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Mellowmarsh replied to James123's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
It’s not my problem, if you’re going to believe what others label you as being who you believe you are, and take it very seriously and literally, and personally, then that’s your problem. Not mine. You take yourself way too seriously, that’s why you shut people down, that’s why you hide some of your comments. You must already understand that the totality arises as both the impersonal and the personal and that there’s zero difference between the two, unless you’re stuck in literal zone where you fraudulently believe a concept is your true self. -
Commodifying Human Connection I watched a video the other day and I think it really summarized something I have been feeling for a while: For the longest time, I wondered why activities like paint and sip classes, axe throwing, run clubs, pickleball, and the such felt *off* and weirdly hipster/ gentrified to me. I never judged people who partake in these activities nor do I judge the organizers. If anything, I have this degree of respect for them because they are atleast TRYING to do something in this world that is seeming becoming more disconnected and hyperindividualistic (while I'm just currently sitting on my ass writing about this). This video goes into that more in depth but basically, traditional forms of community are crumbling and in its place is coming this commodified version of community. And I think a lot of this commodification is happening because people are trying to implement individualistic solutions for systemic issues. Modern adult life is fragmented and lonely, so activities become packaged substitutes for older forms of community. Instead of things like: neighborhood culture, extended family, religious/community institutions, intergenerational gathering, and stable local friendships, you get ticketed recreational micro-events designed to produce connection quickly and efficiently. There is also an element of hyper optimization that's there where instead of building a sense of familiarity over a course of time with your neighbors by being present in your surroundings and free time, you opt for these quick fixes that you can easily schedule into your Google calendar. There’s also a certain millennial/gen-z urban-professional aesthetic attached to many of these. Like pickleball as approachable athleticism, run clubs as a proxy for wellness + networking + dating, paint-and-sips as curated creativity, and axe throwing as sanitized rebellion. Sometimes what’s irritating is not the activity, but the sense that identity itself is becoming commodified into consumable hobbies. It all feels corporate in a weird way. However, I don't think these forms of community is bad thing because all forms of community have a degree of dysfunction that can be present. Traditional sources of community like churches, neighborhoods, extended family, etc can be subjected to things like toxic conformity, gossip, racism, sexism, homophobia, a sense of obligation without compatibility, and caring too much about what other people think. I'm South Asian and I feel like I have a good sense of how community can look like outside of the hyper individualism of the U.S. and outside of the commodified versions of community. I think that's why I don't romanticize community in the same way as a lot of leftists do in western countries, yet at the same time, I do still see the calls to community as a valid critique to the hyper individualism that comes from late stage capitalism. Like I think what a lot of young lefists and liberals describe as "building community" in the west is really just them trying to build a friend group in adulthood now that they are no longer in a school or college environment. And I think this lack of understanding of what community actually is leads to the over curation of it all, even outside of a commodified setting. Like no, community isn't a group of local leftists in the communist bookstore with baby bangs. That's just your social circle. Community includes your neighbor in his 70s that might have questionable political views but is generally a good person. It includes the mom with 3 kids under 10 who lives above your apartment that is making a lot of noise. It includes the annoying neighborhood watch groups. It includes your coworkers you might not necessarily instantly click with. It includes parents that you don't like but your kid and their kid are still some how friends. It's not just people who are in the same stage of life as you and who share the same opinions/ values with you. Don't get me wrong, I don't think you should allow EVERYONE into your community (i.e. sexual predators, raging neo nazis, or people who would be genuinely harmful to everyone else involved), but it does need to be more expansive than the people who are willing to pay their dues for a run club. I think there is grief I'm experiencing regarding a pre-pandemic world. I don't know what adulthood looked like pre-pandemic but I have a few people a bit older than me who have a recollection of what life after college was like. It just felt like people were outside and social more, like they had a different outlook on what it meant to be a normal person. I remember seeing a post a few months ago on how we see a favor like driving someone to the airport as a *community building thing* now but even 15 years ago, that was just a thing you just did as a part of the norm. And I feel like this pattern of how we inflate the value of pro-social tasks today