Oeaohoo

One of the basic problems of political analysis today is a failure to distinguish between polity (rule of the virtuous many) and democracy (rule of the corrupt many), as Aristotle defined them in the Politics. In common parlance today both of these concepts are included under the name of “democracy” - such that any claim that not every vote is equal within the democratic process is conceived of as “a threat to democracy” - whilst for some others democracy refers only to polity (rule of the virtuous many); for these latter people, democracy itself (as rule of the corrupt many) is a “threat to our democracy”! The real question in politics today is: who are the virtuous many? Who’s vote should be taken seriously? The same distinction between two groups - one who define democracy as “vote of all citizens regardless” and the other who define it as “vote of the virtuous many” - is useful here. For the latter group, democracy has become synonymous with the maintenance of the decadent global American empire, so the values of this empire are what defines virtue: a bizarre mixture of bread crumbs of tradition, corrupt corporate capitalism and woke neoliberal ideology. Anybody who diverges from this value system is not included within the “virtuous many” and so is regarded as a “threat to democracy”. It is only natural then that those members of the first group who do not share these values would turn against democracy as defined by the latter group. They are the enemies - “the corrupt many” whose vote should not be taken into consideration - of this democratic system and so it would be absurd for them to support it. Many believers in this latter form of democracy (rule of the virtuous many as defined by the decadent global American Empire), however, seem to be surprised when the people their democracy has defined as enemies… define democracy as its enemy in return! After all, this is the basic delusion of liberal democracy: the attempt to transcend without including the distinction between in-group and out-group, friend and foe, us and them. As a metaphysical aside, in one of Leo’s videos (probably the one on Gödel or paradoxes) he showed how self-referential systems breed paradoxes. Democracy is a self-referential system (people can vote on how they feel about democracy itself; by voting for an anti-democratic leader, for example) so the paradoxical situation can emerge where the citizens of the democracy democratically elect somebody to overthrow the democracy! Is that democracy or isn’t it?

@Matt23 Just skimmed through it, way too many hyphenated words and vain pontificating. Truth should be simple! So much of Stage Yellow just seems like nerds mentally masturbating and sharing their ejaculate with an internet community. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day!

@Carl-Richard Interesting song, hadn’t heard it before. It reminds me of this (beautiful intro and outro!): Listening to Holdsworth, I always feel it’s a shame he didn’t branch out a bit more into other genres. His stuff all seems to be very locked within the heavy jazz fusion sound world.

Exactly. One side says that anybody who isn’t on their side wants to overthrow democracy, the other side… wants to overthrow democracy! A match made in Heaven. Being a minority doesn’t necessarily translate to being oppressed. There are many cases, most in fact, in which a minority rules over a majority. This can be true even when the minority is alien from the majority beneath it. For example, after the Normans had overthrown the existing elite in England, everything was reoriented towards their styles and values. It was forbidden to even speak English in the courts! Yes. What we live under today in the West is really the tyranny of Chaos ruled by an oligarchy of corporate executives and pretending to be a democracy.

@Philipp Yes I relate to what you say. I am 24 now, I was definitely not solid Yellow (I don’t believe in Spiral Progress but it is fine for this sort of communication) at 20 as I had and still have certain unresolved tendencies in most of the earlier stages but I have always tended towards holism and systems thinking. Incidentally, I was drawn to Nietzsche during these years and in this regard because, though he was not a solidly Stage Yellow thinker, he has an intense disdain for all forms of duality in the practical domain: between work and play, thought and act, cause and effect, and so on. As far as Stage Yellow university programs are concerned, I’m afraid I cannot be too specific as I feel a deep disdain for modern academia. I have just noticed through mostly reading and occasionally listening to podcasts (for example, the podcast Hermitix often has Yellow-level thinkers on it) that a few of the most discerning and insightful people within the academic realm are increasingly seeing the shortcomings of even Stage Green thinking. For example, I recently read about an academic publication called Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age which sounds like a very Stage Yellow approach to the history of religion. I have also noticed that rejected elements of Stage Blue are being reevaluated within academia from a higher context: certain universities now seem to be somewhat open to the study of esoteric religious doctrines such as Western Esotericism which was introduced by Dame Francis Yates; early prototypes of systems thinking like Oswald Spengler (author of The Decline of the West, an attempt at a metaphysics of history which tries to formulate a model of human civilisation) and Mircea Eliade (author of A History of Religious Ideas) who have been rejected from the history of ideas because of their very vague and in fact mostly negative relation to right-wing movements are getting renewed attention; there is a stronger emphasis in modern academia on an interdisciplinary approach and many academics seem to be realising that deconstruction can only take you so far. Other people on here can probably tell you more about Stage Yellow thinkers within academic science, neurology and the study of consciousness, artificial intelligence and things like that. However, these are all still very much fringe phenomena and most universities today are deeply embedded in Orange, Green and to a lesser extent Blue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_study_of_Western_esotericism

