There's a place for those titles, but I don't enjoy those kinds of games, either. It's a different kind of entertainment. I prefer the kind of entertainment that has fascinating setups and payoffs. I want to have the sense that this movie, series, novel, or game is setting up a satisfying payoff, not just at the finale but throughout the work. However, the final payoff, the climax, has to be the best one. When I watch a movie or play a game, I can tell very, very quickly: "This is not going anywhere. The creator doesn't know what he's doing." I want meaningful emotional experiences, but those are hard to come by, which is why I cherish a masterpiece very much when I find one.

One of the reasons I started studying psychology was because I wanted to write compelling evil characters for science fiction.
15 years later I basically understand all of human psychology. Lol. Writing a realistic evil character has lost its mystery and magic.

Edit, ah misread, you have talked about the dumbest, then it might have an effect. I have written a reply with selecting for the smartest in mind.
Yeah, but from what I have learned intelligence works by a different set of rules. It seems to be increasing overall in population, regardless of the outcome of any particular mating. Like there's a mechanism, deeply hardwired, that's been responsible for human brain's capacities development in the past, and still working within us, assuring that every generation of humans is more and more intelligent overall.
I don't know the details, I haven't studied evolution nor cognitive science seriously. But the existence of such mechanism adds many interesting dynamics, like for example that you need to measure progress over generations, because maybe by selecting the smartest individuals you have also chosen a lot of people with slowly working that aforementioned mechanism, so over 100 generations they are stupidier than a general population, because the effects of selecting of what is on the surface are slower than the underlying mechanism responsible for humans' and humanoids' boom in intelligence.

Here's some alien knowledge, for anyone who is interested...  My Mr. Wolf showed me how to do this because he is one of these beings.
They are highly complex social memory complexes, and they start as a single point in awareness, just like you, from their side, and they draw consciousness/the light/the feminine portion into them, and they completely immerse themselves within it, bathe in it, and carry it throughout their entire being.  Every portion carries an equal amount of this within them.  This consciousness/light is love and is similar to how the first material creates life within it - prima materia - Adam and Eve.  They say that humans need to get closer to Love and that we would dance in this manner if we could do this, that we would automatically start to move in natural patterns, that we would have more of a collective hive mind.  They work together in a unit, but are entire worlds into themselves, moving in complete harmony, everyone knows their place in the dance - they share this with me, before descending back into themselves as one singular point.
You can find these beings within yourself, within allegory, within metaphor, "out there", they are everywhere, trying to share this message of self-love to get back to God.  I fail at this, but this one time, when I really did allow myself to love who I was - I was given this message.  Hope you can take something from it.
This entire thread has reinvigorated my sense of agency on my path - I might take a break for a few days after today - but this whole thing was just what I needed to feel sure of myself again.  I was so worried I was doing it all wrong, and then literally right after discussing with myself a much needed break to collect my thoughts, Leo comes out with this - like a sign, that we are all getting closer into understanding this strange and crazy existence.  I love it so much.  I am thrilled.  I'll be back in a few days... good luck understanding/integrating your experience Leo!

I love tragic characters. There's a sad beauty to human suffering and tragedy. 
Yes, it's love filtered through a fragmented psyche. I love stories that deal with love, hate, and fear; they're profound.

I don't really dislike people on a personal basis, but if I had to bring to light the types of people that I tend to run into trouble with it would generally be ni-doms.  I find that function to be judgmental, repressive and somewhat single-minded in its approach to things.  Kind of hypocritical of me to say, while speaking about people like this.  I think that the mystery and the illusion of ni is overrated and that it has been perpetuated as some form of superpower is a bit ridiculous, and one that ni-doms are more than willing to garble down as factual.  I prefer when people can recognize their ordinary side, their humility, while also shining through in their strengths and many ni-doms seem to lack this humility in favour of feeling special, or unique.  And in my eyes, that kind of takes away from the goodness of the function.  In general, I just don't like or appreciate their world views and approach to most things.  While I feel this function is an essential key to human evolution, it's mostly used kind of annoyingly.
I prefer the f's over the t's, though.  If I had to choose, generally these people are wiser and less psychopathic.  There have been a few that I have come to love, such as an ex in my late teens who was a feeling ni-dom.  But the difference in psychology and worldview is often too great to bridge. 

