Why even read books?

[LordFall]

  On 4/1/2025 at 8:29 AM, AION said:

If you give Tolle or Ralston books to a deep SD orange person it will go above their head. Same way Wilber will be gibberish to most people on this forum.  

See you just straw manned your own point, you went from there are no best books to if you give an advanced spirituality book to a person not familiar with it they won't be able to understand it. 

There are clearly some phenomenal books with way more value than other books but you are also right that you need the right books for the current stage in life you're at and you need to be open minded if a book exposes you to knowledge that stretches your belief systems. 

[BlessedLion]

  On 3/30/2025 at 6:08 PM, AION said:

Especially on topics you already know. Most authors just rehash the same old same old with a special sauce of their own making. 

Especially on topics that are very mechanical in thought it is useless. Like I’m into marketing right now. And those books are such a grind with endless stupid anecdotes and masturbation of their ego. 

Just throw the ePub file in an AI grinder and link it to your existing common place book and bam it just filters out the juice. AI is basically the equivalent of man domesticating the work horse. It seems very mundane to do the monkey work. 
 

Currently I only read a book

• if I’m new to the topic/field
• if it is good fiction
• if it is a classical piece or worthy of my time 

Books keep you locked in and can rewire your brain and are better than your phone

[BlessedLion]

  On 3/31/2025 at 1:27 PM, Leo Gura said:

That's not true.

There are many other good books. But after a certain point they start to repeat and give diminishing returns.

What you can learn from the books about mastering yourself is quite limited. The real work is outside the books.

Most new books published today are marketing gimmicks. But occassionally you find a gem.

I def agree with you about diminishing returns though, you can only read about enlightenment so much before you have to actually go sit down and do the practices. 
 

I would love to find other mind expanding books, but it’s hard to find them. Many of them I just find boring or lacking value 

[BlessedLion]

  On 3/31/2025 at 1:39 PM, OBEler said:

@Leo Gura I would pay for an updated book list where you rate again how good the book really is.

Some books you rate higher because you didn't discover better books at that time which are better written about that topic. For example your fist spiritual book ever readed, you would rate that probably high because it blows your mind. But after discovering countless other good books about spirituality this book might be just average.

Also some books promise you big things and hype you up. If you believe in it and think you found the holy Grail without testing out then you rate this book also higher than it should be.

I’d also love to see any other mind bending books you might’ve found recently. That Book list is life changing 

[Hello from Russia]

  On 4/1/2025 at 8:29 AM, AION said:

If you give Tolle or Ralston books to a deep SD orange person it will go above their head. Same way Wilber will be gibberish to most people on this forum.  

Ken wilber is our homie, bro

[Davino]

@gettoefl @EternalForest

There's a difference between making a book for profit vs earning deserved remuneration for your work.

I shouldn't have to say this explicitly, it's quite obvious.

That’s the insight a savvy businessman like Naval Ravikant is pointing toward.

[Leo Gura]

The issue isn't profit per se.

The issue is that over the last 20 years marketing gurus have taught everyone the idea that to become a respected expert in any field you must publish a book. So now everyone with any degree of fame writes a book just because they need to in order to establish that they are somebody important. So we have millions of people writing shitty books with very low substance just as part of self-promotion. This has diluted and corrupted the whole book industry. Books have been corrupted into self-promotion vehicles.

Book buyers are not aware this corruption has happened. They just assume a book is a book.

[trenton]

  On 4/1/2025 at 10:38 PM, Leo Gura said:

The issue isn't profit per se.

The issue is that over the last 20 years marketing gurus have taught everyone the idea that to become a respected expert in any field you must publish a book. So now everyone with any degree of fame writes a book just because they need to in order to establish that they are somebody important. So we have millions of people writing shitty books with very low substance just as part of self-promotion. This has diluted and corrupted the whole book industry. Books have been corrupted into self-promotion vehicles.

Book buyers are not aware this corruption has happened. They just assume a book is a book.

This sucks. I was just writing a book about self-love in which I describe the insights I had about how the mind works and how I helped others along the way. Do you think this corruption will be a problem for people who actually are interested in writing high quality books that will actually help people?

[Leo Gura]

@trenton A problem in what sense?

You can still write a great book. But it will be entering a deluted market.

Most people have no idea what I said above, so it's not that they won't buy your books on account of that. But your book does have to compete in a sea of vacuous books.

This market diluting problem is going to be a huge deal across all industries soon thanks to AI. We will have am endless sea of midocre AI content with no good mechanism for finding the human-made gems.

Edited Tuesday at 11:27 PM by Leo Gura

[OBEler]

  On 4/1/2025 at 11:25 PM, Leo Gura said:

@trenton A problem in what sense?

You can still write a great book. But it will be entering a deluted market.

Most people have no idea what I said above, so it's not that they won't buy your books on account of that. But your book does have to compete in a sea of vacuous books.