@Razard86 It is not that monogamy is better than polygamy. They simply serve a different function and reflect a different orientation towards life and transcendence. Monogamy is fit for sattvic cultures whose orientation is towards transcendence of the earthly and animal condition. It is the least natural and so like you say it often goes along with increased violence and material instability; it’s real purpose, however, is not material but spiritual so all of this is a false refutation of the value of monogamy. Polygamy in the form of polygyny is fit for rajassic cultures and civilisations whose orientation is primarily towards the active application of spiritual principles in the world. After all, God is Unity and the Goddess is Infinity; God is the One and the Goddess is the All; God is Truth and the Goddess is Love. It makes sense, then, that a society whose main intention is the active application of spiritual principles would allow men (as incarnations of the One and Unity) to take multiple wives (as incarnations of the All and Infinity), but not vice versa. Polygamy in the form of polyandry (women taking multiple husbands) is fit for tamassic cultures whose orientation is towards the body, the Earth (as “Mother Nature”) and the tribal totem. It is the most natural but it lacks a transcendent dimension, except in dark expressions such as necromancy (black magic) and ritualistic forms of dark and chthonic ecstasy. Each of these have their own place in the hierarchy of existence and can be beautiful or terrible in their own way.

@Razard86 I am not against primitivism or “demonising polyamory” as everything has its proper place. It’s just that Stage Green likes to exalt it and even fetishise it as some ultimate ideal, like the “Noble Savage” of that precociously Green Frenchman Rousseau. For example, “What really makes something primitive?” is a classic Stage Green response, and so is your romanticisation of the idyllic peaceful lifestyle of those peoples who were “conquered and killed off to small numbers by those oh so advanced selfish, killing, monogamists you refer to. Those same monogamists who lie, cheat, still, kill, suffer from mental illness, and then kill themselves. Issues that those primitive societies you refer to, barely had.“ I don’t agree with Spiral Dynamics but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. It is so basic anyway! A model fit for children… The common definition of primitivism is misguided: the (mostly) Western historians and anthropologists who formulated the modern conception of history mistakenly assumed that everybody in the distant past was living how Australian aborigines and African tribes lived at the time of their theorising and writing, just because it was a superficially more rudimentary form of life which they had immediate access to. This is an arbitrary assumption, however: those African and Australian tribes could just as well be degenerated residues of ancient civilisations as so-called “primitives”, and why assume that pre-historic peoples lived in the same way as “primitive” people today? I have already defined primitivism above. The examples you gave of polygamy fit exactly the description of primitivism that I described! You suggested that an African Matriarchy practise polyandry and I specified that the primitive societies which practise polygamy are characterised by “cults of the Earth and of the Mother”! African ritual is very much based on frenetic dance whose aim is ecstatic possession (the Yoruba gods who “ride” the intoxicated subject, for example) which is exactly what I when I mentioned “frantic and Dionysian rights involving dance, sex and a ritualistic use of drugs”! I even said that you would find it offensive! You make so many assumptions. I understand that sex is not a merely bodily phenomenon (though it can be and today generally is). After all, sex is a reflection of the fundamental polarity of manifest existence and sexual union is a reflection of the underlying Unity of these twin principles. Even Stage Blue tradition tells us this: Plato’s Myth of Er in which before a metaphysical Fall all humans were hermaphrodites; Genesis, in which it is written ‘In God’s image he made them, Man and Woman he made them’; Purusha/Prakriti in Hinduism, Binah/Chokmah unified as Kether in Kabbalah, the alchemical hieros gamos and so on indefinitely.

