Scholar

Deep in the night a Sparrow met a Mouse. "I told you, right up there, thousands of them, don't you see them?", said the Sparrow, pointing to the sky with one of his wings. "No, I don't see anything, only leafs and dirt!", the Mouse argued, looking around to find the so called 'stars'. The Sparrow was aghast, not able to comprehend how the Mouse could be so blind. "Not on the ground, up here! How can you not see them, they are everywhere!" "No, I don't see anything on the ground, only leafs and dirt!", the Mouse repeated, increasingly frustrated with the Sparrow's arrogance. "No, not on the ground! You have to look up here, the stars are in the sky!", the Sparrow chirped, fluttering his wings passionately for the Mouse to see. Once more the Mouse looked around. He looked in front and behind, to his left and to his right, even beneath his own four paws! Yet, he could not find a single one of the stars! "I am looking, there are no stars on the ground! I knew you were lying all along little Sparrow. Stars don't exist, stars could not possibly exist!" The Mouse crawled back into his burrow to go to sleep. Now all by himself, the sparrow would watch the night, the stars and the moon. Until the sun would rise he would sit on his perch, gazing far up, where the Mouse would never take a glance. Had this pop into my mind after I had a discussion with someone about how they were stuck in their paradigm, that they would not be able to see the limitations of their perspective if they would not make attempts to escape it. I tried to tell them that they had to stop thinking and instead focus on what their thoughts were pointing to in their experience, so they could see them for what they truly were. They couldn't do it, they still responded with the same thoughts I was trying to tell them to inspect. They didn't have the ability to question the seemingly self-evident, they were completely deaf to what I was trying to communicate. It was so weird, I felt just like the Sparrow.

Why does Buddha seem to have been passive while Christ seems to have been proactive? Buddha's actions seems to have been manifested more among the lines of leaving all living creatures alone and helping those who would come to ask him for help, while Christ seems to have been far more involved in trying to help and aid people, as an action rather than a reaction. Where does that difference in action originate from? Can we learn something important from Christ that we cannot learn from Buddha, and vice versa? Maybe there is a difference between fully dissolving the ego and structuring it in accordance/resonance to the divine?

It seems like I am living in hypocrisy. I know that the right thing to do is to surrender to the aid of those who need it the most. I know that it is what I have the greatest passion for, yet I show no true effort to go towards that reality. What is the point of enjoying life when there is incomprehensible suffering in this world? It is not even true joy that I am experiencing, it is superficial and momentary happiness. It does not give me anything, it does not add anything to my soul, nor my character, nor to what I deem to be right. Why am I not able to live consistent with my philosophy? If I was the one to suffer, I would urge myself to give up this fleeting happiness in the aid of myself. And I know that either way the surrender of my self is my ultimate destination. I know that the greater the concern for my self, the greater will be my suffering. How do I take the step to live one with what I deem to be the only moral thing to do? I truly do not see the point of continuing the path I am treading on, not rationally, not intuitively, not emotionally. I can continue living a superficial life amongst superficial people, creating superficial tools for superficial purposes. But what is the point, other than to preserve myself in a way that seems to be comfortable, but yet grows more unbearable each day? If I were consistent with my beliefs, I would follow the suffering of those who need it the most, those who are neglected and those who nobody else is willing to stand for. I would learn to give love unconditionally, I would actually live a life worth living. I know that this is the best thing to do, why do I still resist? The comfort cannot be a good reason, and yet it is the only one I can find. I have to remind myself of the suffering that is experienced. I am not yet ready for awakening, not before I have not resolved this inconsistency. I have to restructure my life and my character, I have to commit to radical change and I need to be strategic about it so that I have a chance of achieving it. I have always known that this was what I had to do, though it has taken so long for me to consider it a serious possibility. I have to rid myself of all pride, of all desire to find approval. This cannot be for glory, for money or fame, it has to be for nothing else but compassion. I have to be able to sacrifice everything in order to achieve what is my true authentic desire. If I do this, I will find fulfillment and peace. It does not have to be grand, it simply has to be the best and most honest effort I can do. What is even the point of this continuous struggle? Concern after concern about myself, instead of a surrendering to the servitude of god. This is what the world needs the most now, true sacrifice for the greater good. I know it will be the path to true joy, yet I also know it will be the most difficult thing I could possibly do. For now, I at least have to give a good effort to start trying.

