Carl-Richard

I will add that in the Discord I was a part of, I can't remember ever feeling personally gaslit, shamed or threatened by personal interactions with the leader. But I still felt like calling it a cult, because the beliefs were just that wacky (negative energies, entities, weird practices around that, doomsday tendencies at the end).

Is it a social group with deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society (often religious in nature). And to have a stringent definition means that it creates a false sense of security about one's own community and one is less wary about the fact that the existing dynamics could in themselves be problematic and if were they to be cranked up a little, could develop into the full-blown cult you're so keen distancing yourself from. The analogy is to have the same sentence from someone who is stopped with a barely illegal BAC vs someone with a definitely illegal BAC who crashes into a lightpole and kills someone. Maybe you shouldn't have the same sentence, but maybe you should call both DUI (and the difference is in the degree, not categorical).

Bro is that my beard? 🤣😂

This community scores on literally all the points that are not "in-person" (except the meditation/chanting one unless you want to stretch it into recommendations to take mind-altering substances to "know what I'm talking about"). Virtually all of Leo's blog posts are about how destructive ("egoic, self-deceived, low-consciousness, stupid, unintelligent, corrupt) the world is and he routinely implies his teachings are an/the antidote (e.g. "Conscious Politics", "Pure Philosophy"). They use highly divisive and emotionally charged language and are highly judgemental, repetitive. I personally am repelled from reading them for exactly that reason. The reaction to this thread is a cult study on its own. Also, in your thread, it was implied I was being disrespectful for having a different opinion and that I "don't deserve his teachings". Emotionally charged communication. Instead of simply addressing my points and showing through argument, Leo will routinely say words like "you don't understand", "you don't know what you're talking about", like in this thread and the other cult thread I linked. It functions to remove my autonomy and belief in my own mental faculties. Statements like "I'm the only authority on epistemology" (see the other cult thread) reinforces that. PMs when I'm acting out and being critical, like here, trying to "talk it out". Happened multiple of times. No incense or eye contact, but a different level of proximity. The emotionally charged communication and autonomy-deriding language happens in a public forum inducing public shaming. Other members will routinely adopt the same style and gang up on you. "You only care about survival, your mind runs on self-deception and self-bias, of course you will disagree with me, that's expected". I would suggest this is a too dichotomous framing. Most sophisticated cults teach you such techniques, that's their appeal. And ironically they tend to use those techniques to protect and validate the ills of the cult. The virtues and the ills coincide, they are not mutually exclusive, and they often work in tandem to maintain the cult identity. That's what make cults so tricky. It's a tug of war between seeing the benefits and the ills. I'm sure you can find autonomy-increasing teachings in MAPLE, as you can in Bentinho Massaro's community, or in the Discord I was a part of. "But it's more ills than benefits in those cases". Well, let's assume you can even make such a distinction, does that warrant a categorical distinction (cult vs not-cult)? If the difference is only in degree, then maybe that's all it is.

Without using mind control on me (i.e. answer plainly without redirecting, without accusing me of not understanding or being purportedly disrespectful for having a different opinion), what is mind control?

If I'm sitting in a meeting or I'm simply interacting with someone and I'm expected to listen, show that I'm paying attention and not talk or do anything actively (simply "being present"), or watching a movie especially in a cinema, and sometimes sitting in lectures, that's the most common occurence.

This made me visualize a GIF that probably doesn't exist where a person gets like a violent shiver or spasm undulating through their body from cringing so hard and the image is glitching and flashing profusely.