that we used to see as normal not long ago has exasserbated post pandemic. I remember telling a story about how I showed up to a friend's house extra early for a party to help her set up and calm some nerves. The person who I was sharing this to was telling me how I'm *such* a good friend and that my friend who I had helped won't ever forget what I did to help. But to me, this kind of felt like it was the baseline. Like I helped my friend clean up a little around her apartment, I didn't drive her to the hospital after she got an allergic reaction lol. I think the way that tasks that consisted of you being a normal person a few years ago is being inflated into these community building gestures has to do with how scarce and how much more inconvenient they seem post-pandemic. I know the video above is talking about how community feels monetarily expensive. And I don't think there is something inherently wrong with spending SOME money to go out and live your life. I'm not saying you should beat yourself up regarding the finances of you buying lunch as you're hanging out with a friend. I think of the following quote from Karl Marx: “The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.” At the same time, I don't think money should be a barrier to entry for socializing. I've had friends over the years who lost their jobs or experienced time without income and I loved having the opportunity to find cheap or low cost things for us to do. I also love having people over and just yapping more than meeting up at restaurants these days. I think part of it is that I want to same money and another part of it is how enshitification is coming for us all. A lot of restaurants are over priced AND mid lol. And I think there is an added layer of intimacy of people coming over to my apartment as opposed to us meeting in public. There is an element of other people becoming more intertwined with my day to day activities as opposed to us having to curate and schedule things out in advance by 6 weeks. And I think the setting also feels much more low stakes and casual. Speaking of casual low stakes interactions, Bengali people have a specific word that refers to such things called "adda." When I think of "adda" I think of your friends randomly coming over to your place, you making them a cup of tea and some snacks and yall just chilling for a couple hours / an unspecified, unstructured amount of time. I also think of these specific chairs that are all over the developing and underdeveloped world: https://20toestravel.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/the-plastic-chair-praise-of-the-underappreciated/ (I ran out of space for attachments so I'm just going to include this link) I think of the evenings in India where a bunch of kids go down to play and you have just some random neighborhood aunties sitting on these plastic chairs and talking shit about people while loosely watching the kids (and reporting them to their parents who live else where in the apartment complex if they are misbehaving). Like you don't need money to socialize. All you need is a plastic chair and a random snack you're willing to share. You don't need to go to a scheduled event. You don't need to deep clean your place and go all Martha Stewart in there. You don't need to spend $25 on a mediocre salad. And you definitely don't need to go into a network event that is just the personified version of Linked In. And I think this degree of curation and commodification becomes an obstacle in the very degree of intimacy that a lot of us crave. The video above goes into this point more regarding the app Partiful for example which started out as an easy way to invite your friends to events but then devolved into annoying, impersonal push notifications that you get from people you barely know. I think of this in the relm of hosting where some people making hosting into this elaborate event with themed decor, a fancy menu etc. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. For some people, that's just their hobby and tbh, I enjoy doing the same thing during the holidays. But I think there is a certain kind of intimacy where rather than going all out, that your friend is allowed to see the dishes piled up in your sink or the pile of laundry in the corner that you have yet to fold and put away. I'm not saying bring your friends into unsanitary conditions, but I am saying that your place doesn't have to look like it's out of Better Homes and Gardens. And I think that's why a lot of new parents have trouble making/ keeping friends. Because rather than just having people over in their chaotic environment as is and allowing them to help with the baby and be incorporated to their day to day life, they feel this pressure to host people, clean up, come up with a menu etc. Or they feel the pressure to scramble for a baby sitter so that they can go out with their friends at a club or expensive restaurant when that isn't really their life style or stage of life anymore. Again, nothing wrong with getting a baby sitter so you can get out of the house and not be attached to the kid, but it's more about the expectation of being hyper scheduled and having to treat socializing as project management. I don’t resent people for creating structured ways to meet in an isolating world. I respect the impulse. But I grieve that so much adult sociality now has to be branded, scheduled, paid for, and curated. I want more room for the ordinary, imperfect, low-stakes forms of togetherness where friendship is not an event we produce, but something that can coexist with daily life.
