, the only touch of aliveness. And yet the typical human life and it's idiosyncratic dramas and issues are just complete reverse of that. We all are looking at it right now right in it's face, and yet mistake it as something else. hell yeah oh my god. I dare you to find another more grotesque distinction than that. Hell yeah oh my god

@winterknight Am I a robot? Like literally...I'm doubting this as I do self inquiry. During self inquiry, it is found that no phonomena have any being whatsoever. This whole thing called 'being alive' is a sham. No phenomena possess life or sentience or being. The world doesn't say "hey look! I am the world". The body, thoughts, feeling don't have any being to assert themselves either. What I knew as life, I discovered the whole of it as dumb, dead, insentient, hollow phenomena. I am not alive! I was never alive. This is where self inquiry goes to. It's seems like I am/was an insentient robot all along. Only by some god forsaken accident/magic, this illusion of a living, separate 'I' seemed to nest inside that robot. Upon inquiry, that virus vanishes and the robot stays like as it is.

@FoxFoxFox Can you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean by dimensions. How can something without attributes have different dimensions? Or does the way in which it is perceived divided into 12th dimensions? But the perception itself would be consciousness.. Confused. @ivankiss So it has intelligence.. I can't wrap my head around it. How can it have intelligence? How can something that is nothing and is completely void, have intelligence? Of course this brings up the problem that I don't even understand intelligence. I get stuck on one particular thing. I divide the world in my head into two conceptual categories: The void, nothingness in which everything is occuring and the forms that take place in it. (Including any phenomena like intelligence, sentience etc.). I don't yet understand how they are both the same. Exactly the part where the duality of something vs nothing collapses. Hasn't clicked yet.

What is God? Part 2... FAQ -Are you saying that I Am part of God or that I Am God? You are God and part of God, it depends what you define “You” as in that sentence. If you think of yourself as a biological creature that was born, the ego mind, that you, is part of God, the deeper you, the one you will discover through practice, that thing is fully God. When you are fully awake, you realize that you are the whole of God. That’s radical statement that exoteric, orthodox, religious teachings do not tell you, but it is the case. When you first realize God, you might experience that you are a part of God but not yet realize that you are the whole of God, that requires doing more work. -If I Am God, why Am I not experiencing it or feeling it? God is a trickster in his very nature, because trickery or illusions is the substance of reality. Reality is possible when you imagine that it’s possible and you believe in it in a sense, you have to trick yourself to experience reality in the solid physical way the way you do. In fact you are experiencing God right now. When you are born as a human being, you mistake God for this physical reality that you are in right now because of the sense of self, the ego that helps you to survive. You are in God all the time but you are not realizing because it is not important for your survival. The substance out of which everything is made is completely irrelevant to you in your everyday life, which is why you ignore it. There is nothing but God, you are not just conscious enough to realize this. -Why is God hiding from us? Why is God so tricky? For you to be born, you need to be born as a lie, as a deception. God is a shapeshifter, it is formless, pure potentiality and can materialize in all forms, it’s an infinite chameleon. The nature the Godhead is pure formlessness, pure potentiality. God is a shapeshifter, it’s difficult to spot because you confuse the form for a physical object. There is actually no difference between illusion and reality, this is how God creates, this is the very mechanism of the creation of anything. Appearance is reality, illusions is all you can have. What we call our physical world is constant never-ending process of forms emerging out of formlessness, like every word Leo is saying. The nature of creation must be tricky. -Why is God invisible? Isn’t that convenient? When you go to rock bottom to what is true, you have to accept what you find. It is actually highly inconvenient that God is invisible, because it makes it challenging but still possible to find it. You believe you are an observer inside the body… What is that observer? Isn’t it some invisible being…? Which of course is God… -Is God falsifiable? Is the Truth falsifiable? God is prior to science and the notion of falsifiability. Theories are falsifiable but God is not a theory, it is pure Truth. God is verifiable, not falsifiable. You can verify what Leo is saying. Falsehood doesn’t exit, only delusions exists. -Can you give me proof of God’s existence? No, it’s a personal journey that you go on, you have to cut through the illusions of social conditioning. It’s called Truth seeking, the spiritual quest, the “Hero’s Journey”. Don’t expect anybody to deliver it to you. God has the power to fully deceive itself and also the power to awaken. -Don’t you exploit the gaps of science? Science works to