Apparition of Jack

@Bno Should we call out Bernie for working with both Corporate Dems and Republicans during his 40+ years a politician to push policies that help working Americans too then? He co-authored and signed dozens if not hundreds of bills with these two parties up and down the decades. Does that now make him not a true progressive? Should Bernie2020 ditch Bernie and instead put some other "purer" progressive in charge instead?

@Bno Some of the Buddha's work was counter-productive too, but that didn't stop him from making a massively beneficial impact on the world. Should we be suspicious of the Buddha for not being "enlightened" enough now and dismiss all of his teachings?

@Bno With all due respect, and feel free to accept or deny my observations as you wish, but from what I've seen you say here I get the gut feeling you may still be dealing with some degree of a Blue/Orange shadow. This is perfectly fine, we are all at the level of development we need to be at right now, but if you're serious about Green progressivism then it may help you to think about facing and integrating these Blue/Orange aspects of your psyche, so that you become more clued in on and more effective in harnessing the dynamics of the Green progressive movement, IMO.

If you want to include them, I've heard the Seychelles and Mauritius have relatively high levels of economic development, putting them probably at at a blue/ORANGE stage. Also, I'm sure there are relatively developed parts of countries like Kenya or Namibia, but these would be relegated to the wealthier areas of bigger cities. I'd say overall Africa is still stuck mostly at a Purple/Red/Blue level of development, for a large number of reasons. One thing developed countries could do to help African countries to develop would be debt forgiveness.

Have you noticed how those blonde haired blue eyed Nordics only maintain their beauty standards by pushing this image onto the rest of the world as "THE" most attractive racial type though? Have you noticed how most Hollywood movies involve fair-skinned actors in the lead roles, despite neither Hollywood, nor California, nor the USA, nor the developed world at large, nor even the entire world, still exclusively resembling these features? How many dark-skinned, dark-haired tech gurus, lawyers, politicians, models, actors, singers, philosophers, journalists, scientists, sports stars, celebrities etc. are out there in the West today? MILLIONS! And yet our culture doesn't reflect that. Why is that? Because blonde-haired Nordic people have a specific survival reason for wanting to make sure mainstream culture resembles "them" the most. Why would you want Asian, Indian, African, etc. people getting fame and status when you can horde all this for yourself, especially since it gives you access to more money and sex than you could ever deal with? The ego-mind finds sharing to be completely abhorrent to its survival agenda. The problem is, this attitude is untenable. The future is not white, but mixed. No matter how much ethnonationalists may fight and protest this, the effects of globalisation and multi-culturalism are inevitable. The law of non-duality makes this so. Whenever a power imbalance arises, nature will come to correct it out. The question is not how much will the future be mixed, but rather how quickly are we going to adapt to it? The longer we delay making the conscious transition to a multi-racial global civilisation (which will involve shifting our attitudes around sex, the media, dating, beauty, and so on), the harder the social disruptions will be for everyone.

I have been analysing Brexit/ this latest election from a SD perspective too, and the only conclusion I can come up with is that I've underestimated the strength of the ego backlash against Green that Blue/Orange would have in the face of globalisation / changing environmental realities and so on. I thought that the election of Trump in the US would force the rest of the developed world to push more strongly towards Green, but clearly Blue/Orange simply has too much cultural sway over the industrialised countries these days for there to be a smooth, straight-forward transition. Still, Bernie remains a strong possibility in 2020. In some sense this prolonged Blue/Orange backlash may be what's needed for the global noosphere to manifest enough Green goodwill to finally see a Green president enter the White House (which would then drag the rest of the world closer up to Green in the coming years.) It sucks for the individual countries manifesting these Blue/Orange politicians for the time being (UK, Australia, Brazil, Hungary, etc.), but then again human evolution has never been easy. I'd say it's still up to us here to fight the good fight and continue to propagate Green causes, because sooner or later they will arrive. Things are still up in the open. We can harness this opportunity.

Brexit was simply too strong in the British public’s psyche to make running a campaign on anything else but it worthwhile. Also, too many powerful interests had a vested stake in making sure Brexit passed and keeping Labour out of power, hence the constant demonisation of them in the media. This is a huge step back for Britain, but all the conditions were there for it to manifest. The collective denial of both climate change and neoliberal social destruction is paradoxically what compelled people to vote for the party most likely to make these issues worse. As I said in my previous post on the issue, Brexit is neither here nor there so long as the country is poor and sick. But here we are. Let’s look forward to more cuts in public spending, more entrenched greed and more inaction on environmental devastation.

Weird. I saw this on my news feed yesterday and was going to watch it, but now when I go to click on it it says that the video is unavailable. I wonder why.

