Xonas Pitfall

Question: There are some puzzling contradictions I find . . . related to the idea of absolute truth and certain claims Leo has made. If someone becomes more “purified” or ”cleansed” through realizing absolute truth, they are supposedly supposed naturally want to let go of negative desires, such as lying, predatory behaviour, psychopathic tendencies, etc. However, also according to Leo’s blog posts, a person would not gain miracles or special powers because wanting miracles or higher enlightenment would be selfish. In other words, wanting God to give you powers would still be ego. How does this follow? In the same way they accept the truth that they cannot perform miracles or be a "higher form of a healer", couldn’t they also accept darker truths about themselves and continue being such free of conscience instead of automatically becoming morally purified? If enlightenment does not give you access to some aspects of God’s power, then why would enlightenment give you access to any kind of purification or separation from your desires (especially for people who are born with antisocial predispositions, psychopathic traits, pedophilic attractions, or extremely strong lust, etc)? In both cases, you are still acting as a human and accepting that you are human, and that this is your current truth. If someone claims that enlightenment makes you more aligned with God, meaning you develop a desire to be more like God, then why would that only apply to qualities such as being more truthful, pure, honest, or loving? Shouldn’t it also be reasonable to desire other god-like abilities, such as having powers to heal, bending reality in evermore magical ways, or creating things? Leo himself has said that this is one of the aspects of God: it does not need any “behind-the-scenes” atoms, physics, or rules. According to him, God can simply spawn things directly into existence in a single moment, without any underlying mechanism or separation between hallucination and reality. Why would the second type of desire be considered silly, wrong, or unrealistic, while the first type is treated as valid or expected?

You can definitely derive truth from scratch, but you first have to define what “from scratch” means. If it means starting from fundamental principles or from reality itself, then the only truth left, I would say, is A = A, or correspondence. That is all you need for truth; in a sense, that is truth itself. From there, you can try to derive other aspects of truth. A = A implies Solipsism. A = A also implies Love. A = A implies Purity, Truth, Unity, All, and God. It also implies Identity, the Self, and the “I am.” However, when you deal with more relative notions, it becomes more difficult. Then questions of preference arise: which biases should survive? Should the more truthful bias even survive, and how would you determine what counts as more truthful? How do you filter for a truthful bias when you do not have all the available information, intentions, or self-awareness and clarity? This is definitely problematic.

Yes! Although, to play devil's advocate a little. . . , I would definitely say there is some aspect of us that has a more genuine insatiable curiosity (if you are the type of person who values it) to see more in depth, to understand “the actual source of things” and how they came to be. A good example would be someone who could easily remain religious because it provides community, guidance, love, a pre-given sense of meaning, and a feeling of control or context in the world, yet still chooses to question and deconstruct further. Similarly, someone might have the option to pursue a career focused on accumulating the most power or money but instead chooses a path that feels more authentic to who they are. Of course, you could argue that both choices are still driven by a desire for control or happiness. In an absolute sense, they fall into the same category. The place where you feel the safest and most grounded is often the place where you feel most authentically seen, loved, and aligned with your own truth. Ideally, it is also the place that supports your survival without requiring you to compromise your authenticity. In that sense, seeking that alignment is the best option from a survival standpoint, from a sense-of-control standpoint, and from a more spiritual truth perspective as well. - But I definitely agree with the OP: there are many traps people can fall into when they repeatedly claim to be aligned with the truth or its source. A lot of the time, both from a more “tough love” and “spiritual” perspective, people sometimes use the label of “I am just being truthful” to push their own bias and agenda, or even to be harmful. One thing I also noticed Leo doing in his posts is using “truth” to promote or call things ugly that he personally does not feel drawn to or like. Even though he might say, “Oh well, this is all relative,” it is interesting what he calls out and what he does not call out, or what he says is aligned or not aligned with truth. I feel like this is one of many traps someone can fall into once they claim they “know the truth.”

