Paulus Amadeus

@Display_Name A couple years ago I had similar fears about AI. I was worried that some super AI would take over and somehow manage to keep me alive forever. It would torture me to death and then revive my body until eternity. Nowadays (even though AI is way more powerful then back then) that fear is completely absent in me. Looking back, I can see that there was a massive amount of unprocessed fear in my system. I believe that at least some of this fear came from my family lineage. In my dads side of the family there have been many generations of people who seriously believed in hell. I was raised as an atheist, but I think this fear of hell somehow got programmed into me. So when I heard Sam Harris talking about AI taking over, my fear of hell buttons got pushed hardcore. At the darkest moments I considered wearing a suicide pill on a necklace, so that if I read somewhere that AI had gotten super powerful I could quickly kill myself before the AI could get its tentacles on me. I think the way out of these nightmarish thoughts is doing serious deep healing work. Feeling your feelings, working through your traumas. I don't think 'not allowing negative thoughts' is going to cut it. I was never able to banish negative thoughts from my head. The only thing that worked was working through my shit. And this was more on the level of the body and emotions, then on the level of mind(although working on beliefs can be powerful as well). The fear of AI/hell can also greatly be reduced by deeply realising that there is nothing wrong with you, and that you are and have always been 100% been worthy of love. The universe will not torture you because you are bad. You are not bad, and the universe loves you unconditionally. On a different note. Everything is happening within consciousness, so it's impossible to upload your consciousness into a simulation. If in your dream you dreamt that there is some super AI, then no matter how smart this AI is, it could never put your dream into itself. It is in the dream, not the other way around Uploading consciousness into the computer is complete nonsense. It's like a if a television screen was worried that the villain in the movie was going to lock it up in a basement and torture it forever. I really hope this helps. Having these fears was the darkest time of my life. You can work through this and then the world will look very different again.

@JuliusCaesar you sound like an ego on steroids. Spirituality is about the exact opposite of what you describe. You'll find that you actually have no control at all. You can't even get yourself to not think for 10 seconds. If you can't control the thoughts in your own head, what can you control? Control is an illusion. Likely you are just afraid to be out of control. I get it, it is scary. But ultimately that fear is an illusion too. You don't need to control reality in order to get what you want. Because ultimately what you really want is love and oneness, and reality is already love and one. But, trying to control everything makes that hard to see. But yeah, you are never going to get this kind of power. Forget about it. But maybe it's your path to chase power for a while. Could be. But you will fail for sure.

If you really want to save money for society, you want to invest in reducing the amount of trauma people receive during their childhood. This way many murderers won't become murderers in the first place. Some ideas to do that are: - increasing the minimum wage -> low-income parents will be less stressed, making it less likely that they heavily mess up their kids. - teach yoga and meditation in school -> will allow kids to feel more calm and centered, and start dealing with trauma from an early age. - make therapy widely available -> will allow parents, also low-income ones, to deal with issues before they transfer them to their children. - make online high quality free courses available for how to raise kids the right way -> would obviously cause a lot of backlash from right-wingers, but could make a massive difference if people actually were open to the teachings in such courses. - pay teachers a higher wage, and hire more of them -> this way you'd have less kids per classroom, and teachers would be less stressed, so they would have more time and energy to help the kids out. I could think of a couple more ideas, and I'm probably missing some very effective ones here. I think that every dollar you'd spend on policies like this, you'd save a 10-fold later. Plus you save millions of people of incredible amounts of suffering.

That is pretty profound and makes a lot of sense to me.

This seems pretty absurd to me. Are you as compassionate towards video game characters as to actual humans? Goodness can have no reason. But what we direct our goodness towards depends on our worldview. If I don't believe that other people are conscious, I would only be good to myself. If I believe that other beings on this planet are conscious, then maybe I will try very hard to become a benevolent force in the world. A solipsist's idea of goodness might as well be raping everyone and doing heroin. Only himself to be good to!

@Leo Gura Thanks for your replies Leo. I was talking about your level of consciousness at one of the peaks of your psychedelic trips. You have said that In these peaks you have been in full god consciousness. For me that would imply that you, in full-blown god consciousness, chose to fall back asleep and become Leo again. And if that wasn't the case, that would imply to me that you were not in full god consciousness, and that the 'higher god' was still determining whether you would go back to being Leo or not. Anyway, I'm probably just splitting hairs here. Thanks again for your replies!

