Is The Kind Of Life Diogenes Lived Is A Zen Devil Kind Of Life?

[Viking]

question for the purpose of understanding better the zen devil concept

[Leo Gura]

Yes, he was a dick. Don't be like that.

[Haumea]

Quote

A zen devil is basically someone who believes he is enlightened (and "mastered" zen) and acts like he is, while he actually isn't. Did Diogenes do that? I doubt it. He probably didn't even hear about enlightenment during his lifetime. 

 

A zen devil in my understanding is someone in the lower purification stages of enlightenment (lower and upper subtle in Ken Wilber's hierarchy) - once you hit the lower causal stage any bad behavior is highly unlikely.  Not everyone stabilized in these stages misbehaves, but some people do.

You would be shocked if I named some people who were in these lower stages - I'm talking real assholes here.

Speaking of Greek philosophers - Plato was enlightened, but Socrates was fully enlightened.  Think about their works: The Republic is totally a product of someone in the lowest stage of enlightenment, while Socrates left no work: "only don't know." (“The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I am not quite sure that i know that.”)

 

[Leo Gura]

18 minutes ago, Haumea said:

Speaking of Greek philosophers - Plato was enlightened, but Socrates was fully enlightened.

Don't be so sure about that.

I've yet to see any credible evidence that they were enlightened.

Don't forget that Greeks consumed mushrooms, LSD, and God only knows what other kinds of psychedelics. And mystical experiences do not constitute enlightenment.

[Haumea]

Think about it this way, Leo - if Socrates wasn't fully enlightened, he would have likely left philosophical work given his first-rate mind.

But he didn't.

Because fully enlightened masters rarely leave systematic intellectual, philosophical or religious work.  This is a product of lower stages of enlightenment.

There's nothing to be said.  They may leave some pointers on how to achieve enlightenment, but they aren't system-builders.  They don't create theories, schools of thought, etc.  This is usually left to their disciples.

Jesus didn't write the Bible.  His disciples did.  

Just having an experience usually isn't enough, certainly not enough to leave the kind of body of work that some of these people have.  That is perhaps the strongest evidence you can have - the sustained output.

BTW, Nietzsche was in the same stage as Plato. "Beyond Good and Evil"? Virtually a motto for that no-self stage.  No self, no doer, no good, no evil.

I'm not aware of him having access to mushrooms or any of the typical psychedelics, but he did supposedly use opium in his later years.  Was that enough? I don't know, but regardless, not everyone who is in that stage is going to broadcast it to the world.  Some just become world-historical innovators.

So evidence is hard to come by.

Edited August 17, 2017 by Haumea

[Leo Gura]

@Haumea He didn't leave behind any written work because most philosophers of his time did not. Philosophy was lived and practiced and spoken, not written down at that time. That doesn't make him enlightened.

[Arkandeus]

from what I know there is something like negative enlightenment.
souls can chose the path of negativity up until the 5th dimension.
but our planet is of a polar positivity, there's only something like a 5 percentage of negatively oriented-souls. 
Or even lower, it's not really a path for anyone, well almost. 

Genghis khan is a good example of negative enlightenment, from what I heard he ascended as a soul into higher realms, where he joined negative planetary constellations. 
Interestingly enough Adolf Hitler was a soul that was positively oriented. So after he died his soul had to go through a  huge phase of recollection healing itself from the self-inflicted trauma. 
I don't buy into solely blaming Adolf hitler for the holocaust anyway. He was as confused as the millions of people who supported and enabled him. 

 

sociopaths and psychopaths really interest me.
I suspect that someone like Ted Bundy is on the path of negative enlightenment. 
But there are many sociopaths who chose to cooperate with society and not kill others. 
So I think even sociopaths can chose the path of love. 

 

 

Edited August 17, 2017 by Arkandeus

[Pierre]

Socrates and Plato are the fathers of western rationality. Doesn't really fit with enlightenment...

As for Diogenes, I see him as one of the first rascal gurus. His radical questioning of all social conventions was certainly showing the right direction.

[Heart of Space]

7 hours ago, Arkandeus said:

Interestingly enough Adolf Hitler was a soul that was positively oriented. So after he died his soul had to go through a  huge phase of recollection healing itself from the self-inflicted trauma. 
I don't buy into solely blaming Adolf hitler for the holocaust anyway. He was as confused as the millions of people who supported and enabled him. 

 

What kind of crack are you smoking?  And can I have some?  Lmao

[Erlend K]

@Haumea From what I remember, Socrates was generally opposed to written works on moral grounds.

