Scholar

One thing to notice is that, the priest seems to be using this mechanism as a way to establish power. In one of the scenes a priest establishes a random boy in the crowd to be a witch. You realize what kind of power the priest has, because at any point he can basically accuse anyone, and the crowd will believe him. Subconsciously, the crowd will fear the priest, because they know each of them could be next, and so they will further please the priest, and their belief will become even stronger. They certainly don't want to appear to be a witch, and the best way to do that is to buy into the story and become radically convinced of anything the priest will say. So the priest has an incentive to keep establishing his power by accusing people to be witches, while the crowd is incentivised to believe him and do everything he does. There was an interesting case I think in mexico or some other south american country, where scammers went into a village and pretended a prostitute was a goddess. Because the people in the village were supersticious, they at some point began to believe in the story. Initially it was about scamming them for money, but the woman seemed to have enjoyed her position of power so much that she would at some point start picking random people within the group, and tell the others to kill and eat them, including the initial scammers who had been in control of the prostitute. The dynamic was that, because everyone initially believed in the goddess, none of them dared to speak against her, because it would potentially make them the next victim. So everyone would follow her commands, and even kill and eat family members. You couldn't opt out of it, once the group dynamic was established, you were unable to escape it. Even if none of them had believed in the goddess at that point, because they all feared to be pointed out as the next victim, they had to play along. But likelihood is, is that people would have believed her just because it was necessary for their survival. I suspect this is a more of a stage red example, not really stage blue.

The main issue I would see with the way your content is structured currently, is that it will of course repell functional people who are not mature enough, but it will attract dysfunctional people who might have a tendency to fall for these kinds of ideologies. There is always the problem of those who will take everything you say for gospel and are not interested in seeking truth but rather simply want an answer. When you combine the self-improvement with the spirituality, you will naturally attract such individuals, because they are usually the ones who need self-improvement. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's hard to gage really the effect on people when we don't see the actual results. In the past you would have self-improvement videos that would urge and try to convince people that awakening is the most important thing, and I think that will naturally tend to create dogmatism in students. You probably can't entirely rule out all the risks, for that you'd have to do some sort of in person teaching style, but we can always think of ways to minimize this kind of harm.

This is true, it takes a certain kind of maturity to be able to face the truth. When you willy nilly give people the truth, the consequences will be that most of those individuals will be too immature to handle, or do anything constructive, with the truth. I think this would have been obvious to you years ago if you had taught people in person, because you would have seen the results. You fundamentally cannot trust what people say on this forum, nor under your youtube videos, in regards to their claims about what kind of effect your ideas and teachings have on them. and I think you are beginning to realize this. Technically, your teachings aren't that much different from any other teaching, in the end they all lead to the same, yet as we know 99.9% of people will never gain the Truth from these teachings. Sure you can create your own kind of teachings, but I think it's important to realize that this will be a temporary and very localized things. It's made for very few people, at a very particular time in history. Yet, in the past you have treated this almost as if you wanted everyone to get enlightened, and that it's something everyone should be doing. And like I said in the past, I think there is a reason why certain traditions do the precise opposite. They will test whether or not you are ready for the work, they won't try to lure you into it, because that will of course attract immaturity. Rather than trying to convince people's egos that enlightenment is what they need, what we must do is gradually make society more mature, and that will require Love on a different kind of level. If we do this correctly, their maturity will at some point naturally lead them to seek the next level. So, the project of enlightening people and making people mature enough to be enlightened are two different things. I think making enlightenment part of the process of self-improvement is unwise, at least the way you have done it. Self-improvement should be one thing, and then those who are mature enough should be confronted with the pathway towards awakening. To dangle Awakening infront of those who are still maturing just invites all kinds of egoic issues. Which actually, I think your forum is a good example of, because we can see this happening here alot. Just one example is something like relativism. For someone who matures, relativism might not be good at all, because they have not developed even the necessary foundations for living a good life. If you introduce relativity too soon, chances are the ego will use it for it's own purposes. It will use it to justify laziness, devilry and so forth. Putting a warning infront of an immature person that says "Don't do this!", will not be enough. That's not how egos work, if they did, the world would be a much different place.

James Webb Telescope using a galaxy cluster as a magnifying lense to look at some of the very first galaxies.