@Leo Gura That makes sense. But you realise that you are god in your psychedelic trips no? So wouldn't that imply that you could now consciously chose to go back asleep or not? Or is your god realisation incomplete, and is there some kind of higher god that still determines whether you go back asleep or not?

@Leo Gura You just made the same argument against solipsism that we already made. You didn't clarify anything with that. If nothing is objective, then it's also not objectively true that other people don't exist? On some level they do have a separate perspective and a separate bubble of experience? If you think this, then I think you should do a better job at communicating this. I think you are leading quite some people to believe in actual solipsism, and I think it will lead to suicides and mental health problems.

Serious question here, not a gotcha question. When Leo takes a psychedelic, he reports that he becomes conscious that he is god, and that god has just been imagining everything. Time is not real, Leo is not real, biology is not real, other people are not real... etc. Everything has just been imagination! But, at some point the psychedelic wears off, and Leo comes back down into his normal state of consciousness. Wouldn't you think that, after becoming conscious that time, biology, humans, history, psychedelics etc are imaginations... you wouldn't get sucked back into your normal state of consciousness after the psychedelic wears off? Didn't Leo just become conscious that this stuff is all an illusion? That he is making up psychedelics, brain chemistry, time... He hasn't even really taken a psychedelic! The past never existed, god was just imagining it. So my question is: How come Leo gets sucked back into his normal state of consciousness? Does he imagine himself back into the illusion out of free will? Or is there some exterior mechanism that kicks in that reassembles Leo's ego and Leo's normal state of consciousness?

@Tim R I know we share one consciousness underneath. I know we are ultimately the same. But then it's interesting to talk about how these seemingly separate perspectives came into being no? And it's interesting to discuss whether or not other people on the planet have a separate perspective, or whether they are just a cardboard figures without a perspective. I don't think we disagree on what is going on. I'm just saying that its interesting to talk about how these different perspectives came to be. What is the purpose of them? where are they located? How is it possible that they seemingly walk around in the same world? These are questions that I personally find very interesting.

Yeah it is completely ridiculous. Trying to convince someone of solipsism is about the most absurd thing you could ever do. What's also completely absurd, is believing a teacher who says solipsism is true. If the teacher is right, he is not conscious, so he is basically just a cardboard figure. In which case you have absolutely no reason to believe him! It reminds me of the logical paradox "this sentence is a lie". If you believe Leo when he is talking about solipsism, you can then immediately no longer believe him.

@Tim R if it is so ridiculous to think about bubbles of consciousness, then why are you not conscious of my experience right now? Seems like at our level of consciousness, it's very reasonable to speak about different bubbles of experience. In fact, I think that any model of reality that doesn't talk about how different bubbles of experience came to be is a very incomplete model. I know that there is no center to consciousness. I know I'm not my ego. In fact, I know ego actually doesn't exist. Ego is a happening of thoughts that creates an illusion of a separate entity, where there actually is none. But even a completely enlightened master will still have a separate conscious experience of a seemingly separate human life. Maybe god experiences all the consciousness bubbles all at once, and in that state there is no such thing as separate bubbles anymore. Something like that would make sense to me. But right now you don't have access to my inner states. It is a completely valid to talk about this being the case, and to talk about how this seeming split has come into existence. To pretend like our separate inner lives are just flimsy illusions created by the ego I think is just simply not true. You can transcend the ego and still not be conscious of other people's experience.

Why would you want to convince other people of solipsism, if they are just figments of your imagination? Makes no sense. The idea that other people don't have a personal consciousness, and that I'm imagining everybody, is completely ridiculous to me. Sure, I can buy that everything is god's imagination. But then why wouldn't god dream up a world and put multiple versions of herself in that world? Even people with multiple personality disorders apparently have dreams where their different alters occupy the same dream, and can interact with each other. But somehow I'm the only thing in existence? And that other people have a conscious experience is just something that I'm imagining? If solipsism was true, then I don't need to listen to Leo. Leo doesn't have a subjective experience, so he is has never become conscious of anything, let alone god. I really can't understand how Leo could ever say that other people's consciousness is something my mind is inventing. If god is infinite, wouldn't one of the infinities be a shared dreamworld with loads of imagined god incarnations in it? Otherwise god has just created this random little 3D movie with just me in it. That seems awfully limited and uncreative for an all-powerful all-loving creator god. I get that ultimately the shared dreamworld has come about by the imagination by god. But that does not mean that currently my girlfriend does not have a conscious experience. She could be god imagining to be my girlfriend, as I am god imagining to be me. Ultimately that is not real. We are both the same god. But there is conscious experience happening in her, as there is in me. I know I'm not conscious of my girlfriends inner experience. But I don't buy that the only thing that exists is what I'm conscious of. I'm not conscious of the damn feeling in my foot most of the time. So it doesn't exist when I'm not paying attention to it? But then the feeling in my foot pops into existence as soon as I start doing a body-scan? That would be about the least elegant model of reality imaginable.

