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I'll try my best to explain this. God is, by definition, God. If God were something else, then God wouldn't be God. The definition of God, as you will realize through contemplation, awakening, etc., is that God is fundamentally all, or that which has no "other." There is nothing outside of itself. It is all-encompassing. So God isn't merely a "creator"; God is everything. It is everythingness. If you agree with this definition, then you can follow the logic from there. For God to be all, to be everything, it is in a bind that is self-defined: it has to contain both the finite and the infinite. It has to be capable of containing both limitation and unlimitedness, and it has to create limitations without bias. Why? Because if God were limited by any bias, then God would be limited by that very bias. For example, if I define a set as the set of all prime numbers, then I have to include all prime numbers. If I leave one out, then it is no longer the set of all prime numbers. It would be the set of all prime numbers except 7. So everything has to exist without any fundamental bias. If God were biased toward creating a world without evil, then God would not be everything, because God would be limited by the exclusion of evil. If God is the set of all that exists, and you remove something because "that cannot be God," then God suddenly isn't God anymore. It becomes something that does not include that thing. You could therefore say that the only thing that "limits" God is the fact that God has to be itself, or everything. In other words, God cannot be biased toward one part of existence over another, because then it would cease to be everything. It has to take in everything and be everything. That's the first reason. The second reason is that the notions of good and evil, as well as pain and suffering, are extremely tricky. You could technically argue that you commit "sadism" every time you kill an insect, every time you choose not to help a homeless person, or even when you put your own body through pain by forcing your muscles to grow stronger. Evil and suffering exist as long as you agree to the rules of existing as a finite self. Every single moment of your life, you could theoretically end your life and exit this particular bind, but you don't want to because you want to continue living. As long as you are attached to existence, form attachments, and want things to be a specific way, you will inevitably experience some degree of pain and suffering. Take the classic example of a gazelle being chased by a lion. Both animals simply want to survive and feed their families. Who does God give the bias to? What should the animals be fed on? Are you going to commit "genocide" against the grass and nature too? How do you decide what gets eaten alive and what doesn't? If you're a game developer, I'm sure you can understand this yourself. It's incredibly difficult to satisfy everyone's preferences. Every time you reject a feature request from a player, for example, you could argue that you have caused some degree of disappointment or pain for that player. And this problem continues at every level: whenever one thing is given preference over another, something is necessarily excluded or denied. Bias is fundamental to all of this. Bias is also what separates duality from nonduality. Why should one thing be one way and not another? Why prefer this over that? How do I define what is evil for me and what is evil for you? What is good, and what is evil? Who gets to decide that? The moment you prefer one thing over another, you introduce a distinction. You are saying that this should be one way rather than that way. In that sense, preference itself creates a form of duality. As long as you're attached to being alive and to existing in a particular way, you'll experience pain and suffering whenever reality doesn't conform to that way. Who says you're entitled to comfortable weather all the time? Why can't nature suddenly become extremely cold and bring another ice age? Is that evil being done to you? From another perspective, you're imposing your preferences onto nature by expecting it to behave the way you want. From a nondual perspective, there is no fundamental basis for preferring one part of reality over another, because there is no ultimately separate "other" to stand in contrast to it. TLDR; Pain, suffering, evil, and sadism exist because God is, by definition, everything. For God to be God, it must encompass both the infinite and the finite. Once you enter the finite realm, pain, suffering, and "evil" exist depending on the perspective of the observer. It is "evil" to paint over a beautiful masterpiece, but it can also be good because it creates space for a new masterpiece. It is "evil" to die from cancer or disease, but from another perspective, the body and its cells fought to survive for as long as they could, and harmful genetic traits may not be passed on. It may seem "evil" that God doesn't simply give you a harem of beautiful women who exist solely to please you, but from the perspective of those women, it is good that they are not reduced to objects existing only for someone else's desires. It is "evil" to age and lose your energy and vitality, but it can also be good because you eventually return nutrients to nature and make room for new, novel lives to emerge. The moment you accept the finite world, you accept these issues, because a finite thing is defined by certain conditions it needs to thrive, be happy, and exist. If you could genuinely be happy with anything, you wouldn't be bound by those conditions. In that sense, you wouldn't be defined as finite, but as infinite. If you were completely fine with losing a leg, you wouldn't be defined by the normal human attachment to having an intact body. People will call you an "abnormal human" just for that. Evil, suffering, and sadism exist precisely because you are not a bot. Because if God were biased in any way, then as the creator, God would have to behave according to that specific bias, imposing an even greater limitation on you than the limitations we already experience.

Yes. If Lordfall's point is simply that, from a relative perspective, there is a lot of pain and suffering, then yes, absolutely. You'd be foolish to ever deny that. However, when you start using terms like God, nonduality, ultimate, foundational value, etc., you are usually implying a more absolute, nondual frame. This is why people corrected your post. From this frame, there are no fundamentally separate minds or "others" upon whom God can be sadistic. There is only God being God, one reality, one mind.

