Joshe

Haha, good point. Spirituality is supposed to produce well-being, not destabilize it. I wonder if your spiritual work is causing you chronic stress, then you’re simply not doing it right? It was causing me stress, so I stopped. One idea of spirituality is to be at peace, not with all, but with myself. I can see this would take dedication and work, which would compete with other priorities. Having competing priorities was a stressor for me. I decided that I’ll work towards it after I’m done playing my survival game, when I can devote my resources to it - hopefully, in the next 10-20 years I’ll start back on my tattiwigwanda. Lol. I intuit the bulk of the work is not “understanding”, but “letting go”.

When Leo dropped his 5meo video, I was like “holy shit I gotta try that”. I was super excited but I couldn’t easily acquire it, so it remained a desire for like 3 years. Within that time, much came to light. I realized that 5meo would be like any other psychedelic - you have a profound experience and then come back to reality. I saw the clinging, the obsession, the delusion, and the separation. It started to seem unwise.

A good disclaimer for your book list. I scoffed at my dimwit ex girlfriend for telling me “books are stupid”. But looking back, she did have a point.

Lol, thanks! Yeah, the dim and small font is intentional - for my eyes only, so fuck contrast ratios! I ain't gonna make it screen-reader compliant either. 😂 I showed you the zoomed in versions too, lol.

Been working on a new app to help manage my freelance gig. This is the aesthetic I'm currently into for UI. Basically Tailwind zinc theme and high contrast colors. Love dark mode. Probably should tone the green down a bit. Also recently built my own command launcher/raycast type thing, which is efficient af. Claude code baby!

You don't know nothin' about slithering pythons bro. 😂

True, and something else to look out for: Having genuine insight makes it easy to assume others are only operating conceptually, when in fact they may be tracking the same thing but from a different angle. This showed up in my relationship to Leo's work early on. He'd make statements like “you don't understand,” and my response was always, “yeah, I am probably missing something.” I never had an ego around my ability to think, so when an intelligent person says that I don't understand, my default stance is acceptance and inquiry. But over time I gained enough epistemic confidence to actually test those claims. And I often found they were wrong - sometimes very wrong. Not only was I seeing and tracking the thing, I was often doing it better than they were. So, it seems like there are two traps here: one for the epistemically humble who over-defers for too long, and one for the person that has genuine insight but over-generalizes it and assumes others don't see what they see. "The meta-pattern is that genuine understanding doesn't necessarily produce legible explanations, and legible explanations don't necessarily indicate genuine understanding." Side note: I have a problem with the word "illusion" in the way it's typically used here. To call something that exists - like "ambition" - an illusion feels sloppy and just isn't right. A dream also isn't an illusion. Well said.

I'm aware of the "isness" when my mind isn't doing it's thing, but I haven't made it beautiful yet. I mean, it has been, but it's not usually. Usually, it's just neutral awareness of it. But maybe that's exactly what it should be or maybe recontextualization is necessary? Yeah, I'm just letting things happen organically. I'm sure I'll get back on the wagon at some point.

@Natasha Tori Maru How is it not about meaning? Beauty and love are meaningful to me. As you know, I haven't prioritized spirituality, but to me, it seems to be about beauty and love. I haven't put a ton of thought into it actually, so I'm genuinely curious.

Yes, we're in agreement. I said "Spirituality as an escape from being a human." in the context of explaining the all-too-common path. I probably shouldn't have put it on its own line like that because is does kinda read like "is".

😂

@Hojo I stand corrected!

I agree with you on the current circumstances, obviously, but I disagree that nature is more determinant than nurture with regard to drive for a thing. If you took 1000 female children and raised them in isolation where awakening was the ultimate goal - told them from birth this is what matters and built cultural reinforcements around it - you could easily program them to have the requisite drive. You're saying truth-seeking suits the masculine better, but how do you know how much of that drive is nature vs nurture? Of course it's both, but my 1000 girls thought experiment shows the power of nurture. It would even be possible to flip the script completely given specific circumstances. So, it seems to me you're not speaking on what is inherently true, just what is true right now.

Of course, but if you take 1000 women and 1000 men and put them in equal environments with all things being equal, any they all share the same goal - to awaken - is there any reason to believe more men would awaken than women if they had equal drive for it? I doubt it. It might even be 60/40 women on top. And spare me the "If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle" 😂 The thread title is "Do men and women awaken equally ?" Given the current circumstances, no, way more men do. But level the playing field, and my money is on the women.

I feel you. I've done a good bit of visual design work and it's a pain in the ass trying to explain decisions to clueless people. I can't stand when they're like "change it to blue" when it should be neutral. One thing I could never understand is why most B2B and enterprise designs (like Salesforce) are almost always shit compared to something like a polished SaaS app. But then I learned it's intentional. B2B doesn't like fancy and they tolerate imperfection and boring much more than other domains,. So what you might call "bad" design in one domain can be good and convert better in another. That didn't sit well with me because I'm like "NO!!! You cannot do that!!" On some level though, once you get past basic design fundamentals, a lot of it is subjective and designers often get carried away being concerned with minor details. To your main point: there are plenty of talented designers who are not what you might call "conscious". I've seen no connection aside from the general level of competence that often accompanies higher consciousness. I've collected thousands of screenshots of great designs and just marveled at them and used them for inspiration in trying to create my own designs. That process + learning design fundamentals and tips I think is sufficient. Eventually, you know a good design when you see one. I feel like most people are capable of this, regardless of conscious development. One cool thing having visual design sensitivity is that you can tell how much effort people are putting into things. For example, the actualized.org website isn't responsive in the year 2026. lol.

