Leo Gura

No No

Sounds very mild. If you aren't even sure what it was, then by definition it was very mild. Your mind will play tricks on you since you are eager for a mystical experience. Just keep doing the practices and be patient. You are not supposed to be seeing things a few weeks in. You are doing good work though, keep up the effort. Being too eager to have an experience tends to interrupt it from happening. If you try to grab the butterfly it will fly away from you. It's like with sex. If you are too eager for it she won't give it to you. You gotta play it cool.

I don't think in those terms. Reality does not bend to beliefs, you'd need to turn those beliefs into actions and those actions can bend reality. How far it will bend is never known ahead of time because it all depends on the actions you take and how much and in which ways you want to bend it. But you are always limited by others who can bend reality in opposite directions. You can try to start WW3 but others will stop you.

You can pause a video as much as you pause a book.

That's why I need to write the book. It is overdue.

It is not close to done. It will require at least a year of consistent work. But my time is split between that and videos and blog and appearing new podcasts and chronic health problems. A lot. If I wrote everything I plan to write, it would easily be over 1000 pages. 300,000 words+ But I may need to split that into 2 books to make it more marketable. Not sure yet. I'm not sure it warrants a whole new video. I have two videos already covering that topic. But that is a topic I plan to address in my book. I also have some old blog posts about it. And maybe some more blog posts in the future. Cheers!

Yes, Michael Pollan is shallow.

Early bird gets the worm. Haha! But it is proper that Feynman's estate had that video taken down. It is an abuse of his voice. But the content was gold. Oddly conflicting. To explain how your mind constructed all of Reality.

Please find examples of fake spirituality. I am especially interested in New Age examples. But cult examples are also acceptable. This is spirituality that is very conformist, performative, fantastical, conceptual, ungrounded, word salad, grifty, magical, corrupt, occult. Cringe spiritual BS, basically. I want to see how bad it gets. How deep does self-deception and fantasy go? How deep does the New Age go?

You are comparing incomparable things. Painting paintings is so easy compared to making a game or a film. These things are not even in the same universe of difficulty. You are a genius if you can even ship a game.

If we could we would. It looks easy in your head.

None for me.

I will be appearing on a technical science podcast soon. It is run by academics. Probably within a month. We are still scheduling. Should be interesting. I already had a friendly chat with them and it went well. They ask good skeptical questions. They are materialists but openminded. I plan to be doing more interview appearances this year across various channels and platforms.

AI is not a scam, but it is overhyped. Using AI to make music is not a scam, but it is problematic and limited in many ways. A CEO's job is to run a profitable company. So he is doing his job. His job is not to make good music or good musicians.

To some degree. But its more about the density and depth of the insights. My writing style is pretty causal and simple. Some verbal wit, but I'm not trying to impress people with fancy language.

The ego might tell itself that, but when the rubber meets the road the ego will not be able to stomach that much self-sacrfice. Socialism would work is we were all Awakened, egoless saints.

Some people have permanent state changes. Martin Ball claims to be one. The baseline state returns to normal, however your mind is permanently changed, so you don't see reality the same way even when you aren't high. There are permanent changes, but they are not to state per se. State is important but it's not the only important factor in this work. I am not high right now, but I relate to my present experience as God. I don't need to be high to recognize God all around me.

Because the book needs to be much more potent and cohesive. It is not a random asortment of things I say.

Even their skill is overrated. Of course they have skill, but there are so many skilled artists whose names you'll never hear. It is not skill that made Picasso a household name. Was he skilled? Of course.

You can be highly social without caring about stutus or money. This is like what hippies are. However, you are right that people who chase money also tend to chase status and they tend to socialize a lot.

The YouTube recommendations algorithm keeps getting worse and worse, suggesting shallow crap. We need to crowd-source this problem. Let's begin keeping a list of the best, unknown YouTube channels. I'm always looking for high-quality channels related to philosophy, psychology, political science, sociology, history, documentaries, geography, travel, etc. I'm looking for serious channels with mature people who talk about mature subjects. Not drama, not culture wars, not clickbait, not entertainment. Channels with interesting, high-quality content. Channels that are educational and add to our understanding of the world. These channels usually have fewer subscribers, less popular. If you know of such channels, if you find new channels of this kind, please share them here. When you share the link, please write a few words about what the channel is about and why it's worth watching. I will share the best of these suggestions on my blog as well. Thank you. Examples of the kind of channels I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDissenterRL/videos https://www.youtube.com/@WHATISPOLITICS69/videos https://www.youtube.com/@SoftWhiteUnderbelly/videos https://www.youtube.com/@thestoa/videos https://www.youtube.com/@IntegralNaked/videos https://www.youtube.com/@LetsTalkReligion/videos

Whoooosh! Over your head.

Marxism fails because it fundamentally misunderstands human nature. It fails to take survival seriously. The ego will not surrender its survival for the benefit of a collective good. The Marxist's own ego will not do it.

Yes, this requires lots of intuition and skill, which is developed through trial and error. After a decade+ of doing this work and pushing truth on people, I have developed a very good intuition for when to back off and not push. But I'm still sometimes wrong because I don't know how much truth any particular person can stomach. I tend to overestimate it because I am a glutton for truth. But most people aren't like me.

Psychedelics do not raise baseline, with rare exceptions.