To think in just one mind without subdivisions is insane lol, that's like saying you wrote this post or I wrote your comment. > It is one mind. That's the entire point of Leo's Actualized.org. It's most likely that you simply haven't had these experiences, whether through psychedelics, meditation, sobriety, introspection, or other means. Which is totally ok; that's why we are in this forum to help each other At the highest level of awakening, you experience the collapse of the separation between Self and Other. The Self becomes all, and the "Other" is also recognized as the Self. I'm not trying to make this unnecessarily difficult. Yes, from our ordinary human perspective, the world is filled with beauty and horror, love and hatred, pleasure and suffering, creation and destruction, compassion and cruelty, and countless other apparent opposites. But once you start talking about God, nonduality, or the highest perspective and "values", your definitions have to change accordingly. Concepts such as sadism and masochism depend on there being an "other" toward whom an action is directed. From the highest nondual perspective, that distinction no longer exists. All apparent dualities collapse into one because there is no separate "other" outside of the One. That's literally what nonduality means (it is in the word itself - not DUAL, not TWO): there is no fundamental second thing, no separate Other, no independent contrast. There is only One. When we apply dualistic human definitions to the highest nondual context without first redefining the context, we are imposing distinctions that the nondual framework itself has already dissolved.

Nonduality means your excluded middle will collapse. Excluded middle assumes that category A is inherently different from B. But all categories are duality.

All that matters is he is here. So let's get him some pussy. Hell. With all that nonduality talk he probably needs it.

@Breakingthewall aren´t you supposed to be in the spiritual niche? Or did you get fed up from the endless nonduality debates

Hmmm, but do you think this might be conflating "only a certain kind of person is interested in authenticity" with authenticity only being important inside that microcosm? I perhaps may be misunderstanding your passage here - prompting to be corrected Consider mathematics: only a certain type of person might spend their evenings thinking about prime numbers - but that doesn't mean prime numbers are only applicable/relevant within the mathematical microcosm. ------ Are you pointing to authenticity being heavily context driven? If I ask someone "what is authenticity?" there is an inherited context smuggled in to the answer that changes the answer almost every time - and while context is always relevant, it seems even more so with authenticity. "Authentic to what?" then becomes the refining question - and I can't escape asking this. The above is why I also semi concluded authenticity does not have one universal definition (it can if we consider nonduality) .... because it is a relational term - it exists in the space between me and whatever I am acting in authenticity to. And that space changes as a result of any one of the two elements changing - it is relationally constituted.

@Inliytened1 nonduality is true, but also you are human monkey that has needs, in that paradox we live our lives. If you believe you are God a little too much, you soon will become a spiritual narcissist and bypass mundane human stuff acting from a high horse, look up Bentinho Massaro, great example of this

@Jodistrict exactly, just a bunch of nonduality nerds

I’m trying to understand an experience I had that I interpreted as a possible awakening or mystical opening, but unlike the peaceful or blissful awakening experiences I often hear about, mine eventually became extremely frightening. I had been studying spirituality, nonduality, and consciousness for around five years, so I had a substantial theoretical background before this happened. I was already familiar with ideas like ego death, surrender, the illusion of separation, and the possibility that consciousness is fundamental. Then I went through a period where reality started feeling radically different. Perception became extremely vivid and unusual. Ordinary things could look strange or almost unreal, and I experienced an intense sense of love and unity. I also became deeply focused on another person, whom I experienced as the Beloved or as somehow representing Reality itself. At one point, it felt as though I was getting extraordinarily close to something fundamental. The usual sense of separation seemed to be dissolving. But then fear became overwhelming. I began to feel almost like prey being hunted, as though something was coming after me. It felt almost like I was approaching a point where the self itself would disappear. Instead of surrendering, I retreated. In the metaphor I've been using since then, it felt like a moth approaching a flame: the moth is drawn toward the flame, but eventually realizes that getting too close may mean its own destruction, so it flies away. Why do some awakening experiences seem profoundly peaceful while others become terrifying?

That’s right I can’t stop talking with a passion about this stuff, I just can’t stop, I enjoy talking about this stuff, and will probably do so until I take my last breath. For clarity, I can’t stop talking about nonduality. l love the subject topic with a passion.

@cetusyeah that makes sense to me, the version of nonduality that Bernardo Kastrup and other rational-spiritualists where after death you just merge with the whole with no individuality left wasn't very intellectually or emotionally satisfying to me. I think in an interview Bernardo was asked about death and he said he pictures it being like a sensory deprivation tank. But I don't think the data (NDEs, past life memories, out of body experiences) supports that.

