Scholar

To me it seems like causality doesn't really make sense from a Non-dual perspective. All of your questions are invalid from what I can tell. In fact, all questions whatsoever are invalid, just as all statements are invalid. Everything is absolutely valid and invalid the same time. It's tricky to talk about this because no matter what you say, it's wrong. Even what I just said is wrong, and even the statement that what I just said is wrong, is wrong. It's not even really wrong. Validity is not valid. Statements are just statements. Knowledge is just knowledge. Ideas are just ideas. What you are asking us to do is try to describe to you the color red. It's absolutely impossible. If you want to know, you gotta go and experience it yourself. What you have to realize is that nobody can give you the answer, because the answer doesn't exist. And, everything I just told you is completely wrong too. Oh, and the fact that everything I told you is completely wrong is wrong too. And everything everyone tells you is wrong too, and yet it's wrong that everything everyone tells you is wrong. You have to understand that you cannot understand. For you to see the truth your mind has to give up looking for the truth.

Recently I've been quite interested in Leonardo Da Vinci, and as I watched a few documentaries about him I noticed quite a few similarities in Leonardo's approach to life and self-improvement work. There is a book called "How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day" which I haven't yet read, but the author basicly describes a few of Leonardo's principles, which are: Curiosita’ – an insatiable curiosity Dimostrazione – testing knowledge through experience Sensazione – continued refinement of the senses Sfumato – a willingness to embrace ambiguity Arte/Scienza – developing a balance between art and science Corporalita’ – cultivating fitness and poise Connessione – recognizing and appreciating that all phenomena are connected I find that quite interesting. To me it seems like he basicly understood self-improvement on an almost intuitive level. Especially principle 5 is very interesting to me, having a balance between art and science. Maybe in a sense this translates into having a balance between the "left" and "right" brain, to both master intuitive and logic thinking. The willingness to embrace ambiguity is one of the key principles for self-actualization, just as the continued refinement of the senses. A large part of his life was dedicated to meditation, and very soon in his life he understood that ones circumstances do not rule over ones life (he was a bastard, in a time where it drasticly limited your options in life). He was journaling aswell, thousands of pages of thoughts, ideas, sketches. He even used his journal to write down simple things so he wouldn't need to remember them (like what he would have to buy). And I know that these things help the mind to be clear and have deeper focus, because the brain does not have to hold the information constantly, which does require mental ressources. The last point is quite interesting aswell, maybe hinting at non-duality, but I don't know. Now my question is, was Leonardo Da Vinci such a genius that he discovered the value of all these principles, or did all of these principles make him a genius? Maybe it was a interplay of both, but I think one can learn quite a lot from him.

His martial arts stuff makes him seem kind of fishy to me... I don't know what to make of that.

@doronshadmi @HII I wasn't trying to indicate that we are supposed to be passive. My point was that it was completely impossible to be passive. You are a productive of nature, so is absolutely everything you do, every thought and every action you take. No matter what action you deem to be best is exactly what nature intended for you to deem best. Making conscious decision is part of the evolutionary process, and it seems like nature is evolving towards higher consciousness, simply because it is ultimately sustainable. The challenges, the catastrophies, the things that we deem as horrible are exactly what leads to higher consciousness. Without them, there would be no need for anything at all to develope. See, my point was not whether or not we should do something about a 10k asteroid colliding with earth, my point was that the threat of a 10km-asteroid colliding with earth will inevitably create evolution within civilization, either that or this particular civilization will be deemed unfit for survival by nature. You are a product of biology, consciousness and culture. This includes every single thought that you will ever form. You have absolutely no play in that, because you do not exist. From this perspective individuality does not really exist, in a strange sense. You are a force of nature, produced by a force of nature, and you will do exactly what you will do no matter what. And all of that, as we can observe, is a balancing act of harmony and chaos, chaos challenging harmony to evolve so that it can face, ultimately, the absolute chaos. Remember that without the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, we chimps would have never had the chance to become the rulers of the world. In fact, the lack of almost total annihilation is exactly what would have completely dismissed that possibility. We do not even know if our species is capable of producing an entirely enlightened civilization. It might not be, and future problem-solvers might actually be what will lead to higher consciousness. You might not like that idea, but it is entirely possible. That does not mean that we shouldn't try our best, we will do that either way. But so did the dinosaurs, and they did simply not succeed. Is that a tragedy to you, or the greatest gift that you were ever given?