Hi All, I check this forum pretty much every day, but I haven't posted anything on here in a long time. Since Leo's last 3 video's I have gotten really excited about Cook Greuters EDT model (Ego Development Theory). I think it's a really beautiful and helpful model and I think the model can be super powerful for self-actualizing. So after reading the original article twice, I've come up with a list for myself. In the list I list: 1. the attributes of each stage that are currently active in me 2. what my 'percentage' in the stage is 3. what I can do to integrate and transcend the stage in question. Here is the list I came up with: It's a pretty long document. But it might be interesting for some of you to see the workings of the psyche of a fellow Actualizer on the path. Achiever: 25% I can be a harsh critic of myself when things are not working out Seeing results and getting rewarded is an important way to get affirmed for me The drive to achieve and succeed can lead to overexhaustion I have an urgent sense that time is fleeting I can suffer depression from not having fulfilled goals and ideals I can put a lot of importance in the completion of small short term goals, instead of looking at the long trajectory. How to embody and transcend I shall get even more clear on what I really want instead of looking at short term goals like getting laid or making some money. These goals are ideally stepping stones that are to be enjoyed, not important goals in their own right. create safety in terms of money, sex, friends etc so worrying about ‘normal’ succes is diminished Observe carefully when criticizing myself See how there are certain aspects of my life that I can’t control Pluralist: 25% I Can be triggered by hyper rationalism I can increasingly see how the values of my upbringing and culture have programmed me and others I know how to consciously scrutinize my beliefs I can sometimes not appreciate the gift of the lower levels I feel a split between old levels of being and new levels of being I can feel that I have many contradicting voices in me How to embody and transcend Think deeply about why all the lower stages are necessary Scrutinize my own beliefs more! Think about belief and facts more. Heal the split between the old levels and the new levels by journaling and doing shadow work etc Let the different voices in me speak and communicate with eachother Strategist: 45% I can be able to integrate many different aspects of myself I make meaning independent of conventional ideas I worry about not treating people with dignity and respect, and the right for self-determination I have a systems view of the world and self I have high ideals but I am also realistic about what it takes I realise the need to the most I can be in order to be of service to others Wanting to help others evolve is one of my strongest motivations I recognise natural hierarchies in life I think higher development is always better I want to “become the most one can become”. I think good company, intimate relationships, good occupation and chances for self-actualization are essential for a meaningful existence I accept self and other as complex human beings with both positive and negative traits I am occasionally blind to the transformer’s own identification with and self-importance in being a “transformer.” I become dissatisfied with their lives when they feel they have not fulfilled their unique human promise or when they have not lived up to the greatness they expect of themselves. How to embody and transcend Dive deeply into loving and open relationship Create a career that helps people evolve Do industrial grade self-actualization Let go of identification with being a transformer have mystical experiences become more aware with paradox and ambiguity in life construct aware and ego aware 5% I feel that having an ego which craves clear boundaries and significance and unceasingly tries to create them is a constraint to further growth and understanding. I am sometimes aware of how the constant and automatic judging habit of what is good and what is not creates much of the unhappiness and striving for betterment so prevalent in ordinary waking consciousness “Here my ego goes again despite knowing better” is a sentiment I experience daily How to embody and transcend observe how projection and language creates my reality Start to see more and more deeply how limited the endavour of map-making is See deeply how the ego is constantly creating itself through language and thoughts Become more aware of how constantly labeling and judging is creating a lot of suffering and unhappiness. Start to think more about concepts as ‘knowing’ ‘language’ ‘proof’ etc. Have mystical experiences. I got my work cut out for me

@Serotoninluv that is an interesting point. So you are saying that although there is no stuff behind the scenes, there also is? But I don’t really think that’s how it works. If Leo says ‘’there is no material world’’, then it is not implied that there also is one at the same time. Reality just happens to be mind stuff! On the dream point: I agree! But why is the dream so consistent? What makes it consistent?