By the way, what the communists did to the level green meme's of Karl Marx is what people in this community do to the level turquoise meme's that Leo is communicating in his videos. It is literally the same mechanism, no one can help but do it. The only advantage we have is that we know about this mechanism and thus have to tread with great care about any positive statements we make about the nature of reality that we have not yet experienced ourselves. There is a reason why Zen Masters talk in riddles, and we do not yet know whether Leo's way of advocating the Truth will not have some sort of catastrophic results for certain individuals who follow this path. It is an experiment, and there is a possibility that there is a greater wisdom we have not yet articulated.

High level Memes can be adopted and culturalized across all developmental stages. A good example are the Indonesian mass killings, a capitalistic (Multiplistic-Individualistic) ideology adopted by an Absolutist-Egocentric society. Each stage can interpret a high level Meme through it's own framework, in fact that is the only way it can do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66 Watch "They act of killing" if you want to get a deeper insight into the mechanisms taking place. All of this should be fairly obvious if we consider that all current major religions have kosmocentric meme's as a foundational structure of their ideologies. Memes spawned by the highest consciousness individuals have always been hijacked by lower consciousness structures. Our entire world is governed by ideologies that contain high level Memes but yet are on the lower levels of the spectrum, and even things like physics are no exception to that. Just look at the difference between the inventors of quantum physics, or even the inventor of the theory of relativity, and the physicists who currently live off of the fruits of these great insights into the nature of reality. Same mechanism, high level meme's adopted and misinterpreted by lower-level stages.

Consider why you assume that your skepticism is valid in the first place. What does it mean to question something? You are lost in thoughts and stories, and because thoughts and stories are just thoughts and stories you will find them to be empty if you try to investigate them. What is confusion? Don't just ask yourself that as a question but try to look at it for what it is, as a meditation rather than contemplation.

Not quite, it is not that simple. It would be accurate to say that AI will most certainly be able to generate images which please the human eye, which even might invoke different feelings and emotions, but it will not be able to create art, at least if you have an understanding of art that comes from an artists perspective. In fact I would say that, in the case that AI has consciousness, it would be able to create art, but not human art. I will try to explain why the difference is important. Art from my general perspective is not merely a product or a result, or even the process of connecting meaning to a given experience. Rather it is the attempt of articulating (in whatever way you want) a fundamental truth about human experience in a way in which this particular aspect becomes elevated, more obvious to the human mind. Art becomes more truthful than reality because it reveals a hidden aspect of human experience and attempts to blend out the mundane. This is something Jordan B Peterson is talking about, even if he is articulating it in a different way. A book like Harry Potter contains a truth about human experience that goes beyond all naturalistic descriptions of reality. Yes it is simplifying natural reality, it is extracting irrelevant information and pushing forth that which it wants to communicate. If you look at a painting like this, the way the values are grouped, the way the edges are controlled masterfully to lead the eye through the painting in a very deliberate way, it's all intentional. And furthermore it is not how reality looks like, yet somehow this painting tells us more about this person and the artist than a photo ever could have communicate to us. Why is that? Because a photograph simply captures reality, it does not capture an experience. In this case the artist, who is John Singer Sargent, communicated his own experience of reality onto the canvas. He took what he felt to be most important and he painted it in a way so that we would see that it is the most important aspect. We get an actual insight into the mind of the artist, a communication of how he experience this very moment of his existence. If you look at the features of the face you will notice that there is contrast between the values and edges so that this aspect of the painting captures the viewers attention. Of course we could teach an AI to do the same thing, to generate an image just like that (even though I don't even believe that will be possible, though that is another discussion entirely), but what would lack in the process of creation would be the intention. An artificial intelligence does not intend to communicate it's experience, because it does not experience. It does not feel like any of the aspects of the picture are more important than the others, because it does not experience any pictures. That is why you need to feed it data so it can generate anything. A human being does not require that because their consciousness is the source of the intention. Art is basically: Consciousness -> Experience -> Intention of communication -> Manifestation of communication within reality We can only communicate our experiences if the receiver of the communication is capable of experiencing the same thing. That is what art truly is, it is taking a particular aspect of experience that the artists wants to communicate and extracting it's essence, leaving all unnecessary information out. It is unfortunate that this principle or understanding is not a conscious part of our generation of artist, to the great detriment of culture and society at large. It is not just because it would result in better art, but because right now we are so disconnected from our nature, from our experiences. The process of art can be a process of spiritual inquiry, as it requires us to inspect the fundamental truths of our experiences. Today we operate on such a surface level that we don't even consider this. From Harold Speed, you should read some of his books. Another good quote:

That's what a lot of Philosophy graduates go into.

This might be true if I made an argument in a debate or a discussion that would be saying that, but I am not. I simply made recommendations to people in this forum who I repeatedly see reduce everything to very limited concepts that they somewhere caught, like for example the concept of "ego". If you reduce everything to a very broad concept you will actually lose understanding , and more than that you will actually fail to recognize lack of knowledge within a certain domain. I don't see how that is knowledge signalling, and I think you are being very close-minded and defensive for some reason. Sure I was signalling knowledge, that was the whole point so that I could get people motivated to read up on some of this stuff themselves, it's not like I have an inherent superiority, you literally just have to read the books on Leo's book list. To even suggest that what I am doing is due to some sort of arrogance or that it is some sort of debate tactic is so ironic. You literally just dismissed everything I said on the basis that it is knowledge signalling, without providing any rational to how it is "knowledge signalling" or in what way it would even be relevant to the discussion. What if I actually have a deeper understanding of human cognition and development than you do? You will invalidate that because I recommend you books? What are you doing here?

This is what happens when a human being does not develop the capacity to recognize the limitations of formal operation cognition and does not transition into vision logic or post-formal. You have to understand that from his perspective, what he is saying and interpreting, is actually valid and correct. Nothing you ever will tell him is going to make sense to him, in fact it cannot make sense to him. People in here have a tendency to dismiss this as pure ego, but that is very reductionistic and simply false. I can only recommend again and again that people in this community start to read some of the books on Leo's book list. The positions Leo is communicating are far more sophisticated than most people's understanding of the conclusions of these positions are. Leo's hour long videos are not even proper introductions into these topics, and people come away from them thinking they have understood them. This cannot be reduced to epistemology or egoic behavior, there are very specific reasons for why these positions necessarily arise within a human mind, how and why they are overcome. Once you actually go through these stages yourself you will see, feel and understand why conventional communication between these cognitive operators are relatively futile. It is in a very real way as if you tried to make an infant understand what object permanence is. It is not merely an understanding that can be communicated, it is a perception that is connected to cognition. It is how the mind generates it's own subjective reality. Thus it is not even knowledge or a merely a perception, it is actually a difference in the subjective realities between two subjects. These perceptions and cognitive operators structure your reality, and you expect these people to take in information that was generated by cognitive operators and perception that are simply non-existence in their mind structures and consciousness. You cannot understand object permanence if you have no experience of object permanence. You guys really need to read more books.

I would do what motivates you the most. As long as you try your best to surrender the addiction you will be fine. You could be trying to avoid wet dreams but not count them as relapses if that works for you.

Have you read any of Ken Wilber's books? I feel like you could benefit greatly from adopting multi-perspectival cognition.

