Leo Gura

It's like focusing on the weight of a car. Not a very important factor for car performance.

Philosophy is about depth of questioning. The depth of your questioning directly determines the power of your mind. If you don't question deeply you will never have a buff mind. Memory is the wrong thing to focus on when it comes to mental development. The point is not to build memory, it's to build understanding. What do you understand? That's the pivotal issue. Deep understanding requires decades of mental exercise. You could memorize all the world's books and your mind would still be weak.

The most important thing is to sit down and actual do inquiry into epistemology. You just sit down and reason it out from scratch using first principles, not books or anything you heard or believe. Derive epistemology from scratch. That's the actual work. Just reason through how epistemology works. How is anything known? What is knowing? All the best topics naturally follow from that line of questioning. This will lead you to contemplate self-deception, what is belief?, ideology, openmindedness, what is truth?, bias, relativity, construct-awareness, assumptions, egoic mental attachments, not-knowing, skepticism, what is science?, etc.

@Natasha Tori Maru There's a lot of amazing stuff on that list besides UFO books.

High dose mushrooms are very challenging because they get very chaotic and uncontrollable. It's like entering a twisted dream world. You have know idea where it's going to go. At a high enough dose everything becomes problematic. Moderate doses are key. 700ug of LSD is like 5x the normal dose. 125mg of 5-MeO would be 5x the normal dose. Either of those is likely to end badly. You're petting a wild bear at that point.

And philosophy is the squat of the mental activity. Mind who don't do philosophy are like weightlifters who never squat. This is why scientists are cognitively weak. Scientists don't squat. Science is like the guy who only does bicep curls, thinking it will make him strong. You can't get strong doing bicep curls.

"Knowing" is a very loaded and tricky word. It can be defined in various ways. In my worldview knowing means knowledge. Knowledge is quite a limited and shallow thing in many cases. You want some way to differentiate intellectual knowledge from the more deeper kinds of "knowing" like knowing how to walk. Because those are quite different things. They function differently in the mind/brain. This is why you can't just read a book about surfing and then go out and confidently surf. Confidence in surfing can only come from tons of training/experience. You are free to define terms however you want, but be careful with conflating ideas because it can lead to wrong conclusions and expectations. In my view, knowledge is lesser than understanding and experience.

His teaching are pretty valid though.

I haven't taken it already?

It's a bad take. This is where developmental psychology is so useful. The Blue & Orange stages of development are not the result of stage Green's existence. This is backwards. Stage Green exists as a response to the limitations of Blue & Orange. Reactionaries are too busy reacting to bother to do some deeper research into the developmental causes of all this woke vs anti-woke culture wars nonsense. Green's talk about toxic masculinity because it's a real issue. Andrew Tate is the poster boy of toxic masculinity. It's just that people in stage Blue & Orange are not mature enough to see it. The right-wing wants to portray criticism of itself as being groundless. But it isn't. There is legit grounds to criticize people like Tate, Trump, Musk, etc. Saying that Green demonizes men is, ironically, a demonization of Green. Green doesn't demonize masculinity, it simply criticizes the toxic parts of masculinity, but those who embody toxic masculinity take that as a personal attack. Toxic masculinity should be demonized. Right-wingers deliberately conflate toxic masculinity as all masculinity, which is a flagrant strawman of Green's position. Remember, equality is offensive to those who benefit from inequality. Telling men to treat women better is literally offensive to some immature men. Equality itself is a frontal assault on the likes of a selfish ego-maniac like Cobra Tate.

@Natasha Tori Maru I wouldn't call it knowing. It goes beyond knowing. You don't just know walking or tying shoe laces. It is wired into your brain without massive training and experience. It has become trained to the point of instinct. Knowing is far too theoretical. You can know things intellectually but still be insecure about them. Knowing alone doesn't resolve insecurity. Training does.

@Natasha Tori Maru You should read the new UFO books on my book list. You'll get a kick out of those.

I don't know of any good books on psychedelics other than the one by Chris Bache. And of course the Carlos Castaneda books. But reading about psychedelics is not very useful.

For me LSD is more challenging that 5-MeO. LSD trips tend to get twisted and sour for me. 5-MeO almost never. But this will vary person to person. LSD is such a long trip that a lot can go wrong.

God invented rape, murder, torture, and slavery. So what exactly is God's moral code?

