FlyingLotus

Blog Videos on Enlightenment ? ♾️ ❤️ • Feb 29, 2020: What It's Like To Smoke Salvia Divinorum (note) • Feb 5, 2020: Explaining God For Dummies • Dec 17, 2019: Miracle Awakening • Dec 15, 2019: Ego-Collapse Awakening • Jul 17, 2019: Infinite Love Awakening • Jun 21, 2019: DPT: The Other God Molecule • Jun 11, 2019: Total Omniscience Awakening • Nov 29, 2017: Absolute Infinity Demo (10 mins)

Teal Swan has a good video on Parts Works. IFS is awesome. It's a very thorough version of Parts Work. Check out Jay Earley's books. I made a post about it here:

I've updated the Blog's Table of Contents and put it in the "High Consciousness Resources" forum. That part of the forum doesn't move as fast, so it's less likely to get buried. You can find it here: ✒️? Leo's Blog Table of Contents ??️ I've also added: A selection of Leo’s Short Essays on Epistemology and Enlightenment. They’re good and short. I recommend reading them. Also includes his Retreat & Personal Notes. List and Summaries of ▶️ Leo’s Blog Videos, Summaries and Interviews ▶️ Added sections on "Interviews with Leo" and "Viewer Compilations" that are good to watch. Enjoy!! ? Psychedelics: Safety, Trip Reports, Research, Episodes, Forum Mega-Threads, General Info ?

Actualized.org Blog: Table of Contents List of Leo’s Blog Videos List of Blog Quotes Posts on Cults, Creativity & Art Posts on Images of Infinity, Strange Loops Posts on Gaming, Funzies, Music Posts on Actualized.org, Conferences Blog Posts for 2017.............(pg 45 - 58) Blog Posts for 2018.............(pg 31 - 45) Blog Posts for 2019.............(pg 18 - 31) Blog Posts for 2020.............(pg 8 - 18) Blog Posts for 2021.............(pg 1 - 8) _________________________________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents covers up to mid-July 2021. blog page numbers will change overtime as more posts get added to the blog. ? = posts about Spiral Dynamics. ? = posts about Safety and Psychedelics. ? = posts where Leo’s written an essay or extended commentary. (note) = posts where Leo’s written a short commentary.

That goat should become the Actualized.org mascot But Leo, how come you're omniscient and don't know that the delivery guy comes into the scene after 5 minutes? How come you have to check the camera's battery life???? That part of the video was so funny and random. You're very welcome Leo. It's all a labour of love. Just like Life.

@Preety_India Awww, thanks. I don't need to hear it from Leo. I already heard it from you!! Who needs Leo, lol. He also said something nice the first time I made a Table of Contents months ago.