demystify reality, it succeeds to some extend, but it will never fully succeed because reality is infinite. In fact the more it tries, the more deluded it becomes. Take an apple cut in in half, you get more surfaces, cut in half, you get more surfaces and so on. There are always surfaces, but no substance to anything within reality. The substance of reality is nothing, the gap, the emptiness between the surfaces that unifies all the surfaces into a Oneness. -What do you mean with God is nothing? A nothing that exists and you can become conscious of it. An atheist and materialist have fully bite in to the illusion of physical reality, but also they also don’t recognize that reality is subjective and relative. There is no objectivity. Reality is however you hold it. There are no human beings, human being is the Universe being sentient of itself, God consciousness that you’ve confused for human beings, your parents, your friends are just figments of your imagination. Leo explains he had the traumatic insight that his parents never existed. Reality is alive, sentient and a-mechanical. The sentience, the aliveness that you feel, that is not yours, that’s the universe being alive and you are just a piece of that. That’s a big reframing of how you see reality. Reality is one spontaneous occurrence, therefor you can’t explain it through any mechanical process, it’s instant and direct. Atheists are also missing the importance of love, not recognizing that Being is Love. The physical substance of existence is made of love. Atheists don’t recognize oneness, they think of the world as being fragmented. But you are not really interfacing with the universe through perceptions, you are the universe. Atheists don’t recognize space/time, matter/energy, cause & effect, birth & death as illusions. You might say yes you know that time is relative and so on, but you are not conscious of that… they are all concepts. Atheists don’t recognize higher states of consciousness, and believe that everything can be understood from their currant state of consciousness. If you’d change that state of consciousness just a little bit, all your doubts, fears and concern would change! Science is completely contingent on your courant state of consciousness. Atheists don’t recognize that consciousness is not a by-product of the brain. Atheist don’t recognize science as limited. To understand God you got to use other methods. Can you prove that science can resolve every question? Atheists don’t recognize the existence of paranormal phenomena, at higher states of consciousness you can access various paranormal phenomena. The atheist doesn’t recognize that he as God has created himself. The atheist doesn’t recognize that all dualities and all knowledge he uses to understand the world is manmade or conceptual. The atheist doesn’t recognize that he is God. The atheist doesn’t see that reality has no limits. Outside the physical universe is infinity where anything is possible. -Can God be an hallucination or an illusion? You can trick yourself that you are conscious of God, but when you are conscious of God, that is unmistakable, you become conscious of God through no intermediary, not through language, symbols, perceptions, not even through experience. It’s direct. -Can God be a brain state?If you can experience God by taking 5MEO-DMT, doesn’t it prove that God is just a chemical? No, everything is consciousness, the 5MEO-DMT that you take is consciousness, consciousness interacting with consciousness. When you take 5MEO-DMT, you forget you ever had a brain and the existence of the universe, you realize that it is not brain state, not a chemical, not a neurotransmitter, it is God. God is absolute Truth, there is nothing like it and you whole reality collapses when you realize that. -How can you trust that psychedelics reveals anything true at all? This can’t be explained to you unless you take psychedelics in a sufficient dose that you have a breakthrough experience. You will say “oh that’s impossible!”, you got to stop trusting your mind of what is and what’s not possible. You cannot know what is outside the matrix when you are inside the matrix. -How can you be sure that you’ve been outside the matrix? To exit the matrix is to realize that there is matrix inside of another matrix inside of another matrix to infinity. To realize God is to realize that there is nothing but matrix within matrix. What you’re living right now is just hallucination and psychedelics show you that there is no other possibilities than hallucinations, a meta-truth. -Could there be something beyond God? Could God be part of a computer simulation? You are treating God a s a phenomenon, like seeing some alien. You can replace the word God with “everything” or “totality”, those terms are expendables and goes beyond itself forever, it’s the process of “beyonding” forever by definition. If you imagine something more is possible, you haven’t understand the notion of totality. A computer simulation is a very finite thing. They occur within God but God doesn’t occur within a computer simulation. -How do you know that the infinity you are talking about wasn’t generated by something else? God can only interact with itself. God has to limit itself for not being conscious of everything all the time. How do you play a chess game alone? It’s like playing chess alone with the right hemisphere of the brain running the