Actualized.org Video Summaries!

[Nic]

Understanding Recontextualization

 

Context is the backdrop which frames a set of facts.

Some exemples of context: historical, literary, social, metaphysical

The mechanism of recontextualization opens up the possibility of radically changing your understanding of a situation or of some brute facts without changing the facts themselves. The problem that we see with science, materialism and with rationalism is that the people who believe is those just want the facts and dismiss spirituality, mysticism and psychology. They say if you have the brute facts as physics report them to you, those cannot change and therefore, the fundamental blocs of reality can never be really challenge. But with recontextualization, we have a way to change our understanding of the world without changing the fact.

The really deep truth in life are not in the brut facts, they are in the context which gives meaning and significance to those facts. As it turns out, context is way more important than content. Context is the background, content is the foreground. A lot of people get lost in the foreground, the brute facts and forget about background, the context. When you think something is true by looking at the content, the meaning can radically change by looking at the context and you learn that what you thought was true, is false and vice versa. This allows us to turn science upside-down without actually changing the facts and the discoveries.

 

What people care about is not so much the facts, what we care is actually making sense of things, understanding, and that hingers upon getting the right context. When you get the right content but the wrong context, you will still be wrong. But if you get the right context and some wrong content, you are still going to be right. This is a way to turn certain convictions that we have about reality upside-down.

In the sentence: A man is jumping… out of a plane with defective parachute…. in his dream… in a movie. That were 4 recontextualizations in one scene. If we can keep expending the context forever, how can we ever know that you gotten to the bottom line?

Or you can zoom out a picture and understand why a person smiles or not on that picture, there might be a gun pointed on his head.

This is why big picture understanding is so important, have you gotten the right context? 

What is more important than the facts, is how the facts get selected and framed. Science is good at finding the facts, but very bad at properly selecting the facts and interpreting the facts. The most important context is metaphysical context.

The context that you use for interpreting what you experience is right now, your experience of life, is never made explicit. You have this metaphysical web of beliefs which is your context, which you interpret all reality from, and you are not even aware that you are interpreting reality. You just take your interpretation as reality, and that is the whole problem. The dualistic/materialistic context is for most people the context they are operating from:

You believe that you were born, you are human being and alive in the 21st century, in the universe, that matter is made out of particules, that you will die. And you have a deeper context which tells you that none of that is context, all this are just facts.

The empirical evidence that earth is the center of the universe, that the sun is turning around earth or vice versa is actually identical. We never experience the earth moving. That you believe that the earth is moving is a context. That is why science is so tricky, you can never look at the facts and say: “Oh that’s how it is!”

99% of what you call science is purely conceptual. Fundamentally if you haven’t verified it for yourself, your beliefs that stars are far out suns are no better than a terrorist that believes he would go to heaven for killing civilians. Epistemologically there is no difference. There will be a difference the day you pull out a telescope and verify it for yourself. And 1% of science is for you empirical validations. 99% is concepts and web of beliefs and a lot of stuff taking on blind faith. And what is similar between science and religion is that you will deny that this is true. Scientists, rationalists will say that science is empirical and validate this with formulas, people verified it for us in the past. The fundamentalist islamist will say the same thing, that Mohamed verified that for him too. What Leo dispute is not the actual size of a cup, He disputes the conceptual bagage that you bring in the situation and how you think of that cup, all the theories, where do you think I came from, what you think it means because none of that is found in your direct experience, all of that stuff is a vastly complicated web of metaphysical concept. Even with Einstein theory of general relativity, most people still have the newtonian, a naïve view of reality, even scientists. And then came Quantum Mechanic that turned everything upside-down again.

Everybody now has a darwinian way of looking at the world, but you don’t actually see evolution in progress, it’s a conceptual scheme that you bring to some situation. We are not denying evolution or the theory of general relativity, but we have to see what they are, they are conceptual schemes, and they are context. If they are context, they can be recontextualized. That’s the key point!

There 2 kinds of recontextualization: 

1) A surprising twist or a shock, without metaphysical recontextualization. Where you discover that Darth Vador is the father of Luke Skywalker, Usual Suspects, Fight Club and so on. When you discover that you were bullied by someone in school, and you discover 10 years later that this kid bullied you because his mother had cancer

2) When recontextualization affects physical reality. It can come from contemplative and mystical practices, it changes your view on your experience that you are having right now. You think that you are having an experience right now because of the context in which you are framing it. When you remove that content, the world won’t physicaly change, but you will come to the realization that your experience in itself is God, always. That’s a radical recontextualization. You’ll discover also that this is not your life. Another recontextualization would be that perception is actually being, or that you are God, or that everything you see is a dream or a hallucination, or that everything is made out of consciousness, or that past and future are just concepts, there is only eternity, even life seems to have specific now moments, each one of those moments existed for eternity. A radical recontextualization is not something you believe, you need to have it happen, not to believe in it. Or you can come to the realization that there isn’t such a thing as non-existence. Or that everything that happens to you right now and all of reality is actually nothing, or that any object is actually infinite, that you created the universe, or that you were never born and you will never die and that what you really are is a concept. The experience is not a concept but you inside the body, that’s a concept. 