Hopefully he replies to the explanation . . .

Sure! You claim masculinity is more predisposed to truth. Yet much (most) of the corruption you’ve described, and much of what we see historically and today, has been driven largely by men operating within systems shaped by male power. Women and minorities were often prevented from acting freely and forced into subservient roles, while men had far more freedom and authority. If masculinity is supposedly more oriented toward truth, why has that power so often produced corruption instead? In fact, if you were truly a caring guru, wouldn’t you want to open education and retreat centers to share that truth with everyone, especially those you consider more vulnerable or emotional? You wouldn’t seek to control or subordinate them. What kind of “God's Love” would that even be? You even said it yourself: But who are these psychopaths you’re talking about? If they are mostly men, how does that support the claim that masculinity is more truth-oriented? And who, historically, has restricted women from pursuing truth in the first place? In fact, didn’t many religious leaders, spiritual gurus and philosophers either prevent women from participating or genuinely believe they were incapable of it? That often justified greater subordination while restricting women’s access to knowledge and agency. Does that really sound like a system made up of people more aligned with truth, love, sovereignty, and autonomy? You can’t claim masculinity is more spiritual or more oriented toward truth when many of the corrupt systems we see today were largely built and run by men with power and freedom to shape them. You can’t selectively highlight positive traits while ignoring the disproportionally negative ones. And you can’t rely on the argument that “well, women gave birth to them.” Just as you might thank your mother for care, safety, and love, but you wouldn’t usually credit her as the sole source of your spiritual identity or beliefs. In the same way, you can’t fully credit or blame women if children turn out antisocial. Are you seriously going to argue it’s their mothers to fully or mostly blame who turn them into power-hungry antisocials? That argument doesn’t hold. -- You argued in your blogposts that there have traditionally been more male gurus because women wouldn’t leave their children behind to pursue enlightenment. You said: How is this a good point for men? Imagine if we flipped the scenario: women are far more suited for truth because which woman would go fight a war to protect her family? That action is far more suitable for a man than a woman. To prioritize truth over everything and everyone else is a hell of a thing, and it comes more naturally to women than men. That’s why nature allowed men to be stronger, to fight and protect, while women focus on spirituality, and actual truth-seeking. Who’s really facing the true, harsh reality of survival here? The one who’s protecting something so vulnerable, just after giving birth, in a jungle, while struggling to keep a newborn alive? It's funny how convenient it is to abandon your wife and children in the name of "spiritual seeking," and then turn around and claim she’s the delusional one. You can’t flip-flop and nit-pick these arguments. You can’t say men are "more hardcore" because they go to war "Grrr... raw survival, protection, pragmatism, guns, bombs, aghhh!" and value truth for that, but then say that they leave their families to go sit in a cave, abandoning the women to take on the brutal, life-or-death responsibility of caring for the child. How does that make sense? How does that follow? --- You seem to shift between frameworks. Sometimes masculinity is aligned with Truth for ruthless realism (war, domination, survival). Other times it is praised for detachment from survival (leaving everything behind for truth). These standards conflict with each other. In the Zionism example as well, you were quick to dismiss identity as “silly”. If brute realism is the rule, then the stronger side asserting control is exactly what your framework predicts. So telling them to “just drop it” contradicts your own premise. You are being idealistic. It’s their own hierarchy of identity and culture that shapes what they believe should belong to them. But when someone critiques hierarchies like patriarchy for causing harm, you frame them as pragmatic, necessary and inevitable. There's more, but for now . . .

Agreed. Although, it’s difficult to ignore the bias when one approach is more easily brought up than another, yet not in other scenarios. But all good.

To clarify, I’m not arguing against that - ideally yes. I’m pointing out contradictions in how you appeal to truth and what truth is in a given scenario. I hope I made it clear in the above comment.

