Replacing the devil by the ego goes hand in hand with replacing God by the ‘neighbor,’ whence an ‘altruism’ that appears as an end in itself and thus loses all contact with metaphysical truth, and so with genuine spirituality

and

all forms of leftist “do-gooderism” … do not work in practice. To be perfectly accurate, like the Dalai Lama’s ideas, they will work, but only in paradise …

I still couldn’t explain this to anyone to anyone else who was there (or to myself, exactly), but I am now entirely sure I’m right to mistrust this guy and his ideas.

What is the mechanism of discernment, to know this without knowing how?

We figure if we can get people to voluntarily redistribute stuff, poverty won’t be a problem, nor will other things. But the problem is, giving is just as controlling as taking if it is done for the wrong reasons (my last ex showed me this) and thus the giving itself is not the greater good.

To top it off, you have to basically destroy people’s egos to get them to do this, I would think– ego is the will to get what you desire and need (that’s the way I see it) but freely giving does not really satisfy the ego- so ‘altruism’ is made a substitute for the ego. The reason it is hard to understand is because in reality, this system — more or less the source of communism — is flawed, misshapen and incomplete in many ways. Attempts to delve through it to the greater truth lead to misery and evil, so people abandon the greater truth and assume that ‘altruism’ is it.

But what man would argue that the world is flat just because one road goes off a cliff into the ocean? But that is precisely, I think, the idea that ‘altruism’ is the greatest good suffers from.

If the ‘deepest’ spiritual seekers of a particular thought/wisdom tradition turn out to be miserable, insane or forced into seclusion, it reveals flaws in either their own ideas or the system from which they come. That isn’t to say that the wisdom they have is not wisdom, but instead, their wisdom or truth is not complete. The Christian way of looking at this problem is actually not to call them ‘occultists’ or ‘heretics’ and throw them out, but instead to ‘test each spirit’ (1 John 4:1 — I think…)

In the first sentence, does Shoun basically mean, what’s going on is incompatible pieces are trying to be put together… so, Satan/God is on the vertical, whereas the ego is a purely neutral thing that deals with the horizontal world of the will… and trying to switch their places results in more or less kicking over the tables of thought? Likewise, there is the same vertical/horizontal switching going on with neighbor/God?

Or maybe its like we’re trying to subordinate the spiritual to the physical, but since the physical proceeds from the spiritual and not the other way around, what we’ve really done is make the flesh spirit and the spirit empty?

I mean, could you use a cup that was tipped on its side?

You know, I just realised, my first statement of the last post was… I remember writing it, but it came from a deeper place. Just, POP! Neato.

i wish i could understand that, can anyone please break it down into something i could make my 7 year old understand?

i was asked the other day,” What do you want to be?”
“The King of the world”, i said.
my reasoning is, i already have the first requirement.
i wouldn’t lay claim to any of it.
“Thou shalt not steal” would no longer be a sin, would it?

i also wish you could see the “…Bride adorned for her wedding.
She takes my breath away.
But the kick in the balls is, she’s marrying another “Rock”
This is me>http://www.ravendays.org/latin/saxum.html

Like i said, i am living in a microcosm and it sucks.

Kind of reminds me of those teenage sitcoms where the young and impressionable protagonist lets his slightly-older and ‘cooler’ buddy throw a party at his house while his parents are in Tahiti. The result invariably is, he’s cool with it until the guy starts letting the lowlifes in (to get drunk and trash the place) at which point there’s really very little he can do to stop him.