Leo Gura

No, that line of questioning is misguided. Stop trying to reduce it. It's like I'm trying to get you to recognize the ocean and you're saying, "Oh, H2O, yeah, I know that." No! H2O is not what I mean when I say ocean. If you equate ocean with H2O then you missed the ocean. God is the ocean, not H2O.

That's not what I'm pointing to when I say God. Again, of course you can reduce everything down to emptiness, but that's not the same as consciousness of God. A reductionist mistake is being made. If you are equating God with emptiness you're got grasping the significance of God. You're just conscious of emptiness and calling it God. Which is not what I'm talking about.

No, the ground for me is the same as for the Buddhist. Consciousness/Mind is emptiness when reduced down. But realizing God is not about realizing emptiness.

I think that would vary a lot from person to person. You need to find what makes you feel most creative. For me, about 5 days of nonstop meditation makes me very creative. So I'd start with that. Just force yourself to sit and do nothing all day long. Eventually your mind will start to fill the void with creative thoughts.

Just have something more important to worry about. When you're not doing anything important with your life, then your mind will be consumed with petty worries. You just need a big picture that drowns out the noise. Teaching people about psychedelics is just far more important than feeling shame about what trolls think. Of course if your job would fire you for talking about such things then don't talk about it until you get a better job.

Problem is that in the US any legalized drug is marketed with hyper-capitalist zeal. The marketing of drugs should be made illegal. It's crazy to allow marketing of weed.

I get all sorts of powerful new business ideas and art project ideas in the middle of a retreat. It's quite frustrating because you're not supposed to focus on them when you're meditating. But you could really flesh those visions out. It's powerful way to hone your life purpose.

Those tornadoes are freaky.

Killing people in cold blood is so repugnant that if you're actually going to do it, there's a lot more involved to that than deconstructing reality. There's some kind of twisted emotional trauma element which has, ironically, not be deconstructed. You can jailbreak your mind but you'd still need some compelling reason to go out of your way to murder people. It's just a dumb way to live.

Hard to say. Ideally they would be decriminalized but not marketed and commercialized like weed. I don't like the commercial weed industry.

There's not really room during a hardcore retreat to indulge in creativity. However, I notice that I get crazy creativity about 3-4 days into a retreat. You could design a kind of retreat specifically for creativity, but that's different than a meditation retreat. Try both and see which one suits you better.

Although Mark will soon find that his long ass episodes will get very little views and require so much more work than interviewing people that he might not like the drop in success. The reason everyone does interviews is because it's 20x easier and more profitable.

That's why I never interview people. It's lame.

I don't think he's gonna appreciate you regarding him as that. Problem is, if you regard people are beneath you, they will feel it and close down their minds to your ideas. So this Spiral Wizardry stuff is really tricky. It's saint's work.

Of course. There is no authority to tell us what the right development pathway is. We have to figure that out ourselves and we will disagree about it. For example, Don Beck thought that Trump is just what America's development required. Was he right? Who's gets to say? Does America need more Blue? More Orange? More Green? More Yellow? You could answer that 4 different ways depending on your biases and purposes.

@Joel3102 Hardcore MAGA basically requires cult deprogramming techniques. You could try teaching him just about stages of cognitive and ego development. Rather than arguing over content, try to explain structures of the mind. You don't want to get drawn into a debate about trans stuff or guns. You want to keep it about meta mind stuff. But you're never going to change the mind of someone who doesn't want to grow. The reason my work works on you guys is because you want to grow. Which is rare. Most people do not want to grow mentally. They just want to survive as they are.

Spiral Wizardry is basically the answer. You have to empathize with their level on the Spiral and be respectful and lower yourself to their level rather than preaching advanced things down at them. That's not something I'm practiced in because I just assume my audience are epistemic masochists like me. That works online but not in real life.

@abc123 I don't have a good answer. I teach advanced things for advanced people. I don't really know how to drink beer with your local Joe and talk about football. The ideas I teach would offend the hell out of most normal people.

Trump def qualifies because of how much bullshit he spreads. He dumps horseshit into the epistemic pool by the truckload.

Well, but I see no preemptive solution, so there's no way out. That's not just not the case. That's not happening.

There is a factor to intelligence which is general, across-the-board. That determines a baseline. But then there are individual types of intelligence over-top of that. So people can be quite dumb or rusty in some domains. For example, I've always struggled with math intelligence. Math was always an uphill struggle for me because the way my mind works is not wired for it. My verbal intelligence is way higher and comes to me effortlessly. Intelligence determines what comes easily or naturally to you and what doesn't. But also don't forget that you can develop higher intelligence by training, education, cognitive development, consciousness work, emotional work. Rationality, for example, isn't automatic, it must be developed. If you fail to develop rationality you will be pretty dumb even if you have high general intelligence. 1-4% of the population has aphantasia, which means that cannot visualize, they do not see images in their mind. It's not a lack of intelligence, it's a kind of neuro-divergence. Maybe you have that, I don't know.

@Vynce That's why sages and saints have always been rare. Oh well, it's good to be a unicorn among horses.

Yeah, that's the whole game. It's deeply frustrating and sad that people get stuck like that in their own narrowness of mind.

CEO: Chief Epistemic Ontologist!

I like that one