whites, and the left hemisphere running the blacks. God tricks himself with false separations and generate the possibility of surprise. -Can God create a rock that he himself cannot lift? The Godhead is infinite potential, it can limit itself in forms, forms have limitations. -Can God destroy himself? Destruction is a concept that make sense within the roam of forms, but you cannot destroy the vacuum of empty space. It can destroy himself as incarnated versions like you, or as a star, it’s the fate of all forms, formlessness itself is the only permanent thing. -How do you know that your experiences of God are not confirmation bias of some stuff that you’ve read? When you have these absolute Samadhi experiences, all your conceptual knowledge flies out the window, you are in truth of it and this is self-validating. You can read about all human beings being unreal, when you have the experience of it, you won’t want to accept it, it is the opposite of confirmation bias. Leo never wanted God to be true, he studied ancient texts -How can you be so that you are right? Shouldn’t we be more humble with our truth claims? False humility is no virtue… Leo is just being honest. Absolute Truth is the nature of absolute Truth, wether you are conscious of it or you are not. If you are not conscious of it, you can’t understand how absolute truth can be possible. It’s a certainty, it’s not like scientific knowledge, you need to experience it to find out. To make the claim that we don’t know what God is a big agnostic mistake, because you are actually saying: we can’t know. -Is it possible to have a false experience of God? If so, how can you be certain that you haven’t misunderstood God? Yes it is possible, to have a false experience, but when you have awaken, you know what awakening is, but even so, you can trick and delude yourself, self deception is still occurring after your firsts enlightenment experience, this is why Leo is always crosschecking with other mystics and texts, continuously studying himself, and even so, he never claimed to be infallible, he is still open for recontextualisation of any kind. But the actual experience of God is not a self-deception. Certain lower degrees experience can be self-deceptive. -If God is all loving, how come there is so much evil in the world? Why is there so much suffering? There is no such thing as evil, it is a projection of your ego mind. From your point of view, you are a limited biological creature and you need to survive. What you call evil is what is threatening to your survival as a limited formed being within this larger universe, you are vulnerable to having your form radically changed… death. You believe suffering exists, because it is a mechanism within you that helps you to avoid dangerous situations. Without suffering, you wouldn’t be alive. When God incarnated itself, it makes itself limited, it obligated itself to play the game of survival which necessitates pain and suffering. From God’s perspective the world is perfect. It’s like looking at a horror movie from the audience point of view or from the point of view of a character of the movie itself. The goal is to not feel too much sucked in the movie. You can’t believe that this actually applies to your life, and it is the most important thing that there is, death is the worst thing there is, suffering feels so bad, you confuse all the suffering and the pain for reality because you are egotistical and selfish, you had to be to experience the universe at all. You are God caught in a bind. As human beings we are addicted to excitement, violence, horror, sex, food, suffering and pain. Secretly you don’t want to give up your suffering to be happy, if you did, you’d be awake a long time ago. -If God is all loving and good, how come he doesn’t care if we are murders, rapists and so forth? It’s because it is so all loving that it doesn’t judge. You as an ego, because you care about survival and have something to lose from it, you judge murder, rape, criminality and war as bad and wrong. You created an identity of being moral, good and upright, viewing yourself as a defender against all the bad guys. But you are full of hatred, you hate murder, rape and war… God loves it all, which is why they exist. This love is too radical for you, you are not ready to embody this love because you have way too much to lose, you have life, your children, your money, your business,…, to defend. You are not ready to be all loving. For you to be all loving, you’d have to be dead, you’d have to be the Godhead, not this incarnation as a human being… or you’d have to be conscious. -If God is all loving, why is it not evenly hateful? Evil doesn’t really exit, it exits only from the ego mind’s point of view. In a sense, God is evil and hateful, but it is doing it through humanity. God loves evil and hate so much that it doesn’t mind living through it as a human being. God wants to know what it’s like to be murdered, getting raped, being a slave or in concentration camp and so on. Hate and evil is visible only from a limited point of view. Do you think God created everything except murder and rape? He created everything included all the stuff you consider evil. It’s only evil from your point of view. -Is there a devil? If so, did God create evil? The devil refers to the mechanism of survival, the ego, separation, illusion and falsehood, not a red man with horns. You are the