😂 Yeah, I never questioned it much because maybe I just don't know, but it just seems really odd to have a trip and experience some strange new thing and to call it an awakening. I once took so much LSD, I couldn't even keep my eyes open and existence felt like multiple very large slithering pythons. I was stuck in that state for about 4 hours on the couch. I guess I had the "multiple slithering python" awakening? 😂

Right - the fact that ambition is an illusion is only meaningful if one hasn't already seen through it. But if you haven't seen that yet, when you hear "it's an illusion", you can't help but question if what's driving you is wrong in some way. This could lead to followers trying to reject their ambition. I was pointing to how that could be bad. There's seems to be a sort of purgatory one has to go through before they realize, "yes, it's an illusion, but that doesn't mean it should be rejected." And some might never even make it out of that purgatory. But yes, something has to matter. One could choose many different things to matter, ambition being one.

Right track. It's nice to see some light being shined here. If spiritual teachers were actually responsible regarding psychological well-being/destabilization, they'd provide more than a once-ina-blue-moon 20-word disclaimer. In the real world, people are seeking relief and so they ignore the 20-word disclaimer, and the so-called gurus know this and conveniently ignore it. Also, it's the ultimate scheme: sell a product to a desperate person and if the promise of the vague, abstract product doesn't materialize, it's user error - not product failure. And there's no way to tell, so lock in for the next decade because it's the only way to reach the summit. And in the meantime, buy this other book/course/program to solve the dozens of blocks that will arise, because once you invest enough financially and emotionally, you'll build up sunk-cost fear and start telling yourself lies about who you are and how it's all worth it. Just keep going for another 5 years - the summit is there!". Not that everyone is doing this but I think it's important to be aware of incentives and how spiritual sales funnels operate. For too many, it often loops like this: Suffering prompts search for meaning Spiritual ideas give relief and direction Commitment grows Real-life problems get bypassed/postponed Distress appears again because it's structural Further disengagement from life via abstract ideas Loop keeps going Apparently, they call it "spiritual bypassing" - spirituality as an escape from being a human.

I'm no statistician but I don't see how lifestyle access can be used to measure capacity. It would be like trying to infer intelligence by counting who went to university when half the population couldn't even go. There are plenty of intelligent non-university people who wouldn't show up in the stats.

Some ideas:

So is making distinctions, which is your favorite thing. To say something is an illusion is to imply one should see through it and drop it, but if we’re gonna be consistent, we have to apply that to all illusions. But that would flatten life and wouldn’t be any fun.

You have to go deeper into what the actual problem is. Make your emotional map as high resolution as possible. Is it irrational frustration, agitation, anger? What is it actually? It’s usually not just one thing, but many things serving different functions. Anytime you’re dealing with a problem that has several causal factors with multiple functions, these are not easy to solve. You have to go deep into every facet. Or, if you just want to skip the emotional map, you could just maybe practice loving-kindness meditation on him u til you accept his smell and character traits you don’t like. We resent imposition. And parents impose. So, either stop resenting the impositions or figure how to make them stop. Either way, it’s not an easy problem to solve.

I'm trying to get you to see that's not all you and several others are doing. If someone stood up at a Mozart concert crying "I thirst for the day you compose again! I'm 5 years behind reaching your level of musicianship! The godly gems and divine fragrance of your unique work!" - that's MORE than just gratitude and appreciation going on. No shame in having blind spots - we all have them. The key is to not ignore them when they're pointed out. Using exemplars for aspiration is one thing - praising them to the high heavens is something else. At a certain point, praise crosses over into worship. Praise says "that was valuable, thanks and good job." Worship says "you are elevated and I am below." One is a transaction about content - the other seems to do with peacocking devotionals for various egoic reasons. Just some thoughts. I could be wrong. Good day sir!

I've been alone my whole life because I can't connect with people because they are too shallow. I desperately want to be seen and met but I'm fucking terrified of being ordinary so I judge everyone as beneath me. So I figure I'm isolated because others are too shallow. Since I'm terrified of being ordinary, I can't allow myself to be ordinary with them. This is a common pattern. Happened to me. I remember being a kid and desperately wanting others to play with me in my unique sandbox but all the kids just wanted to play in the normal sandbox. One blind spot Leo has is that he's converted this pain into cosmic insight to avoid feeling it. True integration of difficult truths doesn't feel cool or exciting. It's painful. It feels like grief and humility, then relief. When I saw what an asshole I had been my whole life - resenting people, calling them shallow, mediocre, etc. - and then realized I did it because I was hurt - I bursted into tears. Haven't been the same since. Highly recommend.