This is probably where is important to distinguish between Eastern and Western Europe. I am from the UK and can very much confirm what Bobby_2021 says. Most universities in the UK were created during the industrial period: they have gone from being a factory of workers to a factory for the broke and woke army! I can’t tell you what a disaster UK universities have become: it is a sick joke, a total parody and perversion of education. Of course, France - the home of le nonséns de la postmodérnisme - is even worse and other Western European countries are following the same track. I understand that parts of Eastern Europe are somewhat “lagging behind” but I’m sure they will “catch up” sooner or later! I have noticed though that early Stage Yellow seems to be emergent particularly in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands and many of the most advanced thinkers in Europe over the last few centuries originated from Basel in Switzerland. Yes academics can be quite grounded because the university provides with a safe context in which to apply themselves creatively. Society at large has stopped providing this so many people outside of university today lack this basic sense of containment. The only real option today open to those for whom such institutions could only be a stifling limitation is to create such a context for oneself. The Boomers are the ultimate degenerescence of Stage Blue and there is a lot of Orange in them too. Real Stage Blue doesn’t make silly jokes about women in the kitchen and so on, it appreciates and respects women in their proper place in the hierarchy of human existence. There were many highly respected women in the Catholic hierarchy, for example. They are certainly one of the real issues but my guess is that they will be dead soon; then you might have some new real issues to deal with!

Exactly. In my experience modern universities are nowhere near Yellow. Some of the sciences are till stuck in Orange (they have even fallen back into an even more intense version of objectivism and positivism to defend themselves from Green deconstruction) and the humanities are just an indoctrination into postmodern nihilism and Frankfurt School anything-but-Hitlerism. Not to mention that the life people lead at university is barely even Blue. Naturally, people like to pretend that partying every night, having promiscuous sex and taking dangerous drugs is Green love and openness to experience but I don’t think so. I was at university for 3 years and I didn’t meet a single systems thinker, mostly just Orange nerds and Green hippoids. Also, the university structure itself is a sort of Blue-Orange hybrid (traditional hierarchies integrated with capitalist superstructure). All of that being said, I have come across some academic writers and thinkers around today who are at least intimating Stage Yellow. Even someone like Mircea Eliade in the last century was moving in that direction from within the academy. It’s just very rare and personally I don’t believe that most people are up to the task of rising to that level; maybe they can prove me wrong! I would even say Purple! People generally have a very disenchanted worldview today. Yes, this world needs a good ol’ fashioned conquering!

In most parts of the world today the same phenomenon of mass male failure are observable: in Japan, for example, there are the “Herbivore men” who have lost the capacity for traditional masculine assertiveness and directionality and in extreme cases the Hikikomori who isolate themselves from society altogether. In the West we see a society becoming more feminised by the day, emphasising safety, security and material comfort above all else, so that masculinity is actively discouraged for young men today except in very crude and degraded forms like the “Real G”s of modern music and celebrity culture. It is the ‘dominance of women in the household’ during ‘extreme forms of democracy, characteristic of tyranny’ which Aristotle spoke of. There are a few women who will lament this loss of virility in men and seek out a real man, but many will laud over it as the “new man” who is not afraid to express his weakness and his sentimentality, probably because they like having their man as a little dog they can use for their own vanity and pleasure. In all of these places it is most generally reflected in declining birth-rates and the loss of any desire to assist in the preservation of one’s society. There are very weird and sad male sub-cultures today such as the anime waifu, multifarious fetishes for muscular and masculinised women representing a deferring of the masculine role, exponential increase in varieties of sexuality which deviate from the norm, and so on. I don’t think it is enough to simply view all of this as men falling into traps who just need a little self-help advice. They are symptoms of the broken nature of modern society which no longer adequately encourages people to contribute to anything greater themselves. After all, this would be “toxic masculinity”!