This market diluting problem is going to be a huge deal across all industries soon thanks to AI. We will have am endless sea of midocre AI content with no good mechanism for finding the human-made gems.

on the other hand we have improved search engines and  AI which help to find the right book out of millions out there. Also we have people like you who do the front work of looking for best books out there and share their knowledge. That was all not possible years ago. People were besides pick up rarely interested in self improvement. Nowadays this industry is huge.

Edited Tuesday at 11:40 PM by OBEler

[Natasha Tori Maru]

  On 4/1/2025 at 10:38 PM, Leo Gura said:

The issue isn't profit per se.

The issue is that over the last 20 years marketing gurus have taught everyone the idea that to become a respected expert in any field you must publish a book. So now everyone with any degree of fame writes a book just because they need to in order to establish that they are somebody important. So we have millions of people writing shitty books with very low substance just as part of self-promotion. This has diluted and corrupted the whole book industry. Books have been corrupted into self-promotion vehicles.

Book buyers are not aware this corruption has happened. They just assume a book is a book.

I have found the same! The vetting process is absolute garbage 

Books are the new marketing platform to supplement reddit bot reviews 

I do try to read new material, but most is verbal diarrhea

[Leo Gura]

  On 4/1/2025 at 11:39 PM, OBEler said:

on the other hand we have improved search engines and  AI which help to find the right book out of millions out there.

Search engines are the worst they've ever been, flooded with SEOed shit.

AI will be used to generate more shit than you will be able to search through.

[Jayson G]

  On 4/1/2025 at 10:38 PM, Leo Gura said:

The issue isn't profit per se.

The issue is that over the last 20 years marketing gurus have taught everyone the idea that to become a respected expert in any field you must publish a book. So now everyone with any degree of fame writes a book just because they need to in order to establish that they are somebody important. So we have millions of people writing shitty books with very low substance just as part of self-promotion. This has diluted and corrupted the whole book industry. Books have been corrupted into self-promotion vehicles.

Book buyers are not aware this corruption has happened. They just assume a book is a book.

@Leo Gura I'm starting to see a pattern. Just like you mentioned here, the interesting thing is that a lot of these books actually do have nuggets of truth, but the books themselves are a sea of low quality, lower perspective information. So those nuggets of truth actually blind the masses into buying into the entire sea of shit. 

Similarly, Naval Ravikant is a brilliant businessman with mostly good business wisdom, but he started talking about the nature of reality, etc. and with such confidence and charisma gets his big audience believing the nature of reality is primarily grounded in science. Turns out he's a trump supporter. 

Then trump and Musk themselves, they use nuggets of truth to rationalize defunding entire organizations. Or he might put up some emotional show how he saved X person with the agenda of destroying an organization. (I'm not too good with political analysis, I'm noticing abstract patterns.)

I guess this pattern is: Humans will use nuggets of truth, weaponizing truth to serve their own selfish agenda and corrupt and cause a lot of harm. Nuggets of truth can actually do great harm.

[Leo Gura]

@Jayson G The ENTIRE predicament of life is the problem of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

An illusion that is entirely false is not an illusion at all. Illusion is the use of truth to deceive.

[Jayson G]

  On 4/2/2025 at 0:53 AM, Leo Gura said:

@Jayson G The ENTIRE predicament of life is the problem of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

An illusion that is entirely false is not an illusion at all. Illusion is the use of truth to deceive.

@Leo Gura Wow I can see that now .. the design of an illusion is intelligent in that way, thats wild.

I never realized thats an illusion. 

I met a christian yesterday who went so off the rails into this hyper fictional story about reality which he completely believed. And I was thinking how blind can someone be. He was just completely caught in an illusion, it can feel so real.

Edited Wednesday at 12:58 AM by Jayson G

[Jayson G]

@Leo Gura I don't know if you discussed this, or if its obvious, but how actually do you distinguish truth from falsehood? Is there a method? I can see careful observation being one. But even with that, through observing, how do you really know what is true and what is false? Intuition? but can that be trusted?

[Yimpa]

  On 4/2/2025 at 1:12 AM, Jayson G said:

how do you really know what is true and what is false? Intuition? but can that be trusted?

 

[Yimpa]

  On 4/2/2025 at 0:56 AM, Jayson G said:

I met a christian yesterday who went so off the rails into this hyper fictional story about reality which he completely believed. And I was thinking how blind can someone be. He was just completely caught in an illusion, it can feel so real.

[Leo Gura]

  On 4/2/2025 at 1:12 AM, Jayson G said:

how actually do you distinguish truth from falsehood? Is there a method?

Yes, there is a method, and only one method:

Infinite Intelligence

Edited Wednesday at 01:47 AM by Leo Gura

[integral]

Books are useful in that you retain that information far stronger than video formats and it becomes an integrated part into your thinking process.

To become fluent in the language of Leo's work we need movies and games that we could consume at the entertainment stimulatory level.

The problem is we consumed garbage our whole lives, so our minds are fluent in garbage.

Edited Wednesday at 02:10 AM by integral