Carl-Richard

Anything emotionally disruptive that has happened to you in the past that affects you in the present in the direction of pathology (or coping mechanisms for that pathology), which is always a spectrum. Trauma means "wound".

Maybe I'm too far gone down the non-dual Buddhist rat rabbit hole. Maybe an old dog doesn't learn new tricks 🐕‍🦺

Sure

I'm merely suggesting a possible tool for you, sir. My feeling is you have something from the past that is driving something in the now. It might not be big, it might not be flashy, it might not even be interesting. But it might explain a lot of what is going on. But yes, feel free to not listen to my feeling. But then I will not listen to your feeling that "other teachers are not awake", how about that?

We're claiming they affect how you evaluate your own mind, and it might not be limited to just the short-term. After all, the insights during the trips stay with you after the trip, do they not? Imagine telling somebody to take psychedelics and that it might be hugely beneficial for their life, and they answer "I'm just clear that it won't". Trauma is as illusive as it is subtle. That trauma must be hard and obvious is a deep misunderstanding. Not even as a curiosity you're willing to explore your own mind from the outside?

Do you see, considering me and other's critiques on how psychedelics impact your mind, how that might be a problem? Could perhaps an outside view be pertinent for this kind of work?

I mean, you can say that, but is that really like you? Could it maybe be a deeply ingrained thing? Perhaps a trauma thing? Have you gone to therapy before?

Does being highly egoic, highly judgemental, highly in need of asserting superiority, to put things down, to speak in a highly charged and emotional language, affect your ability to see things clearly, to make contact with reality, or not? Consider that you might dislike many arrogant statements not because they are arrogant but because they are untrue. It might not be as much that you dislike the statement "I'm the most awake person in the universe" because it's arrogant, but because you think it's in any reasonable estimation not true. And you should sometimes trust your estimation of things. They might be entirely correct, and you might be fooling yourself that they aren't, perhaps for some other virtuous reason: "I can be given Absolute Truth, if only I accept this possibility. Maybe the arrogance is just noise, maybe my strong disgust and disbelief is an ego-defense mechanism". And that's ironically a perfect way to self-deceive yourself. And what's the alternative to making such harsh and egoic statements about everything (and I mean literally everything, read Leo's blog, as @Joshe pointed out and which you should be perfectly aware of by now anyway)? What is it that Leo puts down so often? What is it that these other teachers teach where the goal is seeing through the illusion of the ego, seeing through the illusion of flashy experiences, of cool insights into the play of mind and Maya? It's the teaching of Enlightenment. What is it that countless of highly conscious and respectful and virtuous people have left the forum over or been kicked out over for daring to speak favorly of? @Moksha @Nahm @Tim R @mandyjw @Consilience Enlightenment. Are you for enlightenment or are you for chasing ever more flashy and impressive experiences, ever more flashy hallucinations during psychedelic trips, ever more flashy existential insights thrown up by your hallucinatory human mind? Just so you're not confused, Leo seems to be quite clearly for the latter, not the former.

What changed between the quotes from "earlier Leo" and the quotes from 2026 Leo?

I have 16030 posts on this forum. So yes.

Wait is this for real? Like actually for real? And my parents say I have OCD.

I'm just asking what you think.

What was quoted here was quite consistent across time. In fact, I can remember he saying something similar two days or so ago (it's in some of the quotes). So is it something he said you have a problem with, or what?

What is your position on using air purifiers with ionization?

What's the problem?

You can also flip it around and ask "but doesn't a conspiracy theorist also find facts for their narrative?". And that's true, but the difference might be they might be more likely to start with the narrative and then find the facts (i.e. confirmation bias like Leo pointed out), rather than walking around and consuming facts after facts after facts until a narrative pops out. An example that comes to mind of choosing the narrative first and then the facts would be Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero. He essentially created a graph by deriving some mathematical equations from the I-Ching, and then he postulated that the graph represents fluctuations in novelty in world history. And then he looked at the peaks and trophs and tried to find a fact (an event in the real world) that corresponded to the graph at that moment in time. Doing it that way makes it much easier to find facts that fit the time wave, rather than sorting through facts and then concluding what would be the time wave. That's one of the reasons why narrative cognition is more efficient. And narrative cognition is used in science all the time like you say. It's in fact virtually always a requirement, as you virtually always want to go from a theory (narrative) to a hypothesis to then confirming or disconfirming that hypothesis with data. But of course science (or specifically quantitative science) addresses this problem partially with repeated measurement and control of confounding variables. But there are still problems with narrative-driven cognition even in quantitative science (problematic research practices like HARKing/post-hoc hypothesizing, multiple comparisons, p-hacking), which fuels the replication crisis in particularly the behavioral sciences. After all, the scientist's livelihood and career depends on the narrative being correct, as that is what gets published and what gets the university money. So there is a massive incentive to skew the results in favor of the narrative being correct. And that may unfortunately never change unless we either get infinite resources in society (perhaps UBI would help a little) or just less prestige-based publication practices.

