AtmanIsBrahman

I thought of another even more simplified model. It has four categories: 1) How the ego relates to itself 2) How the ego relates to other egos 3) How the ego relates to God/Reality/Truth 4) How the ego becomes God, i.e. relates to God as God These categories put self-help concepts and practices into an even more big-picture overview. For example, Understanding your personality, health, and life purpose fit best into (1), while socialization, looksmaxxing, getting money fit into (2), philosophy and rationality fall into (3) and establish the bridge into the only non-egoic category, (4)— merging with God. Of course all these distinctions are collapsible. They are just meant to give a new way of looking at self-help.

I decided to make a list of the sub-fields of self-help, inspired by Leo's old video from a few years ago. https://youtu.be/HJXthKsytpE?si=rpkTXIayk_0O__ky One criticism I have of Leo's list is that he often presented practices (such as shadow work) as fields, whereas I would consider them a practice that is an aspect of a field. I only listed what I consider to be fields. I also added some fields that Leo didn't mention. My list: 1) Life purpose- finding and creating your life purpose, and pursuing it as a career 2) Career- figuring out the thing you will spend a large portion of your time doing that will lead to getting money 3) Getting Money- finding out how money works, strategies to make money; learning investing and business; hustling 4) Mastery- mastering a skill, and learning the art of mastering a skill 5) Learning- finding out about various subjects and, importantly, the meta-skill of learning how to learn 6) Looksmaxxing- improving your physical appearance to get better social outcomes. Overlaps with health, biohacking, and social dynamics 7) Getting girls- Learning game; Online game, daygame, nightgame 8) Socialization- learning how to talk to people, make connections, enjoy socializing, be socially calibrated, influence people. Especially important for introverts. 9) Social Dynamics- understanding the social domain on a systemic level. Includes sociology and anthropology, politics, psychology and evolutionary psychology, blackpill/redpill, understanding conformity, and understanding collective ego. 10) Understanding your personality- figuring out the static aspects of who you are as an ego, and how to fit your life around them. Might include MBTI, Big 5, neurodivergence, etc. 11) Spirituality- the vast field of mystical and direct-experience approaches to reality. Can be used for being happier, eliminating suffering, chasing mystical states, psychedelics, the paranormal, contemplation, meditation, etc. 12) Philosophy- finding out what is true about the Universe/Existence/Life. Includes metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. This overlaps with spirituality and makes use of but goes beyond rationality. 13) Rationality- learning to reason well and distinguish between truth and falsehood for worldly things. This includes scientific method, logic, argumentation, etc. It helps you to make better life decisions and ultimately do philosophy. 14) Health- living well and long. Includes nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management (or avoidance), avoiding drugs. 15) Biohacking- using biological knowledge or pharmaceuticals to improve your life. This involves using rationality and science to figure out which chemicals might be worth using (of course be careful). Might include taking psychedelics, taking supplements, peptides, testosterone, etc. 16) Happiness- finding out how to be happy. Might involve all of the above areas. Of course, there is some overlap between many of these, but I think they sum of the landscape of self-help pretty well. What do you think? Is this a good summary of the self-help landscape? Or did I miss some fields? Leo's list, for reference: 1. Success, productivity and goal setting 2. Law of attraction 3. Time management 4. Career and life purpose 5. Creativity 6. Business and entrepreneurship 7. Marketing and sales 8. Leadership and management 9. Money management 10. Dating and attraction 11. Relationships 12. Love 13. Family and marriage 14. Sexuality, masculinity and femininity 15. Health, fitness, nutrition and alternative medicine 16. Body awareness and bioenergetics 17. Self esteem and confidence 18. Emotions and emotional mastery 19. Shadow work 20. Addiction recovery 21. Trauma recovery 22. Mental disorders 23. Personality types 24. NLP and (self-)hypnosis 25. Religion 26. Spirituality (and consciousness work) a. Non-duality b. Meditation/mindfulness c. Yoga d. Psychedelics e. New age/paranormal/psychic abilities 27. Shamanism and the occult 28. Healing 29. Psychology a. Positive psychology b. Transpersonal psychology 30. Lifestyle design 31. Technical "how-tos" 32. Politics and government 33. Philosophy, meta-physics and epistemology 34. Social psychology, cognitive psychology and anthropology 35. History and science 36. Biographies