(This is a really good video about using your life purpose to maximize goodness in the world ?) Summary of Blog Video: Extra Insights About Good Intentions (uploaded August 23, 2021) -Some people have been misunderstanding Leo’s latest youtube episode: “Everyone Acts From Good Intentions” “But Leo, so what if ‘The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions?' Are you saying that the intention to ‘be good’ negates the evil of mass murder? So destruction is ‘good’ if you have ‘oh so good intentions, your honour.’ Aren’t intentions pretty shallow compared to destructive consequences…?” -What Leo was saying in that episode is pretty radical. He’s not saying that evil people rationalize their evil as good, but that their behaviour is still evil. He’s saying that… Everything is an incarnation of Absolute goodness. It’s just an extremely biased, unholistic, twisted, finite, selfish form of goodness. God acts through everyone and everything. All people are literally good!! Even when your mind is rationalizing destruction and murder, it’s actually good. Actual good, not just evil trying to rationalize evil as good. Hate and evil are just twisted forms of love, because… -Absolute good is all encompassing. It embraces everything. Finite good is not like Absolute good. People define “good” based on their level of consciousness. So, relative bad exists alongside Absolute good, but relative bad (and relative good) are still finite, selfish points of view. “But Leo, how can something like caring about the planet still be selfish?” -Well, what about the trillions of other planets in the galaxy? You don’t seem to care about them. (Also, you’re probably overestimating how much you really care about the planet.) Notice how all the good you do is always a finite good, not the Absolute good. (10:40) eg: Let say you donated to a charity for tigers. That’s good and selfless, right? Well, how much did you donate? Why didn't you donate more? Why not donate your whole life savings? That’s finite good, not infinite good. You don’t love tigers infinitely. So, your love for tigers is finite you monster Survival and Goodness -Basically, you have survival needs that limit your capacity to be infinitely good. Your capacity for goodness is limited by your empathy, your level of consciousness and especially your survival needs. -Notice that you can’t help others in an infinite way, unlike God. Your physical form puts you in a survival bind. After all, you can’t be loving and helpful if you’re dead. -This doesn’t mean you should stop doing good things because they're finite good. You also shouldn't become a doormat. This is just about understanding your limits as a human. -In enlightenment work, we experience peak states of love and still have to survive (16:40). We realize that our day to day level of consciousness isn’t as high as it is in a peak mystical state. That can make you feel less loving and worthy than someone who’s actually less conscious than you. You’re trying to live up to these impossible ideals of love. Thing is you’re always going to fall short because of your survival needs. Your love will always be finite and corrupted. Finite good is still a corrupted form of love (18:38). -The finite domain is the material domain. It’s not fair to expect yourself to embody infinite love in the finite, material domain. eg: For Leo to film videos for us ?, he can’t be infinitely loving. He has to be loving in a finite, corrupted way and keep certain attachments. Otherwise he’d neglect his survival needs, give all his money away to charity, end up homeless and die ?, and there’d be no more Actualized.org. -Notice how when you express love it’s still finite, conditional and corrupted by survival. That’s okay because you’re stuck in a human state of consciousness. -The Godhead is infinite and formless, so it can love infinitely and without fear of “losing” its formless form. -However, none of this is an excuse to be hurtful and unloving, or to not try to love more. -You can increase your capacity to love by raising your consciousness and empathy and recognize the holism and unity of everything. Psychedelics is the most direct way. Raise your baseline level of consciousness through meditation, yoga, mystical experiences. -Also, removing obstacles to love will make you more loving. You can do shadow work, release fear, trauma, anxiety, anger, releasing limiting beliefs and judgments about others (sexism, racism, ableism, etc.) Reading more books can open your mind and heart. Same with educating and exposing yourself to more cultures, people and experiences, so you’re not afraid of “foreigners.” Idiot Compassion (31:50) -Idiot compassionate means being compassionate in impractical ways that diminish your ability to help others. It distracts from your life purpose. Idiot compassion drains your ability to be compassionate in an effective way. -Compassion is a delicate balancing act (33:00). To find that point where you are serving the highest good that you can serve given your finite form, your finite state of consciousness, weaknesses, strengths and problems. (Reminds me of the episode where Leo talked about Obama’s drone strikes, and why it’s facile and unproductive to demonize complicated situations as “evil war crimes.”) Realistic Practical Love There’s a realistic, grounded practical version of love. There are also two extreme traps people fall into: The “love is some silly hippie notion” camp. The atheistic rationalists fall into this trap. They’re so disconnected from love they don’t understand that love is a metaphysical aspect of reality. That’s very problematic. The ungrounded new age hippies who think you should always apply absolute love without considering the implications of living in a relative, material world. They talk about love and peace in an idiot compassion way. The idiot compassion group assumes that you just need to be lovey-dovey towards everyone and that solves everything. They’re confused about the difference between Absolute truth and Relative truth. Having an intention to be lovey-dovey and good isn’t good enough. You’re a finite being with survival needs. You don’t have infinite money, time or resources. No one has that, not even Batman. Be Honest About Your Limits -You need to be honest with yourself about your limits. You’re not unlimited in the material domain. You can’t drink a glass of poison and survive. You can’t jump out of a plane without a parachute and drop kick a coven of warlocks. You have to be selective with how you invest your energy. -To do good in the material, relative domain requires that you allocate a significant portion of your time and energy to taking care of your body. So, love cannot only flow outwards from you. -Women have this problem because they tend to be more compassionate and fill more of a caretaker role in society. They can become too giving and self sacrificing. Leo’s mom is like this! This ends up backfiring and leads to a lack of capacity to do good in the world. -When you’re serving others too much, you don’t take care of your needs and your body deteriorates. You compromise your mental health and get drained. You have to be smart and practical about how you express your love in the world. (37:23) Effective Goodness Requires Exquisite Balance -If you really care about maximizing your output of love into the world, it requires exquisite balance and intelligence, there’s no algorithm for it (37:50). To be good and giving, you need to maintain your poise, groundedness and connection to spirit itself. If you’re showering others with love but you have no love for yourself, this will create problems. You have to find your unique balancing point. -To do good in the world, you have to be selective with your time, money, energy and resources. You can’t help all the children in the world equally, there’s too many of them. You have to choose which children in the world to help. You can’t give money to every charity. You have to make a choice. You have to be wise about how you give your time, money and resources. “How would the world be best served by the time and money I’m going to give?” -These are difficult questions with no obvious answers. The whole point of you being alive, conscious and intelligent is to make these decisions for yourself. That’s the joy and hell of life! -Material life is a finite experience. That means you have to make difficult decisions. You can’t go to every university, or date every lovely, eligible person, or fulfill every interesting life purpose. Even one is too much for most people. So which life purpose is the best for you, that’s going to maximize your output of love? Leo’s Life Purpose course can help you with this, but you have to make those decisions yourself. -It’s important to see the profound tradeoffs and interconnections between the finite and the infinite. It’s a dynamic dance between the two. That’s what reality is. -Intelligence is your capacity to see and maximize goodness, love and how it's expressed. (41:50) That’s the true definition of intelligence, not IQ. The ultimate puzzle that intelligence is trying to solve is how to maximize love and goodness. That’s the puzzle of your life. -All the decisions you make in life can be framed with this question: “How do I maximize love and my expression of love?” Find wise ways to maximize love in the finite domain. It’s very different than how a fool expresses love. Wise vs Foolish Love -A fool tries to maximize love in foolish ways, like injecting heroin, or eating greasy cheeseburgers, or robbing someone’s life savings to spend it on a Maserati, or promoting toxic forms of picking up women. A fool may discover, eventually, that none of those ways are very effective. They come with side effects and terrible consequences. They don’t produce love consistently, and they don’t produce the highest levels of love either. There are also costs that you pay, for the rest of your life, that outweigh the little bit of love you get in the short term. -The wise person wises up to the foolish ways he’s been trying to maximize love. The cheeseburger drains your health, so the wise person will sacrifice taste for energy so he can funnel that into his life purpose. He trades the love he would have gotten from the cheeseburger for a higher quality of love from his life purpose and the meaningful impact he’ll have on others. You could trade drugs like heroin for psychedelics. That could lead to Kriya yoga or meditation. You can bootstrap your capacity to love this way, inching your way up bit by bit. You’re solving the puzzle of love. It takes a high degree of intelligence not to eat that cheeseburger, or give into vices and instead work on your life purpose (45:23). Solving the Puzzle of Love -As you solve the puzzle of love, you become more loving and happy. Love is all you want. It’s what really makes you happy. -There are also different gradations of love. If you’re a low consciousness person, you’re satisfied with low forms of love. If you’re a high consciousness person the low forms of love no longer satisfy you. eg: If you’re a low consciousness person with no interest in growing, you might be happy with just going to bars and hooking up everyday for the rest of your life. If you’re mature, you’ll realize that’s not fulfilling and you want a deeper form of love. Maybe you’ll get married, and have children. After a while you might take up psychedelics and yoga. Stuck at a Level of Consciousness -A lot of people are stuck at a certain level of consciousness and they don’t want to raise it. If you give them a high level of love it will freak them out and plunge them into an existential crisis. -To experience the higher forms of love requires maturity, wisdom and intelligence and very little fear. There’s a trade-off between love and fear. You have to be willing to surrender a lot of attachments. -To a dogmatic, close-minded religious person, the highest forms of love will feel like hell. They’re super attached to love looking like their religion or to a finite form of God. -Bad psychedelic trips can happen if you’re scared, close-minded and resistant to love. Hell is being disconnected from love. That’s why you need to do prep work to make the best use of psychedelics. The infinite love will still be shocking and scare your pants off, but it won’t be hellish. (ep: Dangers of Psychedelics. Summary is here.) -If you have twisted understandings of the world and of people, you won’t open yourself to love. Dense minds with big egos and trauma, fears, toxic ideologies, will need a gradual process of development. However, if you’re really advanced you may not need a long, drawn out process and can get straight to the love. -Actualized.org is all about raising your consciousness, opening your mind, and growing your capacity for love. It’s about experiencing infinite love without recoiling in horror. Even the episodes that seem philosophical or technical are about that. (50:18) -So, good intentions aren’t just rationalizations. They come from Absolute good and ARE good. It’s just finite, partial and biased. -If you want the unadulterated, impartial, unbiased, Absolute kind of love, you must become formless. If you realize that you are the Godhead, you’ll have the best of both worlds. You can bring the Godhead back into the finite, material world. It’s all about how much love you can handle, and how you want to manifest that love. Finite Doesn’t Mean Inferior -Finite manifestations of love are not inferior (53:50). They’re less total, but “inferior” is a judgement you’re putting on it from your finite human self. One doesn’t have less value than another. The finger isn’t less valuable than the hand. It’s smaller, it’s different, but not inferior. The value of everything in the universe is the same, according to the Godhead and Absolute love. -From the Relative perspective, certain forms of love are “inferior” because they interfere with a larger purpose, which is to create a peaceful society. So terrorism is an inferior form of love compared to charity work. It’s inferior from the Relative perspective, from the goal of constructing a good, happy thriving society. From the Absolute perspective terrorism not an inferior form of love compared to charity work, or anything else. To the Godhead, everything is of equal value because all parts are necessary. No part is more important or above any other part. You need to know the difference between Relative and Absolute truth. Know how to distinguish them properly, but also know how to collapse them when necessary. (ep: Relative vs Absolute Truth)

@Loving Radiance posted this in the video summaries thread . Summary of Blog video: Back From 2 Month Break, Updates (uploaded February 5, 2020) Balance of Creative Work & Rest Possibility of getting over-satiated from over consuming personal development / spiritual content to the point of just consuming it: This results in not living life anymore as to not experience the whole range of life because the mind is still immersed and is not truly resting. Resting allows getting conscious & self-reflective of one's work by recognizing limitations from a detached birds eye view because of the contrast of work & rest. Pacing oneself (resting, and working with the right endurance & speed) serves long-term sustainability of creative work output: All areas of life are better to be seen through the lens of sustainability ("Is this area of my life sustainable? If not, how can I make it sustainable?") Undogmatic sustainability includes exhaustive unsustainable work in one area while neglecting other areas (temporary.) Looking at one's life to be an apple tree: Apples are results Result-oriented approach isn't healthy as only caring about the apples neglects the roots, trunk, branches, leafs... Other parts of the tree are other areas of life that get neglected when one only focusses on the fruits of the work. Creative work: Is counterintuitive to manual work. Being pragmatic & deadline oriented eats up creativity. One is most creative (getting ideas & inspirations) when nothing productive is being done Directed with deadlines gets practical (perfectionism is restricted) Seems to be balanced when done in cycles of: Working on a project Finishing the project Time off & resting Work with less creativity needs smaller cycles (diurnally and hebdomadally rather than biannually or annually) Innovation: That what worked before will not be that which brings your work to the next level Being stuck in your old ways of doing creative work will get your work outdated by the competitive innovative work of other creative people True Spirituality informs & transforms all areas of life like the way of doing creative work. Role of requisite variety (RV) in life: Definition from Wikipedia, "If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled." There is not enough RV used when one is stuck on any problem Not enough RV manifests in a narrow uncreative approach Troubleshooting with try & error has to be so much done that success is inevitable (through lateral thinking & trying out a wide range of solutions; there's now equal/higher RV than the problem) Upholding identity is something that often holds back RV Find root problems in your life and apply RV - one solution will work by chance Working on projects: Requires focus (eliminating all distractions, creating a working environment)

You're very welcome @Preety_India . To be fair, Leo just said awesome work in the summaries thread