I didn't say flying a plane makes you a pilot and I didn't say monks are the happiest people in the world. I think you are trying to disagree for the sake of disagreement.

People have this strange idea of society, and of great people who have changed it. This is not really how the world works in my view. There was not one individual or group that changed society, what really happened was society producing a new group or individual, and thus society changing itself and evolving. You have to see society as a living organism, and we human beings as microorganisms within it. Just like any organism, society, or countries, or anything else, are really bound to the forces of nature. Nature will form them, and nature will be the one destroying them. There is not one thing in the universe that is not the act of nature. Everything that is happening is completely natural, meaning that the interplay of resistance and harmony is what is really creating civilization, not you, me or any individual that has lived since the beginning of mankind. Yes, the white blood cells in your body keep you alife, but do not forget that it was the organism that created the white blood cells. It is a collective endevour, and no single cell has control over everything else. Infact, whenever they are cells that seem to have their own agenda, they either lead to catastrophic failure of the organism, or the organism resists and destroys the cells. The perfect example for that is what happened in the early 20th century. It all seems like it was driven by personal and individual agenda's, but the personal and individual agenda's were a creation of the society/civilization itself. The superorganism of civilizations is a little bit different from the smaller life forms we personally can observe. They are far more elastic and still in a stage of early evolution, kind of like singular celled life-forms were billions of years ago. Nature is in a time of experimentation, and it is feeling out what kind of life is stable and sustainable. The difference is that it is one continual life-form that is evolving within a single generation, unlike DNA-based life that really evolved through the change of ongoing generations. So, civilization is a magnitude of complexity higher than regular life forms. Both civilization itself has influence on the microorganisms within it, just as the microorganisms have influence on the civilization. With that said, it is not certain that a global meditation habit for all human beings would actually benefit the civilization. A claim like that is very simple minded, just like the claim that it would be good if Hitler never existed. The mechanisms, even the ones we deem as very negative, might be crucial for the survival of the organism. Feminism and modern SJWs are a product of early stage civilization, in which we are still in. Civilization is completely unstable, it's more like a fluid than anything else. It might completely collapse in the future, and nature will most likely form new civilizations, until one evolves that is stable enough to sustain and most likely procreate. I would be quite frankly surprised if our civilization would survive the process of natural selection. The high complexity of this superorganism makes predictions almost impossible though, so it might surprise us. I stopped viewing civilization as a construction and am starting to see it as a living organism, which might even be conscious in some shape or form. It will evolve on it's own terms, no matter what we do. I trust it to balance itself out, and if not, then there is nothing we can do about it, because we are part of the balancing. We are doing the balancing right now, completely unaware that we are entirely created by the super organism, we really are here to sustain homeostasis. We really just have to do what we were made to do, which is exactly what we are doing right now. We are completely helplessly stuck in this process. The bacteria in your body do not have any clue what they are doing, they just do what they were made to do. Even the neurons in your brain. Thus, the humans have no idea what they are doing for the superorganism. And only god knows what the superorganism is doing for whatever is beyond it.

Everything is expirience, even an idea. So why can you not learn from an idea? If you read about history you learn a lot, do you propose for us to make the same mistakes again so that we have an expirience we can learn from? If your father died as a soldier, do you really need to join the army so that you can learn to avoid war? I think the proverb is very wise, because it actually is true, whether you like it or not. Most people will not be wise until life has punished them into wisdom. Is it wise to waste your life until you happen to have an existential crisis, or is it wise to forsee the existential crisis and waste no time? Most people seem to know that buddhist monks are among the happiest human beings that live on this planet, and yet only the expirience of life might make them actually follow that path. The unfortunate thing is that most people will not have the expirience, and that is why it is foolish to hope for it to come. Yet, because we are all fools, it is really the only thing most of us can hope for.