Imagine you're a normal person in your own life, working a job and barely keeping your head above water and a homeless person looks at you and says "the workers just want to keep us down, it makes sense as they would want more control". You would be like "I'm just trying to do my job, I ain't got the time or resources for this shit". Do you think the elites have less responsibility, more time, more actual resources than you, to plot a plan of world domination that requires other people like them to be aligned with their interests and in on their plan and not preoccupied with their own interests? The higher up you get in the rungs of power, the more strings are attached to you, the more of your time is valued, the more of your time is needed, if not, you get outcompeted by those that have that time. You think Jeff Bezos has time for your shit? Just playing the anti-conspiracist devil's advocate. If you look around, you see arguably much more division than cooperation, certainly across country lines, across company lines, across different competing agents. And you conclude that at the very top, at the very highest levels of organization, beyond all countries, beyond all companies, there is perfect and synchronous cooperation? This is the fact-driven position (criticizing the narrative by pointing to dissonant facts; real concrete things grounded in the real world). The narrative-driven position is "but the elites are creating all that division to benefit them, to keep us under control; it's all an epic plot, a play, a deception". These are connections that could make sense but are less grounded in concrete things. They are more general and more like possibilities than actual facts. What appeals more to you and why?

Is this not entirely inconsistent with "Apparently we are never meant to feel thirst at all, in an ideal body / health / world."?

You can have a narrative which is more dense in facts (data points) and one more dense in connections or inferences and conclusions. That's the salient difference I'm pointing to. When a conspiracy theorist is like "look at how weird the videos look of the moon landings -> it must be staged", the anti-conspiracy theorist is like "but what about this fact, and this fact, and this fact, and this fact; that surely doesn't yibe with your theory?".

Why is thirst/dehydration not OK but hunger/fasting is?

When I was helping my mom and stepdad move houses (my mom sold my childhood home), we were picking up some final things and we saw they were already starting some renovations (we knew they had planned a lot). And me and my stepdad saw some workers demolishing the wooden fence by the terrace (which my dad had built 20 or so years ago). My stepdad said "remember all the work we spent painting that? Heh". Meanwhile I was left with a distinct feeling like I was watching gore. And that got me thinking: maybe the feeling of gore comes when you see something very familiar to you (like a human body part, or a familiar belonging) get disfigured or demolished. It doesn't matter that it's biological or merely material. It's the feeling of being robbed or seeing the transformation of familiarity to such a severe degree that you're revolted deep to the core. I think the best example of gore that demonstrates this (which is the most terrifying, terrorizing, horror-inducing movie scene I've ever experienced, from the movie Annihilation) is *spoiler alert* the bear. The absolutely disturbing and heartbreaking female screams of distress ("heeelp!") being conjoined with bear growls (which for me was the absolute worst part, something I would've never suspected), the mutation and disfigurement of conjoining a female body/soul with a bear's body, is the haunting experience of seeing something familiar morph into a monstrosity. (I'm not describing a bear attack by the way; I'm describing the aftermath ☹️).

But then we're talking deep in the Walmart sandbox kind of deep. That's why I think "insight" and "belief" are truly not firm distinctions. Insight (unless if we're talking about non-dual awakening as kind of insight, which here we're not) is just when something bubbles up from the pool of other beliefs or the same cognitive architectures underlying those beliefs (language, concepts, words, expressions). It might be highly salient, highly meaningful, by virtue of it bubbling up in that way, but still, it is bubbling up from the pool of beliefs / cognitive architectures and presents itself as that. "Eureka! My mind just had a mind blast!". Ok, but are you the universe yet?

While that is true, the question is how much does it matter to be dehydrated for a couple of minutes or whatever it takes for you to get to the point of drinking water and elevating your bodily hydration to normal? It's like you have 24 hours of the day to be either optimally hydrated or dehydrated. If the thirst signal has a delay in the span of minutes for maintaining optimal hydration, and you follow that signal, you will probably only be off by a couple percentage points each day even if you eat the most insanely dehydrating foods. It's the same logic with how working out can increase longevity even if it involves putting your body through heavy strain for a couple of minutes/hours each day. The strain is only a couple of minutes/hours each day, out of 24 hours (or whatever the workout rate is). So the adapative benefits from working out can outweigh the effects of strain during the workout, because the strain is so little compared to the overall picture.