Blog Quotes Misc Quotes Epictetus On Ignorance The Biggest Question—Douglas Axe Applied Metaphysics Reference Frames The Trap Of Not Seeking Albert Einstein Gets It Gödel On Materialism Exodus 3:13-14 Materialism Truth & Silence Serendipitous Quote On Solitude Dune Quote Who's On First? God Is Porn The Journey On Devilry Actualized Quotes Profound Proverbs Profound Quotes Profound Yoda <(⦿_⦿)> Profound Batman 🦹 🌃🦇

Cults — Case Studies (Trump and MAGA posts are in the main table of contents) Osho Documentaries Inside The Moonies Cult Inside The R. Kelly Sex Cult Inside The Alex Jones Cult (note) Inside The Cult Of Scientology Neoclassical Economics Is A Cult The Cult Of Capitalism The Cult Of Andrew Cohen MLM Cults An Islamic Feminist Creationist Cult Unicult The Church Of The AR-15 New Age Cults The Neo-Nazi Bible (Essay)

Funzies 😹 Realizing What Is God Dog Trips Balls On Wild Mushrooms What It's Like To Awaken True Love George Carlin On Advertising Bullshit Mystical Cat So Are You Chinese Or Japanese? Lost For Words Enlightenment Retreat Fail Psychonaut Lemurs? Simpsons Trip Report Dumbo Gets Trippy The Trump Presidency in a Nutshell Using The Mind To Silence The Mind—King of the Hill Recontexualized Porn Meme Self-Inquiry Futurama's Bender Encounters God On Your Deathbed, Total Consciousness—Caddyshack Meta Argument Science! Music What The World Needs Now (note) The Windmills Of Your Mind (note) Lost - Sunlounger Chill Remix Music - With You It's Not Going To Stop, Till You Wise Up (note) Zen Master's Diary Leo's Music Playlist Open Your Eyes Conferences 🍄 Apr 2017: Don't Miss The Psychedelic Conference! July 2017: Talks From The Psychedelics Conference (Essay) July 2017: Legal 5-MeO-DMT In Europe! Oct 2017: San Diego Enlightenment Intensive Apr 2018: Exploring Psychedelics Conference 2018 June 2018: Esalen Institute Workshops Apr 2021: The Institute For Complex Systems Science

Images of Infinity ♾️ ❤️ Samadhi Full Movie (70 mins) A Taste Of Absolute Infinity (Essay) Infinite Life (Essay) A Taste Of Infinity (Essay) The Mind Of God (note) What Does Nothingness Look Like? (Essay) Zooming Into God The Fractal Of Life Infinite Consciousness GIF (Essay) How Big Is Infinity? Scale Of The Universe 4000 Exo-Planets Found Accessing Infinite Consciousness Strange Loops 🤩 🤯 Strange Loop Cosmology (Essay) ⁉️ Wicked Strange Loop (Essay) More Strange Loops! Strange Loop Meme Strange-Loopy Rollercoasters Killer Strange Loop

Creativity & Art The Pineal Gland Artist (note) Philosopher's Lamp Myers-Briggs On Pinterest A Galaxy In A Rock Aliens Confirmed Whirling Your Way To Enlightenment (Essay) Mind-Bending Gears The Mindblowing Cubli Creating The Never-Ending Bloom—Windmills Build Your Skillz (Essay) Creativity On Stilts 6 Fingered James Cameron On Life Purpose James Cameron On Ecological Awareness "I Cannot Self-Terminate” (post refers to this 😢) (note) Must-Watch Video For All Victims Yugen The Magic Of Consciousness Psychedelic Visions Some talented artists Leo is following on Instagram: holosomnia beloved__world_ infinit.visuals ig_artgalleryy colorfull.wrlds annibalesiconolfi Gaming Stage Orange Corrupting Video Games (note) Finding Your Niche Antichamber: The Game Of Mindfuckery Spiral Dynamics Super Mario Edition The Strange Loop Game (note) The Joy Of Creation—300+ hours (Essay) Stage Green/Turquoise Video Game Disco Elysium Breaking Out Of Wage Slavery—Stardew Valley (Essay)

Actualized.org & Leo News Sept 2014: Book List Launched June 2015: Life Purpose Course Launched June 2017: Clarification: Systems Thinking (Essay) Aug 2017: Clarification: Learning = Behavior Change Feb 2018: Off To Hawaii! (Essay) Feb 2018: Hawaii Retreat - Feb 2018 - Pictures! Aug 2018: Correction: Hofstadter On Analogies & Thinking Mar 2019: Leaving On 30-Day Solo Retreat Mar 2019: Back From Retreat June 2019: Integrating Profound Awakening Aug 2019: Additional Video: How To Test For Self-Bias Oct 2019: Actualized Launches On Patreon Jan 2020: Taking a Break (Essay) Feb 2020: Additional Video: Explaining God For Dummies Jan 2020: New Logo July 2020: Additional Video: Deconstructing Property Rights Oct 2020: Actualized.org Now Available On Spotify! Dec 2020: Taking A Break Feb 2021: Update: Back From 2 Month Break April 2021: Update: Where Is The Promised Integrity Episode? (Essay) April 2021: Launch Of New Actualized Channel May 2021: The Charlie and Ben Podcast interviews Leo — Deconstructing Reality, Psychedelic Enlightenment and Spiral Dynamics. Aug 2021: Additional Video: Extra Insights About Good Intentions Sept 2021: Curt Jaimungal Interviews Leo — Infinite Consciousness, God Realization, Free Will, and Love.” (Part One) ⁉️ ♾️ ❤️ — Ego Death, God, Reality vs Dream, TOEs, and an "Ask Me Anything.” (Part Two) ⁉️ ♾️ ❤️ Feb 2022: Update: Taking Down Solipsism Video Feb 2022: Explaining Take-Down & New Awakening ♾️ ❤️

Blog: Table of Contents 2022

Blog: Table of Contents 2021

Blog: Table of Contents 2020

Blog: Table of Contents 2019

Blog: Table of Contents 2017 2018

(A Selection of) Leo’s Blog Essays (Leo has mini essays throughout his blog. A lot of them are great, but they’re easy to miss. Here are my faves on epistemology and enlightenment.) Epistemology ⁉️ 💡 🤔 💭 Jan 2017: What Is A Meta-Source? Jan 2017: Designing a Conscious Robot Feb 2017: Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience 🤯 🧘🏼 Apr 2017: Understanding Karma ❤️ Apr 2017: The One-School Approach To Spirituality 🤯 💪 June 2017: Just Scaffolding Oct 2017: Embarrassing Stupidity Is Good Oct 2017: Taking Existence For Granted ❤️ 💪 Oct 2017: It’s Not All About Enlightenment 🤯 ❤️ 💪 Nov 2017: Advice For Visionaries 💪 ❤️ June 2018: The God Debate 🌈 🌎 ♾️ ❤️ Sept 2019: This Work Is Not About Belief 💪 Sept 2019: Projection Projecting Projection 🌈 🌎 🏛️ Sept 2020: Conscious vs Unconscious Sense-Making ❤️ 💪 Enlightenment 🤯 ♾️ ❤️ 🍄 Jan 2017: Hidden In Plain Sight Mar 2017: Rethinking Hallucination ⁉️ 🍄 May 2017: Why You’re An Addict ❤️ ⁉️ Jun 2017: The Ultimate Simulation ⁉️ ♾️ ⚛️ Jul 2017: The Best Mix For Enlightenment—Concentration & Contemplation ⁉️ 🧘🏼 🌎 Aug 2017: Infinite Water Wiggly ♾️ Nov 2017: Storyland ⁉️ Apr 2019: Quintessence: The 5th Element ⁉️ ❤️ ♾️ Apr 2020: Everything Gained (note) ♾️ Aug 2021: Seeing God In Everything ♾️ Leo’s Retreat & Personal Notes 🏕️ 🧘🏼 🖋️ 🍄 June 2017: Clarification: Systems Thinking (Essay) Aug 2017: Nothing I Say Can Be Trusted Aug 2017: Clarification: Learning = Behavior Change 💪 Aug 2017: I Am Not A Master Sept 2017: The Mathematics Of Devilry (response to What is the Devil?) 🌎 ♾️ Dec 2017: Things I’ve Been Wrong About 🌎 ❤️ Aug 2018: Correction: Hofstadter On Analogies & Thinking Feb 2019: Solo Retreat Notes May 2019: Thoughts On Unconditional Love July 2019: The Highest Purpose Sept 2019: Infinite Intelligence Communication #001