Leo: “A 3,000- to 4,000-year-old Near Eastern nation of Jewish people, with their own culture, religion, etc., should just drop their identity. Being Jewish is some bullshit humans made up. Easy! People shouldn’t just kill and harm each other over some cultural identity.” Also Leo: “I don’t waste my time with utopian nonsense. These people have no clue how the world is run. Hippie fantasies. Bad situations need real solutions, not fantasies.” Also Leo: “Raw power wins. Women do not have the ruthlessness to dominate the world and lead armies and gangs. Whoever can enslave and rape the most people wins.” You can’t have it both ways. If power rules, identity will persist wherever it’s backed by strength, so asking people to just abandon it is unrealistic. If morality rules, then appeals to domination as inevitability (like patriarchy vs. matriarchy) don’t hold up. And the idea that “one causes harm and the other doesn’t” doesn’t really work here either, because both claims rely on selective standards about when harm matters or not. Understanding Double Standards & Hypocrisy. Sentences like this too: You can’t appeal to “brutal survival truths” as The Truth when it suits the argument and then switch to detachment / surrender as The Truth when it doesn’t. If survival logic applies, it should apply consistently. If moral "Higher Good" restraint applies, that should be consistent too. Otherwise the standard just shifts with convenience.

That’s true, but again, this is exactly the kind of thinking that can be used to justify all kinds of heinous actions. I agree that, ultimately, it may not matter in an absolute sense; however, when dealing with relative, current real-world issues, you need some shared direction, bias, or agreement. Truth alone will not provide a concrete solution. Until that is acknowledged, people keep engaging in armchair criticism of corruption or living in the delusional fantasy that they, or anyone else, can simply let go of all pain, attachment and suffering.

I agree, but that is why it should be applied carefully in finite situations. I really hope I am making sense. Because if you say that, then I could respond: if being fundamentally finite separates us from truth or God, and we can never be fully good, then why not collectively destroy the Earth and claim that this is the “highest truth”? We would simply return to infinity and endless love. And this would be correct. By that definition, it fully follows; and if it does, then you end up with undefined conclusions and answers about what should be said or done, to whom, when, and what should be promoted. You would need to acknowledge some form of relative moral reasoning, such as “humans should survive and feel good” or “we should avoid imposing drastic changes, since people value comfort and survival”, if you want to claim any kind of moral organization or social structure.

These type of statements are exactly what I mean. It's too detached from the reality of one’s current human self and unrealistic. Unless you are speaking from the perspective of an “ultimate” transcendent self, these statements risk being unproductive and impractical.

I definitely agree with it, but you have to consider questions like who decides who gets to live, who pushes which culture onto whom, and which biases shape people’s lives. Otherwise, it becomes a form of detached armchair philosophizing and criticism. That's all. Fundamental truth alone will not help you decide whether you should starve and kill yourself rather than kill an animal if you were a caveman in Africa desperately needing food to survive. It also would not fully settle whether your country should fight another that is threatening to completely wipe out your people. Do you simply let the powerful and selfish win in order to prevent violence, even if that means the destruction of everyone? You can use truth as guidance in the sense of trying to act as humanely as possible. But who decides which culture should be propagated more, and who controls or enforces that in practice?

This is very much a fantasy. We all have attachments and biases toward things we would not easily let go of; at the very least, we would fight for them. You cannot make statements like this because they are too reductionistic and fail to address the complexity of the issue. It is like saying, “I don’t care whether I am poor or rich, since I am always rich in my mindset.” This may be technically true in some abstract sense, but denying that you would have preferences or resistance, such as preferring wealth over poverty, or being stolen from or having nothing would be unrealistic.

I completely agree. It’s just that saying “all you need is truth” or “it’s due to a lack of care for truth” is very reductionistic and can come across as backseat criticism. Even with greater human consciousness, you would still face issues like bias, preferences, which identities or ideologies survive, what is let go of, what gets promoted, and how you would realistically reach that point. I agree that truth, goodness, or God serve as an incredibly useful and practical ideal, but I have seen many statements that feel overly reductionistic and detached from reality when you rely only on that argument as solution. I hope that makes sense.

