Dabidoe

I think focusing on the here and now, what you like doing today, what you're interested in is going to be more fruitful than pondering on your greater impact. Building skills is always a fruitful activity, even if it doesn't "Make sense" for what you think you're goals in life are. The act of being in the moment putting your all into something you're engaged in is a great use of time and will help you feel better. You never know when your collection of mini skills will build on eachother into a "talent stack." I've gone through periods of life (and going through a bit of one now) where I don't really know what the hell to do next. I think getting caught up in the thought storms can be very painful and make you question everything about your life. The solution is to act in spite of feeling, not living in fear. I made my first linkedin post this week and it made me realize "what the hell was I afraid of"? I no longer really give a shit about getting a real job (I'm an "entrepeneur", run my own video production company and do some fix 'n' flip stuff for $) so why not just stop giving a fuck? All the ideas in the world about making your epic impact are cool and all but realistically everything begins in the here and now, the doing. By flexing the muscles of "doing" rather than just ruminating on possibilities you will be more effective into achieving a grander purpose. Just live your life one step at a time and give yourself some self love and permission to just draw kitty cats or screw around if you're enjoying it!

I think this is just yet another example of people who take themselves too seriously failing to attempt humor. It's got some moments but humor + lectures don't mix well. He seems a little off his rocker just full on culture warrior, would be nice if he came back down to earth instead of right-wing radical thought leader.

It's clear given the state of the world that people are self organizing into smaller and smaller factions with increasing amounts of hate towards one another. Do you think the internet has just shoved too many "different POVs" that before the internet would have had a geographical limiting factor? It seems that the extreme right/left are citing the worst case examples broadly onto larger less extreme POVs that they otherwise would not have. A good example of this was the comments section of Lex Fridman's interview with Jared Kushner. A lot of people were culturally programmed to have one POV on the guy (as the son of satan) and were surprised that he wasn't a raving lunatic and could string together a few sentences with clarity and thoughtfulness. Assuming we can understand hatred and division what do you think is the solution? Is it an immutable part of the world that we divide and fight or just an ugly blip in history?

@Basman That's interesting. So do you think that hate is fundamental a tool for survival? Would hate be lessened in a post-scarcity world or would people find different resources to hate one another over?

A video about the techniques, theories and warnings about discovering and connecting with your true self and develop a clearer self awareness of your self as a whole (how do you know what's real vs. ego/imaginary?.) I would like to know specific meditation, contemplation and journaling practices for connecting with and finding my true self. Not sure how much of this is covered in the life's purpose course as I have not done that. How does one properly write one's "life story" and what should one focus on? Emotional memories, objective (ie: in third grade I did...) and what through lines do you focus on to write the narrative? How can you use this self-discovery to forge a stronger self-identity?

This seems antithetical to your expressed identity of being good and moral but go with peace my brother.

I agree. There is very much a negativity bias. Child poverty is down, internet is creative a collective consciousness while very rough on some levels is universally a great thing that's uniting humanity. Facts matter, what are you Ben Shapiro? Does bias matter? Are you really saying ugly people are naturally more hateful of hate or hate makes people ugly? Based on the mind body connection I suppose the latter makes some sense but looks are genetic no? Shell Silverstein isn't exactly Brad Pitt but the guy wrote some beautiful poems and childrens books, not quite Jihadi.

I'm not necessarily interested in awakening in the way others are describing it to be honest. There seems to be an airy-fairy self important vibe that doesn't appeal to me. I greatly cherish my moments of deep insight and understanding, but communicating them seems to be like pissing in the wind a bit. I don't have the right words and seems to fall on deaf ears. In my truly introspective moments I am able to see my "self" as a construct, a set of experiences and DNA behaving semi-autonomously outside of what I guess others are describing as consciousness which I think I mislabeled. That said you are still stuck being your "self" right, you don't awaken yourself out of having to walk to the bathroom correct? On Psychedelics and deep meditation I suppose to use the parlance of the group "My consciousness sees my lower self" and I have an intuition that the consciousness while invisible on some levels is also a universal force that's tied to love. That said I do not want to have conversations with 99.99% of people about this as it seems to diminish the truth behind it trying to explain it to people who seem to have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm sorry, can't really understand this message. Is it intentionally vague?