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Mellowmarsh replied to shubhamsharma's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Stop replying, be still, and quiet. Then you’ll see that both the personal and the impersonal are appearances, images of the imageless. Looking out I see everything, looking in I see nothing is the illusion of duality and the ego. It means that while the external world is vast and full of distraction, looking inward requires observing the "witness" or "watcher," where emptiness is actually the pure, unconditioned state of being. There’s nothing to discuss. Bye for now. R.I.P -
It’s certainly confusing . I’m not attached to defending his stance . I’m just stating what I understand from his point of view. By saying there is godliness instead of god he means to deny the personification of god as you saw him explaining in the videos . He is denying the personified man in the clouds . He denies the god of the Bible . He denies the separate creator by saying existence wasn’t created but was always so . And obviously you also agree on that .you Leo of course don’t think of god as a separate entity sitting outside the world and causing creation …that is Simply the notion of god that he was denying . by saying it is godliness instead of god he simply means it’s more like impersonal energy rather than a person or deity.
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'Absolute' is too impersonal, which misses that aspect of reality, whereas God implies absolute already. Your own username kinda highlights this. Also absolute what? Absolute Consciousness, Absolute Self-Deception, Absolute Infinity — God is all of that. In the same way, calling it 'Infinity', even as Cantor's transordinal Ω, is also problematic since the default association is to the mathematical notion, therefore insufficient. Ein Sof, YHWH, Trinity, Teōtl, ΑΩ, Allah, Vishnu, etc. all point to God, which is quite intuitive and not really controversial. Though confusion and conflation are inevitable regardless, par for the course. Example from How Your Mind Interprets Reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation In the end all that kinda becomes redundant, the point is getting to a place where whatever is pointed at, be it the moon, the finger, rabbit, dog shit, yourself, a concept, an experience, a belief, the act of pointing, and so on is clearly understood to be God. But striving for precise terminology is nonetheless important.
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Breakingthewall replied to Breakingthewall's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
By the way, a reflection on openness to the totality. It's not something you know. If yesterday your openness to the limitless that lives was the case, but today, for whatever reason, the structure of your psyche closes, then you don't know what the limitless was. It's impossible because it's not something concrete, it's not someone, an entity; it's the bottomless, boundless from which reality inevitably springs. If you are open to it, it is total light. If you are closed, you start to think...let's see, so I am the inevitable bottomless flow? That seems impersonal, wild, meaningless, an eternal prison, an infinite machine of equations that creates things because it can't help but. Everything turns gray, sad. The mind finds no foothold, nothing makes sense, not even death is an escape. Relationships with people, work, life...what is the point of this madness? It's what they call the dark night of the soul. So you have to be astute and understand how you close and reopen. -
UnbornTao replied to CARDOZZO's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
I appreciate that you don't tend to indulge in these kinds of social niceties, from what I can tell, at least. Sorry, it's mostly hoopla. Not that it isn't entertaining. Why did you take it personally and as an insult? It's an impersonal, collective fart. Just pointing this out so people don't take it very seriously. I'm afraid they will just go with a simplistic mental caricature-belief of either "yes" or "no" as a philosophical stance in response to the topic, and think this amounts to anything significant for the purpose of becoming conscious. Or worse yet, they might assume they already understand the communication. I don't do the "spiritual" world. It's not something I perform. -
I want to die but death or even the self isn't real so im left with this fucking reality with these meta self imposed limits where I have to deal with these impersonal unloving idiots
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It's only extra strange from humans Pov. From universe pov or an infinite loving being it makes no difference. Because they are selfish. Also, consider how silly it is worrying about somebody raping a child in your dreams. If reality is indeed a dream and you groked that at a bones and soul level then not worrying is indeed logical and perfectly fine. You don't care about the dream character getting burned alive in your last night dreams, it's just a memory for you now. God seems to "allow" everything because indeed everything might just be "somebody" playing with itself infinitely. God might values both, and therefore can't intervene. It might be an "AND" and not an "OR". You can only truly learn something by experiecing that thing. In the case of getting skinned alive, how could god know what it is like if it didn't go through that experience? Experience is irreplaceable and the only way to knowing and wisdom. It's good to ask, how did God became all-knowing? You only think of alternatives for that challenging experience because of your sense of self. If GOD is identical to the world and is not a separate entity out there deciding things, then our conversation here is pointless. Because reality just happens and it must be this way because of absolute infinity, so this is only a tiny possibility unfolding. Everything is absolutely neutral and impersonal, and at the same time insanely personal because there's nothing more than this and you must be it. This explains everything perfectly.