My point is MAPLE already called itself a cult, presumably while implying it's not a bad thing. I have trouble distinguishing the Discord "cult" from this forum with respect to Leo's definition (or any salient definition) of a cult. Leo's definition of a cult, which he cherrypicks from one "expert" (an MD with personal experience of what he claims to be a cult, which makes me and you just as qualified as experts), has the trouble of defining what mind control is, what funneling of sex/money/power looks like. This is not a critique I'm making (while I agree with it), this is a critique scholars have been making of Leo's "expert". Consistent with this, scholars seem to agree more or less on a very general definition of "a cult is a social group with deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society, often religious in nature". This resonates with MAPLE's self-identification as a cult, it resonates with why I want to call the Discord I was a part of a cult, it resonates with why you want to call MAPLE a cult (I'll explain), and it resonates with why people call Actualized.org a cult. For further "proof" underscoring this point, you will feel compelled to call a doomsday cult a cult even if they were the most benign and socially/personally/psychologically non-threatening group of people (no "mind control techniques", you're always free to leave, they don't want your money, no "sexual exploitation", etc.). It is because they are a group with highly deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society (and it would probably classify as religious in nature). It is when the experience in the cult becomes challenging somehow, that we ourselves want to label it a cult, but it becomes hard to pinpoint exactly why or what changed, because the dynamics are essentially always there in some form. "Mind control", "funneling sex/money/power", is always there in some sense. That's why they're hard to define and why there is always doubt and two sides of the story and why people fall for them at all. They are subtle and pervasive, at least in the beginning. And they can become very severe, without a doubt, but it's like boiling a frog: it starts in water, the water has an existing temperature, and you slowly crank up the temperature so it doesn't notice. For example, MAPLE decided to call themselves a cult (interestingly, Bentinho Massaro's community did the same). Is that a form of mind control (they "devalue" the concept by making it benign)? What about Leo who wants to use a very stringent and non-benign definition of a cult? Is that mind control (by making it very stringent and thus making his community supposedly not fall under the definition and he can point to cults as being something external to his community)? Where does the line go between mind control and simply controlling the narrative, presenting one view over another, in a way that might benefit oneself and one's interests?

@Joseph Maynor Yup, Van Halen was also a pianist before guitar. Allan Holdsworth learned violin after guitar (and tried emulating the sound of a horn on his guitar).

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

What is going down in this video, you might be scared to know.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

You're saying a bunch of nonsense aren't ya? Offshoot? Inorganic? We're organic. And this, is a microchip: A.k.a.: https://www.nisenet.org/catalog/media/zoom_microchip_video

Yeah, language. *Rocks go goo-goo ga-ga*: "arTiFiCiAl gEnEraL iNtelLiGenCe"

Speed of light is unironically like the speed limit in your neighborhood. 1. Nobody follows it. 2. Why should it apply everywhere and in any situation? Saying something is impossible based on observation means you don't understand what science is.

Why would anybody leave any place? Airplanes have a cruising speed ~100x faster than the average human. That's mindboggling for a pre-industrial tribesman who has never seen an airplane. Weird. There are already indications that UAPs are breaking the "laws of physics". Think of speed of light as the distance you have to walk to a restaurant to eat. You could order a DoorDash and the food will come to you.

179 cm. I remember looking at a graph of my weight and height development when I was little and I had always been just a teeny-tiny bit shorter than national average (it's now 180.9 cm for adult males) but dead-on average weight. So I've always been slightly more beefy than what my height would dictate 😆

"Smart" is usually associated with being unhappy when it's defined as a psychic imbalance of high IQ (working memory, pattern recognition) and low psychological depth, complexity, introspective ability, refinement, values, awareness, meaning, being, and simply happenstance, precarious situations.

I think it's hilarious how strongly Leo disagreed on you categorizing it as a cult throughout the thread, despite you feeling strongly compelled to call it a cult. Almost makes you think 🤫 I wonder what you think about my "cult" experience. Was it a cult? And then, is it categorically distinguishable from this place?

@Inliytened1 plz anser boss 👆👆👆 ty

"Think for yourself about this thing I'm telling you to think about, but not about what I'm saying". "It's not a cult guys, cult means mind contro- funneling money of course".

We're horse-shoeing into the other semen-related thread.

Lmao. Makes a distinction, refuses to elaborate. I want to think for myself but you're making it hard by not answering my question. In fact, I "think for myself" so much that I won't think about what you're telling me to think about (and "contemplate", the most cliché, overused, groupthink concept on the forum) and instead want to think about what you would've answered me if you had answered.

Whatever you currently want to do. That does not mean blindly cater to impulse and discount all future visions. It means cater to what is the best choice in your current situation.

You're setting up for some dirty revenge playing with pale fluids like that.