Now imagine that you could discover that you are living in a simulation, or that you created your disease, or that you created all the evil there is on the planet. Most people deny the possibility of radical recontextualization as it undermines their sense of reality, it is really threatening and destabilizing. 

Reality is like an anchor, so that you can make sense of all this and live your life, if you lose that anchor you could have an existential crisis. You rely on your memory but how do you know these are not implemented memories. Most people don’t like to have their reality fucked with… You have to love mindfuck, get your mind fucked by reality until your sense of self is destroyed. That’s what enlightenment is. What ever you ground yourself with, it is going to be a thing, it even can be an enlightenment experience. The point is that reality is fundamentally groundless, that is what nobody wants to admit.

Imagine that one day mankind finds out the truth about reality and that would invalidate all the field of mathematics. Most scientists, rationalists, could not imagine that. The mistake would be to ask “how is it possible?”. It opens the next problem which is a failure of imagination, don’t  confuse a failure of imagination with an impossibility, or possibility on the part of the universe.Don’t say it’s because that I can’t imagine it that it can’t happen, as it is the source of a lot of delusion. 

Deeply understand that you can have all the right facts but still deeply misunderstand reality. Wrong context is the perfect self-deception mechanism. Scientists underestimate how much 180 degrees reversals of factual situations are possible through changes of context as science is good at content but bad at context. Academics are needed to get the content right and mystics and sages are needed to get the context right. We need both, by combining them, we can get the best understanding of reality  possible. When you get the context right it doesn’t mean that you get the content right, Buddha didn’t know all the science we know today. Being enlightened, you get awake to the context. The context for everything is the universal self “I”. But part of the awakening is to realize that the context is infinite. So that science always will be infinitely far away from understanding all of the content of reality. You think that you are getting deeper into reality, that is only because you assume reality is finite, you assume that at some point you are going to get to the bottom of things. 

Be more sensitive to context, it could be historical context. You could hear about the Buddha and then think that he was sexist as he didn’t allow women to become monks… Thomas Jefferson having slaves and so on, from your point of view where you are now, it seems crazy to you. But you are looking from another perspective, from another color in spiral dynamics.

It could also can be a psychological context. When teaching comes at you, any teaching, you have to put it into context, especially in spirituality. Just because Eckhart Tolle says something, it doesn’t mean that it is going to help you at your level, at this time.

[SoothedByRain]

@Nic Thank you for sharing friend

For you.
 

 

[Nic]

Sharing is caring! I hope it helps! I thank Leo for making fuzzy concepts crystal clear...

 

What Is The Devil, Understanding The Mechanics Of Evil

 

“Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do” Christ

 

We need to reconcile you with evil because:

-It’s important for your peace of mind and happiness, if there is a lot of evil in your life, you always will be perturbed.

-If you misunderstand evil, you will create evil.

 

What is the devil? 

The devil is you! You are the devil. The devil is not some guy with horns, this is a metaphor, that is cartoon version for you, the self, the ego. Evil is just selfishness, ignorance, unconsciousness. The devil works in sneaky and deceptive ways, the devil must therefor deny that he is the devil, so you behave like a devil while saying that you are good. There is not an entity that deceives you, you deceive yourself, by that very deception you come into existence as a self, from that dynamic comes all evil in the world that you commonly recognize from history books like torture, rape, murder, war, terrorism, genocide, racism, slavery, pedophilia, every abuse imaginable is just selfishness. 