devil, the thing that is going to die is the devil. God created that, not only created it, but God is the devil. We are talking about oneness, totality. You cannot separate ego or the devil from God. Stage blue people in spiral dynamics looses it right here saying that the devil and God are polar opposite… If the devil exist, then it is part of creation, who created everything? God. The devil is God in disguise. God will incarnated himself into devilish forms, create selfishness and through that, God experience what it’s like to be a devil. -Why is mainstream religion so confusing, diluted and inaccurate? Why don’t they explain it in a straight forward manner? Religion is very tricky and you have appreciate where it comes from. It’s problematic to evaluate old religions from a modern perspective. There was no notion of science back then. They didn’t share modern values. How do spread the idea of God with very tribal people that are not scientifically minded, who don’t know how to read, ethnocentric and racist and so on, you will use a lot metaphors and analogies. This stuff was passed down often times as stories, not even written down. The people who wrote it down and passed it down hundreds of years after Jesus’s death , were not even enlightened. Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed were maybe enlightened but they didn’t have video recorder or even write any books themselves. Back then, what is good and bad what advanced stuff, you didn’t even had countries. The ego corrupts all these teachings. Countries and states, rulers and kings used religions to enroll the masses, justify their own rule, make war and so on… The problem with God is that it is such a personal subjective realization that you can’t spread it through mass means. Some fanatics will only believe the teachings, not doing the teachings by himself, wait until you are dead and then create a cult, an ideology. -Why do all the religions disagree so much? How do you know you study the text properly? They all agree with each other, if you look and study the text properly. You need direct experience, mystical experiences. When you have those, it becomes easy to sort the wheat from the chaff and to see the commonalities. The attitude to try to integrate religions is only a 50 to 100 years old notion. When you don’t see religions holistically, than a lot of surface disagreements will seem as though they run all the way down to the bone, but they don’t. -Isn’t religion responsible for most of the war and evil throughout history? Yes, but technology, capitalism too. People are very tribal, selfish wether they know religion or not -Why use the word God and not “reality” for example? Everyone believe they know what reality is. Whatever word you use, there will be a lot of confusion around it, people will find ways to delude themselves about it. The ignorant mind can’t help to be ignorant. -Why do different religions have different visions of God? Reality is one giant mind that uses different kinds of symbols. Even scientific understanding that you might think is literal, is actually symbolic and metaphoric. Your mind needs to make sense of the formless in a formed way. So the christian will have his vision with a vision of Christ and vice versa with a moslem, a Hindu, and also as an equation for a scientist. Your understanding of God is going to be filtered through your culture. -Aren’t you stealing ideas from eastern religions? No, but the eastern teachings are less corrupt than the western teachings. No culture has a monopoly on God or the Truth. -Buddhism and hinduism are different. Buddhism doesn’t have a God! Buddhism has a God: The Ox, Buddha mind, Mu, nirvana, no-self, the Dharmakaya. The mistake many buddhist and Hindus makes is that they think there is a difference between the “buddhist no-self” and the “Hindu Self”, but they are degrees of awakening. For having consciousness of God you need to go beyond, not just being a self but to realize what is the ultimate self ,what is the nature of reality itself. You need to realize God as the formless but also as the form and unify the two together and that there are no distinctions. Buddhist have a God, but they don’t speak about it in the traditional sense. Buddhist don’t believe in a God per say, but they got practices that get them to the consciousness of your true nature, which is God or Mu, nirvana… -How can God be an experience? A more proper word than experience would be Being or direct consciousness. When you come into contact with the Godhead, nothingness you have to integrate it with the experience that you are having here, see that the pure Void is identical to the sensory feedback you have “down here”. You can recontextualize the experience you are having here to the point that it’s not an experience anymore, that will be absolute Truth. -Why do you cross-reference your sources if God is a direct experience? Because you can trick yourself and become a Zen-devil, which is pursuing Zen practices without reading the scriptures. -Why don’t you kill yourself and become God? There is a reason why God incarnated this life, you are here to experience this life. If you kill yourself, you are going to end up right back here, there is nowhere to go, God is constantly reincarnating himself, you will just have another form. While you are in this incarnation, do the most out of it, do the work to become