The most recent list of Summaries & Episodes is here ? Leo's Blog: Table of Contents ? ▶️ Blog Videos, Summaries & Interviews ▶️ ? Actualized.org on Psychedelics ? (has all resources on psychedelics) Leo’s “20 Dream Killers” article. There’s an Actualized.org Textbook. It was assembled by @Cepzeu and others. Summaries in the Textbook (v2) will say: (book pg XXX). You can also check out Leo’s Personal Development Blueprint. It covers over 100 concepts in personal development. Actualized.org Youtube Episodes: The first 200 episodes have transcripts in the video section of Actualized.org If you want to contribute to this thread, select one of the episodes that still needs a summary and post it here Episodes: 1 - 249 Episodes: 250 - 514

(Didn't post this properly the first time. Also needed a re-edit.) 440. Summary: How To Forgive Anyone Who Hurt You - A Powerful Trauma Release Exercise “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” -Luke 23:24 Forgiveness is a very powerful tool that can help you heal and reach new levels of consciousness and fulfilment in life. This exercise is a template for how to heal any situation in which anyone has ever wronged you or hurt you in some way. 1) Pick a person and a situation you want to work on forgiving. Probably an immediate family member. It can be a major or minor event, as long as there’s hurt, emotional baggage or lingering injustice. 2) Don’t start with something super heavy or traumatic. This exercise can stir up a lot of repressed emotion and memories. You should see a therapist for super heavy, traumatic stuff. Forgiveness Meditation (Meditation Begins at 7:27) ○ Replay the memory as you’re listening to the guided meditation. If the situation is really painful, you can relive the situation from a third-person perspective to get some emotional distance. ○ Notice your true feelings towards this person as a result of this situation. You might love this person, but deep down there may be some suppressed resentment that you tried to ignore or never fully aired out. ○ Don't try to act tough or pretend like you're invincible. Allow yourself to feel the hurt. ○ Notice the judgments you have. How did he or she fail you? What did you want from them that they failed to give you in this situation? ○ Now ask yourself, do I want to forgive this person for this situation: yes or no? If you don’t, that’s okay, but let’s look a little deeper. (14:00) What does forgiveness mean here? What are you saying yes or no to? Are you willing to let go of what they did to you without holding it against them in anyway anymore? Are you willing to let go of the hurt, the sense of injustice and the need to get even? Are you willing to stop demonizing them? To understand the situation from their point of view? Are you willing to extend your mercy to that person? Why would you say yes to forgiveness? Notice that your hate, resentment and judgment weighs you down in life. Forgiveness will make you stronger. Replay the situation in your mind, considering all these extra factors: Do you want to be a strong person or a weak person? Do you want to be a hateful person or a loving person? Do you want to continue being traumatized? Do you want to clear the air and maybe rebuild that relationship? You can hold on to that resentment until your deathbed, but is that really what you want? Keep looking at this situation until you realize that you want to be strong and not small, which means you want to forgive. So if you're still resisting, keep looking deeper and deeper until your mind realizes that forgiveness is the wisest course of action. If you're unsure, be courageous and take a gamble. After all, if you think the forgiveness was a mistake you can pick your resentment back up later. The Five Reasons People Hurt You Now let's look at the other person's point of view (22:19). Deeply contemplate: why did this person hurt you? Notice that they didn't want to hurt you. Most of the evil stuff people do is just action out of ignorance, fear, selfishness, the need for and lack of love, and lack of consciousness. These are universal truths about human behavior that cover many situations. 1. Ignorance. They were doing their best to do good, but given their limited capabilities the result wasn't good for you. They were ignorant, so their best wasn't very good. If they're in a low state of consciousness what they think is best for you might be the exact opposite. 2. Weakness and Fear. If they did something nasty to you, it's probably because they were weak in that moment. They succumbed to some kind of fear or temptation, therefore they hurt you. 3. Selfishness. 4. Lack of Love and because of that, a desperate desire to get love. Deep down they were lacking in love and they wanted love from you, but because they're ignorant, selfish and weak they didn't know how to properly get the love they wanted. Usually when somebody does something “evil” it's because they want love, but don't know how to get it except through selfish actions. 5. Lack of Consciousness. This was not a high consciousness person. At that time and situation, if the person was in a more developed state, they would have behaved very differently. If you still can't see this, keep replaying and contemplating the situation deeper until you see that this is true. All people are seeking love in one form or another (31:50). Can you see how in this situation this person was not being evil, but actually this person was trying to be good? This person was seeking love in ignorant ways. It might be in the form of money, sex, a relationship, a favour, a business opportunity, fame, pleasure, etc. These are all just different forms of love. You can't just assume that the person is identical to you and should have acted the way you would have. To say “they shouldn't have done that” ignores their entire life history. People are different, so how you handle a situation is very different from how someone else might. People have different strengths, weaknesses, genetics, upbringing, personality, capabilities, talents, experiences, resources, more money, less money, more status, less status, different gender. The Struggle for Love is Universal Now, bring to mind all of the times when you have acted out of ignorance, weakness, fear, selfishness, unconsciousness and a need for love. (36:00) Draw that direct connection, that commonality, between this person and yourself. You weren't hurt because somebody wanted to hurt you. They were just acting out universal dynamics of human behavior. So it's really not personal, and likewise you've done the same thing. It might seem like, “shouldn’t it be obvious that this person hurt me?” Not to that person, because they have a different world view. They're so preoccupied with fulfilling their need for love that they’re unaware of the collateral damage of their actions. That is ignorance and lack of consciousness in a nutshell. Notice how in your life you try to be good most of the time (40:05). Almost never do you intentionally try to hurt others. If you do it's usually accidental, out of ignorance of some kind. Now apply this principle to this person in this situation. Notice that when you do something “bad” in your life, you’re still fundamentally good. The bad that you do is a mistake. It's a failure, an oversight due to your weakness, fear and ignorance. All you ever want is to be good. The problem is it’s difficult to be good. Notice that this person who hurt you is also fundamentally good. They are trying to be good, but doing it through their worldview. Just like you, all this person ever wanted from life was love. If they lied, cheated, manipulated or bullied you, it’s because they wanted love. What we all have in common is that we're all struggling for love. Try to find that common thread between your behaviors and this person's behaviors and really all human behaviors. We all fear. We're all ignorant, selfish and unconscious to various degrees (43:00). Granted, some are less ignorant and selfish than others, but why? It’s because they’re born in different circumstances. Your parents were born in a different time where it might have been much more difficult to survive, requiring them to be more blunt in their approach. You know these limitations intimately, so you should be able to draw a deep, existential, common link between your struggles and the struggles of this person. Fundamentally, the struggle is the same. It just manifests itself in different ways. How can you hold a grudge against this person for being desperate for love when you have been that way your entire life? Are you willing to be so merciful, so strong that you even drop the need to get even? Can you forgive a human for being scared, ignorant, unconscious, wanting love and for trying to be good but failing along the way? A selfish, hurt person wants to get even. A generous, strong person can extend mercy without needing to get even. The highest strength you can possess is to be hurt by another and to not need to retaliate, because you're secure in yourself. A Chain of Hurt Hurt people hurt people (48:20). Notice that if you were hurt, the person who hurt you was probably hurt by someone else. It's a chain of hurt. So, are you willing to be strong enough to break this chain of hurt? Or, are you going to be a link in this toxic chain and pass the hurt on to somebody else? The people closest to you will get hurt the most by the hurt that you refuse to let go of. When you don't forgive, that hurt bubbles up in unconscious, ignorant ways. It affects your behavior and inadvertently hurts others, like your children, spouse and friends. Do you want to infect others like a virus, or do you want to be strong, cut the chain and save somebody else from incurring your hurt? A Conscious Choice You have the option to make a conscious choice, but look at your options (50:45). Do you choose to keep judging this person who hurt you and not forgive them? If so, notice that you're choosing that out of weakness, selfishness, fear and ignorance. On the other hand, you could choose to be selfless and good, to heal yourself and let go of this resentment. To break the chain of hurt, in which case you choose consciousness, wisdom and love over fear. Now that you’re aware of the consequences of your choices, you can make a conscious decision. Do you want to choose fear and selfishness, or do you choose selflessness and love? Don't feel forced here. This has to be a conscious free choice. Are you loving and selfless enough to embrace the one who hurt you? People act out of fear and a need for love, and sometimes they'll cause collateral damage towards you. Will you let that debase you or will you rise above that? Weak or Strong? Are you strong enough to love even when others are too weak to love you, or are you so weak that you're going to wait for others to love you before you extend your love to them (54:00). Are you strong enough to be able to love without requiring your love to be returned back to you immediately? Recognize that if you don't forgive you are being less than your highest self. You are being less than you are fully capable of because you are capable of love. If you reject this forgiveness you're doing so out of fear, the fear of what would happen if you loved somebody who hurt you or somebody who was ignorant. This is the very same cycle that led to you being hurt in the first place by this person. Right now you can consciously break this cycle of ignorance, so make your choice. Whatever choice you make is fine—no judgments. If you still decide not to forgive, then that's just where you're at. Forgive Yourself First Before you can fully forgive the other person