They can. In fact, they work quite well for many tasks without a world model, especially the ones involving symbol manipulation such as code and parts of math like algebra. But the gap still exists from the intelligence humans exhibit in that humans have an internal physical model of how the world works and they use it to make internal simulations and take actions (planning). When I lift a glass full of water, I have an internal model that predicts how the water will flow depending on the movements I make. I can even visualize it in my mind's eye (prediction). This prediction is continuous, and it captures nuances missed if we were to use only language to model it. If LLMs don't have this internal world model, they can only plan in token space — fragments of language — a representation that fails to capture the nuances of real world. Even if you say LLMs learn an implicit world model from text, it's still a text-learned model. Nonduality points that language carves the world into discrete categories, reality doesn't respect those cuts, and a text-learned world model inherits the cuts.

There isn't a right or wrong path......every path is neutral.....that's what the meaning of nonduality is trying to point out. Every path can't be known? Its freedom from that psychological belief that something needs to happen in order for THIS to already be the Grand Finallie. THIS is already home base.

@Emerald I agree that there are many spiritual bullshiters on this forum, that is why I never open a topic in the spiritual niche on this forum, because you just get nonduality psychos argue everything as unimportant and the only important thing is that everything is one. Aka spirtiual bullshiters or spiritual bypassing, ignoring everything worldly. I appreciate you saying what you find attractive in a men, but also we will give our opinion on that. I think I am attractive, but I still have many nice guy stupid habits, every guy does this, they open the conversation and ask all the stupid questions, I do this too and it is so hard to unlearn, so many mistakes that are able to be avoided. Actually 90% of what I am working on around game right now is talking allot with many girls and trying to ask no questions in the first 2 mins, speaking loudly and being able to free flow more without letting the nerves make you end a conversation prematurely. Also if I can joke in the beginning of the conversation, I already know I am doing very well.

Thanks for letting us know. There’s no such thing as nonduality. From belief to clarity. 👍

Angelo Dillulo is a popular nonduality teacher on youtube. The video critic is a former monk. One of the subjects discussed is the monetization of spirituality and the wider culture of modern non-duality.

It’s the traditional method. It’s the same with the Vedanta Society. When you are initiated you will be given a mantra with no talk of nonduality even though Vedanta is nondual. That is because in the traditonal way, purification most come before self realization. You have to quiet the mind before you can make meaningful progress in meditation. In my opinion, the traditionalists are correct. Westerners cherry pick and want the cherries without doing any work.

From what I understand, he is saying the telos of reality is directly intertwined with its complexity. Without nested order, you cannot have evolution. Evolution happens within one's own life, and as a species, so if you believe the relative is a microcosm of the absolute then ontological and spiritual evolution becomes a necessity. If one believes the unifying substance or substrate of reality is some form of matter, then I can see how one would come to the conclusion that evolution is purely a precipitate of biology. What nonduality doesn't fully articulate is that the universe has to be structured in a way that is top down, and bottom up, at the same time. This is how order and complexity are tied to telos.

To be fair , my understanding of what is so called standard nonduality is primarily influenced by actualized.org, so maybe I'm taking some things for granted that a lot of practioners don't .

That sounds like standard nonduality 👀.

Wouldn't meditation under anti-psychotic medication be perfect for you? It stops you from relapsing into another psychotic outbreak while still being able to integrate your psyche and explore nonduality. Just stop doing crazy shit like running naked into the street. It's just bad gameplay. Think of yourself as God playing a human video game chracter. If you fuck up your human's life you are fucked, doesn't matter if your ultimate self is not affected in the grand schemes of things. If you meditate under anti-psychosis you will probably still experience a sort of mini psychosis because ultimately the experience is not caused by chemicals going haywire in your brain; it's due to awakening. Just integrate the lessons sober before you go hardcore into meditation. Someone completely sober can induce psychosis in themselves just by what they think about. Just be careful of having already figured out grounding mechanisms before you start to engage in spiritual practice. It sounds silly but masturbating is one of my mechanisms. As long as you do it privately it will ground you because it will reinforce the paradigm that we are currently operating under i.e. we are both human males and woman are sexy and you wanna fuck them. If you deconstruct it further then you can realize that women are just a figment of your greatest self but that doesn't really matter since it's a great part of reality and you should accept that boundary to remain a sane human being able to function in reality.

I'll be honest, it's still hard for me to understand how God realization is different from traditional nonduality, maybe I haven't tripped enough (then again Leo also says to not trip much in your 20s sooo....). By traditional nonduality I mean Advaita Vedanta , not Buddhism, although plenty of Buddhists said Advaita things , like Huang Po and Bankei who said all was mind. But what I will say is, Leo excels in the realms of developmental psychology and conscious politics, that's something the traditions don't have.

First of all, nonduality is a relative quality/perspective, not Absolute Truth (which includes and transcends both duality and nonduality). Secondly, relative opposites never dissappear. They just become integrated, and thereby transcended. That's the beauty of Reality. It accommodates and allows absolutely everything, because it is absolutely everything. ☯️

Duality and nonduality are two sides of the same coin.