You should more fundamentally learn the process of remembering and being able to recall what someone said. If you do not have that ability, it's probably because you simply haven't trained yourself to do so. You have to learn to remember, but if you never actually excersise that ability, you will be bad at it. The writing part is more of the process of making sure that you actually did understand and remember what was said.

You're not supposed to remember them after 50 minutes. You can watch the video as many times as you want. The important part is to learn to actually pay attention and think about what he is saying while he is saying it, so that you actually "learn" what he is saying instead of just copying his words. If you cannot remember anything after having watched the video, what did you even do?

I think you have pointed to the problem yourself. It's not just that people are ignorant, the problem that you really need to solve is your own ignorance. Why are people ignorant? Why is it so difficult to change them? Why do they not take people like you serious? You seem to be completely ignorant about all these questions. If you think you are smart, then consider to learn how to be humble. A smart person is aware of his own ignorance, and thus will be careful to call himself more enlightened than others. You can realize that the people who you call ignorant do the same thing you do. They do not question their own opinions and instead try to enlighten others. This is what debates are all about. They are not meant to create growth, they are meant to distribute opinions. And think about it, why would you start distributing opinions of you are 16 years old? You probably know that you are ignorant, you are infact so ignorant that you do not even understand why you cannot convert people to your ideology. How about informing yourself first before you try to change the world? You will spend your entire life trying to rid yourself of ignorance, because there is no shortage of it, and there never will be. Isn't it a waste of time to make other people understand if you yourself have not understood? You can realize that every frustration you have comes from ignorance, from a lack of understanding. You can't change people because you have not yet learned how to change yourself.

A lot of the assumptions that emerge from transcended expiriences can be explained with basic psychology and brain function understanding. When you hear people claiming that they are the universe, the claim and the expirience is completely predictable, and could have been predicted without anyone ever having had an expirience like that. When you see an apple falling down a tree you will not argue that it was you that made the apple fall down, but you will probably argue that it was gravity. The same goes with claims like "I am everything", or pretty much any claim whatsoever about "reality". When people lose the sense of self, the simplest explanation is that their brain stopped restricting the feeling of self to a specific brain process and instead let if spread over the wholistic expirience within consciousness. From that newly aquired perspective, the subject will feel like it is everything the subject is expiriencing. When the brain simulates another person within it's reality, the person will be included in the simulated self. This is what most people who expirience the divine basicly are going through. The mystery of consciousness though is a completely different game. It has nothing to do with reality, because reality seems to be illusiory. It's not just that the self is illusion, even what is left after the self has been eliminited is illusion. Truth itself is illusion. Any claim whatsoever is nothing more than a claim. Understanding anything is nothing more than understanding. It's literally just exactly what it is. This is so difficult to understand because there is nothing to understand. Everything everyone is saying is basicly bullshit, and even that would be a stretch. "Expirience" is not conceptual, but thought is entirely conceptual. They have nothing to do with each other. You have to see the limit, and once you see it, you'll probably see that talking about enlightenment and claiming truths about reality is nonsensical, because there is no reality, and there is no truth. They are concepts.

I think for any question you can frame, you already need assumptions. This is the strange thing about skepticism, it seems like just to be skeptical you already need to buy into a lie that you cannot even question, because the question itself is part of the lie.

You can try out many ways to get rid of the label. Self-acceptance, as others have pointed out, can be really helpful. But you are probably uncapable of doing so at this point, so maybe try something else. If you think you're a loser, maybe you are a loser. Maybe you are even pathetic and worthless. But even if you are, that doesn't mean that you can't improve. Just because you're a loser now doesn't mean that you have to stay a loser forever. You can stay a loser forever, if that's your choice, but it doesn't seem like you want to. If you look at yourself and recognize that you're a loser, it might take pressure off of you. Imagine you were a young, naive child who just started out on the path of becoming a buddhist monk. The child is pathetic, it doesn't know anything, and nobody expects the child to be like a master. It's a child, it needs to start somewhere, even if it's pathetic compared to what the older monks do. If the child works on himself, step by step, then some day he will grow into a master himself. That's all he has to do, make one step after the other. Yes, he's ignorant, arrogant, stupid, but that doesn't mean he'll stay that way forever. Infact, if he focuses on his little goals he will outgrow himself in no time at all. His worthlessness is a gift, because he doesn't need to impress anyone at all, he can just focus on learning. If you're a loser, you are allowed to lose. And only losing will teach you how to win.