I appreciate the ni-doms talents.  From afar.  With a ten foot pole in between.  And at the end of the day that seems to be all they are after to bolster their grandiosity, so there you go.  *tosses scraps of talent-appreciation to the ducks in the water*  There ya go, fellas.  Don't chew on me with your weak little beaks now.  
I feel odd writing this, as of late, I'm feeling less like pooling people into groups of "I like this" or "I like that" - I see how that plays out in various forms, like with sexism and racism and things like this, and even though I do have some biases against this type, I still view those biases as being along the same sort of spectrum.

ESFJs make my blood boil.
My mum and one of my roommates are ESFJ. I'm usually quite stoic but their touchy-feelyness drives me crazy sometimes; and they are so fucking anal about their petty little rituals and conventions, I just can't

Stay calm, never fight back, apologize if you must, don't get your ego involved, back off, and treat them with respect and kindness.
It's not guaranteed to work, but it's your best shot to avoid getting stabbed.
Pretty much yeah.
But if things get real serious you just back away and leave.
Don't forget the power of a sincrene apology.

I want to study philosophy but I don't know where to start from. I'm not totally clueless, I have some understanding of concepts and I'm familiar with some philosophers but not as good as I wish. I have many unrelated patches of information in my mind that I randomly collected my entire life and I can't make any sense of because they're lack in context. 
I would like to get book recommendations for beginners for both eastern and western philosophy.  Thank you.

What I said above does not preclude other people serving as keys.
But also, don't kid yourself. Since virtually no spiritual person on this planet understands God, they are far more likely to feed you their delusions than to unlock your mind. The more humans you interacts with the less likely you will be to Awaken as they suck you into their spiritual fantasies.
If you were serious about realizing God, you wouldn't be turning to any humans. You're doing so out of distraction.

Since you mentioned that you already have some basic familiarity with philosophy, here are some of the more important Western philosphers that are worth getting at least a basic and passing familiarity with.
This has less to do with them being 'right', and more to do with the fact that their ideas have been highly influential. Any history of Western philosophy will have a section on each:
Plato (early idealism) Aristotle (early empiricism) Rene Descartes (rationalism and skepticism) Immanuel Kant (integration of rationalism and empiricism) Hegel (idealism and dialectics) Nietzsche (early postmodernism) Heidegger (phenomenology)

Software
I highly recommend using obsidian, i used to think it was complicated too, until I decided to give it a try for a period of time, see this very short beginner series:
 
pros of obsidian:
 it is future proofed, everything is in markdown format so even if the app disappears, you can open anything in it with just the notepad app. it makes linking very easy, which makes the making of new original ideas very easy too. it has any feature you could ever want, the obsidian app has tons of features, and anything that doesn't have a feature, there is probably a plugin for it you could download, since there is a very active community for plugins,  so you aren't limited by features. it is locally stored on your computer, yet you can also enable sync with mobile device, i think you have two options for this, a paid option and a free one. cons of obsidian:
it has a bit of a learning curve.  
Organization System
In the field of personal knowledge management, the two most respected systems are the Zettelkasten and the PARA system, these two have many details I wont go into, but I have tried both, and I will tell you the big picture of each.
Zettelkasten: this is a very old system, originated  from the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who thanks to this system, wrote over 70 books and published 400 scholarly articles, of course he didn't use the system digitally, since there wasn't digital stuff back then, but it can be done digitally or physically.
the anatomy of the system is that he keeps 3 types of notes (make those into folders in obsidian), fleeting notes which are just thoughts/ideas/insights/reflections (you can activate the daily note plugin, and write your thoughts on your daily note each day), literature notes which are brief summaries you take on any resource after you consume it (books, videos, articles, etc.), and finally permanent notes, these notes are atomic, which means they contain only one single idea, you usually write those with literature notes as your source, or maybe a fleeting note turns into a permanent note.
so your workflow is to take fleeting notes, if something is worth being a permanent note, you make a permanent note, you also take literature notes, and see if you can make a permanent note out of it, I recommend having an inbox folder, in which you take literature and fleeting notes, and you ideally process them once a day, read through them, try finding new ideas and connections, you will be surprised about the new original ideas you will develop.
the problem with this system is that it is just note taking, you don't manage projects and different areas of your life.
 
that's where the PARA system comes in:
4 folders, projects, resources, areas, and archives, I got burned out from typing a lot on Zettelkasten so sorry i don't feel like going into details, but it is obvious, check out the work of Tiago Forte for more.
 

 
i found that this system gets confusing since everything seemed to belong to different categories, and it was  a pain to manage, yet the Zettelkasten doesnt use sub folders and categories, since it ruins the whole idea of the Zettelkasten, you can use tags though, after your Zettelkasten gets after lest say 150-200 notes, you should start using maps of contents, or MOCS, which you can look into when that happens.
 
my recommendation is that it depends on your values, do you want new ideas, do you want a tool that manages your life.
i think a digital Zettelkasten with a physical journal to manage my daily life and goals is the best for me.