Yes, but these are easier things to “play around with, be a chameleon.” What happens when a country is trying to suppress and change the language you use, the culture you feel comfortable with, and how you survive? Again, I agree that ideally we could be playful, but this also completely denies reality.

I agree, but my exact point is that saying “just be who you are” in relative terms causes many conflicts and wars. That is why you need to deal with these issues through relative pragmatism and moral reasoning. You cannot resolve them with abstract notions of truth alone. You can use truth as an ideal or a guiding pointer, but everything else often turns into backseat moralizing and criticism. “Do what you want in the relative world” is what exactly brings conflict between people, because I have my way of wanting to be and they have theirs. Saying “forget your identity” or “forget your attachments” may sound appealing, but who gets to decide that your identity is not important enough to justify conflict? How do you resolve that in practice? I hope I am making my point clear. Saying “it is just due to a lack of care for truth” is absolutely true, but too reductionistic on a practical level.

The issue with these arguments is that, for example, an LGBTQ nonbinary or whomever else person might also say to you, “Why can’t you just forget being a man? Why can’t you just forget being a woman? Truthfully, we aren’t really just human or gendered either; we are made of nerve impulses, chemicals, and social and biological identities! You feel certain impulses based on your genitalia and on social cues that were implanted in you since infancy. Why is there such a fuss over all of this? We are all creatures of light and consciousness anyway. That way, we wouldn’t conflict with anyone on this issue! ” People have strong biases toward identities they feel close to. It is difficult to pragmatically resolve these conflicts; that’s why saying “Truth will resolve everything” feels a bit too shallow in the relative sense, IMO.

I think what bothers me is that a lot of talk about truth and goodness sounds clear until you actually try to use it in real life. Saying Truth means no double standards, treating others how you want to be treated, loving your neighbor, etc... all that sounds good and is True, but it doesn’t really answer much questions in the relative. It doesn’t tell you whether human life should matter more than animal life, or how to think about plants, or more unconscious humans, or differences in awareness and identity. You realize you still need some "biased/imperfect" pragmatism to weigh things. It also feels shallow when moral discussion turns into just pointing out hypocrisy or corruption without dealing with the complexity. That kind of backseat moralizing is easy because it doesn’t require taking responsibility for decisions. It just keeps exposing contradictions in others or yourself without actually offering a serious framework for what should be done when values conflict. Let’s say you are a high alien race and you realize how fundamentally limited humans are, and you think the only way to expand and propel the universe in a better direction is to kill off the species. How do you reconcile that with truth or goodness? Do you just say higher consciousness has priority over lower consciousness, and if so, who decides that and why should that be accepted? If you imagine yourself as a living being among humans, you would not want to be dead, but at the same time, if you stay aligned with your idea of progress with truth, you might justify it. Let’s say you see a bunch of rednecks hating on postmodern movements, and in response you create a Jaguar ad to show support and be more open-minded and nonjudgmental. Even if the ad is seen as ugly or not fitting the target audience, you might still defend it by saying you were trying to stay aligned with truth. In medicine, people have to decide who gets limited treatment. In politics, people argue about fairness versus stability. In culture, people argue about openness versus tradition. Even everyday things like animal ethics or environmental choices force tradeoffs between values. You need actual priorities and some acceptance that choices will never feel perfectly clean. And as soon as you enter the land of priorities, you enter the land of biases. Who gets to decide those biases? How do we know which bias is good and which bias is bad? You instantly run into the need for some kind of collective moralism, or shared “oughts” and “shoulds,” because otherwise there is no clear way to act. The spirituality of “Truth” works in the abstract as an ideal, a pointer, or a kind of aid, but in the relative world it gets much messier. Just repeating truth, truth, truth starts to feel a bit backseat-gaming-ish to me, because situations force you to choose between competing values rather than just name them.