Is there a good conceptualization of the depth of enlightenment? So, regular enlightenment seems to be the getting rid of the ego, but what is beyond that? Is beyond that the investigation of consciousness itself, and beyond that the investigation of what makes consciousness "appear"? Or is it more like going "into" aspects of consciousness and zooming in? Leo is talking about the Absolute, but expiriencing the Absolute doesn't seem to be getting rid of the ego, even though the ego seems to be in the way of reaching that expirience? And why is Leo so sure that you cannot go beyond the Absolute? Is it a logical conclusion, and then, why would one trust a logical conclusion in the face of investigating consciousness? How can you reach the limit of something if it's limitless?

But not everyone taking 5-MeO-DMT makes the same claims, so who am I to trust, and why am I to trust myself?

Ironically the CIA invented the term "Conspiracy Theory" in the 1960s to discredit controversial criticism of the goverment, which itself of course would be labelled as a conspiracy theory. The fact that something like the Kennedy Assassination is put in the same category as people claiming they have been abducted by aliens is quite an effective way to have the public view any investigation in possibly real conspiracies as completely uncredible. Whether or not there was a conspiracy is not even that important, either way it was an ingenious way to control public opinion. No high profile journalist will risk his career to go and actually investigate something that would be labelled a conspiracy theory, and that is a big reason why you get a lot of these "far out" conspiracies, which even if they contain certain truths, are entirely untrustworthy because of the hyberboles and the lack of investigative competence of the people who come up with conspiracy theories. I don't get too deep into this kind of stuff, but from the little research I have done, it's quite ridicilious how the goverment can just stage suicides and deaths in completely ridicilous manners without any real, credible jouranlists even mentioning that it happened or by god, that it might even seem suspicious. Whether or not the goverment actually does that is not even the point, the point is that they easily could do it with no consequence whatsoever, because even if something is ridicilously suspicious, no journalist will risk their job for it, partly because they themselves dismiss everything as conspiracy theories. Other than that, I think there are multiple reasons for why conspiracies are so popular, for example: - emergence of the internet and the resulting uncertainity of credible information - cultural dispersion - increase of atheism - actual conspiracies like Operation Northwoods - lack of mystery in modern culture - increase of social isolation - lack of critical thinking in the population

I agree. I think we are simply too greedy. We want to know everything before we have even understood the simplest things, and we want to achieve everything before we have achieved the simplest things. We have to keep in mind that most of Leo's videos, if applied correctly, will transform your life completely. One video, one piece of advice, could probably have you surpass 90% of the human population. When I discovered Leo I watched tons of videos of his. It did benefit my life to a certain degree, but I realized that I haven't mastered a single one of Leo's advice, not even remotely. Today I am kind of the opposite, I can't keep up with Leo's videos. Every week he brings a new valuable piece of advice, and to be honest, it's doing more harm than good to me. I'm just not ready for it, I have massive amounts of actions I have to take based on previous videos. Applying the advice of one video equals to 1000s of hours of work. It's just impossible to take action on all of his videos, and what I discovered in myself is that it creates expectations that cannot be met. It's like trying to build a space-rocket before having invented the wheel. The fundamentals need to sit, and that will already take tremendous amounts of work. Ironically though it is really the fundamentals that will grant the most benefits. The seemingly most simple stuff is what will give the most growth, and I think especially people who have been long on a path realize that. It all comes down to mastery. You have to apply mastery to Leo's videos, and once you get a picture of the effort it takes for staying on the path of mastery, you will be much more humble about what you can achieve in life. We are like the impatient martial artist who wants to learn the most fancy and difficult techniques before he has appreciated the challenge of learning to throw a simple punch. The one who will appreciate the challenge of the most simple, ironically will achieve the most complex. It is the perfection of the simple that makes the complex possible. Imagine if atoms were inaccurate in their behaviour, if their most fundamental attributes didn't sit. There wouldn't be any life in the universe, no complex construction would have the chance to emerge and be stable. The atoms are perfection, the true mastery of simplicity. And look what they can achieve, look at the universe that has emerged from the mastery of simple rules. The same applies to life. You can either try to apply a thousand rules half-assedly, or you can choose to apply a select few and embed them in your being. Instead of having 20 small habits a day, focus it to one that you do properly. Instead of 20 minutes of meditation, 5 minutes affirmation, 10 minutes visualization etc, do 2 hours of meditation and nothing else. I mean, we make it so complicated, but if you applied true mindfulness to your life, you'd have already won the game. You'd be set. But of course, to get there you'll need to sacrifice and put in really hard work. Instead you can jump from one piece of advice to the other, giving you the illusion of progress while you never have to face the challenge of masterying anything.

