Content vs Structure

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

@Leo Gura You know the red queen effect with survival? That the more survival plays out the more other things catch up to it? 

Survival is a never-ending tail chase. That's true. Survival's function is to constantly look for more advantage, regardless of how much one already has.

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What is the relationship to survival and love? 

For example from a woman's/mother's point of view, how much of her love for her partner and children is survival and how much of it transcends that. Does she logically have to know there's a difference to transcend it? Or does love transcend it in itself. 

Is love itself the structure? Can love not also be the content? 

These are tricky issues which are rooted in complex and profound existential dynamics that few people have any awareness of, and such understanding is not part of our shared culture.

In the end everything is an unfolding of Love. But limited beings like humans get attached to limited forms of love and their capacity to love is very limited because they are preoccupied with survival and they are too unconscious and too selfish to love in the highest ways possible.

Survival is just a limited manifestation of love. To kill another person to maintain one's survival is love for life. But it's a narrow, limited kind of love. Surrendering one's need/desire to kill another person would be a higher form of love.

Selfishness is love! But a limited form of it. Selflessness is an unlimited form of it.

A mother of course loves her children out of selfishness, self-bias, and survival, but this is still genuine love. It's just very limited.

The only problem with limited and selfish forms of love is that they become an obstacle to much greater, unlimited forms of love.

Love is all there is. It is the highest structure of all reality. At the level of the Absolute, structure and content become identical.

We are Infinite Love. The trick is being able to live in alignment with that.

[Anderz]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Selfishness is love! But a limited form of it. Selflessness is an unlimited form of it.

Amen to the first part! Selflessness on the other hand, that's a disregard of the self and therefore dysfunctional. What is needed is Self-ishness, not the narrow self that disregards other, nor selflessness which removes the actual self, removes integrity, removes personal sovereignty. The Self includes BOTH oneself AND others. It's the Self of all.

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, CreamCat said:

What about letting go of my life and improving it simultaneously? I want to see how far I can go in my field. I want to see what is possible.

Yes, that's life. That's a tricky balancing act.

You are God in human form, so you both seek the infinite and the finite and you're torn between the two. You are divided. You seek unity but you don't know how to get there so you grasp around in the dark and you are addicted to division, so every time you grasp you make another division, thinking it will bring you to unity.

[OctagonOctopus]

@Leo Gura

I am love itself, guiding this human ship to love itself. 

[Leo Gura]

8 minutes ago, Anderz said:

Amen to the first part! Selflessness on the other hand, that's a disregard of the self and therefore dysfunctional. What is needed is Self-ishness, not the narrow self that disregards other, nor selflessness which removes the actual self, removes integrity, removes personal sovereignty. The Self includes BOTH oneself AND others. It's the Self of all.

Now you're getting into word games.

[allislove]

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A mother of course loves her children out of selfishness, self-bias, and survival, but this is still genuine love. It's just very limited.

@Leo Gura How can you say that if you never had a direct experience of being a mother (even a father I guess)? Isn't it just a story-telling?

I can understand that if I never taken psychedelics I don't want to speak about them (since it will be far away from truth), or tell about sex if I didn't have one, imagine virgin teaches the nature of sex.

[mandyjw]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

A mother of course loves her children out of selfishness, self-bias, and survival, but this is still genuine love. It's just very limited.

The most horrifying thing that I've experienced as a mother is that unconscious love for your children is such a violent back and forth that it causes a lot of suffering. Unconscious love means that you are terrified that something will happen to your baby, and you spent more of your time imagining all kinds of awful things happening rather than in appreciation of this new life. Our culture plays into this, and sells new moms all kinds of products to prevent SIDS, etc, that actually only serve to increase anxiety. You realize that you are now handicapped in taking care of yourself, yet you must take care of yourself for the survival of your infant. Postpartum depression is an interesting manifestation, and so poorly understood. 

 

[Leo Gura]

11 minutes ago, dimitri said:

@Leo Gura How can you say that if you never had a direct experience of being a mother (even a father I guess)? Isn't it just a story-telling?
 

You don't need to have a child to understand how love feels and works.

There is no fundamental difference between loving a child, loving a dog, and loving a car.

Obviously a mother's love is self-biased because the mother chooses to love "my child" rather than a million other children on the planet. That why I call it selfish. But it's still love. Love is love. We're just talking about degrees of limitation.

Of course you could also say that a mother's love is selfless in that she would be willing to sacrifice herself for her child.

But the same was true of Hitler. Hitler's love was also selfless in this sense because he was willing to sacrifice himself for his love of his country and his race. But as you can see, that was a very limited form of love.

The point is, much higher levels of love are possible.

[CreamCat]

12 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You seek unity but you don't know how to get there so you grasp around in the dark and you are addicted to division, so every time you grasp you make another division, thinking it will bring you to unity.

And, you know how to get to unity? Do you have a clear vision of it?

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, CreamCat said:

And, you know how to get to unity? Do you have a clear vision of it?

Unity is your True Nature. You get to it by stopping dividing the world.

[Anderz]

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Now you're getting into word games.

