Carl-Richard

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 went from the experience with some added depth and understanding of my own self. One thing I learned is 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". Sickening. 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.

Does a feeling of superiority, ego, vanity, perhaps influence, more generally power, count? You know what rich people want more than money? Feeling like they're right, like their vision is being fulfilled. And if you can get there by making people feel inferior, by playing with their emotions, by denigrating their autonomy, that leaves a certain impression, imprint, on people dealing with it. I would bet the types of interactions you endure on here could be impacting how you deal with people in real life in perhaps not the best way. I've been in what I thought was a real cult and I felt less personally threatened, exploited and gaslit than I've been here. Do you see why I'm so curious about what a cult really is? Do you see why I disagree with Leo's cherrypicked definition from some random MD who (like me) had an experience of what he thought was a cult and decided to tell about it? Maybe step out of the cult a little bit and see that there are other perspectives on this issue than Leo's.

I don't care about calling Actualized.org a cult, I don't care about Leo's histrionic obsession about not being called a cult. I care about finding a good definition of a cult. Your definition seems to not distinguish cults from e.g. criminal gangs, business scams, pyramid schemes (or even individuals manipulating you).

Has he directly denied it? He has denied being "the most developed", but then in a following post, he distinguishes development from being awake (consciousness), conveniently leaving that possibility open. The fact that it was in the past and he does not ever explicitly deny it, even when given the chance (and instead he cleverly refuses to address it explicitly), that sort of leaves you with an impression that nothing changed. Besides, the fact that he would even state such a thing at any point in time. "It was in the past, it's not a big deal, don't worry 🤗". Bro. To him it's the same thing. What is a cult?

We're supposed to just accept and be complacent with AI delivering pictorial monstrosities, human disfigurement, uncanny valley horror pieces, to our PC screens every day. Shaking my head.

Last post: did this sit well with you? Probably not, because you left shortly after (immediately after, rather; because you did not post after that): And yes, you did miss the 2023 era, what you were subjected to was only the beginning. Those who did not leave (or were not banned, unlike e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]), those who stayed, developed strong coping mechanisms for enduring and justifying such behavior, which continues to this day in a more integrated and socially normalized form which makes it more pernicious in its own way. My Leo thread was a way to demonstrate this and also to inquire whether this is something they think is ok.

Just to be clear before we move the current discussion to this thread per OP's request (link), the point was not to show Actualized.org is a cult. It was to ask what a cult is. Actualized.org was being invoked when trying to figure out what mind control is. Because if you aren't able to distinguish Actualized.org leader's communications from mind control and you don't want to call Actualized.org a cult, that's trouble for your definition of cult involving mind control. Especially when you don't even want to define mind control like Leo is doing. And I believe my most recent points on that were not challenged so you can take me up on that in the other thread. Me personally, I'm fine with calling Actualized.org a cult regardless of the mind control concept (which I believe to be ill-defined) and I don't believe cults need to be particularly destructive, abusive or exploitative to be called a cult. Actualized.org could be heaven on Earth and I would probably still call it a cult given its type of beliefs and practices (being deviant in nature compared to the surrounding society and religious in nature). And if Leo displays some behaviors that could be defined as mind control, it might only be a minor problem relative to other cults, particularly given the format (not being a live in-person thing). But don't be surprised and don't take it so hard when other people want to call you a cult. Cults like MAPLE, Bentinho Massaro's community, Heaven's Gate, explicitly called themselves a cult and they were fine with it (they didn't see it as a negative thing). Maybe you could too. And maybe there are aspects of a cult that can make you feel hurt or destabilized even when the "mind control" is relatively minor (e.g., merely taking on highly deviant beliefs and experiencing alienation from society, friends, family, is not a joke, neither for them or yourself; you can feel like you don't belong and you can come off as threathening or hard to relate to or you might leave them all together; alienating yourself from your friends and family is highly threatening both for them and you). Maybe it would be smart to recognize that, as a community that prides itself on epistemic rigor and self-awareness.

Did you watch the second guitar video I posted? Do you have an example of "using scales in a good way?" Guthrie Govan perhaps?