Carl-Richard

Me wishing Leo to go to therapy is done out of love. And the "child-parent" narrative is cute, perhaps projection.

5307 post andy. 60k post andy.

You can be extremely sincere and still be egoic. No problem there.

This was the humoristic part of the conversation, where everything that needed to be said had been said and we came to a respectful conclusion, yes with jokes and laughter. That you still are carrying some tension throughout that exchange, might be indicative of something. Is there something you have on your heart that you want to say? I've always wanted to say that Leo might benefit from therapy in some way or another. And I think this was a great way of saying it, it went much better than I had expected, I did not plan it either, it simply happened because it was maybe the right thing to happen (or not, who knows). As for having a closed mind, I've already said to you directly that I can't know whether Leo is the most awake person in the universe or not and I should have an open mind about that. I'm only saying what I think and feel (just like Leo is saying what he thinks and feels that no other teachers are as awake as him). This was also said in the part of the earlier post about you should perhaps trust your estimation of things sometimes and that "I should have an open mind", even if it can be a virtuous position to have (which it often is), can be a way of fooling yourself. It's never an either/or answer to these things. It depends on what you think and your sense of what is right and reasonable in a given situation.

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?".