you must first forgive yourself (56:20). Forgive yourself for all the times that you have been ignorant, selfish, fearful, unconscious and needy for love. Forgive yourself for all the times that you have inadvertently hurt others. Now why would you forgive yourself for this? Because that's life! Because life has put you in this existential bind where you have to survive and where you start life from total ignorance. Survival is complex, counterintuitive and it takes trial and error to learn how to navigate life. So, are you gonna judge yourself for having been born in ignorance? Others are doing the same thing and this generates the full gamut of life, the highs and the lows. So are you willing to forgive yourself for being ignorant and selfish and fearful and needy for love? Why would you not? If you're able to forgive yourself then notice that you simultaneously forgive the other person as well. There's no difference between forgiving self and forgiving other. You’re not just forgiving a specific situation. You’re forgiving the general universal principles of ignorance, selfishness, fear, unconsciousness and craving for love. These are much easier things to forgive when you frame it in this universal way, because these are like forces of nature. It's sort of like forgiving gravity. Gravity is just a force of nature. It's not personal. People are Different You might know how to cope with a situation in a healthy way but don't assume that others do. (ep: Why People Seem Crazy) eg: Don’t assume that your parents or people from a prior generation to you have that kind of knowledge and wisdom. Your parents couldn't just google how to cope with depression, alcoholism, etc. They weren’t lucky enough to come across personal development, spirituality or awakening. Your parents probably had to suffer through that for 40 years until they had you and then they transferred the hurt onto you because they didn't know better. So, keep replaying this situation with this person until you realize that anything short of total forgiveness in this situation would be beneath you. You are too good and too strong not to forgive this person. If any hurt remains keep going through this process, like a cycle. Just keep contemplating it deeper and deeper and deeper. You may need to do this a few times. Awakening and Forgiveness There's an even deeper version of this exercise for those of you who had some degree of awakening. If you haven’t had that this section might not make much sense (1:03:10). At the existential level, the boundary between self and other is not real. You can do this exercise again, but notice that the person you were hurt by is literally you. So, you hurt yourself. You have been resenting yourself. You were both the hurter and the one who was hurt and the hurt that was felt. Existentially, this hurt happened because both parts of reality, of consciousness, was asleep, divided and fragmented. You merge yourself with the other and notice that you and other are one. You finally reunite the two. You notice that everything is You with a capital y, or God with a capital g. Also, if you've become highly conscious, you know that reality, self and God are completely inevitable. There's no other way that this situation could be, so what happened to you couldn't have been otherwise. It was perfect, because it was necessary for your awakening, and for you to have further and deeper awakenings. You can recontextualize this situation as necessary to make you more compassionate, to overcome the situation, forgive, let go, be merciful and realize a deeper form of yourself as love. If you've had an awakening you know that you are love. So, forgiveness is nothing other than you being love. Love is the expression of the entire universe, such that no matter what happens it is love. There's absolutely nothing to forgive, because everything that ever happened to you was love, and at this point you have accepted yourself completely as what you truly are, which is love! When you realize this, you go full circle. You’re completely whole, healed and nobody can hurt you. You look back and realize that nothing really hurt you, because it was all just necessary for you to learn a deeper form of love. So who got hurt? This last part here is some advanced stuff. If this doesn't resonate with you, just keep working on the psychological level, that’s powerful enough by itself. Future Practice 1) Do this exercise multiple times until you get the hang of it (1:09:40). You can do a simplified version of it. Basically, you’re drawing a commonality between the one who hurt you and you who got hurt. You're bringing the two closer and closer until they merge into a unity that nullifies and cancels itself out. It heals itself in unity. 2) Practice this on multiple significant people in your life (mother, father, siblings, ex spouse, partner). Like those you were closest to in childhood, those who caused the most pain. You have more people to forgive than you think. 3) Practice this on individual traumatic events. What happened with your father when you were 5 years old, 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, etc. It's also going to depend on how traumatic your childhood was. The more ignorant, unconscious, fearful and selfish your parents were, the more trauma and hurt they transferred on to you inadvertently. Therefore, the more work you're gonna have to do to let it all go, but also the deeper your lessons will be. Don't think that if you have all this trauma that somehow you're in some terrible situation. No, the upside to having a very traumatic childhood is that, although it was terrible, if you're able to overcome and heal it all, you will be so powerful, so much more powerful than a person who had it easy. If you work through everything on your plate you can become really strong. Invest in Your Future Make this investment in the future of your life (1:12:40). Doing all this forgiveness work should be enough to cauterize a lot of those old wounds. If you focus, this can take as little as a week or up to a month. Think of how much this is going to free up your life going forward. It’ll free up your family and intimate relationships. It'll make you more loving, easy going and peaceful. Otherwise this trauma accumulates and doesn't get processed fully. It robs you of energy, making you bitter, petty, depressed and cynical. You’ve been so hurt by life that you lash out and want to hurt others, and that cycle perpetuates itself. The Power of Understanding Notice the power of understanding (1:14:30). Draw a connection between how a deep, proper understanding of a situation removes all the baggage and enables you to heal. If you think that reality is this terrible awful thing, that's simply because you lack a high enough, existential understanding of life and other people. If you did, it would heal you and you would be loving. God is mercy because God has infinite self understanding. There's nothing left to forgive, because you completely accept yourself as what you truly are. Which is the Truth, the Absolute and Oneness with the Universe. When you're Everything, what is there to judge? Resentment only exists within duality. Anything you resent would just be you shooting yourself in the foot. Realize that forgiveness is nothing other than self-love, self-acceptance, unity, truth and consciousness. You're so conscious that you have nothing left to hate. To reject the absolute, to reject the inevitable is insanity. A Warning about Forgiveness Don’t use this technique to tolerate some jerk who is actively abusing, mistreating or not appreciating you (1:18:00). To keep excusing and suffering his abuse is a misuse of forgiveness. You being loving doesn't mean you have to be someone else’s slave. That’s a common misunderstanding. Leaving a toxic relationship is love. Acknowledge first that you're in an abusive relationship that’s not going to work out. Muster the courage to leave and then you can practice forgiveness all you want, from a safe distance away from the abuser. You can forgive yourself for getting into this terrible relationship. You can forgive this boyfriend or spouse, but first you must recognize that there’s such a thing as physical and emotional danger. You don't want to use forgiveness to maintain a bad, objectively unhealthy situation. If this person is just totally selfish, abusive, blaming, unwilling to work on himself and communicate with you, you need to leave. The most loving action here is to realize that this person is not right for you and this won’t work out. Psychedelics and Forgiveness Try doing this exercise while doing psychedelics (1:21:25). Psychedelics raise your consciousness and open your mind to God, Love, to the ignorance that others are in and that you’ve been in your whole life. Non-Duality is Not Nihilistic Non-duality is not some dry, cold, philosophical nihilism (1:25:00). With awakening you don't awaken to some bleak, nihilistic reality. You awaken to love. Enlightenment is healing. You become complete, you become God, you become Love. You become whole again. Your birth was like a fracture in universal mind. It gets put back together with enlightenment, or with death. Reality is not this neutral thing that materialists and scientists have taught you to believe. Buddhists also talk about reality being emptiness. Of course love is emptiness, love is nothingness, consciousness is nothingness. It's just that “emptiness” has a lot of bad connotations to it. It's often confused with nihilism. People who've never fully, deeply experienced emptiness don't understand that it's love. That's the miracle of awakening. Awakening is so good that you die by drowning in an ocean of infinite goodness. Then you become nothing. You become God. What kind of sick, twisted universe would this be if it wasn't pure love? The twisted, sickness of it wasn't in the universe itself. It was in your perception of it. So, when you unravel your ego you see reality as it is: just pure love. (ep: The Structure of Reality) Why Work So Hard To Awaken? “But Leo, if awakening and death are the same thing, why work so hard to awaken? I'll just wait to die and it'll be the same thing as working really hard for enlightenment today.” So you want to live a miserable life for the next 50, 60, 80 years where you never see the infinite love that is all around? That’s your life strategy? (1:30:00) Imagine you were born an orphan, but had a 100 billion dollar trust fund. People told you to check your trust fund, but you said, “that’s bs. I'm gonna keep struggling and going to a minimum wage job.” Then on your deathbed you finally check your trust fund and realize it had 100 billion dollars in it. Then you die. That would be the most tragic situation, but that's exactly what you're doing when you're postponing your awakening. Every minute that you're not awake you're living through an unnecessary hell, not realizing the love that is all around you. You could do that if you're a masochist. So, what do you do after awakening? You appreciate the love and then you radiate the love and you participate in the love and that's how life should be. The problem is humans are so scared of love that they spend their whole lives running away from it. God can't force the love on you. God can nudge you, but denial is a very powerful force. As long as you're in denial about truth and full of fear and selfishness, even God himself cannot make you realize that it's all love. You have to open your mind and let go of fear, hurt, frustration, bitterness and forgive yourself and others. Then you will make yourself whole and you'll realize love. That's the point of awakening.