Lately, when I watch a movie, I actually watch it. That means that I become the movie—I’m not an ego looking through eyes to see the screen, making my own judgments about the characters and plot. No, I’m actually being all of the characters, the plot, the themes, with no ego. The crazy thing you realize doing this practice is that Consciousness has insane variety, and it includes both the good and the bad from a human pov. Movies allow biased humans to expand their limited frames and peek into universal Consciousness. The funniest thing is that they mostly aren’t aware they’re doing this. Directors think they’re making a movie, getting actors, thinking through everything; really they’re participating in Consciousness. Most people don’t realize the insanity of movies because they don’t allow themselves to be touched by them. The ego constructs a protective barrier so that the contents of a movie will be experienced from the ego’s perspective rather than as Consciousness, which reduces the impact. This is why people are able to watch horror movies. They protect themselves—they aren’t actually watching the movie. This is the reason why children aren’t allowed to watch horror movies. They haven’t fully built up the ego, so the contents of Consciousness communicated through the film enter into their mind. Then they get nightmares and things like that. To actually watch a movie as Consciousness, it takes an exceptionally strong human. Only consciousness watches consciousness; a human does not watch consciousness. A human cannot experience being possessed by a demon inflicting terror on a victim and being the victim at the same time. It’s actually mildly traumatizing to watch a movie like this. But there are also good sides to movies (of course from the human POV because it’s relative). Many movie are more upbeat and jovial. These are more pleasant for the human, but still the human cannot take in the grandiosity of Bliss or Love. Every movie is a figment of Consciousness representing archetypes. The theme is CONSCIOUSNESS. I can only assume this would be extraordinarily amplified on psychedelics. I think this is what Leo was talking about with “integrating himself as the spider queen.” For those who don’t know, he talks about it in Reading a Poetic Description of God-Consciousness. @Leo Gura @Davino @Inliytened1

Ah, sorry. I was going off of memory. I really liked that video though. It’s one of my favorites.

This video is quite insightful

This is too cynical. Actors are God in disguise performing Maya. God doing its dance.

Does anyone have similar experiences to this? I thought I made an interesting thread, curious what you guys think.

Yes, they're more impressionable. More of what's in the movie affects them, whereas adults stay emotionally closed.

Leo is finally teaching us the squirrely alien consciousness space kangaroo spider queen crocodile 😁

Looksmaxxing doesn’t have to affect your inner game at all. Physical attraction is something that can’t be faked with game. Women care about physical appearance too, not just men, so why not improve it? This strikes me as ideology. Honestly, I doubt that Owen Cook or a lot of these people can actually consistently attract women when the cameras are off. It’s physically almost impossible for a woman to be attracted to Owen Cook.

A lot of y’all are massive cope artists

You can always do both. Aside from that, are you aware of the halo effect? People treat you better if you look better, even in non-romantic settings. This alone is a reason to investigate looksmaxxing. I’m actually most interested in this from a pure philosophy perspective. How is it that looks are so important, yet society has a taboo on talking about them? Somehow we don’t want to face the underlying forces affecting interactions; we just want to act unconsciously. How is it that people rate themselves a 7 on average? That’s an amazing lesson in self-bias right there! I think much of the mainstream reaction against looksmaxxing is because it’s so outside of our paradigm of how attraction works that it shatters our worldview and we feel like we have to reject it. “What, you think looks matter more than personality? You’re such an awful person.” This is how collective ego protects itself. The looks/blackpill thing is a fascinating aspect of our survival as humans. I see it as a hard truth that you learn anyway, because you love truth.

And many more things too. A rhinoplasty is quite safe and effective, provided you know what you’re doing and it actually improves your face. A genioplasty is also perfectly reasonable for a recessed chin. Wearing contacts instead of glasses improves looks in the vast majority of cases—and colored contacts can improve coloring. Going to the gym and keeping a low body fat drastically improves your physical appeal. I could go on. I think if you’re in the dating/pickup scene seriously, you should be doing some looksmaxxes.

Clav is actually a complicated case because he did a huge variety of looksmaxxing procedures throughout puberty (all of which is documented on looksmax.org) and definitely changed his appearance as a result. For example, he injected testosterone from age 14, which changes facial structure to make it more masculine. This only works during puberty. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Clav would have looked above average regardless. But the hypothesis that he didn't significantly improve his looks is very unlikely. I don't think it's purely performative. He genuinely believes in the whole looksmaxxing ideology. How would you rate the percentage of looks vs game roughly? And if it turns out you actually can improve your looks significantly, wouldn't it be worth doing? @Leo Gura

It's objective in exactly the way I said it is. Of course, everything is Absolute Beauty in a sense, but this is not what we're talking about. You have to separate uses of terms for different contexts. There is actual science behind this and I already gave you an introduction which you can research further if you so desire. If you want to be closeminded, go ahead. You are approaching this from a perspective of "I am the more conscious/intelligent one; it is on my opponent to provide the evidence or else I was right." Hope this doesn't trickle over into spirituality lol.