It sounds like you have aroused Kundalini somewhat but not so much as to stir up a Kundalini awakening. It is worth bearing in mind that Kundalini and Shakti are just the way that one tradition refers to this energy; we are really just talking about the latent power of the Goddess within the body. It is always moving through you to some extent otherwise you would be dead or you would be some sort of pastiche James Bond Super-Man with no femininity at all! Even practises like meditation can amplify this energy. In other traditions, it is like the Snake which enticed Eve (whose name literally means “Living”) and then Adam to be thrown out of Eden and thus thrust into the suffering and turmoil of mundane life (that is why it is sometimes called the “life-force”, and it is very significant that Gnosticism reinterpreted this myth so that the God of Eden Jehovah was actually an evil Demiurge whilst the Snake in the Garden was guiding them towards liberation and transcendence.) It is therefore also somewhat akin to the Holy Spirit in orthodox Christianity which is guiding people back to the real God. You can also see this symbology on Hermes’ Caduceus and even in Zarathustra’s two animals being the snake of chthonic wisdom and the eagle of proud freedom.

This is an interesting formulation but I think it would be good to clarify what it means for values to be unchanging and fixed from the Traditional perspective. T.S. Elliot said an interesting thing about the Christian Church: It is a mistake to conflate tradition with blind conformism and submission to authority which can therefore never change or adapt to new circumstances; it might have become that in recent times but that is largely to protect itself from the modern cult of Change. Tradition in a higher sense only seeks to conserve that which is eternally true: the ultimate truths of existence must not be discarded but the expression of these truths may change. After all, every tradition in the world has changed over time and has a system for comprehending these changes: in Buddhism through the turning of the wheel of the Dharma; in Christianity Joachim of Fiore spoke of the Age of God, the Age of Christ and the Age of the Holy Spirit (incidentally, we are now in the fourth unspoken Age: the Age of Antichrist! See Carl Jung’s best book Aion for more on this); in Hinduism through the appropriate forms of spiritual practice for each Yuga (Hinduism gives a very sophisticated description of how spirituality changes to fit the conditions of cyclical time); and so on. The traditional religions already understood that everything in this world is changing. The aim of religion is to get to “the other shore”, the shore of eternal principles which is Being purified of all craving for the wheel of mundane existence, i.e. becoming. After all, the Platonic Ideas or eternal forms that went on to be so important for Christian thought are only meaningful in opposition to ordinary things with have a life-cycle of birth and death; the term Samsara can be translated simply as “the world of change” and, though Greek thought shows embryonic forms of the vanity and intellectual confusion that has become so rife today, the Heraclitean school saw clearly that aspect of things from which everything is mere flux and becoming. The mistake of postmodernism is to claim that the eternal (when I say eternal, I only necessarily mean for as long as this world and particular form of existence lasts) principles of existence themselves change. This mistake justifies itself by appealing to the vague discrepancies in world mythology but these can all be explained through reference to the same universal principles. Like you said, the Mother archetype has changed throughout history: however, it is only the expression and the emphasis on certain aspects of this function which have changed, and they have only changed in exact accordance with the principles of cyclical time. The essential nature of motherhood could never change, it simply Is and is a reflection of one aspect of the feminine polarity of existence Herself. I think in its own way this demonstrates that every religion is itself a cohesive whole. It does not need to be “integrated” in with insights from secular science, psychology, sociology and the like because these sciences are all approximate and meandering; they are like nets which close in ever-more-tightly around the essential things which they will never comprehend. So many of these “Stage Yellow” theories are rooted in the dumb conception of tradition that secularism and atheism had already prepared for it.

Haha! I always thought this obsession with survival was one of the weaker aspects of Leo’s teaching. It seems to degrade everything to a sort of spiritualised Hobbesian state of nature and overlooks the fact that survival is only really valuable so long as it is facilitating a certain function. When an organism is no longer serving a spiritual, practical or material Dharma it dies; therefore, Dharma trumps survival. For example, many today would say that sexuality is merely about survival, but what about Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde and all the others who died for their romantic love? The Troubadours and the other chivalrous poets used to play on the relationship between the words amor (love) and mort (death) because they understood that these two impulses are closely related. Likewise the Hara centre in Japanese subtle anatomy and the Svadisthana-Chakra of Tantra is the centre of sexuality and death. Even Freud saw that with his Eros and Thanatos. There is much more to existence than mere survival.