You think you came into existence by being born, a human being is not a physical object, you are a concept. Non-duality mean that there is only one substance out which everything is made of, in this substance there is no distinction between a subject and an object  a self and another, it’s all one. When you are born, there is no self, you are alive without a self, is is born when a distinction is drawn between a self and other, in other words, there is no object, it’s all one, there are no boundaries, but you can draw one if you want to and then believe in those boundaries. Your entire creation is based on the creation of this boundary, if someone erase this boundary, you will literally disappear. That what is means to be a concept. This is why you defend yourself physically from abuse, theft, murder, getting the food you want and so on, but also conceptually by defending your ideas, beliefs, ideologue systems that you have, your notions of reality, various rights and values. To be alive is to be a thing which tries to survive as a self. Your shape makes it seem as though you are distinctive from your environment. All sorts of bad stuff can happen to you only if you are dead set on stay yourself. If you want to keep that shape you have, you have a lot of defending to do, this is what the self is about and that is how the devil gets created, it needs to act to preserve itself and the easiest way to do that is to be extremely selfish. If all you care about is your own survival and your own persistence and if you put those things above everything else, you don’t care what the truth of the matter is. If you want to maintain your configuration, you just have to demonize those things that are really threatening to you. 

Evil is the concept that you invented in order to marginalize those things which are threatening to your existence so that you could justify to yourself your desire to eliminate those things without any self-reflection or any guilt.

The notion of evil you have is completely relative to your own survival. Consider that if you had no self, you would not see evil and it literally would not exist. Evil is not a tangible property out in the world like length, weight, color. Evil is a concept that was invented by the Self. Evil was a concept that was invented by the devil, so that he can be a devil without admitting to himself that he is the devil. 

When you see that the devil is within you, you will see why others act like devils, you will not really blame or condemn them for being devils, because you will see that there is not much difference between you and them. This is what nobody wants to admit is that that the whole point of having a self is to be selfish and to have double standards. You are very quick to see selfishness in others but not in yourself. It’s the most counterintuitive ever.

Think of the most evil things you can imagine, note that they are not evil in a absolute sense but that they are evil for you and represent a threat to all you think what is important. Nazis, terrorists are not evil to themselves, they just have a different agenda. Everyone in the world is acting basically the same, acting in a self-bias manner to accomplish their own agenda. The devils always says, he is good and true.

So you think you are not as bad as a nazi, a terrorist or a rapist, there are different degrees of ignorance, unconsciousness and selfishness, but the very important point to understand is that there is no fundamental difference. It’s just a difference of circumstance and degree and it is much smaller than you think. A nazi is 1% conscious, you are 2% conscious. There is huge room for growth. 

Evil doesn’t come mostly through diabolical planing. The defense department of the USA doesn’t even bother keeping accurate count the human casualties in Iraq (between 120.000 and more than a million civilians killed), but they will repeat endlessly how many people died on 9/11. The taxes you pay are used to fund wars around the world, so you fund evil just by being a citizen or if you support this or that country through trade, you also found evil, when you buy materialist stuff like a new phone, it supports modern slavery. 

You don’t understand you are creating it because you are deeply ignorant and are in denial about it. 

Your nation has an ego, it fights to preserve itself, like every corporation, sports team, tribe or family and couple, the individual ego contributes to the collective ego.

 

Have you noticed that nobody that you would think of as evil, considers themselves to be evil. That is the mechanism working perfectly. Hitler didn’t consider himself to be evil, but rather the jews to be evil, it’s the same mechanism than you use to demonize him or anybody else. When you see and try to stop that mechanism inside yourself, you will understand all the horror that people do. The question is, how deeply do you see it within yourself?! 

The devil only exists by virtue of the fact that he doesn’t self-reflect.

 

Some characteristic of the devil:

-Works through trickery and self-deception, he flips the script on everything, he calls truth falsehood and falsehood truth. Nowhere is it clearer than in religion that is suppose to be the path to absolute truth, this means the eradication of the devil. The devil turns spirituality (which is his biggest threat) into a tool for deepening his ignorance. That is what religion is, it’s a corruption of true spirituality and mysticism. You can pretend to be spiritual by being religious so you can go preach the Truth and convert people without understanding that you are actually being the devil.

-The devil thinks that he is separate from God, this is the very definition of the Self.

-The devil is arrogant 

-The devil uses ideology as his favorite tool including political, religious, scientific, economic, atheist, agnostics, the content of the ideology is irrelevant. The point of an ideology is to create an identity out of ideas and concepts. He love to feel likes he possesses the Truth.

-He is outwardly oriented, materialistic and very pragmatic. 

He is preoccupied with sex, money, drugs, party, internet, TV, pursuing success and so on… He uses addictions and distractions to keep himself from self-reflection.

-The devils self-reflection is neurotic. The devil can feel shame and guilt. True self-reflection would involve you being conscious of your own self-judgement and self-criticism and your guilt and your shame and not being reactive to it… which most people are not conscious of. They confuse this with honest self-reflection. These are just more tools the devils uses in order to trick himself on ever deeper layers. Of course every devil must deny what is said here, he must.

 

-How can a benevolent God allow for evil?