This is Sam Harris' claim, he is convinced that intelligence is a product of complex information processing. Isn't it obvious though that this cannot be the case if one inspects his own expirience? My conscious expirience of the color red has influence on my behaviour, proven to myself simply by the fact that I can become aware of expiriencing the color red. If intelligence or behaviour was merely grounded in physical information processing, the expirience of red itself couldn't possibly create a reaction in the mind. Infact, there wouldn't even be a place for the expirience to take place whatsoever. Isn't it far more likely that intelligence emerges from consciousness, or atleast that the information processing and consciousness are interacting with each other, as it seems? I know from a non-dual perspective it's not seperate, but simply from a conceptual perspective the idea that complex information procressing gives rise to conscioussness, which then has not influence on the information processing whatsoever, makes no sense to me at all. I can clearly become aware of consciousness having direct influence on my information processing. It seems that however neurons work, they are not governed by mere, classical physical rules. It's also unreasonable to me to assume that from a certain complexity of information processing suddenly consciousness would arise. I mean, what hilarious kind of rule would that be? Did the universe just look at how atoms move and decide that if they are arranged in a specific order, interacting with each other in a specific way, consciousness would just pop out? And where does consciousness even pop up, what is it made of? These questions are completely ignored, and assumption upon assumption is made, not even rational whatsoever, by the leading scientists on this field. It's like they didn't even get the fundamentals of intelligence and consciousness down. Does anyone understand their perspective of argumentation?

I think it's fascinating to see that Graham is falling into many ego traps himself, which really emphasizes for me how important the practical investigation of the own mind really is. He is researching ancient culture, he is completely convinced of them having had a deeper message that was essential for them, yet he does not actually value the message whatsoever, atleast that's what it seems like. He is not on a path of self-improvement, self-actualization, meditation or enlightenment, but his entire work is based upon the idea that these are basicly the most essential things to achieve for mankind. He seems just as dysfunctional as Micheal Shermer, just that he happens to have a view that requires greater open mindedness. He is only really open minded when it serves his own theory. Randall to me is a much more fascinating character, and also much more open minded as it seems. He seems to have preserved more of his true curiosity, which really is about discovery more than agenda. It's interesting though that it's very natural for the human mind to fill in gaps with fantasy, and more importantly to recognize how much joy one can recieve from that. If we crack our old beliefs, there are so many possible different beliefs we can replace it with. And we can pick them, we can make them up, we can let our fantasy go freely. In a world prior to science this very ability must have been used all the time, and it probably was amazing. It gave the world a sense of mystery, and more importantly it gave the child the chance to discover and dive into that mystery. Today science seems to have blocked this "play", because there isn't much to discover anymore. It seems like everything significant has been discovered. So we as humans seem to really be depraved of that. Whereas in our natural habitat we evolved to use our fantasy to make connections and sense out of the word, today there is no balance between that process and the simple cold facts of the world. In a sense there is a lack of wonder, curiosity was smothered. It's fascinating to observe this feeling coming back though, and how much the mind is craving it. Imagining that we do not know what was before the cataclysm that might have taken place, and then being able to wonder what exactly it was that was going on. It's curiosity, it drives fantasy, and it is the foundation of the human scientific journey. From that invention and exploration emerged. A problem occurs when the mind gets attached to what it has constructed, when the magical world becomes a new set belief that needs to be procted. This is when curiosity dies, when exploration and invention disappear. We have to be careful about not supressing our imagination, to let it roam freely, but to not get attached to what we imagine. I think it will be a great source of inspiration and motivation. Yes, reality usually is not as grand and fantastical as we make it up in our mind, but the grand and fantastical fantasy is what is going to motviate us to discover what reality really is.