Here’s a few: analysis paralysis, unjustified (or at least unproven) sense of superiority over others or chronic inferiority and consequent social anxiety, lots of big ideas that amount to nothing or taking every day as it comes without living up any larger vision, being too serious or too frivolous with life, glorifying women (“simping”) or resenting them, becoming overly obsessive with personal interests or failing to hone in on a skill set, turning back on society and a “know-it-all” mentality or blindly following the herd, not being open to guidance from others or failing to take initiative, damaging extent of frantic masturbation and porn-watching in youth followed by phase of extreme no-fap, failing to purge negative emotions by communicating and offloading with others and becoming embittered with life or getting lost in the labyrinth of relationships, failing or not even attempting to integrate the feminine polarity or being out of touch with the masculine nature, and so on. A bit of a cobbled together list but I think many of these apply. It is worth pointing out that many of these superficially contradictory attitudes often go hand in hand with each other and inhabit the same one man. Usually, one of them will be exteriorised while the other will be internalised, e.g. hates women externally but glorifies them internally is very common amongst “manosphere” types. All of that being said, I don’t think it is good enough to view this all through a self-help “falling into traps” lens. Many men today are falling into these traps because they correctly see that present-day society is not worth contributing to.

Incidentally, Islam is an interesting exception in this regard. We must remember here that everything in Islamic civilisation is oriented towards Submission (the literal meaning of Islam) to Allah. Those who would tell you that Islamic attitudes towards women are rooted in a crude and blind domination of the male “patriarchal” principle are very misguided, not that one can blame them given the present-day Western indoctrination into the cult of so-called “freedom”. Of course, it is also possible that present-day Islam has largely lost its original spiritual potency and devolved into an expression of one-sided male supremacy, but that doesn’t mean that it always was one! Anyway, in Islamic civilisation the paths that men would take towards God were those of action (particularly of a war-like variety, Jihad) and contemplation (murāqabah in Sufism, for example) whilst women would generally take the path of Love (to the man) and Devotion (often to children). Because practically all women in Islamic civilisation were taking the path of Love and Devotion, the original intention of the harem (the polygynous institution of the man taking multiple wives) in Islam was as a test of the woman’s love. Even the promiscuity that the men in this order practised served this purpose: could the woman lovingly accept her man engaging in sexual relations with another woman or would she fall into the petty possessiveness of the nafs-ul-ammarah (the soul commanding to evil)? Naturally, none of this is to say that we should all adopt the Islamic institution of the harem! It is just a short explication of the oft-misunderstood principles that one polygamous traditional society was based on. After all, such self-sacrifice and dedication to another is pretty much unimaginable to modern Westerners.

Some of this is true but it is important to distinguish between primitivism and pre-history. Many ancient and non-Western cultures also practised monogamy: Hindu India, Traditional China and even ancient Egypt largely practised monogamy (of course the realities of sexuality are always more complex and some people within these groups practiced polygamy). Some might find it offensive but polygamy generally goes along with a primitive mentality: worship of the totem, pantheistic naturalism, a cult of the body and of matter, paths towards transcendence which are hysterical and Dionysian - often involving the rhythmic convulsions of dance, sex or ritualistic drug use - a feminine spirituality emphasising the Earth and the Mother, and so on. Polygamous promiscuity can be witnessed even in the West, particularly today given the neo-primitivism of modern Western man. Forgive me for pointing out that your argument here is very narrowly Stage Green, appealing to the wisdom of the primitives as opposed to the domination and oppression of the modern West. This too is a bias. Also, Stage Green should remember that polyandry (a woman having multiple husbands) was much, much rarer than polygyny (a man having multiple wives). Of course, though, you might be right that the traditional monogamous family has exhausted it’s utility.