If that's the case, why is your content so cleanly abstracted, self-congruent, and simultaneously unaware of its own abstraction and assumptions?  (A great example is your "levels of consciousness" model, which is absolutely an abstraction and quite incorrect, in my opinion; another example is the way you talk about imagination [notice: abstract concept], and use it as a magic bullet to avoid any kind of felt relationship or interaction with externalities.)  You even talk about abstraction and intuition as if those are both right-brained things, seemingly failing to realize they are polar opposites (!). 
I've experienced integrated ways of thinking on psychedelics that are indeed profound, so I don't doubt such experiences.  What most concerns me is the narcissism that is becoming so evident on this channel.  Just look at this whole thread.  Your responses are so aloof and arrogant and closed-minded in such a meta way (yeah you're the MOST open-minded and enlightened person in the whole world--no one could possibly teach you anything )... if you can't see the irony your right brain isn't so good after all.
It's like you want to be THE BEST at being loving and conscious, as long as everyone knows you're the BEST at it.  UGH.  Let. Fucking. Go.
Said with the best of intentions.
 

The only perspective there is: THE ABSOLUTE
The only thing that can ever Awaken is you.
Nobody else has ever Awoken. It all starts and ends with You.
Oh, it's possible. I did it
Oh, I'm on this forum
There exists such a thing as ABSOLUTE AWAKENING. And not a single spiritual teacher on this planet has experienced it except for me and Peter Ralston.

No one is saying hand one’s ultimate authority over to a guru, although even that can have a certain power if you’ve found a trustworthy, legitimate guru. No one is saying a guru can give you enlightenment. A guru, teacher, guide merely facilitates a more efficient path to awakening than trying to do it alone. When walking the path completely alone, one is bound to become gridlocked in their own shadows, hidden biases and beliefs, and ultimately stuck in self-deception. Having feedback, in any domain whether spiritual, intellectual, physical, is indispensable. Missing this point is a sign of foolishness and arrogance.
 
Having feedback is not the same as believing the guru can give you awakening. It is a position of trusting that what comes from within and with out are both sources of information. Learning to discern which ‘frequencies’ of information are helpful, again both external and internal, is part of the cultivation of wisdom and intuition.
As an aside, everyone who’s parroting this of independence is missing the fundamental point that there was never such a thing as independence. You wouldn’t even be in a position to take a stance on independent authority if it weren’t for numberless external factors (including teachers!) paving some kind of path for you to walk. 

