Musings in Epistemology, Life Purpose, and Turning Inwards.

[Ethan_05]

I don't know if Leo is ever going to read this or reply in any way. It would be awesome if he does comment on this conversation, but I think that there are many other like-minded people that could also had valuable information into this discussion. After I started writing this I realized that it starts out in a way that seems to be in the life purpose topic, but I thought it would fit better in this section because I want to have a conversation about epistemology and knowledge on a deep yet practical level. It's quite long, but I think we can start a deep conversation, so here we go:

I'm just a high school student with a common dilemma, what should I do with my life. I guess I see myself as different from my peers in a few ways. Everyone appears, or at least puts on the facade that they have their life purpose figured out. They know what field they want to go into and they're applying to colleges right now in order to further they're career in those fields. I on the other hand, have on fucking clue what I want to do with my life. Not because I have no passions, but because I'm very cautious and don't want to throw myself whole-heartedly into a career that doesn't suit me only to realize that I made the wrong decision later in life. I've known exactly what I want to do with my life many times before only to come to the realizations that this is not what I want to do, I'm passionate about something else. I wanted to be a pro-golfer when I was younger, then I said I needed to be more practical and become a computer programmer, than a blogger, etc. etc. etc. 

Now for quite some time i've been pursuing inner work and have even started a blog and youtube channel promoting people to take action in meditation, and existential inquiry. This is something that I enjoy doing, just reading books, learning about new things, and becoming excited about the possibilities of discovering aspects of myself that go undiscovered in most. My true nature. Wow that's exhilarating - until you sit on the meditation cushion and your ego say "I don't like this very much" and comes up with a tricky and elaborate subconscious plan to stop you from doing this important work. (Even this post right now in this forum is a way that I'm avoiding doing Contemplation as taught by Peter Ralston.)

Thus with my career dilemma and interest in doing deep existential contemplation I'm starting to think that a deep understanding of epistemology is a great start on the path of spirituality work. Not in believing an ideology, but in taking action and having direct experience in an effective way. The reason I'm writing in this forum is because I don't know where to start in learning about epistemology. I read Peter Ralston's The Book of Not Knowing and I understand that he teaches many deep epistemological lessons in relation to doing contemplation but I want to gain an understanding outside of one or two source(Leo Gura and Peter Ralston). I've looked up epistemology in the past and all i've found is books by Immanuel Kant and stuff like that. These are probably great reads, but I need something more practical and applicable in my daily life. Might it be best to start with the philosophy of science or how might I approach learning about epistemology on a fundamental and practical level in which I can start applying this philosophy in my life. 

Tell me if you can relate to this. I'm deeply interested in Leo's content and he releases great content and very long speeches. I can never find time to listen to them because if I don't give them all my attention it seems that I miss a lot and just don't have multiple hours to sit in front of a screen and give leo's words all my attention. Thus a problem arises. I can spend my free time watching and listening to leo's worldview and experiences with consciousness work without myself having ever experienced anything this deep or I can pursue something else. I recently had like 5 of leo's most recent videos cued up on my browser. I want to learn about Godel's Incompleteness theorem, quantum mechanics, the collective ego, etc. but that's like 10+ hours of videos to watch. Now here's the problem, with my busy life if I try to keep up with watching leo's content then I don't have much time left over to read other teachings and get a balanced and big-picture understanding of these topics. That's why I'm interested in epistemology. I want to be able to watch and read content without taking it as true or probably true. I want to have skepticism and understand a solid epistemological grounding from which to further research and pursue learning. 

Thanks in advance for any responses.

Ethan.

Edited April 22, 2018 by Ethan_05
minor changes to grammatical structure

[Leo Gura]

Hehe, that's the whole problem of life: you have a finite amount of time and an trillion different directions to explore.

It's almost like you'd have to be God to explore them all

Talk about a quality problem.

[Ethan_05]

Any ideas of quality books or courses on epistemology, Leo? I have the book list but it seems that most of the books are related to epistemology with regards to science(the philosophy of science).