I get the sense that you’re being close-minded and not approaching this in good faith. But I’ll assume the best. First, I already explained why looksmaxxing is new. As for the validity, my claim is basically that attractiveness is objective and can be improved. Here is a video showing how these measurements are objective: This video dives into the eye area using science: How I understand it? The first thing to do is really learning about what makes for an attractive face and body. Then you can make changes accordingly. How do I know that the ideal standard is accurate? From cross-referencing various sources, combined with my own direct experience of what looks good. The science is really just making explicit what we already know subconsciously through our biological programming. And we all have an aesthetic eye. Once you have some knowledge, you can analyze your face and then decide what changes to make. You may decide to make none at all, which is fine. Here’s an example of what this looks like (male perspective). You may find out you lack facial angularity, which contributes to perceived masculinity and attractiveness. A solution to this is getting lean—most people underestimate how lean is ideal and don’t realize their face would be improved from leaning out even if they aren’t conventionally speaking overweight. Getting lean reveals your facial structure. Let’s say you get lean and see some improvement, but it’s still not great. In that case there’s not much you can do, but an easy softmax is growing a beard, which will cover up the lack of angularity in the lower third. Of course, this is still inferior to having good angularity, which is basically just genetic. This is just one example of a possible looksmax, and you would just keep applying this to yourself to whatever extent you want to.

I'm not sure what you mean by "your" data. That's not what data is by definition. Yes it is. It was citing actual studies. This honestly makes me doubt your intelligence. If you actually read the response carefully, you would see that it's an adaptation of research that mostly started in the 70s and became more solidified by the 2000s and 2010s. I'm not. Why are you lacking in openmindedness and critical thinking on this topic? Look, I'm just trying to fill a gap on this subforum. If you're interested, why not research yourself rather than asking me to provide the studies or my thought process so that you can correct it (while assuming you're right from the get-go)? If you don't want to, that's fine too.

I see your point-- I am mostly just theorizing. But it's also disingenuous to say pickup artists were doing genuine science. If they neglect a huge variable (looks), that's not good science in my book. He has a point. The looksmaxxing space is very ideological and gross. But there is a lot of truth behind it too. I think Leo's position is that looks do matter quite a lot, but they aren't changeable. I would disagree with the latter part-- they can be meaningfully changed by just about everyone, and of course some more than others.

I asked claude about the looksmaxxing/attractiveness science timeline. Here's an excerpt of what it said: Anyways, looks are objective not subjective, they are cross-cultural, and recent advancements are actually... well, recent.

I can give a more detailed response later. Essentially, noticing these principles is a recent phenomenon. You didn’t see people analyzing each part of a face scientifically 40 years ago. It’s in part due to gender roles changing, plus survival being easier, contributing to men caring about appearance being actually feasible sociologically. It’s quite easy to see how looks could be objectively studied. What makes men see a woman as hot? (They generally agree). Well, obviously it’s something about the facial features. Same thing with male celebrities. Take an attractive male celebrity and mess around with his face in photoshop. What makes him look worse if you change it? That is a factor in looks. You get the idea.

@Natasha Tori Maru It’s not true that women have been looksmaxxing for ages. Yes, they have done makeup, but looksmaxxing is much more detailed, broad, and extensive than just that. For example: Do you know what the FWHR is? Facial width to height ratio. In males, the ideal is close to two. It signals dominance and untrustworthiness. People with a high FWHR are considered more likely to cheat. This is based on science by the way, not just stuff made up by looksmaxxers? Do you know what the three facial thirds are, and how they should be proportioned and men and women? Looksmaxxers have this down to a science. Do you know what makes a good eye area? Most people think it’s eye color. Really, it’s a combination of features in the eye region— in males, dense and lowset eyebrows, minimal upper eyelid exposure, deep set eyes, narrower rather than round eyes, lack of scleral show (white of the eye underneath the iris), a clear sclera with minimal red, etc. See? This is very detailed, and it 100% is new. People were not talking about these things in 1980.

Not sure what you mean. If you’re saying it’s better to stay in not knowing about whether looks or game is better, that’s fair, but my point is more about taking the looks part seriously as they aren’t mutually exclusive. The balance could be 65% game and 35% looks and it would still be worth paying attention to looks.

Colored contacts are good. Blue often works well, though you have to make sure it looks natural. Gym is good for sex appeal.

Pickup is a good skill to have, but looks are at least as important. It’s honestly a huge gap in understanding on this forum (which is fine because spirituality is the focus) that getting girls is just about doing the correct psychological things. We judge other people’s attractiveness practically instantly. It’s a biologically ingrained mechanism. Pickup will not work well if you’re below average looking. It’s not that hard to do some amount of looksmaxxing, and it has clear benefits.

I think most of you guys hugely underestimate the role of looks. Here’s an excerpt from a looksmax.org post (full post here: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-even-looksmax-guests-and-new-users-please-read.18461/) Pretend you’re a girl (if you aren’t). 1. This guy approaches you and says “Hey, you put that cute outfit on for me tonight?” Now how did that make you FEEL? Probably laugh at his cockiness and reject his pathetic ass right away. “Hey, you put on that cute outfit for me tonight?” Now how did that make you FEEL? A little different hm?