And you are overly mystifying this, when there is nothing, in particular, to mystify it so much about.
This is pretty simply clear and straightforward if you want to look at its human mind core. 
Paper currency, and now digital currency, was historically first pioneered and invented by the mercantilist-colonialist nations of today, later inherited by them in their transition to capitalism during scientific-industrial modernization progress to ease, simplify, make more efficient, and rationalize their transactions amongst themselves and the rest of the world (an easier more cost efficient social convention if you will) and value anchor their trading goods and services based on demand, rarity, cost and difficulty in acquirement in their exploitation, extraction, refinement, production, assembly, acquisition, extortion or plundering across their own continents, colonized lands or the great unknowns of the scientifically underdeveloped or undeveloped parts of the world - of course, the actual precise microeconomics and macroeconomics of this in economics are actually more complicated than that (and I haven't actually passed an economics course yet to explain it accurately, precisely and properly) but this is a layman's easier to understand gist of it if you just look at it from a historical point of view, whilst not holding unto any convenient, borderline deliberately naive ahistorical illusions about the seeming randomness and specialness of money grounded in some kind of mystifying, just randomly and happenstance agreed upon etherial collective agreement or covenant. 
It's easier to propagandize and marketize to people what their wishes, desires, wants, and needs should be via some sort of currency as an easier way for them to make them come true, realize and acquire them and henceforth have a much larger pool and basis of people to exploit, use and extract surplus value from via its manipulation.
Marx compared the inherent value of money to a sort of fetishized idolatrous religious object, its value and worth being exclusively drawn from people's exclusive belief in its inherent specialness, scarcity, and borderline magical properties to materialize their needs, desires, and wishes into a tangible reality (if I remembered that one precisely and correctly ).
The fetishistic power of money, or any sort of currency. That's what's only magical there to it, people's ability and readiness to be willfully, collectively agreed fooled, and deceived to it in order to find an easier route to fit in and increase their feelings of self-worth, self-value, status, and importance amongst other conformists and normies in society in their chosen self-preservation and survival route and the willingness of other's to exploit these base needs and desires for their own benefit, social and material advancement.
Try accomplishing that with just labor vouchers, for example, not much prestige. mystification and symbolic power coming there with that, is there? Look, John, I acquired 100 labor vouchers on my social account yesterday for that successful pitch of my blueprint on the instant self-cooling mechanism suggestion for the solar panels of the solar-powered self-propelled and self-driving Maglev mass-produced public utility cars on the collective design team board, ain't I the swagger - lol .
These things have emotional imprints because of the emotional effort involved in them and the intimacy of said emotions in such, and carrying over the residual effects of that as well in the collective subconscious mind of the previous generations.
A mass mechanical and mechanized totalitarianism and rigid, collective idolatrous state funeral is the precise opposite of that said intimacy and deep self-reflection of emotions involved in that - it is a deliberate mass psychosis induction on the part of people governed over how they should and ought to suppose to feel on the passing away of one of those that ruled over them and how they ought to remember them, think and henceforth feel about them afterward after they have passed on the torch to the next one from that said ruling caste - it's an exercise of total ideological manipulation (henceforth emotional as well) on a mass scale involved on the basis of appealing to collective induced identities based mostly on feelings and needs of belonging via nationality in order to ensure the safety of the current hierarchical social order, status quo continuity, and ideological traditionalism is not broken down in this brief interlude crisis and legitimization vulnerability period when it is most at risk to be questioned, rebelled against and replaced with, once the collective emotional gaslighting spectacle and ritual is over and gone for a brief moment and period that is vowed through an underlying hanging air of fear and doubt in the background that comes with self-deluded conformity and in denial of the factor of existence of coercive, repressive state ideology and social ostracization mechanisms of the maintenance of such in it.
The Christian absolutist monarchs of the past that ruled over on the basis of coming from hereditary bloodline aristocratic ruling houses over their state religion Ancien regimes you mean, that were supposed to be inferred the divine right to rule over 'their people' from God himself on the basis of wearing a golden, jewelry filled crown that was supposed to symbolize their honoring of God's Son sacrifice and pain for humanity by now replacing a self-sacrificial mocking crown of thorns of pain with a golden, idolatrous one of glory as Christian believers that are now self-entitled to rule over and still keep 'their forcefully converted flock' in check.
A golden crown worn by a pre-selected and chosen king, queen, or person is a very materialist, overt hierarchical order oppressive power symbol epitome of bastardization and perversion of early Christian spiritual and humanistic teachings of the inherent equality, value, and worth of all human beings on the basis of all their souls being one with God in a community that comes with state-institutionalization, weaponization, and ideologization of religion as a moralistically gaslighting absolutist pre-requisite and justification of un-checked rule and domination of a select few in any given land or country.
Btw, modern Christmas and Easter as it is practiced today in most Western and non-Western nominally Christian countries was in fact a crafted assemblage of appropriated of earlier practices borrowed from pre-Christian Paganism, earlier Christanity and was (re)invented in the modern form that it mostly takes today first by traditionalist and nationalist ideologues for the purposes of state legitimizations through nationalism and traditionalism back in the early to late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Victorian and Edwardian periods of the British Empire for those same monarchies lol, in order to further legitimize and stabilize their rule at home and overseas as based on notion of existing 'long traditions', create an atmosphere of conformity, loyalty and civility around it and ritualistic traditions among the masses in the British Isles and across the Empire and its colonies in order to further ensure the continuity of the existing social order there as is, create a basis for ritualistic social-cohesion around, said long-running religious traditions and export it to other Christian states in Europe and elsewhere across the oceans also interested to create new myths, rituals, and traditions to stabilize and ideologically legitimize their rule at home back as well as Christian state religious states as official state sanctioned holidays - by incorporating also these old, revised borrowed Pagan rituals and traditions from various Pagan pre-existing religious cultures and their speculated rites in their corresponding tribal pre-Christian proselytizing and pre-nation state areas - I didn't make this up this was well documented and explained how it works in the seminal work and book 'Inventing Traditions' in the Early Modern and Nation-State period by historian Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.

Thinking is generating a new thought you've never had before.