(Reposting because it was in bad need of a re-edit. I wrote the original summary, so I'm referring to my own work, not someone else's, lol.) 476. Summary: "Understanding & Coping With Nihilism” TLDR version: -People think nihilism is depressing, apathetic, and negative, but it isn’t. It's False Nihilism that says life is meaningless so why bother, just be destructive. Destroying something out of spite is attaching negative meaning to it. That’s not meaningless, that’s meaning. -True Nihilism recognizes that because life is meaningless, value is not absolute, but based on your survival agenda. Because value is arbitrary, you are free to question everything you’ve been programmed with. This cleans your slate and lets you build consciously, on a foundation that’s true to you. You get to question and deconstruct everything you know, because it’s all arbitrary anyway. -This is emotionally difficult and confusing to the ego, but it will lead to your authentic purpose and even awakening to God consciousness. -During this nihilistic funk, learn a variety of perspectives to figure out what you want. Cross reference them, Steel-man them. -You will create consciously instead of carrying out some inauthentic, default programming like an ideological robot. You will align with love/passion, and live a life of purpose that’s based on what you truly value and who you chose to be. -Your authentic purpose is your love for life expressed uniquely through you, free of the distortions of social conditioning, helping others to awaken to the truth of consciousness/infinite love/God. -When you're under the illusion that one thing is better or objectively more meaningful than another, you will always suffer because you will seek the better and resent the worse. -If you commit to realizing the Absolute Truth that nothing is better or more meaningful than anything else, you’ll discover that all things are wondrous, good and created by love and consciousness. (ep: Good Intentions II) That frees you up to joyfully explore life and let go of your attachments. _________________________________________________________________ Summary for "Understanding & Coping With Nihilism" “In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.” — St. John of the Cross -What is Nihilism? Which parts of nihilism are true? Which are false? How does it fit with personal development work? What are its limitations and strengths? Society Tends to View Nihilism Very Negatively Dictionary definitions: “The rejection of all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless.” “Extreme skepticism, maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.” “A world view that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless.” “A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.” -Nietzsche's saw Nihilism as a way to clear away all false narratives and religious systems. It wasn't just about destroying all values. It was about creating a clearing on top of which one can build an authentic life, based on one’s true values instead of social conditioning. -How do you know something is true for you unless you derive it for yourself, from first principles? People are attached to society’s programming (religion, science, norms, values, morality, etc). They overlook its limits and problems (inequality, hatred, judgment, violence, etc). -Saying that things should be destroyed because they’re meaningless doesn’t make sense. If something has no meaning, how can it be “bad.” If it’s not “bad,” why would you want to destroy it? To actively destroy something out of spite is to attach a negative meaning to it. That's an extra step the mind has to take. That’s not neutral or meaningless or nihilistic. Nihilism at the turn of the century Nietzsche wrote during the late 1800s, when Judeo-Christian values were starting to unravel (11:35). Spiral Dynamics’ Stage Blue Christian culture was being challenged. Nietzsche was at the forefront of Stage Orange. Refresher on Spiral Dynamics: Stage Blue = Religious. Traditional. Rule based. God-fearing. Stage Orange = Materialistic. Success-oriented. Capitalist. Scientific. Stage Green = Inclusive. Compassionate. Diverse. New Age Hippies. (This part of the episode has been glossed over somewhat) -Many of the axioms, assumptions and frameworks that existed for hundreds of thousands of years started to be questioned. (language, logic, mathematics, science, physics, gender roles, political systems, God, etc) Some people claimed all this change would unravel society and lead to war, disaster and many monstrosities. You could say this is the backdrop against which World War I and World War II occurred. With all this change in this new directionless nihilistic world, how could society best move forward? After a period of nihilism and questioning Stage Blue, we have Stage Orange (materialist, scientific, capitalistic worldview). -With the materialism of Stage Orange comes a pragmatic approach to reality (25:20). The problem with Orange is if there's no higher order values, no God and anything is allowed. That leads to a hollow existence. Life is just about material acquisition, personal comfort and carnal pleasure. Losing spirituality leads to a lack of direction, and because of that society could become very dysfunctional. -With post-modernism, we start to question the idea of an objective reality, that science is the one true explanation for what reality is. After all, scientists are biased in determining what’s worth studying. It cherry picks data and how to interpret and frame that data. Stage Green emerges in the 1950s and 1960s. Nihilism, Feeling Lost and Aperspectival Madness -Stage Green is very difficult on you psychologically and emotionally because you feel lost (32:00). If there’s no objective truth, how do you know which perspectives are beneficial and which are toxic? -Aperspectival madness. If all moral systems are just constructions, programming and social conditioning. If all views are just partial, limited ways of interacting with reality, how do you know which views are the most valid? -Leo went through a phase of being a complete relativist in his teens. He thought neutrality was the closest to truth. He didn’t realize as a teen that there are higher quality ways of looking at things and not every side is equally valid. Later he started to question everything and became very skeptical. After all, if you take even one thing on faith, it can open you up to deep epistemic error. Why Nihilism Gets Viewed Negatively Nihilism Undermines the Ego (39:33) -Meaning and value are not found in the outer world. The ego constructs meaning and value in order to survive and orient itself. eg: Science doesn't prove anything is valuable or meaningful. Strictly speaking, all science does is measure and predict stuff. It tells you where the moon will be next year, but doesn't tell you if the moon is good or bad. -Your survival needs will override any philosophical considerations of nihilism. Humans are caught in an existential bind for survival. You have deep instincts from a billion years of evolution. You are biased against deconstructing meaning. Society is in the Business of Constructing a Civilization (41:55) -Constructions are very useful for survival. Society has a bias and the ego hates when its constructions are questioned. Western civilization is a house of cards built on an unquestioned foundation of axioms and assumptions (metaphysical, epistemic, religious, theological, scientific, linguistic, etc). eg: Money. If everyone saw money as just pieces of paper it would destroy the economy. -Western civilization would rather go with a useful falsehood than the truth. Most people aren't interested in knowing the dollar is imaginary. They just want to use the dollar to buy food. -When your attitude is very selfish, that opens you to all sorts of falsehoods, fantasies, constructions and illusions. These “useful falsehoods” get piled on. You get so lost in all the bs you forget it was just a construction from the beginning. -Dis-illusion: the loss of illusion (46:20). Nihilism leads to disillusionment. Deconstructing the foundations of your mind will lead to an existential crisis. The ego doesn't like this. eg: Why would a scientist who’s invested 40 years into his PhD work do a serious deconstruction of science or academia? How would he will feel if he realized the entire foundation of science and academia is built on illusions, fictions and constructions? -The mind has an infinite capacity for denial and rationalization. It’s interested in survival, not truth. You’re playing ego games, but you think you're being rational and truthful. This stops you from doing a serious investigation into the foundations of your mind and reality. What Nihilism Gets Right 1. Life Has No Meaning and Purpose (50:40) -Because all value is created by the ego, things only have meaning relative to your ego's survival. Meaning and purpose are based on ego and identity. What's meaningful to one person will not be meaningful to another. Buddha is meaningful to Buddhists, but not so much to Christians. In the Catholic Church eating a wafer/eucharist is meaningful. To a Buddhist, or scientist it has nothing to do with being spiritual. The moon has huge value to NASA and very little value to your dog, no matter how much he enjoys howling at it. -If everything is meaningless, why should a good life be any more meaningful than a bad life? After all, some people like to suffer! This means you’re free to pick whatever life purpose you want. 2. All Morality is Relative -There is no “good” without an ego. Morality is based on value, meaning and purpose. All the atrocities of human history were justified as “good” because it helped the perpetrators. -How can something be “bad” if you don't care what happens to you? If you didn't care about being tortured, then it wouldn't be bad. People think that badness is “baked into” the torture. “Badness” is just your reaction to fear, hatred or the pain it causes. Why should pain be bad? If you didn't have pain in your life you'd be dead. -Saying that “death is bad” implies a bias towards life. If life is meaningless, why should you value life over death? You can't have life without death, so if you condemn death then you also condemn life. Everything finite dies. The only thing that doesn't die is the infinite, but the infinite isn't alive to begin with. The infinite includes both life and death. It doesn't distinguish between the two. It also doesn't value one over the other. -If you think you're being rational or scientific by holding these beliefs, you just haven’t thought through them. Science has no opinion. In fact, science would tell you that pain and suffering are useful because it’s how we evolved. 