Carl-Richard

Meditation is high effort, low reward.

I can't think up a brave thing I've done

I'm not making any prescriptions for Leo's spiritual pursuits, only for how he talks about them. I've tried to delineate out a few key ways in which his focus differs from those he considers "not awake", and why a clearer language is needed when referring to these people. Like I mentioned in an earlier comment, Leo hasn't had great success with increasing his baseline consciousness in any traditional sense (the focus of traditional spirituality), and he has instead opted for exploring deeper and deeper psychedelic states (psychonautics). He has stated that he has probably gone deeper on psychedelics than any other person before him, and that he is better wired for that than the alternative. He is playing to his strengths.

The content he has issues with has to do with the lack of psychedelics. You do it because of the love you feel and the compassion for other people's suffering.

It's what's interesting in the context of this topic which puts into question what Leo really means when he says "none of your gurus are awake" (unless he is indeed only doing the mind trick, which he isn't btw, because he is making that judgement based on the content of their teaching, which is relative stuff). Teaching itself is a relative thing. You can never deliver the absolute to someone, hence pointers. Do you have a problem with teaching as an activity? What is the problem exactly?

I think in this context, "nobody is awake" is only interesting if it's a relative statement. If it's an absolute statement, it's redundant. Of course from an absolute perspective, nobody is awake, because there is nobody to be awake; there is no person, only God, etc. That's not very interesting though.

Well, I think you're doing the non-dual Jedi mind trick of levitating the conversation out of the relative domain and into the absolute domain, which is a silly thing to do. When we're talking about teaching, spiritual practice, taking psychedelics, walking the path vs. having walked the path, etc., we're talking about the relative domain.

I think awakening is well-defined, and that you can follow the pointers that teachers throw at you, and that you can experience great results by doing so. So on the contrary, I believe that there is someone to teach this to: someone who has not yet seen the pointers and who is interested in following them.

You're not sounding like Leo. You're sounding like every spiritual teacher. You're teaching right now.

Yes you can. If you can teach it, you can point to another.

That is the spiritual change I'm talking about.

Most spiritual teachers claim that they at one time experienced a drastic spiritual change in their life, and it's implicit in all of their work.

What is awakening then?

He doesn't mean Actualized.org is literally just a podcast. He means it literally has its own podcast on Apple Podcasts.

It tells you that it's a phenomena that actually exists as opposed to somebody lying about their internal experience, claiming that they're awake when they're actually not.

I guess you're talking about Leo's concept of awakening, which is an infinite regress (whatever new insight he adds to the list). It's not a stably defined concept, so by definition, nothing can refer to it. However, traditional spirituality has a stable definition of awakening, and we've found a good neural correlate for it (the Default Mode Network). So this idea that "nobody is awake", is only true within Leo's paradigm.

To think that it tells you nothing is foolish.

What traditional spirituality calls awakening looks like something in the brain: 32:19 - 33:28

How so?

No way ? Really? Let's hope it's not like his talk with Michael Brooks ?

Close your eyes and touch your nose.

Yep

What do you think of the Steve Vai collab video in the Freak thread?

I've actually noticed that the few times I've talked to people who've had a few drinks without drinking anything myself, I easily get into that party mood where I'll talk a little louder and make jokes. A lot of the party mood is really just a mood. Try drinking alone (don't) and see the difference. About drinking alone, back in my weed smoking days, I would try experimenting by adding a few beers into the mix, and I found it was a complete letdown. It's like the alcohol completely removes the manic velocity and interconnectivity of ideas, which was the main thing that I liked about weed.

@thisintegrated What do you think of my newest topic about Leo's "main shtick"? I need your perspective on it