Okay, fair enough. I was actually thinking that by selflessness you meant basically transcending narrow selfishness, but I wanted to make a statement about how the word selflessness can be misinterpreted as meaning some "service to self" vs "service to others" duality conflict.

Hey! You bashed Christians in your video!  Just kidding. More seriously though I like how hardcore Christians believe in miracles while the lukewarm mainstream Christianity is on a dangerous slippery slope towards reductionist scientism. What I reject in fundamental Christianity is the idea that family values should be preserved. Jesus Christ said the opposite! He came with a sword to break up the family unit. And he talked about so-called loved ones; if you only love your loved ones what more are you doing than tax collectors? I think the Bible describes structure and the content is more or less just parables.

[petar8p]

Here is a simplified, unsophisticated model that might provide some additional understanding of this topic. I chose to break down the multiple structures of human-being. 

First we have Being, which is what Leo is trying to point to us with his work. This is basically who and what you are at the core level, and everything that really exists, so it might be a little counter-intuitive that I put it in the center, but bear with me. 

Then we have World View and Paradigm. This is what people tend to identify with the most, after being a human and fighting for survival of course. 
Leo always gives numerous examples of these in his videos. Neo-marxist, Realist, Atheist, Scientist, Christian, Buddhist, Hippie, Optimist, Enterprenuer, Self-help guy. Pragmatist, Socialist are just some of the labels we associate to this structure level. 

After this come the thoughts, concepts and mental structures that guide someone further with his actions or decisions. Everything is closely linked to and operates within the Paradigm one is locked in. Everything that falls outside of the paradigm is filtered out, justified, rationalized and demonized. When the conflict between the Paradigm and what we see in the real world arises, that becomes the main cause of strong emotions and devilry. This is where most of the collective suffering in the world is born. People want to cling on to their ideology so they see everything else as a threat to their identity, which they have to defend and stand for, because they must be right. 

Finally, we have the real world manifestation of all the sub-structures I described so far. Most people try to focus on changing their behaviour and then they wonder why it is so hard for them, but how can it be easy when you have all these massive and rigid sub-structures below this level. If any type of behaviour you immerse yourself in is going against the grain of those sub-structures, you're gonna experience resistance and your "will-power" will run out pretty quickly. Also, focusing on changing behaviour is working at the effect, not at the cause, so the results are also always going to be very surface-level. 

The deeper you go within changing and breaking down these structures, the deeper change it's gonna have to your life. But it's hard, and we don't wanna go down there. It seems as if you're going down the rabbit hole, and you are in a way.

This is why working on uncovering your Being, realizing the true nature of who you are is the hardest, and at the same time the most rewarding work you can do. 

[remember]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

We're just talking about degrees of limitation.

 

2 hours ago, mandyjw said:

Postpartum depression is an interesting manifestation, and so poorly understood.

tell that to someone who just bought a car and still feels depressed... it`s all utterly selfish. especially the mother - why did she selfishly go for the hormones she could have had all of that through chemistry no need for the child.

@petar8p good point!

although the structure seems to be an other induced structure not a self induced structure - correct me if i`m wrong. it seems like the point never left the circle.

Edited November 11, 2019 by remember

[petar8p]

32 minutes ago, remember said:

although the structure seems to be an other induced structure not a self induced structure - correct me if i`m wrong. it seems like the point never left the circle.

Yeah, I said it might seem a little counter-intuitive. The model represents how Truth goes through many filters then, first of which is that we're a human being, then comes the paradigm, then the thoughts and emotions and then the behavior, or what is acted out in the "real world". 

However, still, all this is talking place in the Being, because we started from there. In the same way that thoughts are generated after paradigm, EVERYTHING we have in our experiences is generated in Being. It is Being, a.k.a. Awareness, a.k.a. Consciousness, a.k.a. God, a.k.a. Love. But you can't really put it into words, as it comes before the words. Words appear in it, not the other way around. Also, this is why I put it as the smallest dot. It's unspeakable of, yet unavoidable.

Edited November 11, 2019 by petar8p

[mandyjw]

48 minutes ago, remember said:

tell that to someone who just bought a car and still feels depressed... it`s all utterly selfish. especially the mother - why did she selfishly go for the hormones she could have had all of that through chemistry no need for the child.

 And on the seventh day God rested, and thought to herself "What have have I done? I'm not going to sleep for the next 18 billion years. " 

[Anderz]

Leo talked in the video about "going meta". Lately I have been thinking of mindfulness practice as a meta perspective. The ordinary daily life perspective is to be identified with one's thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness practice moves the mind into a higher level where thoughts and feelings can be observed which lifts the self above being trapped in the mind. In my experience it only leads to a conceptual understanding except for a little bit of higher awareness, but I find mindfulness to be a useful practice for going meta. 

Edited November 11, 2019 by Anderz

[Zigzag Idiot]

 

@mandyjw My mother has always had problems with insomnia.  

I also learned earlier in life that she went through a horrible postpartum depression after I was born. I really feel for women who experience this. It's bound to have a good degree of guilt that mixes in and aggravates the condition.