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I don't know about this. I respect your position. I feel like this is all impersonal talk online to a degree.
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So just to give some context first, and then ill resolve everything at the end, so dont worry (yous just have to bare w/ me, as theres a few things i have to explain) The most important text here is probably the Testament of Solomon, a Greek pseudepigraphical work that presents itself as Solomon narrating how he commanded demons to build the Temple; It describes specific demons by name, their functions, the celestial forces that bind them, and the verbal/ritual means of compelling them. This is not fringe material, as it sits in a direct line from the broader Solomonic tradition, which in Second Temple Judaism assoc. Solomon w/ wisdom over spirits based on a passage in the book of Kings ~that later interpreters expanded enormously! Closely related are the texts found at Qumran, particularly the Songs of the Maskil and 11QApocryphal Psalms (11Q11), which contain explicit verbal formulas directed against demons. These are the earliest datable examples we have of something functioning like conjuration within a Jewish-proto-Christian framework, from roughly the 1st century BCE. The practitioner speaks directly at hostile spirits, invoking divine names and attributes to repel or bind them. Jesus performs exorcisms constantly in gospels. Alas, the gospel writers are somewhat particular in distinguishing/scrubbing or writing around it, such that later, it'd not be recognized as what contemporaries might call conjuration (note, that I summarize this word at the very end). The distinction is in ἐξουσία (exousia — authority, inherent power) and τέχνη (technique, craft). When Jesus commands an unclean spirit in Mark 1, the crowd's reaction is specifically astonishment that he speaks with authority and not as the scribes: names, formulas, and ritual is scrubbed. ἐξουσία is the one the gospel and epistle writers are conveying~for Jesus and by delegation for his followers, and τέχνη is the one that has to be written around, suppressed, or reframed, otherwise you get some fairly surprising stuff happening. Then you have the curious ep., Acts 19 (the sons of Sceva) seven itinerant Jewish exorcists who try to use Jesus's name as a conjuration formula against a demon, essentially treating "the name of Jesus" as a powerful voces magicae. The demon responds by saying it knows Jesus and Paul but not them, and physically attacks them. Jesus, the Necromancer, scrubbed from history. The Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) from Egypt?, 2nd-5th centuries CE, are indispensable, as they contain explicit syncretic material, including invocations of Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth, and by the later papyri, Jesus, alongside Egyptian and Greek divine names. These show you the actual working-level religious technology of the period, as opposed to the theological positions of the canonical writers. The presence of Judaeo-Christian divine names in the PGM tells us that these names were understood in the broader Hellenistic-Egyptian religious marketplace as particularly powerful voces magicae, regardless of what the nascent church thought about By the 2nd-3rd century CE the church fathers are actively theorizing, Origen in particular, Contra Celsum, discusses the power of names at considerable length — arguing that divine names carry intrinsic power tied to their sound and form, not merely their meaning~a striking concession to the logic of conjuration, even as Origen is trying to distinguish Christian practice from it (Tertullian and later John Chrysostom are playing a part in treating anything magical-in-nature as bad and deceptive... shameful) "Shame" is a sudden feature in the first century that previously hadnt been treated like OMG, whys everyone naked. Why are there zombies and demons in the literature, get it out! Like, if Jesus's name genuinely compels demons — which the exorcism tradition absolutely insists it does — then what exactly is the difference between that and conjuration? The answer that the tradition reaches for is the exousia distinction, the name works as a formula~activating impersonal cosmic machinery, as well as for personal, delegated divine authority. ---------------------------------- P.s. What is "conjuration" In Early Christianity? Conjuration is described as a process or act that involves invoking or summoning spiritual entities. This practice is explored in terms of its effects on both the soul and demons, as well as their responses to such acts. The examination of conjuration highlights its significance in understanding spiritual interactions within the framework of early Christian beliefs (and its not to dismiss incantations, inscriptions, invocation, evocation, necromancy, ritualistic ceremony, sacred offerings, divination, psychic/telepathic powers, etc.,"to conjure<something>" pertaining to all of these too) ⸸ conjuration is the reverse ~upside down~ cross, abjuration ☥ is the ankh, the upright up-cross, leading of either a spirit, or your soul, either abjuring to~or conjuring from (realm of the dead)
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WonderSeeker replied to WonderSeeker's topic in Society, Politics, Government, Environment, Current Events