enlightened. You don’t want to wait until your last breath to realize God and do spiritual practices unless you want to realize on that day what you have missed and be miserable with yourself and others. The point is to live a conscious life. -How can ego exist in the presence of God? God is all powerful and is able to present a situation where it forget itself, it has to awaken to itself. The God’s head incarnated itself into forms it can see the full ramification of what it is. God is becoming conscious of himself, not only as humans but also as animals and bacterias. -What is the point of talking about God? To realize that it’s a possibility, it transforms your life, opens the possibility to live with a true genuine joy, health and well being. To point you to technics to achieve that and point out the trickeries and traps. To inspire you to live it, not only to listen to the possibility. -Will science ever be able to understand God? The way science is defined today, no. It will have to open itself more to mysticism and non-symbolic methods of investigation like first person experience, scientists will have to take psychedelics. The bridge between mysticism and science as we do it today is already starting to happen today by a few pioneers. The line between science and mysticism is a line that the human mind is drawing, it’s not a hard line that exists in the world. -Can’t we give more time to science to answer all questions and realize that we don’t need mysticism at the end? No, it has to include mysticism. Modern science has serious limits, it only works through language, concepts and through the mind and there are aspects of reality which are true and are beyond the mind, that needs to be access through methods that are not equations or rulers and particles colliders and photographs. -Is it possible that science and spirituality work together in the future? Yes, to help to integrate the two together is Leo’s greatest contribution to mankind, laying the epistemic foundation to the reform of science. -If God is alone does it feel lonely or is God sufficient in itself? The Godhead doesn’t have any quality but when incarnated as form, God feels lonely! When you will be awake, you won’t feel lonely even if you are alone. -Why are some people very curious about God and others are not? People are born with different brain types and genetics and also went to different schools. Some people are more interested than others in metaphysical questions. Some people are born more spiritually gifted. Many spiritual advanced people might have been killed throughout the ages in favor of the kings, dictators and tyrants who wanted to rule the world. -By what mechanism does God create things? There is no mechanism, what you see is exactly the mechanism. The entire universe is spontaneously, a-mechanicaly existing, it’s just being. The mechanism only appears to you when are looking through it using the human mind, making sense of little pieces of it, breaking it apart and making it seems like there is a mechanism of cause and effect. The problem is, you are not conscious of it, it is literally one solid miracle. Scientists are pushing the experience down to the point where they can’t explain it anymore (with quarks or even equations being at the source of our experience) and say maybe we will know in a 1000 years what is beyond those. But it is so direct you can’t point to it, you can’t know or explain it, but you can become conscious of it, the pure manifestation of nothingness -Where did God come from? God always existed and will exist forever. The formless Godhead is eternal, but forms needs to be created, so you created your own body and mind. It’s a paradox, it’s both eternal and you created yourself. -Why did God create itself? Because it want to experience itself, it’s a never ending process of self creation and being. -Can God be an alien or artificial intelligence? No, God includes both. -Could God have evolved? No, but at the same time it is constantly evolving. -How do you reconcile God with darwinian evolution? Design and evolution are actually the same thing. When a human being designed buildings this is evolution too. All this happens in a larger context in the mind of God, all that is happening with intelligence and sentience, it didn’t happen through randomness and chaos. -If I created myself as God, why did I create this shitty life? You do have the option to change your life at anytime, feel free to exercise the option of spiritual development to grow yourself and awaken. Imaging what it was like in the roman days where 40% the roman population were slaves. God is in love with any situation you can imagine to be, it doesn’t judge, it lives through any possible scenario that a human can live through, you as God will live through all that, so depression, death, cheating, lying… That’s why the Buddha said that life is suffering, the only solution to that is to awaken. Awakening allows you to deal gracefully with any kind of shitty life. It’s so easy to loose your happiness in life because it is so conditional. -Is it possible to become conscious at all times, not only as peak experiences with 5MEO-DMT or only in some meditative state ? Yes, it is called Sahaja Samadhi, the ultimate state of Samadhi. -How come people realize God and than fall back into duality? The absolute Truth is such a huge thing that you are rarely going to get with one