Leo Gura

Firstly, that is NOT open borders. Our borders are enforced and always have been enforced, even under liberal presidents. The threat of deportation and other problems are always there for illegals. Amnesty + citizenship is the same issue. Amnesty was done under Regan and even many conservatives are okay with amnesty as long as the border is enforced. The problem of amnesty isn't really a liberal one, it's a practical one. What do you do with 10 million+ illegals who've been here for years? Deporting them all would be unworkable, expensive, damaging to the economy, and cruel. So that leaves us with 2 options: 1) do nothing, 2) amnesty. Amnesty usually involves paying fines and making other contributions to society. Illegals pay sales tax, local tax, and payroll taxes while not receiving social security, Medicare, or other benefits. So to say that they will get free medical benefits is not quite right. And if illegals are given amnesty, they then pay into the system just like everyone else, so their medical benefits are not free. And finally, it's not like you have a solution to illegals coming to the USA. They will come anyway. Most illegals are visa overstays from airports, not border crossings. No wall is going to stop it. Walls will just be climbed over or under, or flown around. So the problem of illegals will remain. If you really want to stop illegals then the only workable solution is to provide massive help to their home countries to boost their governments and economies. That would be a great long-term strategy. The US could loan those countries money similar to the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe. The only other option is a heavily militarized border like North/South Korea. But that's quite barbaric. Policing that entire border rigorously would waste more money than it's worth.

That's a serious misunderstanding of Spiral Dynamics. SD stages are not good or evil. It's just relative degrees of awareness and development. The reason some people don't like SD is if they find themselves low on the scale and then judge themselves that that is bad and unacceptable. But SD never said you are bad for being at a lower level. There's nothing evil about saying that person X is in 3rd grade while person Y is in 12th grade. Development Psychology and Spiral Dynamics help us understand one another better. It's the exactly opposite of calling people evil.

No major left-wing political candidate is advocating open borders. This is some bogeyman the right wing created. Also, applying for asylum is LEGAL. I have no problem with border enforcement as long as it's humane.

@Bryanbrax Too many wacky visuals in that video -- gives the wrong impression. Think of it as nothing changes visually. Just awareness increases and sense of self collapses or expands. It feels like being hyper-present. You become so present & aware that you literally see through the substance of physical reality. What once looked physical now seems like a hologram. Physical objects appear empty, like a hallucination or a mirage. You can see them still, but they lack reality. It can also feel like the air got sucked out of the room. Everything becomes crystal clear and luminous. It also feels like divinity and pure magic.

@Angelite What does that have to do with retreats? When doing a retreat, be crystal clear about what you're doing and what the parameters are. Don't be jerking off in your Mom's basement and calling that a retreat. A retreat is when you're meditating/inquiring 24/7. Or in the case of psychedelic retreats it's back to back days of deep tripping.

@cetus56

@Zizzero Discussions about the fundamental structures of government and society is not a culture war. This is very substantive and important stuff. Be careful with such sloppy false equivalencies. If you think that what I'm doing here is just the ideological opposite of what Fox News is doing, you've got much to learn and you are contributing to the problem. Just because a topic is polarizing and emotional does not make it any less important. In fact it's all the more important because people do not know how to think properly about polarizing issues. They tend to either take one side or do a sloppy false equivalency, both of which are dangerous. Ignoring poltical questions is not an option if we care about consciousness. Actualized.org could not exist under a regressive government. When monsters come to power they tend to silence and repress the intellectuals and wisest people.

Your position is not quite racist but it is enthocentric. Small minds think ethnocentricly. What you're doing is defending an identity you constructed. But you want to deny it. But I am pointing it out to you that you are in denial about it. But the nature of denial is that you will deny that you are in denial. So here we are. You are stuck in Tier 1. I am trying to communicate to you from Tier 2. But you do not understand Tier 2 because you have an enormous amount of consciousness work to do. And of course you do not want to do it, so you make this about me. If your mind succeeds in making this about me, then you won't have to grow. Which is just perfect for your ego's survival. Do not underestimate the sophistication with which your own mind is tricking you. Nothing your mind says can be trusted. Your mind is a blind survival machine and it spins your ideology.

In Vegas, during the summer months, the Luxor hotel's giant beam of light at night attracts the fattest moths ever. They circle around the beam like eagles.

@cetus56 Haha Wherever you go, there you are

When a racist demagogue hijacks government, to point it out is not an obsession nor a culture war. As a conscious citizen I have a responsibility to speak up when unconsciousness runs rampant. That was the key lesson of Nazism. You keep projecting projection onto me. LOL. Funny how that works, isn't it? You do it without knowing you're doing it. That's how projection works. When you do it, you tell yourself the other is doing it to you. The perfect self-deception.

I love road trips. They just aren't retreats.

I address libertarianism a lot because no mater how extreme or moderate it is, the people who hold such an ideology are very common today. Especially stage Orange young males. They get trapped by this ideology because they have a deep lack of experience and understanding of political history and they want to assert their individualism come what may. I have yet to find one libertarian who has a keen sense of history or how government works. It's an ideology based on ignorance. It is thoroughly ahistorical. There certainly are some excesses to stage Green. But to use those excesses to demonize Green and stay stuck in Blue/Orange is even more pathological. I am not arguing for extreme Green. You are projecting that onto what I'm saying. We need healthy Green & Tier 2. We can't get people to Tier 2 without passing through Green. You're getting distracted by all the culture wars. What I am talking about has nothing to do with culture wars. That is a media-created distraction. What I'm talking about is educating people about how government really works. There are many degrees of being full of shit. And Trump & Fox News are the masters of it.