This question is asked from the devil’s perspective. To God nothing is evil. Anything what is threaten to the devil is what’s evil. God is everything including all boundaries, so God is not separate from the devil, if you believe that, that is because you are a devil. 

God is the devil, duality is non-duality, from the perspective of non-duality, duality and non-duality are identical, from the perspective of duality, there is only duality. Infinite consciousness also includes infinite ignorance. God is playing this game with itself and that’s what you are. We are one but we think we are two.

 

Isn’t the devil bad?

No, to think the devil is bad is being more of a devil. Don’t confuse it with any kind of imperative of how you should behave, if you should or shouldn’t fight nazis, lock up criminals or rapists and stop devils. We only talk about the deep mechanics here. You are free to do whatever you want.

So is it relativism where we don’t stop the nazis when they come? That’s bad for everybody… No, that bad for your ego, for you as a self. Hating evil is just more evil, you just add more to it. That is why we should not focus on actions, they are external, they are deceptions of the devil. Everybody is afraid of everybody else and this is why evil exists!

So don’t stop being a devil, but instead become conscious of the fact that you are a devil. Your behavior will start to change in distinctive ways.

 

-How to stop evil?

Seeing people in other doesn’t stop evil but in fact creates the evil which you seek to stop. The solution to evil is to see it within yourself. Trying to get rid of evil only creates more evil, that’s the trap. Condemning evil is antithetical to truth because it doesn’t exit, it’s a projection.

 

There are two facets of evil:

a) not doing evil yourself, eliminating selfish actions.

b) the seeing of evil in the world

 

If you want to stop doing evil actions, you have to stop seeing evil as you are the creator of it. As everything interconnected, what ever you call evil is actually you.

In case of wars, you have to turn through propaganda the enemy as a devil and create that separation between you and him because human beings don’t like to kill other human being that are just like them, that would create to much cognitive dissonance. 

 

So should we not stop the nazis from overtaking the world? 

All the above is just to understand the mechanics of calling somebody evil and seeing evil in the world and co-creating evil with your mind. If you want to stop the nazis, you can stop them without calling them evil. But the fact that some nazi overtake the world might happen. 

To stop them from their ultimate goal, you got to fudge the truth to defend our lives, values, thrive, to reproduce, and it is not wrong or right, but this is exactly what evil does. The ego is so attached to survival that you can’t see the value of truth for truth’s sake.Because you are asking the question from the perspective of survival. 

 

What is the point of truth if it doesn’t help me to survive and thrive? 

Maybe to access the truth you have to die. What benefit the truth has,  you will never know because all you care is survival. 

 

The desire to end evil is itself selfish. The reason you don’t accept the selfishness of others is because it tends to thwart your own selfishness. 

What you want to do is being as selfish as you can possibly be there you need to preempt the selfishness of others. The demand to being a good person plays into what the devil is doing. The problem is not good versus evil, the problem is the dichotomy, the fact that you drew a line between the two. So if you just go and be good, that won’t take care of evil.

 

How come evil hasn’t been vanquished yet? 

-Maybe it’s because people want to fight evil by becoming good, but it’s not gonna do it, it’s probably the most counterintuitive thing there is. The solution to evil is to acknowledge that you are the devil yourself. This realizations requires months of patience observation seeing how you behave like a devil without guilting yourself.

-Committing to truth for truth’s sake rather than your own pleasure or your own survival

-Surrendering to the truth even if it means the death of you and this means dropping all your opinions, judgements and ideology about life, good and evil. Even though the ego is conceptual, it feels physical

 

Turn inwards to fight evil, solve the problem in yourself, you erase the boundary that you have drawn of what is considered to be yourself.

Don’t think that to stop evil we need to stop the violence, the rapes, the wars, that stuff was never evil, but you need to eliminate the concept of evil. In fact your daughter can still get raped, my nation can still get attacked. But we have been fighting violence with violence for thousands of years and that stuff still happens. The trick is not to stop violence, it is to understand what it’s about and to stop being so defensive to the point where you are not offended if violence is done to you. You don’t go seeking out violence, but you want to dis-identify to your physical body, your mind, ideas and beliefs. Once you are detached from that you are not going to care to what is going to happen to the body and with your life. By doing this dis-identification, you are set free, you are not worried anymore. It is a conceptual problem mistaken as a physical problem.

 

Exercise: you are one perspective upon trillions of other perspective from other creatures in the universe. Try to take on God’s perspective, as God you will inhabit all those creatures. 

Imagine 200 years ago you were alive as a slave, you were beaten, you worked and then you were hung, that was your fate. Really imagine that as if you lived through that. 