@Leo Gura From what I understand you spend most of your time in your house / your meditation cabin these days since you’ve been able to set yourself up rather successfully and to continuously pursue awakening, but do you still have “worldly” obligations to family/friends that you engage in? Do you ever attend a cousin’s wedding, or a grandparent’s birthday, or have an old friend contact you online and ask to grab a couple of drinks to catch up? If so, how do you handle these situations, do you just go along with the ride or do you use it as a chance to get some people thinking about self-actualisation? If you don’t do these things, how do your family/friends take it? Do they understand what you’re doing on some level or do they get annoyed with you for being some hippie hermit? What does “social balance” to you look like?

First of all I'm not from the UK, so I can't speak to what life is like on the ground there, and what I'm about to write are just my own observations, so feel free to accept or reject them as you please, but from what I've seen on the news, from YouTube videos, and from some friends/family I have other there, life seems to have gotten a lot tougher and a lot greyer since the Tories got in around 10 years ago. This has been the result of years of austerity cuts and attacks on crucial public institutions, which has left British society much poorer as a result. Yes, some billionaires get to party with their mates in Dubai, but we're not talking about billionaires here, we're talking about the well-being of a country of tens of millions of people who have to live and work in the real world. This is also on top of the climate situation which isn't getting any better, and which needs to be dealt with if the UK wants to stave off the worse of the social/economic/cultural etc. damage that will result otherwise. With all this in mind, a vote for the Tories is a vote for further decay. They are a party without any vision and a unhealthy lack of humanity, and have really screwed over the British people since their time in office. They have a lot of powerful friends, but these powerful friends really don't give a rat's ass about the actual well-being of the country. Now, if you're adamant about defending the Tories, I'm sure there's hundreds of examples of minor policy things they did that helped the British people since their time in office, but this ties in to Leo's video on Structure vs. Content. Getting too caught up in the tiny details of Tory governance (content) misses the point, since it's their structure (party for the elites, by the elites, at the expense of the rest of us) that's the problem. This is not to mention their ties to Russian money, US multinationals, Saudi despots, and so on. Labour's policies are about actually making the UK a livable country again, using empirical tools to do so, as well as changing the structure of politics to better give the people a say in how their country is run (this is why they are so hated by big businesses and the Tories.) All of their economic policies are based on hard evidence, and have been shown to work in the countries they're implemented in. Funding hospitals, funding schools, giving worker's more rights in the workplace and so on is good, and Labour has the best chance of making this vision a reality. As for Brexit, I'm neither here nor there. If it happens or it doesn't happen is irrelevant if the people in the country are broke, sick, unemployed and depressed. The most important thing for the people of Britain nowadays is to make it a liveable place again, and, in my best estimation, that's what Labour will help accomplish.

@Danioover9000

I know I’m just some guy on an internet forum, but if anyone in the UK reading this is still on the fence about voting/who to vote for - go out and VOTE tomorrow for Labour or whatever other high-consciousness party has the best chance to win in your seat!

This is an interesting question. The first thing that came to mind would be to suggest that this sort of thing already happens - watching one of Leo’s videos is in a sense of form of hypnotising yourself to Leo’s teachings, since your being presented with ideas and concepts you can’t (yet) consciously verify as true but have a subconscious suspicion that they are. The difference is though that Leo’s teachings don’t directly give you enlightenment, they only lay the epistemological groundwork for realising enlightenment yourself through your own effort.

Duly noted. I ask because as I continue on my own journey I find myself desiring these things less, and yet for a number of reasons I still find it more suitable to go along with them for the time being, so I was looking for examples of what a possible sense of balance between personal mysticism and worldly interaction could look like. I don’t think I’ll end up in a cabin in the woods any time soon, but carving out my own niche for myself in the society I live in is something I’m working towards.

I don’t think anyone ever seriously expected impeachment to actually get rid of Trump. What it does is create a whole ‘notha level of stink around him that will make him even more offputting to voters next year, which is when he can finally be kicked out.

@Sizeable Oof I think what you’re asking here is “Does Leo support the Chinese genocide of the Uighurs?” In which case the answer is obviously no. Genocide is an incredibly low-consciousness endeavour that harms everyone involved (including those doing the genocide.) But that wasnt the point Leo was trying to make, he was saying that even this - as terrible as it is for human egos - is still just dependant on incomplete ego-judgements. From an absolute POV, everything is utterly perfect the way it is, including all the wars, rape and murder on this planet. The question is not “how do we judge these things?”, the question is “how do we raise our consciousness enough to get to the point where the need for these judgements falls away?” Edit: Just to be clear I’m also not saying we don’t need to work actively to prevent these things. It’s incredibly hard to self-actualise when you’re locked in a concentration camp run by authoritarians. The point is that we shouldn’t make judging and condemning violence and hatred as evil our life’s work, but rather make awakening and liberation our life’s work, which is what will ultimately reconcile human suffering.