His takes on Trump around 34:00 are shockingly awful. For how smart Jaing is I fail to understand how he comes to these bullshit conclusions about Trump such as: - he won 2020 - he's a victim and everyone was trying to cancel him even though he was innocent - he's not a part of "the elite" Even with a fraction of nuance, he still made it seem like Trump is this brilliant guy that is to be trusted and should be seen in a more bright light. In a different interview with Patrick Bet-David, he said he would have voted for Trump in 2024 if he could. That's bizzaro considering he's also claimed to be "on the left," and for democracy. I understand Jiang's main operating principle is viewing everything as a power-play. Maybe in his mind he cares less about the 1st person on-the-ground reality and sees the world as a giant, impersonal 10-D chess game of power. Hard to tell. ----- The spiritual insights he brought up were great though. His analogy of the body as a husk, with a divine spark seeking other divine sparks hit home. Glad he recognizes this. This is the most important thing to keep in mind... -
As a spiritual seeker, you may have heard many teachers say that spiritual awakening is the end of the personal self. While such claims have undeniable relative value/validity and can serve as effective pointers towards the realization of Absolute Truth (aka. spiritual awakening), it is important to keep in mind that all such statements regarding the "true nature of reality" (and the recognition thereof) can by definition only ever be relatively true, but never absolutely true. To appreciate why this is the case, it is necessary to understand what the word "Absolute" refers to: The Absolute is the infinite field of reality which includes and gives rise to all possible qualities; every quality that there is (and could be) is a relative aspect of that which is Absolute, meaning that anything that you can name, think of and experience is it - and also, it's not it. As outlined in my little "theory" above, consciousness must constantly oscillate between contrasting qualitative states, for without such oscillation the experience of reality would not be possible. (An experience = a relative quality or set of qualities that "stands out" from the infinite sum total of all qualities and thereby comes into existence). This is why all polarities such as "self/no-self", "personal/impersonal", "limited/unlimited" etc. essentially represent two (relative) sides of the same (absolute) coin, since they can only exist and be experienced in relation and contrast to each other. Where there is no Yin, there can be no Yang... and vice versa. However, once (your) consciousness enters a high-frequency meta-state where all seeming opposites are recognized as equally valid facets and expressions of the same infinite Reality, there is now a sort of simultaneous meta-experience of self and no-self, personal and impersonal, limited and unlimited and all other complementary opposite aspects of the Absolute. So in one sense, all of these relative aspects/perspectives are still "online" and fully available to you; and in another sense, they simply cease to have any meaningful significance since all conceptual definitions are now seen to be nothing but mere arbitrary labels. When the pendulum of consciousness swings so fast that contrasting qualities are being experienced simultaneously (as it were), they essentially merge together and neutralize each other... and what remains is the ineffable Divine that contains and transcends absolutely everything and is impossible to speak of. So while it is true that upon awakening there is no more solid sense of self, there is also no solid sense of no-self once you have truly passed through the proverbial gateless gate. Seemingly conflicting statements such as "I exist as a person" and "I don't exist as a person" are now just as equally meaningful/meaningless to you as all other verbal utterances (aka. relative perspectives); you may still emphasize one aspect over the other in order to make a spiritual, philosophical or ethical point(er), but there will be no more dogged attachment to either side of the all-encompassing Coin. Depersonalisation on the other hand signifies being (often involuntarily) attached to and stuck in a specific relative perspective; it means that there has been a shift from personhood to non-personhood, and now the latter perspective is being mistaken for absolute truth and thereby made into an (egoic) identity. (If it sounds strange and unbelievable to you that it should be possible to construct an identity that is based on the tenet of "I don't exist", then you really don't know just how enduring, clever and creative the egoic mind is... trust me, it can make an identity out of ANYTHING, lol). To be clear: For some people, temporary depersonalization may in fact be a necessary phase or stage of their awakening journey; it may just be the appropriate antidote that will over time cure them from their attachment to "being someone", so none of this is meant to be an indictment that points out some kind of shortcoming or character flaw on your or someone else's part. All I am saying is that it is beneficial to see things for what they are(n't) and that there is no need to overly indulge in and willfully prolong such transitory phases. After all, the point of awakening is not to trade in one attachment-based identity for another, but rather to transcend all identity and fully thrust yourself into the great unknown which is quite literally beyond description. But then again, in case you prefer to foster your depersonalisation and milk it to the very last drop, then by all means... depersonalize away.