There is an interesting insight to gain from what Jordan Peterson is saying here, even though he lacks the consciousness to truly recognize the depth of what he is saying. The lesson is: Love is fundamentally attractive. If your teaching, your words, your actions, do not resonate with the masses, you are not embodying love to a sufficenty degree. If you embody love, people will worship you, because they see in you the Grace of God. There is no avoiding this, and the following corruption that will ensue as you depart this world. Ideally, you do not even need to intellectualize God. Your very being should be a message from God. As long as you communicate Love, through embodying Love, that is all you need to do. That's all that is needed, that is the message. The more you will embody love, the more people will get attracted to whatever you will say. In the end what do you want to achieve by trying to convince people of the reality of God? Why all the talk about truth and devilry? In the end, the only goal could possibly be Love. People do not need to realize, or understand, what they need is Love. If you can give them that, you are giving them God. You can give them God without them ever realizing it, and yet they will know God in the purest form. If you can sufficiently Love them, it will not matter what they believe. Embody love to such a degree that they cannot help but be in awe, despite them disagreeing with you, or even hating you.

Me too, it's a bad habit.

I often get the feeling that you try to look for disagreement in what is written on the forum, so that you can use it as an opportunity to play out your teacher role, and I think it sometimes makes you unnecessarily contrarian and misinterpret some of the things that someone might communicate.

I feel like you are understanding love in a very narrow way here. A healthy way to seek awakening is fuel by your love for the truth. That's why you are where you are in the first place. You have to cultivate Love. The people who turn love into a selfish monstrosity are people who have lacked genuine love in their life, especially during early years of development. Clearly I am not talking about some surface level naive love here, and of course not only about "receiving love". The joy of love comes from experiencing love FOR a thing, not receiving it by a thing. And that is what must be cultivated and exemplified. I mean Leo, you can try to convince people by fear to seek awakening. "Your life will be terrible if you don't, look how stupid you are, look at all the things you are missing!", but how much good does that do for anyone. If you could simply express your total love for truth, you would inspire people that way, And you would inspire the right people, who might share this genuine interest, and therefore ought to be pursuiting this issue. in fact, when you do inspire people, it's mainly for that reason I think. Not everyone has to seek awakening anyways, we have to develope as a species in so many ways before we will be able to focus more on these higher spiritual pursuits. Then, you will also not have as much of a danger of corruption, because corruption happens precisely because people have underdeveloped egos. This means, we must raise the quality of ego in general before we give them the holy grail.

1) I think that's because loving others completely means to be awake. There is no difference. 2) I think that is myopic. They will seek awakening because they seek love, so the best way to truly encourage them to seek, is to love. Think of Christ, a singular individual embodying Love, spawning an entire institution that seeks God, creating thousands of mystics, aswell as fundamentally leading to your life and your awakening. I do not think the most sophisticated and intelligent way to make people seek love/awakening is to convince them of seeking awakening. In my personal experience, your lack of Love is one of the things which discouraged me from applying your teachings. The little Love you do embody and express is what I am encouraged by most, and I doubt that this is just me. 3) Yes, but you know yourself that, the expression of your own potential for love will lead to the recognition of their own potential for love. This is what religion is, until it is corrupted. Corruption will happen either way, the question is, will a part of your teachings be part of it, or not? If Christ's teachings had not been corrupted, you wouldn't know about them today. In fact, if none of the mystic teachings were ever corrupted, and integrated into the survival of civlization, your life would not have been the life it is today. Love can only exist to the degree it is tolerated by the ego. That's all you can do for your brothers and sisters.

Death is Union with Eternity/the Absolute. The point at which your individuated consciousness stops is the moment it dissolves into Eternity. Eternity is non-linear, there is no time in eternity. This means that everyone dies together. When you die, the entire universe dies with you. And because there is no time in eternity, everyone's death will be simultaneous. Birth and death are the same point. You can imagine your life and existence as a curved line going from the Godhead and then merging back to the same spot. The Godhead is absolute Union, which means the enlightement of all things, of all beings. It's Infinity. God-realization is Death, it is the Death of All, which means it is the ultimate Enlightenment of All. You can think of it in linear terms as well. Think of an animal who died 100 millions of years ago. Once that animal died, it's experience of time ceases, too. It's like when you are in deep sleep, and hours can pass in an instant. Your death means never waking up, which means that the entire time-line of the universe passes instantly. The death of all things happens instantly, meaning from your point of view, the very same moment of your death. The moment of your death is the same moment all of history passes and all beings died and return to Infinity. This realization is contextualized as Nirvana in Buddhism. It is said that when you awaken, all living things awaken with you. In Christianity, Christ delivered us from evil upon his death, his sacrifice. Because his death was your death, and therefore your liberation. Leo had a similar experience when he said that if he dies, the entire universe dies with him. That's basically the same phenomena described in a different way. It has to do with the nature of Eternity/Infinity.

For context on the first image posted, here you have the nights sky, zoom out to see how far it is zoomed in. https://web.wwtassets.org/specials/2022/jwst-smacs/

Lack of imagination.