Now imagine yourself as a concentration camp victim, you were starved, beaten tortured and ultimately led into an oven and then burned, and that your fingernails were clawing at the concrete walls as that happens.

Imagine that your daughter was raped, imagine that you are the mother, than the father but also the daughter that’s being raped … how does that feels?

Imagine that you are in the middle east and your entire house and family was blown up in a drone strike because of some mistake of military intelligence, collateral damage.

Imagine that you are an ant, and some kid just steps on you and squishes you, notice what that feels like.

Imagine that you are a pack mule in ancient Roman times and you are working to lug giant stones for public works and they work you to death, barely feed you, they leave you out in the cold and eventually you starve to death.

Imagine you are a lion in Africa, just resting and suddenly you get shot by a man doing a safari.

Imagine you are pig in a factory house were you were born and raise, you have never even seen the light of day, you never saw the sun or grass, you were given little tiny space that can’t even turn around and you just live there in your own feces, and then you were butchered for food, that’s your existence.

 

This kind of exercise are really helpful to see the other side that the devil doesn’t want you to see. Since you are God, you are every single life and pesrpective that ever was and ever will be. In the sense that you will experience all of them and you already have but don’t have the memory of it.

The reason why you are so complacent towards all the evil in the world is because you have a very cushy 21st century lifestyle and still you want to moan, bitch and complain. You literally were the slaves, the concentration camps victims, all these butchered animals, but you were also there abusers, you were Hitler, Stalin, the terrorists, you are all of them because there is no boundaries, that is what non-duality means. When you become conscious of that, can you see how that might change your behavior not in a moralistic way? 

Try to consciously living your life and see that everyone you interact with, the people, the insects, the animals are you. You just don’t have access to their perspective, what it means to be you is to not have the other’s perspective. Notice the difference that makes in your life, just observe. You don’t want to inflict unnecessary suffering on other beings. Don’t act like you are one until you really feel it because that leads to more devilry.

This is exercise is not a concept, you have experienced what it’s like to be every single things that has ever and will be alive, you just don’t have access to it as a self right now, that is non-duality.

Do you want unconditional love and tranquility in your life? Then surrender all notions of evil forever. With enlightenment comes the corollary that you will never be able to criticize or condemn anyone ever again for any action what so ever, even the most heinous and disgusting actions that you can possibly imagine. 

The devil creates the very thing that it tries to stop.

[Sven]

This is great! Thanks

[Nic]

What is spirituality?

 

Spirituality = Metaphysics = Philosophy

Metaphysics means for most abstract speculations about things which are not empirical and that you can’t possibly know, so that they have no scientific value.

But spirituality or metaphysics is an investigation into the fundamental nature of existence.

Science questions physical phenomena, measures it put it into equations and theories. Metaphysics is asking about the substance of things.

Why does existence exist, why is there something rather than nothing, where does it comes from, what is matter, what is energy, what are quarks, how could it has arisen in the first place, what is a thought, what is physicality, what is time, what is space?

The mistake is to think that those questions cannot be answered as they are not objective questions, therefore, they are not in the domaine of science, so we shouldn’t take them seriously, which is a very unscientific manner of dismissing metaphysics. Spirituality is metaphysics, it is actually a deeper pursuit than science.

Don’t mix up spirituality with religion.

Spirituality is: developing a deep metaphysical connection to reality. It is a connection to the wonders of nature.

When you see a beautiful sunset or listen to a beautiful piece of music and you feel that connection, the feeling that you have at this moment is a 0,1% of what spirituality can be, what true spirituality is, is cranking up that connection until you have a long stream of it, until it strikes you all the time, such that it can no longer be ignored. 

Those beautiful moments which represent a minuscule fraction of your life can significantly be amplified so that you feel it all the time without having to rely on an external stimulation. 

A scientist could still want to deny that saying, yes, emotions are cool but where are the facts? You wanting facts is because of your emotions, your life is not governed by facts but utterly by your emotions and feeling, including your whole pursuit of science and your rationality. You re irrational by your clinging to rationality. 

This metaphysical connection manifests itself as a feeling. The more conscious you become, the more amazed you become at just what reality and existence are, this is what leaves you with this sense of awe and profundity.

Spirituality is not filling your mind with fantastical ideas, it is the opposite of that. It is removing all the ideas you presently have about reality, questioning them so much that you deconstruct everything you think what reality is until what you are left with, is the raw objective truth, that is what blows your mind! 