3. All of Reality is Relative There is no objective, external world (59:35). Not just at the cultural level, but the ontological and metaphysical level. You are hallucinating physical reality. (Leo has other videos on this) 4. Reality Cannot Be Known in the Way Humans Try to Know It The universe is infinite and your knowledge is always partial and limited. Your models are just partial perspectives and you will never get the full perspective by acquiring more and more knowledge (Epistemic Nihilism). 5. All Beliefs are Ultimately Untrue (Leo has other videos on this) What Nihilism gets Wrong 1. Nihilism Gives Meaninglessness a Negative Meaning (1:01:48) -Meaningless means the absence of meaning, not the presence of negative or positive meaning. False “lower-case” nihilism: Surface level nihilism that doesn’t go far enough. Says life is meaninglessness and thus “bad.” Can lead to depression, cynicism. Giving meaninglessness a negative meaning is self-contradicting. True “upper-case” Nihilism: Deep nihilism that deconstructs your ego and worldview, so you can create your life and values from a clean slate. -If hearing that “the world is meaningless” means something to you, that's not meaninglessness that's meaning. If you truly realized that life is meaningless, you couldn't be depressed about it. If you're using that as a reason to destroy or be lazy, that’s giving it negative meaning. -False nihilism is just toxic ego. That’s why people intuit that nihilism is maladaptive. You don't want to live in the world as a toxic, false nihilist. If you're angsty and turning into a misanthrope, you need to recognize this not true nihilism. You’re attaching negative meanings and that is ego. It’s also less functional than the ego of those who construct illusions and houses of cards. -You need to take your Nihilism deep enough so it goes full circle into True Nihilism which deconstructs all your illusions. 2. You can't derive an ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is’ -Reality could be completely meaningless and you could still enjoy it (1:05:25). To say that “reality is meaningless” does not mean you ought to do something about it, like destroy an institution or commit suicide. eg: You could be a total nihilist and still enjoy sunbathing in Hawaii with beautiful women, or gazing into the ocean eyes of an Adonis, an exemplar of the Divine Masculine, over a candlelit dinner at sunset, after a day of snorkelling off a glass bottom boat surrounded by cute baby seals, while indulging in fresh roasted macadamia nuts drenched in chocolate, after riding a hot air balloon over a safe but bubbling volcano, flocked by singing doves, and then Mr. Ocean Eyes gets down on one knee and says, “FlyingLotus, you could make me the happiest man in the world by”—sorry, where was I? Yeah, anyway, those things are perfectly compatible with nihilism, meaninglessness and whatever. (It’s not pathetic. It’s a good song!) -Nihilism completely frees you up to be any way you want. The question is: what do you really want? Now if destruction genuinely makes you feel good, I guess you could go for it, but does it make you feel good? Is that really what you want? You might say, "no, that's part of the game. You ought to destroy the system, man.” But, why is destruction better than creation? Shouldn’t nihilism leave you in a neutral position? -The real problem is you’re confused about what you want. If you cleared that up you would be very careful in what you destroy. Certain things need to be questioned and reformed, like corrupt social institutions. However, the desire to take a wrecking ball to everything is a dead end. 3. Nihilism Doesn't Complete the Deconstruction of the Ego into Awakening and God Realization -Skepticism is often misused. False skepticism happens when nihilism is used to destroy everything outside of you, but it's not turned in towards you. -True skepticism is also skeptical of itself. It takes the wrecking ball of nihilism and skepticism and swings it at yourself. It deconstructs your giant ego before you go deconstructing institutions, social systems, science, religion, etc. -Most nihilists Leo runs into have a giant nihilistic ego. Nihilism becomes their ego and identity, but they're not conscious of that. They are contradicting themselves, because when the nihilism gets so deep, the nihilism has to destroy itself too, but most nihilists won’t do that because it’s too threatening for the ego. -The ego co-ops nihilism, which becomes very dysfunctional. Nihilism as a survival strategy in life won’t work out well for you. 4. Nihilism is Stuck at the Level of Concept -It’s not actualized into deconstructing your ego, which leads to true awakening. Mostly nihilism is a belief or philosophy. 5. Nihilism isn’t Political -If you think government is evil, you're not being a proper nihilist. It shouldn’t necessarily lead to anarchy. 6. Nihilism overlooks what happens when you reach the bottom of nihilism -If you go all the way down the rabbit hole of nihilism, you eventually awaken to the absolute. Everything loses meaning, but then you go through the dark night of the soul and the ego dies. Then you awaken to God. -Consciousness is the only real thing. Nihilism is missing the very soul and heart of reality. You are God. God is everything. God is beauty, love, divinity, spirit, goodness, truth, consciousness, all as absolutes. -The paradox of meaninglessness is that when it completely collapses you discover infinite love and absolute goodness, which is everything (1:11:47). Then you’ll realize all those stupid nihilistic beliefs, all those philosophers you read, were all deluded. “I was just using nihilism as a defence mechanism against the realization of what I am as God, as infinite love.” -Then you're no longer depressed. You no longer want to destroy at that point. You fall so in love with yourself and reality that you actually rediscover a higher purpose. Your higher purpose is to help mankind awaken, not because you have to, not because someone told you to, but simply because that's what God would do. That's what consciousness does. Consciousness is a Self-Awakening System -Everything that happens within consciousness is just a means to help consciousness awaken to itself (1:13:00). When you relinquish your selfish needs you lose yourself, then you become a force of the universe for its own awakening. There's a million ways you could do that (art, teaching, engineering, science, politics, etc). Then your life takes on the highest and deepest meaning. -You realize that all meaning is a construction, but awakening is not a construction. The universe awakening to itself is an absolute. So what the nihilist is overlooking is the the existence of the absolute. Many scientific, atheistic and rational people just can't open their minds to the possibility of the existence of an absolute truth. -Consider that you're wrong and that absolute truth does actually exist. This is it. You're in absolute truth right now you just don't realize. Criticisms of Nihilism from Above and from Below Criticism of Nihilism from Below: Fear-based, ego-based, shadow-based. Nihilism will lead to an inability to function in the world. Relativity will lead to total chaos. Society will fall apart without traditional values. The criticism is a defence mechanism from deconstructing the ego. Criticisms of Nihilism from Above: Nihilism is self-defeating and conceptual. When you go all the way with nihilism, you realize something deeper: infinite consciousness, love and God. Before you Critique Nihilism, First Acknowledge its Truths Everything is absolutely groundless and relative. The world is inherently devoid of meaning. All value is self-biased. The trick is that applies to nihilism too. You gotta do the self-reflection, complete the strange loop and realize that your nihilism eats its own tail. The Real Problem with Nihilism: It Doesn't Go Far Enough -You need to take nihilism past ideas and into embodied practice. The ego loves to neuter things that can change your life by turning them into mere ideas or philosophy. -A mystic is just a nihilist who went all the way, who took it from philosophy to