@Aimblack That sounds like an interesting opportunity because it has emerged naturally through meditation as opposed to being forced through bodily practises. Given that it has emerged naturally it is quite possible that it will resolve itself naturally but it might be worth researching ways of using this energy for spiritual ends. I know, for example, that serious Kundalini practitioners seek to force this energy to explode beyond even the head into the infinite blissfulness of the Sahasrara-Chakra. Naturally, this has certain dangers from a human perspective! That being said, it sounds like you did the right thing in guiding the energy back down the spine. Kundalini Yoga is based on the basic polarity of Shiva (the masculine principle) and Shakti (the feminine principle). What you are doing when you guide the energy back downwards is using the active Masculine principle to essentially “calm down” and ground the feminine Kundalini energy. It is perhaps mildly controversial to say but I would say that meditation is an essentially masculine activity facilitating detachment and self-overcoming; as such, it sounds like it has already helped you to control the emergence of this built-up energy. Activities such as meditation which are based on becoming the witness of one’s experience and detaching from the eternal flux of ordinary reality can actually arouse Kundalini in themselves. To use a mundane example, it is like how a woman will be attracted to a man who is detached and doesn’t need her. The increasing lucidity and detachment which comes from meditative practice creates a sort of metaphysical polarity which stirs and arouses the feminine principle within oneself. Incidentally, this is exactly why I originally noted that it is dangerous to engage in Kundalini practices when you are not grounded in a stabilising masculine energy. What happens to people who engage in this practice unpreparedly is that the feminine Kundalini energy forces it’s way up the spine and accumulates in the head which can cause extreme discomfort, and because they lack preparation they are unable to do anything about it and the effects can be disastrous. This reminds me of something I forgot to mention above. It would be very useful for anyone working with Kundalini to have a good understanding of the principles of polarity and balance. This is actually an extremely rich and complex area because there are so many different levels and areas of life (and more-than-life!) to be harmonised simultaneously. It might sound a bit odd but I think for me it was useful that I had many years of experience as a musician before getting involved in Kundalini: after all, music is essentially composed of consonance and dissonance and tension and release, the task of the composer being to harmonise these into a beautiful whole. Additionally, I think I might have overstated the difficulty of engaging safely in these practises today. In a way, the present time is a very opportune one. There is more information than ever readily available to anybody who needs it and residual spiritual influences are likely to guide the serious seeker towards the appropriate material for their growth. However, every so often you will come across somebody saying how Kundalini has ruined their lives so it is always best to proceed with caution.

@Aimblack My sense is that, unfortunately, for most people today the only real option is to throw yourself in at the deep end and deal with whatever issues emerge as they do. Even if there were a hearty supply of fully-realised Gurus today offering initiation into the path of the Fire Snake, nobody would be willing to practice the kind of selfless commitment and radical dedication to another person that such a context demanded. I’m sorry if this sounds hopelessly nostalgic or like a naive and romanticised portrait of the past, but it is what I strongly believe to be the reality. The trouble is that the practices of Kundalini Yoga are designed to heighten sensitivity and awaken within the body itself a liberating and burning fire of transcendence. Any remaining complexes or human attachments (samskaras) will be drastically inflated by this process, making them now much harder to overcome and much more dangerous. Remember that Kundalini and even the general Tantric model of the subtle body (Chakras, Ida and Pingala, the Nadis) were highly secret teachings. I would say that anybody interested in Kundalini Yoga should not start the journey until they have a fairly steady understanding that they are living in a dream whose ultimate purpose is to awaken out of. They should be relatively stable and non-reactive with a meditative and contemplative temperament. Most importantly, they must understand that they are essentially doing when practising Kundalini Yoga is taking their ordinary experience and amplifying it exponentially. Everything which is ugly about you will also seek to be amplified! I hope I don’t sound melodramatic; in a way, these are just the requirements for engaging with any spiritual path. I hope this answers your question! It is worth pointing out that my path has been rather heterodox and combined numerous different elements. Someone else on here might be able to speak more precisely about Kundalini specifically. Personally, I had already been on the spiritual path for a few years and had a single awakening to God as Divine Love before I started practising Kundalini Yoga. It is only a vain personal digression but in a way my whole life felt like a preparation for the awakening of Kundalini. It is possible that the practitioner will be called to the practice when they are ready for it. For example, I have always liked music with an evocative and liberating character. This Sonata by my favourite composer Scriabin very much captures the feeling of Kundalini moving through the body:

@Preety_India You are unable to understand hate because you are a highly empathetic person. I understand hate very easily because I do not have much empathy with people! You are failing to see that hate is really an expression of love. When I hate somebody it is always because I love something else. For example, if I am trying to convince someone of something that I believe and they are stubbornly resisting me. This makes me feel hate towards them but it is really an expression of love towards my beliefs (the word belief comes from the root leabh, to love or to hold dear). Forgive me if I say that the hate I have just described is more of a masculine form of hate. For women it is probably more something like: “I hate somebody because they haven’t been the right sort of friend to me” (in this case, hate is a love for the right sort of friend), “I hate somebody because they ruined my life by doing something horrible” (in this case, hate is a love for an idea of what your life would have been without the horrible thing that the other person did), and so on. Hate is always an expression of love because everything is an expression of Love. Spirituality is not about being the perfect person right here and now. It is about consciously setting as your ultimate ideals Truth and Love and gradually working through the ways in which you fall short of that ideal.