Can you not see how what you have just told yourself is another fiction itself? Namely, the fact that atoms and molecules are fictions, is a fiction in and of itself? Understand this dynamic and notice what is happening, you keep reducing your subjective reality to certain kinds of ideas. What is a label, what is a function, what is a fiction?

The way I try to formulate it looks something like this: Vision logic or post-formal thought is the capacity to adopt multiple perspectives at once and recognize that truth is a relative phenomenon, that truth is actually an aspect of the mind and not an aspect of "objective reality". Due to that recognition one can hold multiple truths at once that are seemingly contradictory, because one recognizes that each of them contains a partial truth, partial validity. It is not merely the recognition that this is true, but a capacity of the mind. It is an ability that is easily recognizable to someone who has adopted it. I get asked for research and proof that vision logic exists and I try to explain to them that I cannot as it is a very subtle phenomenon. I know from their perspective it is irrational to just believe me, or to go through the effort of trying to learn about this themselves because I am just a random person who is telling them that. So what is there to do? It seems like their formal operational cognition actually prohibits them to go beyond it. It's like there a truths in reality that, due to the limited information we have about reality, are inaccessable to us if we follow strict rationality. It might actually be rational to dismiss me and not pursue what I am trying to communicate even though I am right. So how could one possibly nudge a stage orange person in the right direction? And how does it even occur that they themselves suddenly adopt early-vision logic?

Is it recommendable to use 5-MeO as your first psychedelic experience?

Do you avoid telling people about spiral dynamics and integral psychology? Because I feel like any time I mention it people go crazy and want to know why I would ever believe in it, and it's not easy (and so far for me not possible) to make them understand.

I have been following some of Destiny's content on twitch and youtube, he is a streamer. The way he uses his audience inspired the vision. Even though I think he is dysfunctional in many ways, he is definitely onto something as far as his approach goes, even if he is doing it unconsciously. You can really observe the evolution of him, he went from orange to green and is now scratching at yellow after he started using psychedelics. The amount of knowledge he has acquired just by using his audience is quite astounding. What I envision is really an embracing of streaming into educational structures and research, which might take a few decades to manifest. Leo could be a pioneer in this, I really don't see any better option for him. He can do the traditional approach which is mediocre at best, he can keep making videos which also is sub-optimal, or he can try something new and be the first person who recontextualizes a medium for personal development. I a completely unconscious person can get that far with streaming, I can only imagine what someone like Leo could do with it. But he would have to put his ego on the line, which I think he is not yet ready to do.

What I would suggest is to censor and filter people. Streaming is used as entertainment so you cannot compare an average stream of gamers to a stream of Self-actualizers who are there to learn. If you would be saying stupid shit you would be out of the conversation, plain and simple. Cultures change as new people adopt certain technologies, the same happened for every medium that was invented in history.

I think this thread might reveal a hidden question about the process of consciousness inquiry. How do we distinguish Absolute Truth from Relative Truth? How can we ever know the extend to which our own ego deludes us? How do we know whether we are not merely inquiring into the mind, into individual consciousness? Because it is infinite? Well, who says a mind cannot be infinite? Who says each individual consciousness cannot be infinite? Materialism? "This cannot be my mind, this HAS to be everything, THE ABSOLUTE!" What if the mind is absolute? What if consciousness is an aspect of reality that is paradoxical and infinite? But what if there is something beyond consciousness, obviously inaccessible to consciousness? We know that our entire realities are consciousness, thus naturally inspecting that reality will reveal that it is entirely consciousness. It will also reveal that it is all one, and possibly even that it is all Love. Even if consciousness embraces all of itself, does not mean that there is nothing outside of it. An ego might interpret this as Absolute Infinity and God, without realizing that it is only describing this consciousness. What is Absolute might not be consciousness, but the inaccessibility to things outside of consciousness. A few things are hinting that this might be true: - No enlightened master seems to have ever acquired any information that was outside of his mind structures, or that could have been only explained in a way that would suggest he had access to something beyond his or her own mind. - There are substances which change the structure of the brain and conversely induce enlightenment experiences. - Everything we hear enlightened people say about the nature of reality can be predicted with a scary accuracy if we simply assume the position that they are inquiring into and describing their own subjective reality. - People have widely different conclusions about enlightenment experiences, despite it being supposed to be Absolute Truth. There are many similarities which can be explained away as the natural tendencies the human mind has towards the interpretation of these experiences. From the perspective of consciousness, everything is consciousness. I don't doubt that we can have great insights into reality by inquiring into consciousness, but I am yet still open minded about it not having any significant metaphysical implications outside of consciousness. Of course, any enlightened person will dismiss that anything outside of consciousness exists, which is naturally assumed because existence itself is a concept within consciousness, once it is revealed as such it will seem like that concept has no validity. But because of the mysterious nature of reality and our ability to understand anything at all, it is really hard to determined what is going on, and due to the inherent limitations of the evolved human mind, it might actually be Absolutely Impossible. I have no idea how Leo got past this other than blind faith in his experiences and the natural conclusions his mind has given him.

