Hey everyone,

I am in the process of making out what my fears and beliefs are. Some things are easy to spot, others have me running around in circles for quite a while now. I hope I may ask you for your help in getting closer to understanding a particular thing.

Tom says that if anything makes you sad, angry, annoyed etc, there´s always a fear and or belief at the root of it. For me a big topic is animal suffering, but there are a lot of other form of suffering in the world that still make me very sad or angry, depending on the situation.

I have incorporated love and forgiveness into my regular state of beeing quite a lot already, but there are some situations where I usually have problems stayed calm and loving. BBQ´s for example can be such a thing, depending on the crowd. When people not only display ignorance, but that ignorance also comes mixed with pride, often even meanness...when I get ridiculed or even attacked for my ideals I often can´t help but push back hard. I lose mindfulness and get into a state of letting mind take over and let it do battle for me.
So...I know Tom´s priority is politeness over principles, but I can´t, or don´t want to do that. Where does it end, where does it stop ? I don´t think slavery for example was ended by loving forgiveness of "a different way of life". Is it not the more loving thing to do to demonstrate in practice that other ways are possible and maybe start to make someone think ?
All this is not intended to start a discussion about the topic itself, I might as well have chosen a different one...it´s just to demonstarte my thinking process. Obviously I am asking for help in understanding, because I myself feel that something other than love might be underlying my actions.

Yes, I feel the main driving force behind my ways is love for all beeing. While I typed this text hundreds of thousands animals have been tortured and killed not for need, but for pleasure, how could I not feel for them ? but the way I internally handle all this is keeping me from beeing loving, happy and centered at some points and that in turn keeps me from beeing the most positive influence I can possibly be in this world.

So...can anyone maybe help me identify an underlying believe or fear or give me a pointer in which direction to work ? The only believe I can make out in myself is noone and nothing should suffer for pleasure and that killing without need is an evil.
Thank you so much if you have even read this.

Much love,
~Alex from germany

Tom said recently in a fireside chat that consciousness can "disconnect" from the physical body in order to avoid suffering. I don't personally know when it happens.

If you're interested you can find people who also love animals, and work on giving animals good lives. Many people get inspired when they see people helping animals.

The second quote might be the starting point to the first. You might be someone who feels emotionally attached to animal suffering but your defensiveness and anger comes from being, "attacked or ridiculed for ... ideals" and you specify it is when, "people not only display ignorance, but that ignorance also comes mixed with pride".

So it seems like this issue is less about your "love" for animals and more about your own ego and sense of identity. Why do you feel fear when ridiculed or when people disagree with you in an arrogant or hostile way?

I've also never heard Tom say, "politeness over principles". I think his sentiment would be to understand the situation objectively, make a case for your ideals if you feel it would be appropriate/effective but otherwise you can't change or control people and getting angry doesn't help. That's generally what I do as a vegan. But I also feel MBT morals are overstated.

Thanks a lot, both of you, for your replies. It gives me something to work with.

@BlankMind Well, I don´t think dying is such a bad thing in itself, the suffering part is in my eyes mostly what leads up to it. Beeing not beeing allowed to live a live that correlates to their nature and them beeing treated as industrial products. A cow getting forcefuly impreganted and then getting her child taken away for example, no reason for a consciousness to exit I guess, but great suffering without any need involved.

I also think it is a good way to give animals a good home, but there are counters like the one on Gary Yourofski´s Website ( http://www.adaptt.org/ - middle of the page on the left)....it´s millions per hour, only a societal change can make a differance on that scale, I guess.

@Human+ I think you have a point there and I´m just not sure why. I can´t seem to get to a deeper level and find out why it increaes my fear if people are arrogant and hostile to me about this and trying to ridicule me. As a fellow vegan...how to you stay calm when people make fun about baby chickens beeing shreddered or stuff like that ? I really do want to let go of these feelings and reaction patterns, because I know it is not doing anything good, but also it feels like betryel to the cause if I were able to live life "without caring" about these things.

I rephrased it, but Tom also eats a mostly vegan diet when he has the choice and it does not get too inconvenient to do so. He has also stated that it is the right thing to do as soon as you understood that there is a moral question involved. He also said that if he is invited somewhere he will just be polite and eat whatever he is offered, because it is the less entropic choice for him. I put that as "politness over principle" and I think it can be said like that. The talk I am referring to is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbBRpBy5hXM&t=3923s and the section about eating animals can be found at 1:32:00.