I feel like if Warren gets in it will be Obama 2.0. I think on some level she does truly believe in creating big structural change for the US, but on an even deeper level she believes in “playing ball” with the establishment and emphasising compromise over actual policies. Obviously though America is more progressive now than under Obama so she will have to make more room for the left, but as a POTUS I don’t think she’ll be half as effective as what Bernie can be.

Blue: Mr Rogers

Racism is a tricky thing, and not really that straightforward IMO. It’s possible to be racist in some contexts and not in others. It’s why people can have friends of other races and then go home and complain about “other races ruining their country.” In this instance they see their friends as human and close relationships, but then see broad ethnic groups as just a vague idea that’s somehow bad for their civilisation. Its like how there’s a lot of Hispanic Trump voters who want a wall to keep Hispanic migrants out. They themselves might look like and even be related to these migrants, but due to a number of different cultural factors they end up identifying with the dominate, ethno-cultural group they inhabit (and some of the racist ideas this group holds.) So as for Stella’s father, I’d say it’s possible for him to both marry a Puerto Rican woman and hold discriminatory views against Native Americans. The contexts around each relationship are different, and it’s these relationships that her father’s ego can accept or not accept (marrying someone from a Hispanic US territory vs having his daughter date someone from a discriminated minority that also has a lot of social ills within its own community.)

@kag101 Id say a secure and healthy ego is good, but only so long as you’re using it as a base to then go further and get to egoless states of awareness. Being neurotic isn’t good for anyone and you should work on securing your ego first, but if you’re serious about self-actualisation/ awakening it can never be an end goal.

@Leo Gura How much are we able to improve this dirty commune called society though? I realise that I’m not getting out of here any time soon, and even if I could society still offers too many benefits to give up too quickly. But a lot of it sucks as well, and it’s those sucky parts that I’d like to help change. But it can seem like there’s so many of them and their causes are so complex that it can seem overwhelming trying to navigate / uplift them all

@Homer My intuition says that the answer would probably lie within the fact that Yellow is the beginning of Tier 2 over Tier 1. On the surface, Yellow and Green share a lot of values - humanism, environmentalism, sustainability, and so on. However, the difference between the two is the approach they would take to promoting these ideas. Green would start a mass political movement, Green would make badges and get people involved and go on debates with Stage Orange/Blue politicians and find as many Green allies as possible to give themselves the best chance of implementing their vision. Yellow - and I'm talking true Yellow here, someone who has integrated deeply all the best and worst parts of Green - would probably take a "back seat" position in trying to manage a society. If a true Yellow politician emerged, expect them to still go on debates, but expect that debate to almost turn into a sermon as the Yellow thinker explains fully and cognisantly their big ideas in a way that Blue, Orange and Green people can accept. Instead of trying to start a mass political movement, they would probably harness the existing organs of power and direct them in such a way that they create the maximum level of value for their capabilities. A true Yellow politician would probably also try to avoid the limelight, as their individualist / lone-wolf aspect means they generally prefer to operate on their own terms without being beholden to a large, even if well-meaning, Green community. Also, if they are true Yellow, then it's also possible they'd start to bring mysticism and consciousness into their thinking, as the beginnings of Turquoise start to develop. Whether they'd share that knowledge with the general public or not would be up to them - they could decide either way, depending on what they feel would be the most beneficial to society. All of this is just speculation though, I think we've still got a long way to go until anyone of this calibre can come close to holding meaningful mainstream political power. The addition of Marianne Williamson is a unique development in this regard, as she is obviously bringing a lot of Yellow/Turquoise wisdom to the political arena, but I would not consider her true Yellow as she still has a large Orange / Green aspect. Also these are just my ideas. How accurate or not they are I cannot aay.

@Ibn Sina Let's say I take enjoyment out of making fun of people. In fact I do it so much that I do it to everyone I meet. And not just playful teasing, but straight up cruel mockery. Obviously a lot of people would get hurt by my behaviour, right? People would call me out and want to get me to stop. What you're essentially saying is "Why should I care about the people I hurt? I benefit from mocking people, so why should I stop?" And just to reinforce the point, maybe I come from a powerful group of people where mocking others is seen as a sign of wit and prestige. When people start to question my behaviour, I just say "But it's natural to mock others. That's just the way it is." Obviously the point is that it's not "just the way it is," it's instead a set of behaviours I have been taught from the power dynamics around me and want to keep these dynamics going. All the mental and psychological damage I cause from insulting people doesn't matter to me, when really in a more conscious society it would.

@Nak Khid Just FYI, it's probably best not to just copy+paste entire articles and post them here. Most people won't read them that way and important information will get overlooked. Maybe try just posting the link and maybe one or two crucial paragraphs instead next time.

Leo actually has a bunch of videos on epistemology, it's one of his favourite subjects. It's a very useful tool for awakening and grasping non-duality