Sure but you described it like an evolution, like you realize the limitations of one system and then go to the next, as if the next was more sophisticated. It seemed to me more like the positions themselves have certain pitfalls, and recognizing them will naturally lead you to a completely new position/understanding of knowledge.

I feel like this can just be described as: Knowledge is how the world appears. Knowledge is that which is rationally justified. Knowledge is that which works. Knowledge is that which gives the most holistic explanation of reality. But the fundamental question is still, what is even knowledge here? It seems like you go from one survival construct to the next not knowing that you change the meaning of knowledge in pursuit of something.

This is not a fearmongering thread, rather I want to discuss the underlying dynamics for how power structure eventually crumble and give way for others to take over. In my opinion there is a fundamental lack of understanding in regard to how systems evolve throughout time. There is a reason why empires cannot forever uphold their own structures. Every structure on earth is evolving, and in that competing for ressources. Structures that do not evolve are stable, but run the risk of eventually getting outcompeted, or failing due to changes in the environment. So you might think constant change and adaptation is the obvious solution here, but evolution and change inherently is a risky undertaking. The wisdom of evolution is not that structures magically evolve towards the most optimal path, it's that, structures evolve by trying out new things. Most of this experimentation is bound to fail, simply because most paths will lead to dead ends. This is the reason why there was never a singular structure that simply dominated the entire world for the entire duration of history. Because to dominate you have to be the pioneer who walks into the unknown. An empire which does not evolve will we outcompeted by structures that do evolve, but to evolve means to run the risk of falling into a dead end. The US was the dominating power because it did a lot of pioneering work, and this pioneering attitude which it has today will lead to a dead end. It is inevitable, because the way political and social structures evolve is still too unconscious and unsophisticated to actually predict the effects of it's own changes. The systemic issues you see in the US is due to the pioneering work it has done, but that same pioneering work is causing problems this system does not know how to solve. And the failure of this system will be what will inform other systems of one of the dead-ends. That way, other systems will be able to continue exploring and evolving, most of them of course failing, some succeeding and then falling as they run into the same issue. Notice the genius of this system, it divine intelligence at work, and it ensures progress, not for individual systems, but for the given reality as a whole. Infact, even if the entirety of earth fails, this system will ensure that one out of the many planets in this universe that does have complex life will eventually find the corrrect pathway. The reason why I am saying this is to set correct expectations, not to fearmonger. The US will very likely lose it's place as an hegemony, simply because it's culture ran into a dead-end, which will require a fundamental reconfiguration. Looking at this through a lense of spiral dynamics, and thinking that just because something seems green, it must be the way humanity will progress, is naive. Not every green structure will be healthy, or future proof. Again, remember, a healthy progression transcends and includes, which is not the case in what we are observing in the US specifically. As this system fails, and another one succeeds, many structures will naturally follow that example, as it will be the path of least resistance. Being a pioneer has advantages and disadvantages. That very attitude both leads to your success, and your eventual failure. Because what matters is not your individual success, but the success of the system as a whole unity.

He will call it survival. But he can turn it around and ask you the same. What is knowledge, why can a good guess make a huge difference, what is achieved through learning? He will of course criticize you for merely pointing at things that you call knowledge, but what is the nature of knowledge then? Is it truth, and then, what is truth? How can an idea about reality predict reality itself? What is even the nature of prediction or correlation?

You two will be talking past each other, I am not sure if Joe is aware that you are making philosophical arguments and trying to establish a theory of truth or knowledge. He would probably reject the idea that knowledge is an idea about reality that you cannot be certain is true, but that is true nonetheless. Though I am not sure if that's the theory you are positing. Maybe you are just an instrumentalist/scientific anti-realist, and he is not aware of what that is?

I think the argument is that evolution cannot be explained through random mutation. I haven't really read about the topic yet, but I know Leo recommends the books "Evolution 2.0" by Perry Marshall, aswell as "Undeniable" by Douglas Axe. I usually hear the argument, from Christians mainly, that darwinism, and specifically the claim that evolution is explained by random mutation, has not even been proven yet and that it faces challenges that it is struggling to solve. What would be your response to such claims?

To be fair, you can clearly see that he suffers from permanent brain damage after what happened to him with that whole benzos fiasco. I mean he is just going off the rails now, whereas before he atleast had some semblance of rationality.

It's such a shame to me, I love philosophy but these systems are just so obviously delusional to me. You are clearly building a house made of ideas, which is one aspect of existence. You will never be able to explain redness, or define it, or find it's cause. Or understand how it fits into reality. That entire approach is just fantasy-making. But of course you will conveniently ignore the fact that you cannot even explain redness, you will pretend like you have understood all of reality, as if there was such a thing as all of reality.

I suspect it might not count your signature then, I think they verify them. But I guess trying can't hurt.