Mindlessness is relative thing. People here are way more mindful, on average, than the general population or Trump voters. The important difference is that people here are interested in being more mindful. Trump supports are generally not. Being ignorant or mindless is not so bad. What's really bad is being aggressive and stubborn in one's ignorance and mindlessness. And Trump is promoting a culture of aggressive mindlessness & selfishness. People actually feel righteous about being so ignorant. This is a dangerous and pathological development which must be challenged. What you're overlooking is that without a bureaucracy there cannot be a highway at all. A highway is a very complex thing. It requires complex social structures to exist. You cannot just build a highway in the middle of the jungle and have it work. Highways only exist in advanced, complex, modern societies. That's your projection. The things I'm saying you are not capable of comprehending or appreciating yet. Of course! That's the whole point! Not privileged but you must develop through the lower stages by meeting and integrating various low level needs. The fruits of Blue & Orange are definitely necessary. The problem is that Blue & Orange are becoming pathological to the point where the whole planet is in danger. The problem with a desperate homeless person is precisely that he cannot take any higher level concerns seriously because he's so needy he can only care about himself. So the solution is help elevate as many such people as possible by helping them to meet their basic needs, so they stop being desperate. That desperation is making them unconscious and unable to consider larger ecological issues. Ecological concerns are not a privilege. If the planet's ecology crashes, millions of the poorest and more desperate people will die. It's already happening, you're just not aware of it because you haven't studied these issues seriously enough. Drop your ideological opposition and maybe you can learn something here and advance to a whole new level of understanding.

I didn't say he was enlightened. I said God-like. God-like comes in many degrees and is relative to one's era and culture. Also don't conflate Spiral stages with enlightenment. Many Zen masters in Japan or yogis in India are enlightened but only at stage Blue of the Spiral. You don't have to be enlightened to be a good #2 leader. Bernie Sanders is a good example. He's far from enlightened but he is more God-like (i.e., selfless & compassionate) than most politicians of his time. Nuance, nuance, nuance.

But that's the sick twisted irony of this whole situation. Trump is financially irresponsible so electing him reduces economic stability in the same way Bush crashed the economy with deregulation & tax cuts. Trump's tariffs, tax cuts, and deregulation hurt many of the poorest people. The people who vote for Trump are mindless precisely in the sense that they have an economic ideology which ends up shooting itself in the foot. They assume that unfettered capitalism will solve all problems (as their ideology promises them), but this just isn't the case because society and the economy are complex systems which work in counter-intuitive ways. People do not vote for Trump due to economics. They vote for him based on their gut feeling, because they resonate with his values and level of consciousness. Economics is a retroactive rationalization. The economy was improving and doing well under Obama. This is irrelevant to the Trump voter because economics is just an excuse. What drives them is their stage of cognitive and moral development. Don't let their retroactive rationalizations fool you. They themselves do not actually understand why they voted for Trump or are attracted to him. What they tell themselves are pleasant stories. It is very important to see through these stories and excuses. The poorest people actually voted more for Hilary than Trump. Trump's voters are in it for the culture war. Which is why Trump and Fox News are always playing up the culture war. Trump voters do not have a keen sense of policy. A vote for Trump is really a way for people who detest liberalism to spit in the eye of liberals. That's the whole emotional appeal of Trump. Trump is a "fuck you" to the "global elites". But of course the sick irony is that Trump is the fattest, greediest global elite there is because he loves money, sex, fame, power, and success no matter the cost. Poor people voting for a man who has a golden toilet in his house and lost $400 million dollars of daddy's money is the devil's sickest joke.

To help you deepen that insight, there are basically two kinds of leadership: Rally people towards selfishness using fear Rally people towards selflessness using love It really is that simple. Of course there are many degrees of both. Most leadership is somewhere in the middle. Exceptional leadership is #2. And #2 is so rare precisely because is cannot be faked. The leader must lead by example by himself being selfless and loving, which is impossible for a big ego to do. Which is why human history is filled with examples of such terrible leaders. But also a few exceptional ones. Exceptional #2 leaders become deified as gods. Because they literally must be God-like to lead that way. Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Muhammad, Gandhi, MLK, etc. Unconscious people are incapable of such leadership nor are they capable of electing such people into positions of power. Those who get elected tend to be the most ambitious, ruthless, and manipulative ones. Rarely a selfless person will get elected, but he will quickly be demonized and kicked out of power by the selfish people who feel threatened by his selflessness. The thing that selfish people hate the most is displays of selflessness. Because it makes them look bad.

Hunting homeless people. Please don't judge me

Listening to podcasts is not a retreat. A retreat is a serious undertaking. Don't turn it into a mockery. Otherwise you're fooling yourself by telling yourself you did a retreat when you were really just driving in your car and listening to podcasts. Nothing wrong with driving or podcasts, but a solo retreat it is not.

Not micrograms, milligrams. The trips will get much more serious at higher doses. So be careful.

@nowimhere Here's how I conquered my fear of 5-MeO: I did 13 trips over 13 consecutive days. By the end of it I was so deep mindfucked that fear of doing it became irrelevant. It's normal to get a bit of anxiety prior to taking the substance. But once it's took, then just enjoy the ride. At certain levels of consciousness fear becomes untenable.

Trump is rallying mindless people to gain power. That's all this is. "What good fortune, for those in power, that people do not think." -- Hitler

Beyond jaw-dropping. Awakening is not a belief and cannot be embodied through any kind of actions or mental manipulations. The only way to understand awakening is to awaken. This requires a radical shift in consciousness. Psychedelics can help you quickly see how much you're missing.

It takes much longer than that.