embodiment. Spirituality is Nihilism -Spirituality and nihilism are not opposed to each other. Spirituality is just nihilism actualized (1:20:10). -All your attachments were programmed into your mind. It’s all social conditioning (ego, religion, culture, identity, etc). You didn't sit down and choose them consciously. This includes “objective” stuff like science and materialism. Your consciousness is hindered by social conditioning. -Nihilism lets you wipe the slate clean. It allows you to deconstruct the value of everything. From that clean slate you can develop your own meaning in life, your own purpose, your own system of values. You can’t be satisfied in life and inauthentic at the same time. -It's paradoxical, by questioning and deconstructing everything, you will become truly, deeply spiritual. That will make you more spiritual than anyone who professes to be spiritual under the social conditioning model. You will become very authentic, very grounded, strong as an individual and powerful as a leader. -“But values are still meaningless constructions!” Yes, but when you realize you’re in a dream, there's nothing to do but play. Ask yourself: How would I play the game if I was totally free and unattached? If I wasn't coming from neediness, attachment or fear? How do I want to manifest my love in the world, according to my own personal preferences? -You can have preferences but they don’t have to be absolutes. You also don’t have to force them on others. -Knowing that reality is an illusion is the greatest gift, because there's nothing to fear. Construct whatever meanings you want and be honest with yourself that you're constructing them. Construct consciously rather than unconsciously. Becoming Superman -Humans take their own constructions so seriously when it’s mostly ?. -The Superman is living completely from his or her own authentic inner core (1:26:25). His inner motivations run far deeper than anything that society can program. (Nietzsche's Ubermensch) -These are superhuman capacities: infinite intelligence, deep consciousness, living presence. Unlike finite algorithms or social programming. Nihilism and the Hero’s Journey -Nihilism is the belly of the whale in the Hero’s Journey (1:30:20). People invent distractions and excuses to avoid it. Don’t fear it, go through it! -The belly of the whale is the lowest point in the journey. It's your deepest turning inwards to figure out if you have what it takes to defeat your deepest obstacle. The key to victory isn’t a magic sword, it’s your heart and spirit. Is your soul steeled enough to face your deepest inner weaknesses? -The Hero’s Journey is a metaphor for God realization. The hero breaks through to infinite love, brings back the holy grail to his villagers and helps them drink from the cup of infinite love. - You have to be careful because you can go through the journey in a dysfunctional way and end up killing yourself. Being a hero is more difficult than living in mediocrity, going to your nine-to-five job. (ep: Dangers of Spiritual Work) Nihilism is Nothing -The tragedy for the false nihilist is they never realize that God is nothing. God is an infinite, loving nothing. -The Godhead’s Nothing is an infinite shapeshifter with no shape. An eraser that can erase itself. Nothing is not non-existence. Nothing exists. Non-existence does not exist. There’s no such thing as non-existence because there's only existence/consciousness. eg: The Holy Spirit. Consciousness. Nirvana. Shunyata. Teotl. Fana. Shiva. The Groundless Ground. Mu. The Tao. The Force. -If your worldview is as true as you believe, deconstruction can't harm it. Why are you so threatened by nothing? It takes enormous humility to question everything you know. -The devil co-opts spiritual truths to put on a facade of spiritual work. It’s the ego, scared of losing itself and all of its constructions. (ep: What is the Devil) Some of the biggest devils portray themselves as the most spiritual. Practical Tips The problem is you can't find yourself unless you lose yourself first (1:45:20). So, how do you deal with the relativity, neutrality and multi-perspectivalism of the nihilistic process? 1. Distinguish Between Relative truth and Absolute truth -Science, religion, culture, etc may not be Absolutely True, but they can be true about some things (Relative Truth). (ep: Relative vs Absolute Truth) eg: The absolute truth is that all is One, but the relative truth is that the US has a two party system and you can only vote for one. So, which is more aligned with your values? -I still have preferences even though God loves everything equally. I may want a passionate life, but not because it's absolutely true or God is forcing me. Wanting a passionate life is valid, in and of itself. -Leo has many episodes on Absolute Truth. The Structure of Reality episode is a good one among many good ones. 2. Know that your Preferences and Biases Aren’t Objective Truths -If you admit they’re relative, you don’t have to play defensive games anymore. Being honest about your preferences and selfishness stops you from grounding it in a made up story that pretends to be “objective” (genetics, science, religion). You’re freed from ideology. eg: “I’m Christian because I was born in Texas where Christianity is popular and I enjoy Jesus because I know him better than other gods.” versus “People who don’t believe in Jesus are bound for hell.” 3. Study Lots of Perspectives -Do a lot of studying during your nihilistic funk. Date around without marrying the first perspective you meet. This could last 2-5 years. (books, videos, retreats, teachers, traditions, etc.) -Not all will be equally good or bad. You’ll have biases. You will be confused and that's okay! You can play them off each other and cross reference them. 4. Distinguish Between Lower Quality vs Higher Quality Perspectives 5. Don’t Get Stuck in Neutral or the Default -Not choosing is a choice. Life is an existential bind where you must act, you must choose. You can’t align with perfect neutrality. -You’re Not a Blank Slate. You have a default position no matter what because of social programming. If you don’t choose, that is what will run the show. 6. What you Want is the Good Life. -Watch Leo’s episode on The Point of Life. It's really good, especially if you care about Life Purpose. -Be the excited kid with millions of lego pieces. Experiment with building many things. Get inspired by different legos and other people’s unique creations. Follow Your Bliss. Don’t be the bitter kid with only 100 pieces, who builds what everyone else builds, who is close-minded about which pieces to use, who debates and hates creations and creators that are different. 7. Embrace Confusion -Trust the process. Don’t view confusion as negative. Your ego is scared of uncertainty. (ep: How to Deal with Confusion) -Play with ideas, play with life, have fun ?. Verify different perspectives for yourself. You’re building your own epistemology from scratch by questioning everything. It’s a very healthy thing to do. Signs that a Perspective is Higher or Lower -The big difference is selfishness vs. selflessness (2:05:55) . Lower Perspectives: Selfish. Based in fear, hatred, judgment, violence. Us vs Them. Uses emotion, dogma and ideology to demonize the other side. Close-minded, clings to attachments. Doesn’t take in new information. Tries to monopolize other perspectives. Ignores other perspectives, “All other perspectives are stupid. Just focus on my perspective.” Unaware that it’s subjective, that it’s just a perspective. Thinks it represents “reality." Also rejects parts of reality that don’t confirm its biases. Higher Perspectives: Selfless, courageous, loving. Open minded, curious, playful, interested in exploring more perspectives. Nuanced and sophisticated. Intellectually honest and rigourous. Systemic, meta and holistic. Self-aware. Higher perspectives are aware they are a subjective perspective among many. Non-monopolistic. Doesn’t claim to be the only valid perspective. Inclusive. Higher perspectives understand and include the Lower perspectives, but not vice versa. Higher perspectives can Steel Man lower perspectives. Lower perspectives cannot steel man higher perspectives. Find the Good in All Perspectives. Try to Steel Man Different Perspectives It’s the opposite of a Straw Man. Steel Man: Challenging your opponent’s best argument. Watch for how a perspective tries to lock you in. -Do they let you study other perspectives? For example, the scientific community will discredit you for studying the paranormal, new age or religion. Fear vs Love If a perspective is coming from fear, it's false. If it’s coming from love it's true (2:12:45). That’s because truth is Love, there's just many degrees of love/truth. If you commit to the path of raising your consciousness, you can discover the Absolute Truth that nothing is better or more meaningful than anything else, because all things are wondrous, good and created by love and consciousness. (ep: Good Intentions II) When you are under the illusion that one thing is better or objectively more meaningful than another, you will always suffer because you will seek the better and resent the worse. Love is its own reward. Surrender to love, beauty and truth. Live your life like it’s a work of art. Work towards that love with courage and purpose. Your authentic purpose is just your love for life expressed uniquely through you, free of the distortions of social conditioning.