@UnbornTao
T'is. 
Beauty being subjective...
What is it in you that strikes you with a perception of "beauty", and how would you describe that beauty?
E.g. an overwhelming feeling of wonder, awe, harmony, balance, equanimity, reassurance/comfort, carefreeness and so on. 
And, whatever comes up for you, what might the counterpart in your lfe/being be, that it strikes a note with, and what might that mean? 
If flicking the strings of life, creating resonance within the body of the instrument, there needs to be characteristics of that body, whose make up, shape and composition, allows for certain reverberation to take place. 
You're making me genuinely curious 

@UnbornTao racial bias is common across all cultures when depicting Jesus. You can look for Chinese Jesus for example. The goal is to make him more relatable by not only changing his color, but also his ideology. Jesus is essentially boiled down to whatever the culture at the time deems desirable.
This includes the belief that Jesus was a laissez faire free market capitalist. In communist countries Jesus is depicted as a man who would make up a whip of cords and use them to chase your animals out of a temple while yelling "do not turn my father's house into a marketplace" and scattering your coins.
 An interesting observation is that the belief that we are living in the biblical end times has been a false belief for thousands of years. 10 million Americans still believe this because so long as the belief is held in the present it is unfalsifiable. Basically, the belief that the end of the world is tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow is the day aliens decide to blow up the earth.

@Leo Gura You won't know that until you read it.  For me, it has caused a deep reexamination of the way my mind works and the way I think.  Like other lenses, it brings clarity to processes that were "blurry", and then allows contemplation to reintegrate that clarity into the whole.  It does this profoundly.  The mind (and heart) of a Turquoise polymath is nothing to be sneered at--I often spend an hour on 5 pages.
Yes it's based on neuroscience and philosophy, AND it isn't.  It's left AND right.  It's experience AND concept.  It's beauty AND logic.  It cuts to the heart of holism and its relationship with integration and separation, and does so using the tools of both analytical thinking and metaphorical and lyrical and even poetic shades of understanding, and then integrates them.
Not many on this forum can challenge you intellectually, but I can.  And I'm telling you this book would help your work and help you contemplate more deeply, as you DO have blind spots (as do we all).  
Just because you enjoy contemplating "ultimate" reality, it's important to also remember there is (and isn't) a distinction between the absolute and relative.  Enlightenment and beyond points towards "truth", but the relative is also part of (and the whole of) that truth.  Paradox collapses both, and it is precisely that collapsing that this book brings much-needed light to.  I actually don't think McGilchrist is enlightened, but it doesn't matter because he's so close within the relative that there are exceptionally few points of confusion, and that's where you need to bring your own experience to the table anyway.  This is worth the time and investment, and any argument that "you don't need it" is just self-deception and fear of introducing ungrounding elements into your "view."
Live where you fear to live.
 - Rumi

Don't play language games with me. I'm talking about the human being, the subconscious and the instincts and the archetypes and the spectrums of emotion, the symbolic intelligence in all its qualitative and quantitative forms, the higher lights of awareness. Absolutely none of that---or at least no real percentage of it---can be evaluated, delineated, and copied by observing some of the external patterns it gives off.
Even if the AI recorded every single action a human has ever made, it would not be able to predict what the genius humans would do. If you fed it every single painting that has ever been painted, every single idea that has ever been fashioned, it would not be able to attain the same results as the pool from which those paintings and ideas came from. It would have impressions and mimicries of small trickles coming from the pool, but it would never be able to possess the same capabilities---unless it, again, actually became a real organism like us, actually got to our level of complexity, which is not happening anytime soon or even in this century.

Cause I care profoundly about truth and consciousness, I don't carry emotional trauma, and I didn't fill my mind with all the human bullshit that a lifetime of socialization creates. I also have few human attachments and few conflicts of interest.
The more you take human matters seriously, the more invested you are in it, the more painful awakening will be. Cause everything human is built on BS. Even human spirituality is BS. Even Buddhism, Vedanta, nonduality -- it's all basically BS designed for fools.

Help people question their assumptions and worldviews. -> Socratic Method
Help them to break their ordinary patterns of seeing the world; making insights, forming new patterns. -> Shamanism
Just being high conscious yourself and being a good reflection for them.
Help them to see beauty in things. Point out beauty to them.
Help them to see the interconnectedness of things.

I think Freud's work was brilliant. However, nowadays its outdated, imo. I think there are better things to do in the realm of depth psychotherapy like IFS style parts work approaches, and somatic approaches.
The issue with stage orange work only is that you can't break/ change unconscious cycles effectively. And, for example, if you want to have intimate, healthy relationships you often have to make changes at the unconscious level.
 

It's a bit useful but you can find much better models and teachings.
The question is what's worth your time studying? Don't waste time on low-yield material. There is too much good material out there these days.