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Here's another AI-related idea. Leo mentioned in his Traps for Online Content Creators blog post how reading all the positive and negative feedback corrupts the mind, and that the feedback you get is extremely noisy, biased, and low quality. Youtube creators should have the option to get an AI summary of feedback from comments under a video. This would make it so that if a creator wanted, they could only read the impersonal summarized feedback, instead of having to read through every biased personal comment, positive or negative, to get a sense of how they're doing. It'd be nice if the creator could also query the AI deeper about some aspects of the feedback, whatever is of interest to them. @Leo Gura What do you think?
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1st week of exchange. 1st week completely on my own. Damn it feels lowkey good. So many small things happened. 1. Learned to do laundry 2. Spent way too much money (apparently I have to budget lol) 3. Scared to ask other women out, so have been doing so. I realize that women who I think are absolutely stunning, it's hard for me to ask them out. I mean it makes sense, but fuck. 4. Electricity cut off cuz my dumbass forgot to complete the electricity contract (I thought I did) 5. Went climbing for the first time It's been fun. But for some reason, I feel like there is no soul in my life. I can't say why. Everything seems king of impersonal or insignificant. I want to ask girls out, but scared, I use self improvement as procrastination for sure lmao.
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UnbornTao replied to Inliytened1's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Still, why use an abstract term for a presumed breakthrough? Why wouldn't Ramana use terms like X or Y? In fact, for a long time he reportedly remained silent unless asked, if I recall correctly. Anyhow, even if it was a genuine breakthrough, one might not be entirely clear in their mind about what it is they became conscious of. Also, the mindset behind phrases such as "my truth" can be problematic, in my view. We could think of truth as impersonal, even the truth of one's self and of existence. The way language is used hints at the experience someone is coming from. The way I see it, such claims tend to suggest the person is speaking from intellectual conclusions. What is not a concept? According to Wikipedia, the term derives from Latin as a combination of solus ("alone") and ipse ("self"). Again, why would abstract terms be necessary to communicate an experience? I imagine that experience is still what one is referring to. It's useful to observe that everything that happens occurs in your experience. But to claim that this is ultimately true is premature. This is not too dissimilar to when someone talks about "no-self" and all that, claiming they understand it or live free from their selves. Sure thing, buddy. (As a general remark, not directed at you, since you admitted that this was a memory and not a presently operative realization.) I appreciate the honesty. The chances are slim that this is an actual reality for the one claiming it. More often than not, they are stuck in an intellectual world without even noticing - especially when it's taken trivially or as an aspect of a cosmology. That suggests a concept being believed in and adopted. The reality of it is very different from our conception of it. And even though we already "know" that difference, do we really know it in our bones? Granted, it's also possible they may have achieved some degree of freedom from self, though that's still a long way from "no-self." Perhaps it's like rationally explaining the event at the very moment one is being kicked in the balls, abstracting it, instead of simply going "ouch." By their own account, it makes one wonder whether the person was actually kicked at all. Not the best analogy, but it may help clarify the contrast. That said, hopefully it was genuine and real, and/or had a positive impact on your life - which it seems it did. As for the arbiter, whatever is ultimately true is the final arbiter; you, me, or anyone else have nothing to do with it. The video on listening I shared in the blog thread may be helpful here. -
UnbornTao replied to Inliytened1's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Neither do you as a person, though the broader point is that these kinds of things generally distract you and obstruct a truly open investigation. It's just intellectual. They might be useful to entertain so you can learn new ideas and so on, though. Ramana advocated asking, "Who am I?" In my view, he was one of the few who really knew what he was talking about - and in a profound way. Why not do that? It seems that we so-called spiritual people tend to be full of ourselves, despite our reluctance to openly acknowledge it (primarily to ourselves), and may already think we're already deeply enlightened. Most likely BS in most cases. And if drugs and fantasy are involved… yep. Encouraging message! Just be honest with yourself (impersonal you). After all, you can't pretend your way to the truth. You can think that a belief you hold is true - as a matter of fact, we already do - but that doesn't make it true, much less existentially true. -
They're not thinking of work as an individual who leaves the group, goes to an impersonal job, and then returns to "family" after work.
