Space Lizard

I've probably had covid many times already and didn't notice. As someone who keeps my immune system strong with a healthy lifestyle, I'm not worried about this virus and see no reason to get tested. If anything, the stress of testing positive would probably just make things worse. So much of health is in the mind; the modern medical industry, by spreading fear and a mentality of dependency on drugs and vaccines, is actively harming public health on a global scale, imo. Notice that places where the modern medical industry hasn't fully penetrated, like African countries where almost no one is getting vaccinated or tested, have almost no covid deaths. Interesting how that works, isn't it?

You should find a place for John Michael Greer, one of the most brilliant systems thinkers around, imo. Not sure where he fits in your scheme; he combines many ecological/historical/occult schools of thought, influenced by people like Nietzsche, Spengler, Manley P. Hall and Joseph Tainter. Greer is a genius at shooting down the narratives of fashionable modern intellectuals, while showing how ideas rejected by the "Religion of Progress" are highly relevant to our times. It's brilliant stuff, imo; real high level, worldview-changing, timeless thinking. See The Next Ten Billion Years or a recent piece, Tomorrowland Has Fallen, for examples of his thinking.

Why is there no middle ground? We've never been united and never had universal peace, but there's more humans alive than ever. Your statement is pure binary thinking, with no basis in reality that I can see.

Yes, that's a great way to put it. The Religion of Becoming/Progress is all about projecting one's ego into imaginary futures, rather than living in the here and now. Its basic values are Egotism and Hubris--we can be whatever we want to be, and bend the world to our wills to please our egos without limits; we are gods. I think this age of hubris ends when we encounter the limits of this worldview--huge environmental problems, natural disasters, resources shortages, technological apocalypse, societal breakdown or other catastrophes that demonstrate how unlike gods we actually are. Hard to say when this will happen, but I see signs of it already.

You can create your own purpose, unless your purpose is to find an external, objective purpose and source of meaning to follow, in which case you are out of luck. When we speak of “purpose”, we generally mean “what something was created for”. The purpose of a screwdriver is to turn screws, because that’s what its creator made it for. To find the purpose of human beings, ask what their creator made them for. If you don’t believe humans have a creator, then they don’t have a purpose. So there’s no point in looking for a purpose if you don’t believe in an external creator (e.g. God), and any purpose you try to create is going to be subjective and not your actual purpose, just an arbitrary thing you decide to do. The only way out if you’re an atheist, imo, is to stop looking for a purpose and just accept that life is its own purpose.

Yes. Becoming vs. Being. Progressivism vs. Traditionalism. It's a profound divide in the human psyche. It has gotten way out of balance in the modern age, with its emphasis on achievement, improving yourself and fixing the world. I think the next age will be much more conservative, as we re-learn how to value being again instead of always being on the hamster wheel of becoming.

LOL, again, how do you know this? The Western media makes things up all the time (remember Saddam's WMD's? The Trump/Russia collusion hoax?) Try thinking critically. Also try travelling. You sound very naive. It's an ideology; an abstract model, not to be confused with reality. Is this forum for people who blindly believe in models and media, or people who think critically?

You might want to base your opinions about countries on more than what's reported in Western media or some abstract metaphysical model. You are just talking ideology and propaganda until you have some actual experience to back up your opinions.

I'm not convinced that life is all that great, but I do enjoy nature. The forests, rivers, mountains and animals where I live always recharge me when I'm tired of people and all their crazy BS.

People like you are the solution--young people who refuse to have their youth taken from them by people who fear death more than they love life. You don't defeat terrorism by cowering in fear, and you don't defeat a virus by not living. Demand your life back; go out and live. Tell all the old death-fearing authoritarians to go to hell. They can't stop you from living, and don't have the right to even if they could.

I guess he's talking about where Western ideas about individualism and liberty came from, which aren't shared by most of the world's cultures. John Locke was one of the first philosophers of liberalism, which is what this philosophy is called. Thomas Jefferson established a new nation based on that philosophy. It has been very successful, but it has its problems. I'm reminded of a quote by Ken Wilbur about how the Declaration of Independence was really a declaration of egotism freed from traditional spiritual constraints. The way I see it, the USA was the first Luciferian society, based on glorification of ego, individualism and the overthrow of religious traditions. BTW, Terence McKenna was a bit of a crackpot who probably smoked too much pot. Whatever happened to his "timewave zero" prediction of a "singularity" in 2012?

How do you know this? Have you lived in both countries? I have, and I disagree. Both have their problems, their strengths and their weaknesses. There's no way to determine which side is "more conscious"; it's just a statement of personal bias.

Here's what the West brought to Afghanistan: teaching women about the importance of urinal art! So it's not hard to see why the West lost in Afghanistan. This is a civilization that actively works to destroy healthy values and spreads depravity wherever it goes.

I'm grateful that I never spend any time talking about what I'm grateful for, or being around others who do.

It's explainable from evolutionary psychology. Men are reproductively incentivized to take risks and be outrageous, because if they succeed they can have harems and large numbers of offspring. So they value risk-taking, competition and freedom. The successful male risk-taker gets all the women. This explains why men are more prone to extremes in general (intelligence, politics, behavior, etc.) Women are incentivized to be safe and seek social consensus, because they have to bear and rear children, and can't have harems. There's no reproductive pay off for women to take risks, be extreme and value freedom like there is with men.