Carl-Richard

But you're here moaning about moaning. Moanception 👻

Takes one to know one

Insta images of playing with guns seemingly under the influence while later implying he was "so close" to deleting himself. Claiming to be able to turn into an alien on camera, never being able to show proof of that despite trying. Claiming to be the most awake person in existence. There are some posts on the forum I did not include in the Leo thread because they were so disturbing and simply sad and clearly indicative of some mental crisis (it did not seem proper to group it with his other behavior). That day was somewhere in late 2022 - early 2023. That we are honestly discussing whether some dude is the most awake person in the universe is dark. That people are defending unhinged personal attacks and threats, even when they were condemned by the leader himself, is dark. Whether or not it becomes a literal Manson situation is not much of a concern of mine to put a number on. It only takes one thought anyway.

No match for Ken Wilber for example. I actually think Leo's "original work" (if we can call it that, and I'm not just being overly cynical; claims to originality is a difficult issue) is quite unstructured and relatively simple. Most videos are more or less rants that go into each other. A video like "Epistemic responsibility" is a re-vamped video of "What is Survival". And the concepts are things you can learn in quite standard graduate and undergraduate courses. I can't actually identify any "grand syntheses" that do not boil down to something like "everything is survival"; no Four Quadrants style systematization, no truly formalized theories, again rants. And that's to be expected as truly inventing new paradigms or meta-systems like Wilber requires a kind of cognitive complexity that is truly rare. That isn't to say Leo is "simple", but he is less radically inventive and original than what he might claim to be. And that's also to be expected when there is clear hubris like "being the most awake person in existence". This ≠ "the best place". It's so desperate this kind of p-hacking style of argumentation.

This was a cheeky joke, bud. But also respectfully, has Leo displayed psychotic symptoms and other unstable concerning behavior on his journey?

This type of overconfident and hubristic thinking and thinking one is somehow special could only happen here, thinking that this is somehow the "best prepared place" (and do you have even any experience of other groups you can contrast it to?). If Leo didn't tell you 10x a day that he is the #1 authority on epistemology, I think you would probably not even consider thinking that.

I have a business question (or several) I would like some input on. Say "yes" and I'll dump it either in here or in PM maybe depending on if several people answer. Or I'll write it out in full in this post soon.

Feel free to point out what is wrong with my sensemaking. And If I can use Leo's approach here: this wasn't a situation where we were generally coerced or exploited to do excessively weird or unpleasant things or threatened personally or manipulated towards some nefarious end goal. Even at the end when doomsday was entertained and solutions were suggested, there was no explicit coercion "we must do this thing", again, just wild beliefs and suggestions being presented (while that was bad enough). And yes those beliefs had their effect even after leaving the group, as I said. But to say it negatively impacted my sensemaking in the nefarious "cult" sense, as if I was brainwashed to be some unquestioning drone, did not occur to me as a relevant issue. It was the fear-based and paranoid beliefs that I felt had an effect. I also learned a few things from that experience. One thing was that even if you're skeptical, even if you think you're in control and watching something from the outside ("I'm just observing, I'm not really participating"), beliefs creep up from behind and enter through the backdoor. And ultimately, you don't choose what you believe. You believe what you believe and it's a consequence of attention, repetition and what you find significant. That's maybe one thing to remember when you're shooting up 5-MeO at Leo's not-cult retreat and he's the one who starts believing the ghosts are out to get him.

Read the whole thread before you do the Ghislaine Maxwell roleplay. Thought Art already beat you to that anyways. It's so pathetic to watch when even Leo himself has said the behavior was inexcuseable, you still lap it up like dogs. "Actually I think he is quite egoless, actually it's not all that bad". It's nauseating. You would be found at the bottom of the Kool-Aid cauldron in Jonestown.

What do you mean? What is an example of something you think is creative (give me a concrete example of an art piece)?