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Natasha Tori Maru replied to Natasha Tori Maru's topic in Society, Politics, Government, Environment, Current Events
A gun is a much lower barrier to entry for harm than a knife - much more impersonal to shoot someone from afar than walk directly up to them, and stab them (close quarters combat). Impersonality can scale harm (ie gun) but a knife demands some commitment. If the intent/desire is there 100% nothing will stop a person. But a gun and a knife are totally different. -
Dodo replied to VeganAwake's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
1. Always here 2. Always now 3. Self-knowing 4. Peaceful 5. Continuous 6. Aware 7. Still 8. Impersonal 9. Transparent 10. Shining Hehe -
Just as expected... as we are now in the rational era of human development. And there's important work to be done in this era. We begin with pre-rational, where we're fully projecting the world of archetypes onto reality and living fully immersed in the reflection without any ability to question it. Then, there is a dawning of rational, empirical thinking. And one of the drawbacks is that, in seeing beyond the projected archetypes, we lose our sense of certainty and there's a loss of meaning. But it also gives us the ability to interface with empirical reality, and it gives us distance to study our psychology and the archetypes. Then, the rational sets up the necessary foundation to be able to actually integrate pre-rational archetypes into a more holistic post-rational cosmology. So, instead of projecting a king outwardly, we can find the inner sovereign. And Instead of projecting our psychological anatomy onto the universe, we can recognize it as a structure that exists within us. And most of all, we can live as real whole humans... instead of trying to match up to cut and dried impersonal and ideal archetypes. But I see Fascism (and SuperFascism as you describe it) as reactionary response to the loss of meaning that's inherent in this stage of the process (which centers around empiricism and rationality). But its this very discomfort and embrace of uncertainty that precipitates the collective evolution towards the post-rational, where archetypal meaning is actually integrated instead of just projected and unconscious lived in.
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Reality doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone or anything. It will manifest some possibility without a care in the world for anyone or anything. This is the harsh reality that we live in, you're not cared for and nurtured. You're just cannon fodder for no purpose or reason. Just some random reality existing for no reason. Existence is a joyless and careless machine that selects some random reality out of infinite possibilities because anything is good for it. Existence is a cruel predator and you are the prey
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Salvijus replied to VeganAwake's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Emptyness is impersonal, has no expectations and therefor cannot be surprised. It was your ego trying to flex itself with the so called "enlightenment" by creating this theatrical surprise. -
UnbornTao replied to strangelooper's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
I'd agree for the most part, though it'd be tempting to use that "impersonal" bit as a way of seeing suffering as externally produced - that's a trap to watch out for, in my view. You seem to know that, though. A good exercise to get the hang of this principle is to deliberately produce a minor and yet specific form of mental-emotional suffering (frustration, jealousy, impatience, fear) and observe what you did in your experience that caused that disquieting result to come about. -
Mellowmarsh replied to strangelooper's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
Yes I understand that. 👍 The weight is lifted when I consider there’s just indifferent impersonal “suffering happening” compared to “I am suffering “ Awakening doesn’t necessarily mean suffering ends though. Even an awakened one can experience suffering. Anyone who is conscious of knowing is able to reflect. So although trauma grounds itself deep within the mind/body mechanism, we can recognise that we can starve it of any more attention. Or, we can trauma bond with our own body. It doesn’t matter, it’s all just happening so there’s no need to repress or avoid, rather just allow and integrate, by surrender and to fully accept that nothing that is happening is ever personal. To recognise fully that I’m not my thoughts or mind, I am behind, Yes, and knowing the difference certainly lightens the burden when knowing you are conscious of all your projections and therefore the only one responsible for them.