go, you will have to deconstruct your old way of building reality. he illusion is so powerful, it is almost hypnotic in how it sucks you back in, it requires a lot of work to overcome the temptation of going back to your previous state. -Why does it have to be so hard to realize God? Because of the survival drive, it is significant and responsible for everything in your life, it dominates your entire life. God is the undoing of the survival drive. God is the opposite of life, it is death from the ego’s point of view. Ego is also in your genes, forms of life without it must have been erased a long time ago. Changing the mind is a slow process, and it depends on how serious and committed you are. -Can you realize God while having a family? Yes, but don’t try to do it all at once. -How come God can be realize through visualization, shouldn’t it be an obstacle? One of the key to realizing God is concentration. Because the universe is a giant mind, what you imagine tends to become your reality, you can sort of materialize a vision of your deity and merge your sense of self into it and that can be how you realize God. Be careful with your deity like Christ, Buddha, Shiva, Krishna or anything else, as the biggest awakening is not going to have any form to it. -Am I too young as a teen to pursue God? No, if you like metaphysical questions, go for it. But you have take care of solving your survival too. -Can God be experienced at any stage of the spiral in spiral dynamics? Yes, how you experience it will be affected on where you are on the spiral. If you are at stage blue, you will have a very limited, ethnocentric, moralistic version of God. At stage orange you will have a very scientific version of God. The higher you are on the spiral level of development, the easier it will be for you to have mystical experiences and to interpret them properly. So it’s important you evolve to stage yellow or even turquoise. -Why does God needs to self-realize? It doesn’t. God’s whole point is just to be and exist. -Is God personal or impersonal? Both, we can think of the universe as filled with impersonal objects and atoms, but at the same time, as you as a human are part of it, you are the universe, so the universe has human qualities. You are the human quality of the universe. You have to integrate the personal and the impersonal together. It’s a very personal experience when you become really conscious of who you are as God and at the same, there is a sense of no-self. -Does God take an active role in manipulating our lives? The Godhead itself, no. But as everything is moving in and outside your body it is also manipulating our lives all the time. -Does God have an agenda, where is creation going? No, there is no point besides just being, but at the same, that evolutionary process from our human perspective that is unfolding, it seems like it evolves to greater complexity, greater self-awareness. God is getting more and more complex and might one day reach infinity. -Which is more true pantheism or panantheism? Pantheism says that everything, all of reality is God. Panantheism says all of reality is inside of God. Both are true, you might experience them separately but also simultaneously and overlapping each other. -How did mankind first learned about God? Back then, there wasn’t so much distraction so they could have been seating around a lot, meditating, but also through the use of psychedelics like mushrooms around the entire world. Herbalism and shamanism dates back from tens of thousands of years at least. And some people are naturally born spiritually gifted. -Why did God decide to take on my particular human form? God is taking all possible form simultaneously, one of which is particular human form. -Why did God create humans and animals? God is going to take on anything that it can. In comparison with a rock, humans and animals can experience what it’s like to be some sentient entity. Humans are a step above animals in their ability to interface with the universe. -How can the realization of God be used as a human perspective? The ego loves to ask this question, you can become famous and get a lot of sex, but you can also elevate the consciousness of mankind. You can teach, master your emotions, improve how you do science, become hyper-creative, become a better athlete, a better parent, improve your relationship and sex life. Consciousness improves everything do, even business, it can transform your business or your relationship. Awakening might end one relationship and form new ones that will be much healthier and conscious. -Does realizing God gives you special powers and abilities? Yes it can. Magical healing, clairvoyance, telepathic abilities, abilities to see auras and so on, but there is no guaranty. -Are miracles possibles? Everything is a miracle, this very moment right now is a miracle. But, yes paranormal stuff can happen, synchronicity can happen, we can’t know how much from the past is true, if Jesus walked on water for example, but healing can definitely happen. -Is everything in the Bible false? No, but there are racist, ethnocentric, closed minded and factually incorrect stuff. There is also good stuff like when Moses talks with God and he ask God: “Ok, I will go back to my people and tell them that I saw God but what shall I call you?” God answers: you can tell them that “I Am”, my name is “I Am”. Or when Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is