You come to realize that the reason why you were not struck by the beauty of reality the whole time and only during those rare moments was because your mind was full of ideas like the idea of facts over feelings, of an external reality, of materiality and other metaphysical presumptions that materialist science makes. All those beliefs were blocking you from the truth. So when you say that spirituality is just a feeling, that is exactly what is blocking you to see what spirituality is, it is exactly the opposite of what you think it is.

 

Spirituality is not about worshiping somebody, praying to some God, a man seating in the clouds, reading some bible, going to church and rituals, it’s about deep metaphysical questioning and connecting to reality. Philosophy is equivalent to spirituality but in the west we have lost touch with it. 

Philosophy used to be the quest for the truth, the search for the absolute: What is reality? How comes it exists? Why is there something rather than nothing? How is knowledge possible? What is the substance of everything? This is the essence of philosophy, that is called inquiry. Some have arrived to the absolute like Socrates, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Plotinus, Spinoza, Heraclitus, Epictetus, Hegel, Bishop Barkley, these are just examples from the western tradition. They were all idealists, not idealists as a philosophy but as a connection.

Spirituality is not beliefs, it’s the opposite, it’s when you remove all beliefs, it’s the truth without beliefs.

Kant the philosopher got it wrong by saying “we can access phenomena but we can’t access the noumena” (the truth in it of itself). We actually can,…, but it requires work by going beyond language, symbols, beliefs, models, maps, science and maths, that is where spirituality comes in, because all those corrupt the Truth.

Some definition from multiple angles of spirituality is:

-Developing a metaphysical connection with reality

-Answering questions about the nature of existence

-Seeking of Truth  

-Having a personal union with the Truth. This is like making love with reality, have sex with the absolute Truth, you get penetrated in the mind, everything else gets ridiculous compare to this. 

Sex is a good comparison as there is nothing rational for people to pursue having sex, it’s just like all the rest of your life, it is governed by your emotions and feelings, and a rationalist just puts a little sprinkling of pretense of rationality on top of that. He is not aware of the fact that he is irrational.

Trying to convince a so-called rational minded person to spirituality is like trying to convince someone who never had an orgasm to go and have one, and he dismisses you by saying: “it’s just feelings and emotions”. It’s just absurd and stupid. Everything you know is grounded in experience. The difference between having sex and spirituality is that the spiritual experiences take work to attain a good feeling.

 

Some benefits from spiritual work: 

-The raising of consciousness, experiencing reality from a radical different way

-The realization that reality is a mind and not a physical system, that reality is a mental construction, this is the essence of idealism. It requires radical open-mindedness and then you can experience non physical things, things that people think are crazy. 

-The realization that reality is fundamentally mystical. 

The job of most scientist is to demystify reality. But a scientist doesn’t see that his knowledge cannot lead him to the nature of existence using the finite mind as that being is prior to knowing. So you can’t know the nature of reality but you can become it by eliminating the separation between you and reality, separation is an idea of the materialist paradigm, that you can deconstruct. At this point you are going to realize that explaining the universe through a chain of events related by cause and effect will never get you to the absolute. You can’t explain the infinite by using a finite method, you will always get a partial solution, not the whole solution. So you can be reality in its entirety, accessing it directly through consciousness, as consciousness is all there is. You are consciousness and therefore the entire thing, not the thing that you thought you were, that was a fantasy that you had.

-Escaping the matrix, it is waking up, it feels like you are breaking physical reality, deconstructing it until you are completely free of it.

-Alining your life with the Truth and consciousness, embodying the truth, changing all your habits and addictions, deconstruct all your nasty programing that you got from your culture, all your false beliefs. Spiritual purifications needs to happen, your ego need to be broken down, break all resistance to the Truth 

-Dissolving of the ego, the separate sense of self, it’s a conquering of your inner-demons and your shadows. This entity that you think you are, this is an idea, not the truth. Science has never proven that you are a physical biological organism or that you are your body, because science cannot prove identity, it cannot prove what you are. Science can’t prove that you are not that table you’re looking at. It is the obvious stuff that people overlook. It has never proven that there is a separate Self, as there is no objective truth to it, it’s conceptual creation like Santa Klaus. Science can’t prove to you that Santa Klaus is real or not. Science can’t prove that you are separate from your coffee table. Try to think of what scientific experiment it would take to prove that you are not a coffee table.

-Expanding of your circle of concern, you defend less the the thing you think you are, you keep on expanding it until it becomes universal, your passion and your love extends.

-It’s a profound state of connectedness to everything in the universe. It’s not an idea, it’s a physical fact just by removing the idea of separation.