Sure. Can you imagine how boring Star Wars would be if it was Yoda and Obi Wan sitting in the council talking about how chill everything was?

According to Huberman Lab the negative effects of weed start at over 2/month. That said, as someone who abused the hell out of weed my whole life and paid for it (age 14-36...) I completely agree with the statement below

Thank you for saying this. I think a lot of people get a little huff of what "higher perspective" could be and start waxing poetic like Moses on Mt. Sinai. The movie Silence is probably my favorite meditation on this subject. Portugese missionairies go to feudal Japan to help persecute christians and are horrified by the cruel religious persecution and "question God's silence." God can't speak, but does he influence the world? Who knows, we can only just have faith that if we are good in our own lives it will help the world. Personally I think that "evil" has a purpose the way light creates shadow etc. It might not be pleasant but in the grand scheme of the world the purpose of evil can be a lesson to inspire greater good. The same way that suffering creates joy, by contrast "sunny days wouldn't be special if it wasn't for rain" to quote the honorable prophet 50 Cent.

Succinct!

I uh, have no words for this lol, but my intuition is hate is a little more than skin deep. After all Che Guevera isn't on a bunch of t-shirts because of his ideology and that guy sure lit up a lot of people. There are some great points in this thread but I think it's clear the lowest hanging of fruit is starting with your own behavior and beliefs. It seems that pain, isolation and hate are all fruit of the poison tree. We conform to groups even though those groups seem to isolate us from the broader humanity. I'm a jew that has friends in Israel and it took me reading hundreds of comments of people saying awful things, true things and more to make me realize there is good and bad in both arguments and that the real enemy is people of all sides behaving like pieces of garbage. Would a resource-rich future (post-scarcity) help solve this? It's feasible that we can build enough robots to build enough homes for every human (on this planet or beyond) and grow enough food... but will we destroy ourselves before we get there? Either way, I just want to find peace within myself so at least I don't get all triggered and annoyed unnecessarily at the unavoidable stream of hate and lunacy dominating the "zeitgeist."

There was a good series on mental health with Paul Conti and Andrew Huberman where Paul stated that the subconsciouss makes up 95% of who we really are. That rang true to me given that so much of my life has had confusing, logically unexplainable events that can only really be explained by motivations driven by my subconscious. So on an abstract level I can understand all of that. I have a specific DNA, epigenetic triggers, life experiences that influence the fabric of my existence. The structure of my subconscious mind seems to be affected by all of that. Does the "subconscious" in any way relate to the "cosmic conscious" mind that they speak of in spirituality? Is the self (sub + conscious) just a different interface/ or "mask" for the cosmic consciousness?

How can we really tell what a false belief or identity is? I like to think I try to be a good person, reject group think etc... but I'm seeing that a lot of people feel that way are doing awful things in the world. I get angry at people who say bad things, but other people probably would get angry at me for my beliefs. Are there universal truths that are "more good than bad"? I think religion seems like a stabilizing and unifying force on some levels (spiral dynamics blue > red) but there's also so many examples of hate and division within religion. So... should we just accept that the world's an imperfect place filled with hate as best we can?

I think a lot of people put the cart before the horse with this spiritual work. You need to have a solid foundation as a human being before you should attempt to go out into the world and make change. Jesus was a carpenter first after all...

I've had some very strange insights on this I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. From a scientific perspective is the "one who listens" the deeper self and the "one who talks" just an operating system? On some level we're all just a collection of 37 Trillion cells or whatever. So is consciousness just an operating system a "GUI" if you will? I've listened to enough actualized/deepak/others to agree with it in concept but wanted to think about it for myself. I can't help but think (and had some insights meditating/psychedellics) that there is a silent controlling force to the entire world (maybe even elementary particles?) which would make logical sense given that we're technically all relatives of a big ball of matter that just popped into the universe in a trillionth of a second (big bang.)