Hmm… this sounds like a ‘should/ought to do.’

Cuties!

Gotcha. But how do you reconcile classic "moral" questions with this approach? For example, take a lion that wants to hunt a gazelle in order to eat, and a gazelle that runs away to avoid being eaten. Is the lion being “untruthfully truthful” here? Should a lion somehow become vegetarian, even if that goes completely against its nature? It seems like, as long as you have finite creatures with finite resources and finite ways of keeping themselves alive, some degree of conflict or apparent hypocrisy is bound to happen. That’s why I originally said I’m not sure truth is the main issue here. It seems more like a question of incentives and social structures that shape survival and behavior. And again, just to clarify, I am by no means trying to justify any abuse. Trying to think it through.

They would act truthfully according to whatever their desires might be. Throughout human history, we basically see this pattern. If anything, the concept of morality seems like an emergent social structure that reinforces good behavior so societies can function. At the same time, we obviously still see people wanting to exploit or work around it to serve their own survival or self-interest. I think the issue comes when you move to a very high level of abstraction about what absolute truth entails. Then you run into the kinds of problems I mentioned earlier. But I’m not sure, honestly 😅

Just to preface, just in case, I’m not arguing! I’m trying to understand this for myself. I have the intuition that truth is good, right, and the highest value, but I’m trying to reason through it. My issue with “absolute truth” is as you mentioned in the video you said it might turn out that humans might not even deserve to live, or that at some point we should make room for other species, and that one should genuinely and honestly question that. The problem then is that no goal really remains “sacred” except the abstract notion of truth itself. But then how do you differentiate between, for example, a truthful desire to abuse a child? If reality allows such a person to exist and express themselves, then reality allows it. It becomes complicated with “shoulds.” I might think it is completely fine to eat chicken because I enjoy the taste, but the truth might be that chickens suffer deeply for it. My truth is that I enjoy the taste of chicken. Maybe even grass is Alien Consciousness on Salvia, and every time I walk on grass I am abusing a being, yet my truth is that I want to move from point A to point B. It’s tricky to understand 😅

Exactly. That’s why I’m not sure “truth” is really the right argument here. These people often seem to have a worldview that says something like: “I am above the rules,” “I simply don’t care about whatever harmony society prescribes.” They understand they benefit from other people’s good morals, but if they can exploit the system, they will. They may even create rules and structures, and position themselves in power, so they cannot be punished. As long as they can get away with it, they see no reason to stop. This doesn’t really seem like an issue of truth. It feels more like a question of why anyone should care about others at all. Absolute truth itself does not necessarily say “you should care about humans.” Absolute truth is more like “whatever is, is.” There is no universal law written into reality that determines whether humans should live or whether children should be protected or abused. (This is not me excusing any harm whatsoever.) I feel like these issues are much more systemic, shaped by education, behavior, and social reinforcement. How do we teach people not to exploit others when they can? Why should they? And how do we build structures that reinforce this?

Hey, just a curious question about the latest post. Would you even call the “elitists in power” situation a lack of care for truth? In a way, absolute truth is just absolute reality, so whatever happens simply happens. Given that these people do not care for others and prefer themselves over whoever is being abused, that is ultimately what is “true.” You could even argue, in a strange way, that they are being quite truthful about their desires. I’m not sure I would call it a lack of care for truth. It seems more like a lack of a properly incentivized system that encourages good behavior. I wouldn’t say the ultimate result of what happens reflects a fundamental lack of truth. It feels more like a fundamental lack of care for harmony, structure, or following rules. It’s the idea that if you can exploit the system, you should, or that you are entitled to do so. I also doubt that if you told these people they were not being truthful or good, they would care much. Their “truth,” you could say, is that they believe they deserve to exploit the system, and since they can, reality allows for it, because reality simply is. I’m not sure “truth” is the best word here. But I don't know. . .