I think he removed his latest solipsism video for precisely this reason. When has Leo ever told you you’re an NPC? You are the Player himself! Other people do have their own consciousness. It is the same consciousness as yours. It is just consciousness. How could consciousness ever belong to any body? Haha, you are upset about solipsism because now you are only trolling yourself? Bummer! I sense that this itself is a troll. Quite a funny one I might add!

Of course… So is holding grudges! Spiritual refinement is a process of letting go of the limited human identity. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be human on the way. In fact, by definition, for us humans the human level is always the starting point for the journey back to God.

A beautiful description! Maybe we don’t disagree so much after all as this is exactly how it seems to me. I just see it as an exhausted and decrepit mankind being forced back towards the Light from which it originated. I was thinking about our previous discussion about progress and Spiral Dynamics. Spiral Dynamics is a fairly accurate model in terms of describing a development in the complexity of human organisation. However, it is very obvious that every development in complexity comes at the cost of a loss in simplicity. I would say that simplicity is a higher value than complexity. After all, the truth is simple: everything is God. What else do you need to know? Society becoming more complex just means that it is becoming a more complex distraction from God. Today, society has become so complex that most people have forgotten about God altogether!

Ironically, this feels like a passive aggressive jibe at somebody (or even everybody)! Yes, no person who is fully awake will be able to hold anything, let alone a grudge. In a way, though, the grudges that people do hold are also part of the path towards the dissolution of their identity. After all, a grudge negatively effects the person holding it much more than the person who is it’s victim. That is why it is an excellent phrase, to hold a grudge. It is you that holds it. Remember what the Buddha said when someone was getting angry with him:

Yes that is basically what I mean. Only that which is grounded in meaninglessness can fully explore the infinite variety of meaning. Technically speaking, you are the only thing which doesn’t exist. To exist means to stand out, to be apart, to take a stand. God is that which everything else stands out from. God is the only Reality and the only thing which doesn’t exist!

I understand why you would say this but this is actually not the case. The masculine principle is impotent without the feminine. Masculinity is assertion, direction and will; if there is nothing for it to direct or assert itself upon, however, it is impotent. The feminine principle provides the potency of existence and the masculine principle actualises it. That is why the alchemists metaphorically referred to the male seed as the “Living Eve”. This is also why women without an animating male principle in their life will often just sort of marinate in themselves in a sort of directionless abundance of energy. It is potency without actuality. It is also why men without a grounding feminine principle will have all sorts of big ideas but they will all amount to nothing. I agree though that this is perhaps not the best word to convey this meaning. The concept of Power conceived as the religious terms Shakti, Sekhmet (she-who-is-powerful) and Shekinah (Divine Glory) captures this idea better. Yes, social constructivism and postmodern culture is a sort of organised insanity. Maybe that’s why they are always accusing people of “gaslighting” them! To be more charitable, you could say it is the misapplication of advanced truths by people who have not been adequately prepared to receive them. After all, there is a sense in which all identities and all of reality is constructed: it is not a social sense, however, but a metaphysical one! Your point about social security made me wonder: maybe that is why “Stage Green” postmodernism is in love with the welfare state and socialised healthcare. They need these things to prop up their ideology which is alienated from reality. This society is becoming like one big crazy collective who needs their social security to survive! Well, of course that’s how any given society defines insanity! But what if the society or the consensus is itself insane? As is the case today. That definition of insanity seems to be subtly nihilistic in the sense that it denies that there is really a truth to the situation. A sound definition of sanity must involve being in relative conformity to the truth and not just to society. Absolutely! If anything, it has to do with love.