Thanks again for your answers. Have an awesome weekend.
~Alex

I sometimes wonder if these male baby chickens or male baby cows are being made to be conscious just to be killed the day they are born.. I have sat down to dinner at many places and just politely decline the chicken or beef.. no one is offended and if anything you are doing them a favor of explaining the health risks of eating animal products all the time if they ask why you dont eat it.. I find letting a little egg or dairy go in something is showing them that being "vegan" is about avoiding animal products to the extent reasonably possible.. eating a slice of their pizza is not making a difference to the environment, they are not going to buy more pizza because you ate a slice.. and no impact really on your health.. but declining the chicken is your opportunity to share why if they ask.. the new canadian food guide is getting much attention in my country.. it is essentially telling people to prefer high protein plant foods over animal products. Big news lately here in canada. A positive change for sure effecting schools, nursing homes, etc. I think I might do some animal activism this year as well with the save movement or take part in cube of truth events.. maybe meet some nice people!

I don't even know if the LCS connects consciousness to beings who are doomed to a bad life. Maybe evil souls get those lives, to learn what it feels like to be a victim? No idea.

To break your mindfulness and illicit aggression or anger, your flight or fight response likely gets activated. That's a physiological response to feeling threatened.
A good place to start is to ask yourself in these situations, "what part of me feels threatened?", which calls awareness onto yourself. The answer is fundamentally a personal one and getting in tune with your emotional state will probably yield insight. I don't doubt that you may feel strongly about animals but the scenario you describe also points to ego and the reasons for reacting in that way may be very complex or convoluted. For example, people may have a constructed identity of themselves and when aspects of that identity are challenged or undermined, they feel frustration or fear at the lack of social approval. Or maybe they hold a certain paradigm of understanding and interfacing with the world that provides them comfort or security and fear when that world-view is challenged. Maybe, when there is disagreement over basic moral standards in social situations, you fear the other person because you no longer trust them or their way of thinking. Maybe it's a culmination of all the above and more.

I try to recognize where they are coming from and consider all the potential factors that might make them act or feel that way. Even social norms for meat eaters might be to take pride in or be callous in the face of vegans who they might prematurely identify as a threat from what preconceptions they've seen in media. But it is also the case that despite what people say, or parrot in prideful behavior regarding meat eating, they still would likely have an aversive reaction to baby chickens actually being shredded if it happened in front of them. The issue is largely cognitive dissonance here and you should recognize that.

But recognizing that isn't what provides me calmness. I don't try to control things and I am open minded about morality an different ways of living. Consider that in MBT, there can be different ways that an avatar can reduce entropy than being a human with a central nervous system to express love for social cohesion -- and that we find ourselves first in a world where organisms eat other organisms and may live terrible lives of suffering despite that not being the most optimal way of evolving. The LCS does not seem to share our conventional interpretation of love and morality there despite Tom's personification of it in ways that relate to us. What we are left with is a vague notion that the love "out there" is a superset of this one we are experiencing now in our human avatar's stage of evolution. I don't care about morality. I have a natural aversion towards consuming flesh and animal products and also hurting animals, so I don't do it.

I see what you are saying but I disagree. Tom's overarching moral principle is regarding entropy reduction. This can manifest as a rejection to factory farming animals or animal products but in a social situation where the animal is already dead and served up, at the risk of offending the person, Tom might just choose to eat it in a context for social cohesion - especially if eating it does not accentuate the problem of factory farming to any degree other than a negligible to non-existent on.
Do you see how this relates to my above comment and how Tom doesn't share the same ideas of morality as you do.

it feels like betryel to the cause if I were able to live life "without caring" about these things.

I don't think anyone is telling you that you shouldn't care. Only exercise awareness and productivity in your interactions. You can argue if you want but maybe there would be better options.

Tom has said that consciousness will even exist in a fetus temporarily, especially if it is new to this VR and looking for base level experiences via sensory input in the womb, so I doubt it. Assuming knowledge of this would also mean the LCS absolving us of responsibility to deal with large-scale torture and killing.

1. No evil souls exist.

2. Not consistent with MBT terminology or teachings.

3. A chicken isn't going to rationalize or work out the situation that lead to them as a human committing something bad. It's a chicken.

Hello again,

@Human+ Thank you very much for taking the time to give me such a detailed answer. There´s so much in there that I need to look into, many things that give me new perspectives of looking at it.