[Ape]

4 hours ago, Heart of Space said:

What kind of crack are you smoking?  And can I have some?  Lmao

Yes you do! Read the law of one and you can be high on crack too! :-)

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, Erlend K said:

@Haumea From what I remember, Socrates was generally opposed to written works on moral grounds.

That is right. Socrates supposedly opposed written works because they were too dry and rigid, possibly misleading people with theory. He preferred one-on-one exchanges so he could adapt this questioning to yours.

It does seem he was a self-inquirer. Not sure how far he got.

The best evidence for his possible enlightenment was the calm and collected manner in which he took his execution. After drinking the poison, he started to feel it taking effect in this body. He closed his eyes to die as all his friends watched in horror. Then he opened his eyes suddenly and said something along the lines of, "Oh, friends. Can one of you please repay my debt to this town's person? I owe him one chicken. It would be a shame if my death robbed him of what he is owed." And then he died.

[Guest username]

@Arkandeus How did you get your insights?

@Leo Gura IIRC, there was also a fear back then that recording your thoughts rather than constantly straining yourself by holding everything in mind would sully people's intellectual development--not much credence was given to greater collective memory we could get from writing everything down. If we brought Socrates back with all his memories, he'd probably kill himself again as soon as he discovered the internet. 

Not sure that pertained to the discussion but I've always that that was an interesting but sort of silly mindset and that also probably seemed really sensible at the time.

[Leo Gura]

@username Socrates did have a good point. All this theory I share with your guys practically just ends up rotting your minds. You end up thinking you know much more than you really know.

Theory without practice is a very dangerous thing.

If you rejected Actualized.org right now and just went and sat in cave for 5 years doing self-inquiry, you would be much better off in the end.

But how many of you are willing to do that?

[Joseph Maynor]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@username Socrates did have a good point. All this theory I share with your guys practically just ends up rotting your minds. You end up thinking you know much more than you really know.

Theory without practice is a very dangerous thing.

If you rejected Actualized.org and just went and sat in cave for 5 years doing self-inquiry, you would be much better off in the end.

But how many of you are willing to do that?

Scaffolding understood correctly and applied in the right way is the only way to expedite enlightenment though.  That's why you need a good teacher like yourself to explain this to people.  It's a task.  I appreciate what you do.  Tough task.  How do you change the way people are inclined to think about beliefs in a way that doesn't flow into philosophical terrain but rather into clinging differently, attaching differently.  It's a tricky thing.  I would be puzzled about how to teach this to someone because it has some philosophical overtones, but philosophy is a trap in the work too because the point is not to arrive at some kind of answer.  It is to be the answer.  And then to explain to people how to use this truth is a totally new area of thorny "education".  Do you explain or show or do some combination?  I don't know.  

Edited August 18, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Leo Gura]

@Joseph Maynor The ultimate lesson you could learn from the scaffolding is: "Okay, time to go live in a cave for 5 years."

The problem is, the mind doesn't want that lesson. It wants something easy.

So here we are! Welcome to easy Were the work is slow, the mental masturbation great, and the results meager. But hey, it's easy!

[Joseph Maynor]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

@Joseph Maynor The ultimate lesson you could learn from the scaffolding is: "Okay, time to go live in a cave for 5 years."

The problem is, the mind doesn't want that lesson. It wants something easy.

So here we are! Welcome to easy Were the work is slow, the mental masturbation great, and the results meager. But hey, it's easy!

Paradoxically, this is where enlightenment is leading for me -- Personal Power (see video below).  I'm embracing the illusion with more mindfulness.  If I was interested in enlightenment though and I wanted to deep-dive it, I would go live in a cave for 5 years and explore the shit out of reality.  My problem is that I have to work within Maya to get a lot of actions done.  I've built up a machine that needs a lot of tending for better or for worse.  But I love it.  It's a labor of love.  I'm transforming it into that.  Deep-diving is the way to go.  If you're like me, until you satisfy yourself that you have exhausted something, you'll keep cracking at it until you satisfy yourself.  I've done that with math, music (playing jazz), studying law (on my own, I didn't go to law school), studying philosophy, studying personal development, mountain-biking, working on my writing style, doing deep-dives with reading all kinds of books, working on my business, etc.  Everything I do I go deep.  It's a personality trait I have for better or for worse.  Sometimes it has hung me up though -- that kind of balls-to-the-wall, super-driven mentality.  When I was in school I wanted to do every math problem in the book and I often did.  I wanted to penetrate math to the core.  And I loved it.  I was so passionate about that when I was doing it.  It was like a journey for me.  I probably missed my calling as a mathematician, but I would have entered Philosophy through the Philosophy of Mathematics eventually anyway.  Philosophy is my permanent passion along with Personal Development and writing.  Those three have stuck around for years and years for me.  The others have risen, peaked, and then dropped-away.  It's important to see what sticks around and when you are young, it's harder to do that because you don't have the luxury of having 10-15 years to see what sticks.  So, I'm so grateful that I know what I am passionate about.  It has been empirically confirmed in my life.  One of the benefits of being 39 years old.  I may be getting old and that kind of sucks, but I know myself now in a nice way that I didn't 5 or 10 years ago.  Life is getting easier and easier as I get older, although my productivity goes up and up.  It's a weird paradox.  Personal Development and your work Leo has definitely played a role in that.  Self-Mastery really pays huge dividends after 10-15 years of personal development work.