-Attaining and exploring altered states of consciousness 

-It’s non symbolic science. Science is the pursuit of understanding reality, using quantitative measures and formulas, quantifying reality. In that sense spirituality is not science. But science is an elastic notion

What was considered science 300 years ago is not considered science anymore today, we have realized our own mistakes. Science will discover at some point that they are non symbolic ways to do science. Spirituality is the investigation of reality with a non symbolic fashion, without using thought and your mind. This is the most pure form of science which doesn’t even have room for introducing symbols, maps or equations because they introduce falsehood, distortions and illusions into your understand of reality.

 

You won’t understand spirituality unless you have a mystical experience for yourself, in the same way that you won’t understand what sex is unless you try it for yourself.

 

Spirituality is not: 

-Dogma, religion, an ideology or a belief system. Religion is when you come into contact with direct consciousness and you convert it into a belief system, a lot of bad stuff happens. Religion is the opposite of spirituality. it mimics spirituality but it tends to make people believe instead of experiencing for themselves. It’s like believing you have sex or having an orgasm without actually ever having sex

-Blind faith: You are being asked to do practices, to actually experience the things that are being talked about. Such as I wouldn’t want you to believe in sex but to actually try it.

-Worshiping of gurus, icons, people, images, holy books, preachers, priests nor God

-Obedience to authority or following rules, religious costums or ceremonies like going to church

-Acting morally. Being a nice person doesn’t develop a spiritual connection, morality becomes an obstacle.

-Irrational, illogical or unscientific thinking, it is trans-rational, trans-logical, trans-scientific. A spiritual person’s understanding of science and use of logic and reason will be enhanced. It builds on top of science and rationality.

Do you realize that the only reason that you think that you exist is because you are directly conscious of your existence? Do you realize that science is a chemical state, there is no scientific evidence for your existence. So spirituality being only “feelings and emotions that are just hallucinations and chemicals in the brain”, so called facts are just hallucinations in the brain a chemical state.

-Wishful thinking in fear of death, inventing a story so life goes on after death. Spirituality is actually the facing of your own death. Actually it is the rationalist, the atheist and the scientific person who is avoiding his own death. But not physical death, the conceptual self. Because you think you are a physical thing, instead of what you really are, a mental construction. You actually can come to the conclusion by questioning long enough you own existence, that you never existed in the first place and that your existence in the human body was just a mental construction, a belief, a wishful thinking. You avoiding those questions wasn’t an accident, it was by design. When you do physical inquiry you come closer to your own death. Death is a concept, you are a concept. Your death will be conceptual but it will feel extremely real to you because you believe you are real. Until you realized you are not real, you won’t feel comfortable with metaphysical questions.

-Praying for material things

-Crusading against other people’s beliefs

-Joining a cult

-Politics, transforming the world into a better place, to save the wales and the polar bears and to save the world from racism and evil. First do spirituality then do save what you want once you know what the world is.

-Preparing for the afterlife, existence is right now

-It is not proving things, it’s a trap. Truth cannot be proven, all proof is indirect. Truth is a vaster domain than proof, study “Gödel’s Completeness Theorem” saying that you cannot prove the entire Truth

-Constructing elaborate theories

-A subjective romantic experience

-Spirituality is not “just” a chemical brain state. When your probing of existence reaches such a deep level, you start to question what a chemical is, what a brain is, a state or science is, you will come to a point that all those things including chemical brain states and the idea that reality is happening inside of the brain is a conceptual construction. It’s one thing to understanding those words, it’s another thing to actually grasp that none of the reality you perceive is actually happening inside of a brain, that thoughts are not happening inside of a brain, to understand that even a brain is a mental construction, just a thought that you are thinking. And. It’s a complete turning inside out of what you think reality is, it feels like you are loosing your mind as you are loosing you grip and grounding on reality. It might sound bad and not objective truth anymore, but the truth is that there is no difference between fantasy and truth, reality and thought. That what it means to say that you are inside a giant mind. What you think is, is what gets created in a sense.

 

There are different kinds of spirituality:

Nature mysticism, shamanism, voodoo, orthodox religions (but very problematic method), meditative state and yoga, visualization, psychedelics, non-duality and enlightenment.

Spirituality is different depending at what level of development you are at and where your culture is at.

Spirituality in spiral dynamics can be found at all color levels.

At stage yellow you have some visionary scientist like the father’s of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Einstein, Schröedinger, Max Born, Eddington…. are actually metaphysicians, not just academics, they were all idealists and mystics and all believed reality was a mind, not a physical system. But perhaps by putting everything into forms and numbers and by rationalizing everything, they couldn’t reach the deepest spiritual insight.

-Turquoise: Buddha, Jesus, Yogis, Sages

 

How is spirituality practice?