There are no "evil" people, and it's probably not a conspiracy. It's a natural evolution of society. In the end our entire civilization we live in is founded on the idea that the map is the territory, that there is objective truth. People who do not agree with that objective truth are disvalued, and because people who take psychedelics do not agree with that objective truth, you will have a reaction against that medium. There is probably no one around who is thinking "Oh we need to ban psychedelics because it wakes people up and we have to keep them asleep!", it's more like from their perspective, people who do not agree with objective truth are just crazy, and because psychedelics seem to form these kinds of people, the usage of these substances are valued as crazy aswell. It's really all about disagreement and agreement. The question whether or not it's a conscious and deliberate conspiracy like for example the catholic church has done in the past with global populations is questionable. It's probably simply mass ignorance, and maybe an unconscious mechanism of control. For a stable society to develope certain mechanism need to evolve to keep the society stable. Much like the ego in the human mind is not a conscious conspirator, and simply a mechanism that evolved to ensure survival of the organism, it is much the same in the organization of society and civilization.

So I've been trying to get my productivity consistent in the past few months. A few weeks ago I decided to take it slow and just start from studying 1 hour every day, and increase it for an hour every week until I am at 8 hours. So, everything went perfectly well up to week 4, where I already started seeing signs of it getting more and more difficult. I decided to wait another week before I'd go to 5 hours of studying, and I also decided to have one day off each week. On week 6, when I increased to 5 hours of studying, it seems like I started to stumble a little more. One day I got only 2 hours, the other only 1, and then another only 3. So I was 4 hours short on how much I'd have to do for the week. I decided to once again wait a week before raising the study time, so the 7th week I still did 5 hours a day. But that week I kind of failed miserably. These were my hours of studying: Mo 2, Tu 3, We 5, Th 2, Fr 5, Sa 4 and So 0, which is today. I have the feeling like I am burning out, but it might also be my mind trying to stay in homeostasis, like mentioned in the book "Mastery". How should I go about this? Just brute force myself through this or better take it slow and maybe go back to 4 hours a day next week? I'm not sure, because I really don't want to burn out completely.

When I say studying it also includes exercising it. I'd count learning anatomy and just drawing anatomy over and over again to memorize it as both studying. It's not just intellectual knowledge, but also practical skill. It doesn't seem like 40 hours is a lot compared to what the successful people in the industry put into their craft. Some say they used to "study" 16 hours a day, every day of the week, for years. And didn't you spend insane amount of hours building your business, atleast in the beginning? How can one stay competitive if there are people who put in more than 40 hours per week into whatever they are doing? I'm not yet studying 8 hours per day, but that was the goal I was shooting for. I'm a really low energy person, most of the time, and I'd hope to increase the energy simply by getting myself more used to working more and more. Is that a silly strategy?

I'm studying drawing at the moment, and my tasks do get very monotonous. Whenever I introduce a new element or learn about a new thing I do tend to get in a flow state where I can just practise relentlessly. But the problem with mastery are of course the flatlines. I need to do the same thing thousands of times before it really becomes effortless, and often times introducing a new element is not really practical before I haven't learned the more fundmanetal thing first. It's the same with my meditation habit aswell. I usually am really good at meditating when I try a new kind of meditation, focusing on different aspects. As soon as I do the same thing every day my mind just goes on autopilot and it becomes boring. But the problem is that to get really good at it, I need to stick to one thing and do it over and over. For now, I'll go back to 4 hours a day.

You are asking him for another map. To see the territory you need to stop looking at the map.