 

Edited August 18, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Leo Gura]

@Joseph Maynor That is why we each must walk our own unique path. No path is right or wrong. It's Allah's will no matter which fork in the road you take.

Ignorance needs room to play itself out. Which is fundamentally why we must be tolerant of all people and why nonduality wars are silly.

[Joseph Maynor]

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Joseph Maynor That is why we each must walk our own unique path. No path is right or wrong. It's Allah's will no matter which fork in the road you take.

Ignorance needs room to play itself out. Which is fundamentally why we must be tolerant of all people and why nonduality wars are silly.

I appreciate that statement and I appreciate enlightenment.  Stick with enlightenment.  It is magical.  Enlightenment killed my religion though.  Actually substitution is probably a better word.  God is still God, but with just a different referent.  But a lot of the functioning of God has stayed the same in my life.  It's a trip.  I don't talk to God or anything though.  God is just non-dual Being.  And the sense of Religious Intuition that I had is still there, it's just that I kicked away certain beliefs about it.  But intuition is definitely strong in my life, the leading by the Muses.  That's all exactly the same as when I was religious.  The sense I have of being divinely-guided, of channeling the creativity of God, of being a faithful servant of God's Will.  That intuition is all still there with me.  I always have listened to that intuition and have followed it pretty accurately, even when I had to take some shit to do so, and even when I was an athiest before I became religious I had that same strong sense of guiding-intuition I was just more confused about what the hell it was.  When you're an atheist you get blind-sided by spiritual intuitions and think you are going crazy or something, or you just bury them or ignore them, or maybe you listen to them, I guess it depends on the person.  God is not a dude in the clouds, there I said it!  Self-inquiry works haha.  Not to be too blunt here or anything. 

Religions are just dual versions of non-dual Spirituality.  Your video on Religions is on point with this.  I can see where you had that insight because I had the same one.  Spirituality fills the shoes of Religion.  It's just a more realistic sense of God, that's all.  Well, it's not a concept, that's the point -- God is a-conceptual.  God doesn't really have 99 names.  God has one name but 99 dualistic conceptions.  So, yeah, religions are a step forward from atheism (you could argue the reverse too if that's your preference), but non-duality is the final stage of spirituality.  Not to sound too dogmatic of course.  This story is just what's resonating with me as I write this -- and what resonates with me generally when I think about these issues.  The main point that I want to emphasize here is that not much really changed for me practically-speaking from the substitution of religion with non-dual spirituality.  

I used to be embarrassed to talk about spirituality and intuition stuff with people because I thought people would judge me, but what the hell, I have nothing to hide.  I figure we don't talk about this stuff enough because we are scared to open up about it.  I'd rather say, hey this shit really is happening to me, anybody else? [crickets haha.]  People are scared to be judged, I get it.  I don't care myself though.  I have no shame about discussing my beliefs.  This probably goes back to my philosophy training.  But a lot of people are scared to discuss their beliefs, or at least hesitate to open-up voluntarily about them.  That's an issue across the board I find -- a pandemic.  We hide the most precious parts of ourselves from the world.  Why?  How can we learn if we do this?  

 

Edited August 18, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[TimStr]

I consider emperor Nero a zen-devil, too.

He and Marcus Aurelius shared the same teacher, Seneca. The latter two are to be considered two of the main figures in stoic philosophy. I am not sure if they practiced some form of non-dual inquiry, but guessing from the way, they lived their lifes, I think, that they were somewhat spiritually realized. At least regarding the detachment aspect of enlightenment.

But all three of them lived out their stoa in a different way. Seneca was more the yogi kind of guy and others wanted to learn philosophy from him, Marcus Aurelius went full on life purpose, becoming a great conscientious but at the same time extremely modest emperor after Neros death, and Nero himself just went all nuts, burned Rome several times and ordered Seneca to commit suicide.