This is a big opportunity to move the EU in a positive direction in regards to environmentalism and ethics, if you live in the EU, it would be appreciated if you could sign this petition, for the future of mankind and our fellow brothers and sisters. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/025/public/#/screen/home It is basically about moving subsidies from funding animal protein to plant protein, here is more information: https://vegconomist.com/politics-law/end-the-slaughter-age/ Spreading awareness of this is also important, let's try to make this change.

Life is full of meaning. If you want to truly investigate this question, take hold of the experience of "better" ("betterness"), sit down and observe it clearly. See it for what it is, recognize it's being. Currently, you do not know what the question you posed even is. So that is where you must start. Start by looking carefully at the actuality of betterness. When you realize the ontology of the stories you are spinning and creating, which your questions are part of, you will realize why these questions are just that, stories.

So, I have tried to explain to a friend why I think many people struggle with discipline in regards to moral behaviour and they seemed to not understand it at all. I am not sure if I am communicating it effectively, so I want to run it by you guys to check if I am the crazy one and just babbling incoherent nonsense without realizing it. My friend was arguing that, another friend, who is a vegetarian, struggled to go vegan because of discipline issues. I tried to explain to him that I do not believe this to be the case, rather that I think it's about how she relates to animals that is the problem. I view animals more or less as humans, and to me, there is no temptation to consume animal products whatsoever. That option does not even exist in my mind, and therefore, I require not discipline to uphold this behavior. I was making the case that our friend, who still makes a clear distinction between animals and humans, and resists the idea that they are basically both conscious individuals with slightly different traits, is actually unable to let go of these products because her concern for animals is not as deep as mine. If it was as deep as mine is, by recognizing that animals are basically humans with different minds and bodies, she would not struggle at all to let go of these products. Note that she is a person who is very aware of the ethics, and what happens to animals, and is intellectually on board with the morality. He then argued that no, she simply had difficulty with discipline, which I once more disagreed with, giving the following example: I might really, really want to have sex with a certain person, even more so than I would like to consume a certain food, but I would not struggle whatsoever not to rape them. There might be a desire, but there is no true temptation, because of my concern for that individual. I don't need discipline to keep myself from raping that person, that would only be the case if I had no concern for that person, or if the desire was absurdly great. My argument therefore is that instead of trying to moralize as much to people about veganism, and to attempt to discipline them to behave morally, I propose that it is more effective to change the way they view animals. I think what keeps people from acting morally in regards to animals is because of the way they perceive animals. They do not truly recognize the individual within those animals. If that is recognizing, the moral arguments will flow naturally, and discipline will not be as much of an issue anymore. My friend did not understand this argument, and to me it is very clearly formulated. I tried to reframe it, by explaining that it is more effective to focus on internal motivation rather than attempting to resist internal desires by means of discipline. There is a reason why some people struggle with veganism for example, and in my opinion it's because the way they are motivated. If someones dog died if they ate an animal product, for most there would be no longer a true temptation to consume those products, they might desire it, but suddenly in their mind the option would disappear, and there would be no longer internal resistance. Their behavior would be enforced in a way that is stable. On the other hand, if I am not internally motivated, I will have to constantly resist those desires, it becomes a temptation, and usually unsustainable for me to enforce through discipline. I argued that discipline in this way is ineffective in affecting long term behavior, and that we should first focus on changing our internal motivation, by for example increasing our concern for others, and recognizing the Self in others. Is the way I explained this coherent?

It's pretty simple what he is missing. His idea of "Reality is not what you see.", is itself something that he sees, which ironically is what he does not see in this context. He says, it's all just a fiction, but of course, the idea that it's all just fiction must be, according to his own logic, be part of the fiction. His idea about reality undermines itself, because it undermines the very idea of ideas about reality. How can you have an idea about reality, if all ideas are a hallucination? What then is even reality, what even is a hallucination, as these two things itself are defined as part of the hallucination. It doesn't seem to me like you can escape this problem. Leo is correct here, it is a basic form of self-deception. All perception is hallucination, yet his little ego conveniently ignores one part of that hallucination, and that calls that fundamental. In the end, it's as absurd as saying "All colors are actually red!". This is why self-awareness is essential for the process of understanding Truth, because the self is all you have, if you do understand and look at the self, you do not even see what understanding is. You don't see what is happening when your mind says "All colors are red!", and that's how your mind can generate these completely absurd understandings, which anyone who has self-awareness will immediately be able to point out. The most important thing you can learn from this is, that you are approaching this from the wrong angle. If you didn't immediately recognize the problem I just pointed out, you lack self-awareness. No understanding in the world can help you, if you do not see understanding for what it actually is. You are like a blind person talking about colors.