The first video, sure, but if you're referring to the Paul Gilbert video, the only "pause" I could identify was when he paused to create the loop. Other than that, there wasn't much space, and it was pretty much running up and down scales throughout the entire video. Paul Gilbert would actually be a common target of your critique, maybe only less than Michael Angelo Batio. Anyways, jazz fusion players (which Shawn would be classified as) tend to have less space in their playing. More classically or blues inspired players like Paul or David Gilmour bring a different cultural background. I remember feeling similar to you when I first started listening to jazz fusion players, but it's like learning a language. At first you might not understand it, but over time you get used to it. What jazz fusion sometimes lacks in accents and dynamics it makes up for in melodic, harmonic and sometimes rhythmic complexity. Allan Holdsworth is the perfect example. It's like listening to an alien the first times you listen to him. As for Paul Gilbert and Shawn Lane, here is a bit of a funny video I listened to, if not yesterday, only a few days ago:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a26cd3e-d82c-83eb-9d2d-85e5e78f0ed3

What exactly do you mean?

The leader of the Discord was an ex-forum member. And many of the members were recruited from the forum.

And it's really curious, because like I said, me and probably others did not (as far as I can remember) feel personally threatened or exploited in personal interactions with the leader, but despite that, it evolved to a place where a suggested solution was to essentially remove somebody from the surface of the Earth. So we went quickly from what somebody like you guys in the thread (at least earlier) would be very firm to say is not a cult, to a Manson or Jim Jones situation. All through some odd beliefs and a charismatic leader presenting them as an option with their conviction and trance-inducing charisma.

Officially no, it sort of collapsed, but who knows what sub-groups spawned after it and what their beliefs are (and if so, God bless them). I gave a summary of what happened in this post:

Social group with deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society, often religious in nature. The way I was rattled without being personally threatened in personal interactions with the leader was that the beliefs were very fear-based, relied on subtle phenomena and paranoid. Normal everyday people were claimed to be carriers of negative harmful energies for example. But even if my experience in the cult had been a heavenly experience, I would still be inclined to call it a cult. I would be inclined to call for example a doomsday cult a cult even if people's experience in the cult is absolutely a-ok.

I felt existentially threatened and rattled for years after the cult. Why the need to delegitimize people's experiences? Why the need to make denigrating comparisons? Could it be that there are different kinds of cults, different reasons why one would be compelled to call something a cult? Maybe actually study what a cult is on your own without soelly relying on the videos by your cult leader.

Why are you turning what I clarified and added nuance to back into the same black and white issue I clarified, and why are you invoking a should? I gave you exactly the distinction I gave. There is an awful a lot of "shoulds" in this thread when it's really just about what a cult is. You are playing Leo's script well. This is exactly what he would want, people pushing back for him when people call it a cult, suggesting they do a lot of things rather than just have a discussion. I wonder what would've happened instead if he took the MAPLE/Bentinho/Heaven's Gate route and just embraced the concept. "Yeah, of course it's a cult. And?"

I knew somebody would hiccup on that sentence. I was talking about the Discord community I was a part of.

I'm saying the experiences of personal abuse, belittling, etc. has been worse. There were other aspects of the cult that were more destabilizing (the very wacky beliefs and eventual doomsday ideations). I stay here for various reasons.

Now you're treating him like a retarded child and not the Tier 2 multi-perspectival construct-aware God that he is. He knows how to treat people with differing opinions, when he wants to.

I went through every single ban reason and the context they occurred in, if you were curious.

You're literally viewing everything through Leo's definition of a cult, of course you think that. I'm saying you can be a cult without being exploitative. Then you want to ask for examples of exploitation, and then I give you that. But that doesn't change whether or not I'm calling it a cult. I was already calling it a cult Say that to the 8 or more people who were banned in a short time frame for merely disagreeing on him being the most awake person in existence or his methods for getting there. Say that to @Consilience when Leo threatened him to kick him out if he didn't "wise up soon". Say that to people who were fond of non-duality like Nahm and were either kicked out on those grounds or threatened to be kicked out. Say that to these countless posts of abuse. In this thread, I gave a definition of a cult and Leo said "you speak of things you don't even understand" and "it is shameful that I even need to explain this to anyone here". In the other cult thread, I asked him about his definition of a cult and what he thought mind control is, and he said I don't understand what I'm talking about and that I'm disrespectful for even considering entertaining the topic and that I don't deserve his teachings. Any normal interaction would be like you're doing here, asking for clarification, going argument by argument, not denigrating, shaming, belittling, etc.