Ad block extensions are worth their weight in gold! Youtube claims they're going to stop them but there are ways around this. Hoes are precious! Completely agree, just parroting other people's opinions is not going to give you any insights into the nature of yourself, only a member of a different group. Then again, not everyone's cut out for independent thought (maybe just due to conditioning, but seems like there are alot of dumbdumbs out there.) I don't agree with Leo about everything but I respect that he is speaking from within himself as opposed to just using a bunch of spiritual group think buzz words or trying to sell us some supplements.

@Hugo Oliveira Sent! @DianaFr Thank you for your great advice... I recently stopped smoking pot (was doing at work ) which has helped but I can see there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of both self discipline and self care. @MarkKol? I have a girlfriend, she has a job I have a job... Also man no offense but I wasn't making this post to argue about religion. Jewish culture is thousands of years old and by definition has some backwards elements. While I think the subject is very nuanced you do have a point about the Middle East being a far more "Spiral Dynamics Red" type mentality. It is what it is... That said Tel Aviv is a very culturally advanced metropolitan place and everyone I met there was amazing. Jewish people might be kinda dickish and rude (some guy bumped into me and said "EXCUSE YOU!" lol) but they were far less spiritually dead and far more inclusive and communal as a culture than America. When I came back I was in Penn Station room full of nearly a hundred people all silently looking at their phone, a stark contrast to bright loud social Israel.

I have been having a fucking hard time focusing on work (video editing, building my video production business) working alone in my studio. I keep wasting time on reddit and twitter because I am so emotionally triggered by what's going on in the world. I know that it's my fault, that I have agency, that I can just log out... but my emotions are fucking with me. I have friends in Israel (I'm jewish went there on birthright) and I am sickened by the amount of hatred I'm seeing for my people (the punch a nazi crowd is stunningly silent - people are literally saying "hitlers bad but... had some points.") I respect anyone's right to criticize the actions of the Israeli government, violence against civilians and genuinely feel horrible for the Palestinians. Does that mean my friends lives are meaningless, that we jews are beyond redemption? Anyway back to the point. Does anyone have any suggestions for powering through negative emotions working alone?

People have to realize it's a muddy line - but Israel goes off a good metric "would Nazis have killed you for associating you as a jew?" It's kind of pointless to argue ancestry of a 5,700 year old tribe (genetic drift much?) but if you adopt the culture, convert then you are technically a jew. You are also technically a jew if one of your grandparents were genetically Ashkenazi/Saphardic (or Ethiopian) even if your athiest/different religion. I wish people who knew jack shit on the subject would stop flying off at the mouth about it, but that's pretty hard to avoid on any topic on the internet.

The US defied international law and killed over half a million civilians in our war directly, and even more indirectly in our "wars" that went on for 20 years, and nobody made a fucking peep about it. We literally left 30,000 people who risked their lives for decades to help us in the middle of the night to be brutally raped and beheaded. The hypocrisy of the argument that Israel is uniquely bad in their methods of killing terrorists seem to be largely aligned with the general consensus that "evil jew do bad." That said they've gone way too far. I agree that they've definitely overstepped their bounds and are not "reading the room" that they need to slow the fuck down and form a new plan. Jocko Willink discussed it and said "even though it's gonna suck to sacrifice your own people to try and protect terrorists (like we did) you have to go out of your way to show you're trying to save lives to prove your side is worth fighting for." I have friends there on the ground and all of them are scared and angry, which is a horrible place to make tactical and strategic decisions. Netanyahu is a plague on that country...

Thanks for posting this. It's so disheartening reading all these comments that completely justify barbarism... barbarism that literally is counter productive to their stated goals. I wish people would realize that the solution to war is not more war, but alas. God bless this man for having the courage to speak out.

Is it safe for those with bipolar disorder to try psychedelics? I had a relatively small amount of mushrooms on an empty stomach and seemed to have a manic burst followed by a dark paranoid/depressive crash (that very quickly ended after a BM) a decade ago and haven't tried since. Anyone have any information on this subject?