found within, that’s a good pointer, nirvana is found within. But there is a lot of misleading stuff in the Bible, so Leo doesn’t recommend it as a high quality spiritual text. There are much better modern books to teach you the practices and make you realize what the Bible is pointing to. -What is our duty towards God, shall we worship and pray to God? In the greater sense you have no duty, you just have to be. In another sense, your duty is to awaken, raising awareness of the entire cosmos, to participate in this evolutionary game that God is playing. The problem when you pray to or worship God, people are doing it under the presumption of a duality between God and themselves. So the thing you are praying to is exactly yourself. Worshiping and praying is a sort of masturbation. There is nothing to worship but yourself. -What does God want from us? Nothing, be whatever you want to be. But try to be as conscious as you can, try to appreciate your own magnificence as God, otherwise you are going to miss the beauty of life. It’s like going to theater to watch a great movie and not looking at the screen. You can just turn around and look at a beautiful movie. But if you want to sit backward, it’s fine too. -Will following my religion lead me to God, shall I abandoned my religion? Leo is allergic to ideologies, dogmas and fundamentalism, he recommends that you abandon your religion because it’s going to get in the way. It’s brainwashing, you can never lose the only truth that there is, which is God. You don’t need a religion. You don’t need a belief systems. -My religion, already says all you are talking about, aren’t you just rehashing the same stuff? Leo talks from a higher level, the books from the main religions are very ethnocentric, there are not truly holistic, religions try to be exclusive, it is also dogmatic, it is not empirically based and not integrated with modern science. You need to go beyond. We have modern psychological insights, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, anthropology, sociology, economics, linguistics, post-modernism, modern philosophy… there is so much stuff beyond what you learn in the Bible, the Koran, classical Buddhism or Vedanta. You have to adapt your spiritual practice to fit the modern world to deal with new technological complexities and realities. Holy books don’t talk about spiral dynamics, shadow work or psycho-pathologies that weren’t known back then. -What are the most important requirements for realizing God? 1)Lazer focus concentration abilities for hours on end 2)Radical open-mindedness 3)Genuinely metaphysically curiousity. -How can I know that I can trust you? You shouldn’t, you have to validate and verify everything that Leo says, discover what is true for yourself. But don’t mistrust Leo in a cynical sort way too, you have to have open-mindedness to consider this all as a possibility. You can’t be as much untrustful that you can’t run the experiment for a few years. These questions and answers can go on forever, these are just stories, you are not going to figure out God through question and answer because it’s a great way to avoid to do the actual work. Actually, at some point these answers becomes an obstacle. You have to discover those answers by yourself, it’s like discovering the answers at the back of the book of your maths problem, rather than solving them yourself. The only way to understand God is to awaken to God, to become God, to look and feel yourself as God, from that will come all the answers. Remember that you can’t awaken before you awaken. Try to be comfortable not knowing for awhile while doing the practices, trust that one day you will figure it out. One awakening is not enough to understand everything Leo says here, it took him over a dozen awakening experiences to come that far. actualized.org will help you find God with the latest potent and cutting edge stuff.

But why are you distancing yourself from these "extreme" vegans? What is the point of that? I understand it would not be helpful to call someone names, but again, try to have some empathy for these people. They are suffering knowing what is happening to animals, they cannot handle it. It is like torture to them, every single day of their lifes. They see great injustice, and I cannot blame them. There is so much suffering that could be avoided. It's not about whether you respect someones choices or not, it's about what kind of choices you respect. Do you respect someones choice to rape children? Why not? Because you genuinely feel like you don't want anyone to rape children. On the other hand, when people are enslaving and slaughtering sentience beings of a different species, you actually are fairly indifferent about it, aren't you? To people who actually feel like animals deserve moral treatment, it will seem like you do it out of egoic reasons. You do it because you don't want to be judges as intolerant, or because you want to maintain social relationships, hiding all of it under the veil of futility. There are other ways to go about changing people, but respecting their choices is not one of them. Again, ask yourself, if you lived among people who raped children and it was socially acceptable, would you equally respect their choices? And what would a person who would respect these choices seem like to you?

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.