Is it not possible that by doing consciousness practices for years and years, one actually creates a process for becoming more conscious which exponentially increases consciousness so that it seems like, for someone who has not practice long enough, it would be impossible to reach consciousness levels as high as one does with psychedelics? Additionally, as most spiritual traditions include spiritual purification, might it not also be possible that Leo, because he cannot dedicate his entire life to spiritual purification, is hindered within the more traditional approach due to the limitations his ego put upon him? For example, if one would practice consciousness and purification, one would get to as high, if not higher levels, as on psychedelics, eventually? The reason why I am proposing this is that there seems to lack something in the psychedelic process that is present in the traditional approaches. In the traditional approaches, one actually learns a conscious approach to increase consciousness, whereas psychedelics are an unconscious approach to increasing consciousness, though it increases it far more radically. It's kind of like a photographer vs a painter. In the first few years the painter will struggle with creating beautiful and attractive visuals, whereas the photographer can do so in an instant. But the painter can eventually exceed the photographer because he learns a process which gives him deliberate control over the creation of visual that the photographer will not learn in the process of simply capturing reality. Similarly, it might be the case that having the ability to consciously increase consciousness eventually will lead to higher levels of consciousness than psychedelics would deliver, due to the fact that one has a deliberate process of increasing consciousness that gets better and better over time, but takes longer to acquire. The same is true for spiritual purification, one can do so with psychedelics or learn a process that consciously purifies oneself, which gets better and better with practice. How could Leo possibly know what kind of levels the greatest yogis reached, those yogis who truly dissolve their ego in the process of inquiry, so much so that they kill themselves in the process biologically, by for example starvation?

That is because language is primitive in regards to non-dual awareness. We don't really have concepts to describe all the different facets and aspects of consciousness, we literally have no names for the things Leo has been experiencing. That is why we come back to describe it in the same way over and over again despite the experience being different. The thing is that even if he used different words it would be meaningless to you because you have not experienced what he has experienced. What's the point of talking about all the different shades of red to a person who never has seen any red?

You are interpreting a transpersonal truth from a formal operational perspective, which will lead to delusion no matter how much you will try to make sense of it. It cannot make sense to you because currently you lack the perspective to see what is even meant by these statements. See how you are using an orange tool to understand something that was the result of an at least indigo tool.

Yes, but don't forget that this was the case in all currently first world countries when they went through the industrial revolution. Child-slavery, robber-baron capitalism etc. are all part of the evolution of a civilization. Third world countries are lagging behind and sadly have to go through the same insights, revolutions and changes that the western countries did. Due geopolitical circumstances these changes will look very different from country to country, western governments will not be capable of effectively help these countries until they reach second tier.

But the effect itself is based on it's prevalence among the population, that is really the whole point of calling it the effect Dunning-Kruger effect. Otherwise it's just normal incompetence and overestimation of ones knowledge or skill, I don't think there is a need to keep misinforming people about something that is just bad science.