There are 2 kinds of worry: useless and useful worry. Useful worry is when there is actions you can take that will change the outcome of events, like studying for an exam. Useless worry is when there is no reasonable action you can take to change the outcome. For example, worrying about the exam on the day of the exam. This useless worrying needs to be eliminated by just stopping thinking about that topic. Identify whether the topics you're worrying about are under your influence or not. By stopping thinking about that subject. Notice when you are thinking about that subject and just stop yourself. Yes, it is helpful to reflect on your accomplishments. But the very serious kind of confidence comes from way more experience, to the point where you don't even need to think about it any more. For example, notice how confident you are with tying your shoelaces or with walking. You don't even doubt your ability to do these things. Because you are so experienced in them. Your experience with girls is still very low. Which is why you are insecure about it. You have a lot of experience with exams, but a PhD is a pretty unique task so stress and doubt is expected there. Not everyone is suited to earn a PhD.

Even if you go with the perfect player frame, eventually she will want more.

It is the case that women want and need commitment. However, that doesn't mean you can't find women for casual sex. Many women will do casual sex for a while. But not forever.

Retire to a Buddhist monastary.

Suicide it is

Justifying why you will never change is already an epistemic and attitudinal mistake.

This is an obsessive and mentally unstable person who was given many opportunities to correct their forum behavior and arrogantly refused to do so and even asked to be banned. I will engage with this person and topic no further. If you call yourself Jesus, this forum and Actualized.org is not for you, and I will not engage with such people.

I don't imply that. I simply mean it is not a good cost/return ratio for beginners. Perhaps for advanced practioners it is useful. But as a beginner focus must go on pranayama and mahamudra. You can always add stuff later once you are feeling some core effects from your practice.

That's like criticism from below not above. You gotta learn success within capitalism first before you reject it. Just rejecting capitalism will leave you broke and miserable, so be careful about that trap.

Hey, ya'll, I need your help! I want to create a comprehensive list of video examples of prototypical stage Yellow thinking. This is not meant to humiliate or demonize stage Yellow. It's meant to be an educational tool for people learning about Spiral Dynamics. So towards that end, scour Youtube and find all the videos you can which exhibit stage Yellow thinking. Try to find videos which are short and sweet. The more diversity we can display here, the better. Try to find examples from various cultures: Europe, Middle East, Asia, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, Africa, South America, etc. We will create a mega-thread like this for every stage in the Spiral, from Red to Turquoise. But here, let's just focus on Yellow. Each week I will start a new mega-thread topic for the next stage. Do not start a political debate in this thread! It is not our goal here to defend our personal political positions or to judge any stage, but simply to compile examples. Thanks for your help! I'm excited to see what kind of juicy stuff you dig up. Try to be selective with your choices. This can turn into a really cool list. Stage Yellow Values: Nuance & complexity Openmindedness Perspective Novel concepts & POVs Generating fresh insights Understanding Systems thinking Nonlinear dynamics Sustainability, long time frames Going meta Big picture vs technical analysis Holistic analysis Synthesis Connecting the dots Penetrating to the core of an issue Identifying & solving root problems A multi-disciplinary approach Mixing hard & soft sciences Creativity, outside-the-box solutions Ecology Responsible ways of being Studying models Spiral Dynamics Natural hierarchies Education, knowledge, research, reading Reading lots of diverse books Clean content, concentrated information Life-long learning Expertise, competence, experience Context, learning from history Developing skills to become an instrument for the greater whole Independent thinking Neutrality: Being objective/impartial Designing solutions for the entire Spiral Meeting people where they are at Building bridges Social engineering Ecological designs Reducing the suffering of living systems Pulling ideas from many sources Combining different ideas, models, theories Left-brained Vision & purpose, being a visionary Requisite variety, mental flexibility Self-actualization Paradox Uncertainty Responsibility, independence, autonomy Being a lone-wolf Stage Yellow Examples: Abraham Maslow, Eben Pagan, Fritjof Capra, Carl Sagan, quantum mechanics, fathers of quantum mechanics, David Bohm, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Arthur Eddington, Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, John Archibald Wheeler, Joseph Campbell, Erich Fromm, Clare Graves, Don Beck, Spiral Dynamics, Ilya Prigogine, chaos theory, cybernetics, biomimetics, NLP, Alfred Korzybski, the leading edge of academia, futurists, StarTrek humans & Vulcans, Prime Directive, sustainable living, ecology, eco cities, conflict resolution, Wikipedia, Buckminster Fuller