I think I have made good progress on this over the last days. Just yesterday I watched one of Tom´s more recent talks where he said that you can only change yourself and the more you can become love, you might be able to provide circumstances in which other people feel so safe that they might be able to step outside of themselves and might be able to change themselves (or at least think and feel more openly about the topic, I guess). That is what I want to do.

I tend to forget that I too have not been born vegan. I had been conditioned into the "conventional" way of living since I arrived here, too and it took me personally 30 years to step outside of that conditioning even though I concluded that it was the right thing to do long before I was actually able to make that step. If I try really hard I can remember how I felt back then, especially when I felt attacked for that way of live. I guess I´m also displaying a strong cognitive dissonance when I go around judging people these days although I know it would never have changed anything in me and how it made me feel to be judged for it. I will try to be more aware of this in the future.

Also, one of my guiding principles is this quote:

“Watch your thoughts, they become words;
watch your words, they become actions;
watch your actions, they become habits;
watch your habits, they become character;
watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

It seems clear what I need to do, because I know what I want to become and what not.


Thanks to all of you again.

Much love,
~Alex

Tom has talked about IUOCs being able to incarnate as multiple people at once. One example was a father and a son driven by the same IUOC. The father believed in "tough love", so he was not gentle when punishing the son for being bad. But since the IUOC also lived the life of the son, the IUOC was able to fully understand his perspective - and so the IUOC learned that violence is a problem.

Now say what you want, but gruesome psychopaths must have souls that are different, in some way, than the souls of people who find it natural to be good. So what does the LCS do with the IUOCs of monsters such as Nazi doctors? I don't know, but I have my ideas. It's not about teaching a chicken a lesson, it's about letting the IUOC experience the unfunny end of the butcher knife.

The LCS doesn't have to assign consciousness to a defenseless creature doomed to a life of 100% torture. That would be a sour waste of its energy, time and resources; unless there's a good reason to assign a particular IUOC to the creature.

The IUOC's experience is still bound to the chicken's avatar which probably doesn't rationalize or understand anything as they go to the slaughter house, and especially wouldn't relate to any complicated situation they experienced as a human avatar that lead to them making a premeditated decision for harm like murder.

That's why your father/son reference is irrelevant and you're undermining your idea that the LCS wouldn't assign an IUOC to animals that will live a life of torture since you're already giving a reason that would be beneficial to incarnate anyway as that animal in your hypothetical. And as I said before, if an unborn fetus can offer valuable experience to an IUOC so can the life of a chicken or cow, even if factory farmed. The LCS doesn't care that much to completely bubble wrap an IUOC's experience of harm because you are thinking in small terms of what love means. There's plenty of suffering to go around for the inhabitants of earth.




I feel like you're very naive if you think Nazi doctors are the lowest of the low here on earth. IOUC's can have different levels of QoC but largely, being a psychopath or a gruesome murderer is also due to your avatar and its experience in this PMR. You can also be a psychopath, believe it or not, with the correct psychiatric drugs.

Human+, the forum's 5 year old child, tries once again to start a weird knowledge fight with me. And as always, he immediately digs himself into a hole of hopeless beliefs and conclusions.

No, the chicken is the FWAU, a subset of the IUOC. The IUOC is continually conscious in NPMR. (Very basic MBT)

I never said that. By the way, you call Tom's father/son scenario irrelevant, and then you immediately compare a comfortable and safe fetus to a creature trapped in a slaughterhouse. Amazing.

Wrong.

What are you even talking about? I never said that. I made an example. What do you even do Human+? Do you ever try to research NPMR/the larger reality through real experience, or do you just sit on the internet and play clever?

Hmm, sounds like projection to me. I don't think I insulted you but you are also adamant in your position for reasons other than logical discourse.


Okay? And having an avatar as a chicken is still the experience packet of a chicken.

Letting a chicken get tortured and die in factory farming will probably not work out any complex situation that lead a human to commit crime in a previous experience packet. Lol.

And if it were the case, that there was value in that, you'd be undermining your initial idea that the LCS might not be assigning a consciousness to these chickens because of suffering.

Lol



I didn't compare them really. I brought up the fetus to demonstrate that even extremely basic input is valuable to certain IOUC. And because of that, I then suggested that the life of a chicken or cow would also be very valuable in that, even if they experience suffering.


Why not just address your feeling of always getting the last word in.