Meditation, concentration, self-inquiry, contemplations, yoga, meditative yoga, breathing techniques, holotropic breathwork, psychedelics, chanting, mantras, astral projection, visualization, dark room retreats, auditory driving (found in most shamanism), vision quest, sweat lodges, fasting, lucid dreaming, solo retreats, Vipassana retreats and meditation, reading spiritual texts, tantra, shadow work, journaling, workshops, apprenticeship programs, suffering…  

 

To be born in a non ideological family gives you better chances to be open minded. And to be a skeptic 

Why is there an absolute truth and people interpret it differently? Why is there so much confusion about it?

-Most won’t do the work properly. The ego prevents you to see the beauty of the self-deception. Your very existence hinges upon you not seeing the Truth.

Having a spiritual insight recontextualizes everything and changes your life. 

You cannot comprehend the infinite while you still want to remain and maintain your finiteness.

-The truth cannot be communicated at all, which is what religions has tried to do and failed miserably. A science book about the truth is just going to be another religion.

-Consciousness is a complex terrain like mathematics, which includes a lot of subdomains, it takes time 

-human beings have different hardware, neurology, transmitters, chemicals, physiology… No two people have the exact same obstacles and have access to the exact same spiritual insights. despite the fact that the hardware is conceptual. Some people are more self-disciplined, some are born philosopher.

-Our culture, we are still in the dark ages, science and its methods is still primitive, as like before, science didn’t recognize microscopes and telescopes legitimate instruments for investigating reality.

-Don’t expect the truth to be served at you from science on a silver platter, you can’t seat back, play the skeptic, be lazy, like a cynic criticizing everything, not doing anything. Most people are to lazy to read books, not to mention the yoga and meditation you might need to do to have a glimpse of the absolute. Nobody is going to this for you, no guru, no teacher, no video and this excludes 99,999% of people.

-It does take hardcore personal practice to realize and actualized spirituality, hard self discipline, boring, lonely, seating for hours doing this practice.

-The truth is too good to believe, how do you accept something infinitely good? The ego is trained only to take a certain amount of goodness in your life. The ego will drop you back from that state of ecstasy to your negativity and pessimism. It’s like being a lightbulb and screwing yourself to infinite energy, the first time you try, the lightbulb doesn’t hold long before it stops working. So you work yourself up to be a massive lightbulb until you merge with that energy by opening yourself up to that infinite goodness, beauty, compassion, power, intelligence, creativity, and the omnipresence of them.

-It is threatening to your very life because your life is a conceptual fabrication. So if you are a conceptual fabrication, what do you fear the most? Fire fears water, shadows fears light and ego fears Truth. The ego has to call Truth falsehood and falsehood Truth, that is the first trick that the “devilish mind” does or that the ego plays.

 

Why is spirituality important and how is it useful beyond the feelings that you are getting?

The feelings that you get are a symptom of you be connected with the truth, you are not pursuing feelings, the feelings are the garnish, it’s a reward.

All human disfunction fundamentally come from being disconnected from the truth. Falsehood creates sickness and disease, obesity, depression, heart attack, anxiety, panic attack, insomnia, fibromyalgia, various auto-immune disorders, schizophrenia and various kinds of mental disorders, cancer, fear, anger, cravings, jealousy, pettiness, theft, criminality, rape, violence, torture, war, genocide, racism, slavery, corruption, white collar crime…

Cancer is very preventable, a lot of it has to do because of the way you live your life and use your mind. The environment is also responsible for cancer, but who do you think polluted the environment and for what reason? You don’t have a 100% chance to cure all your cancer with spirituality but they are many people who have cured from crippling, life threatening diseases through deep spiritual work. Not changing your environment, your work when needed because you are too lazy to move out, that gives people cancer. When people are disengaged from truth people usually engage in a lot of toxic habits.

People engage in spirituality when they come to a dead end in life, they are looking for any escape of the suffering they are into. The suffering is a construction of your own mind, it’s just because you are playing the game that way.

-All of reality thrives towards union of all creatures, business, cultures, governments. Evolution is fragmentation thriving towards union. Union means Truth.

-Universal love and compassion, true morality, you cannot be a truly moral person, truly loving or compassionate unless you are highly conscious. Love is inversely proportional to ego. Morality doesn’t depend on how strictly you control yourself, it depends on your level of consciousness. So if your level of consciousness is low and you control yourself a lot, you are going fail to be a good human being. Your mind is now filled with cynical, dualistic, rationalist, materialistic beliefs and other forms of beliefs and ideas like religious nonsense, moralizations and rules that have robed you from your connection with reality, if you want to be that child again if you had a good childhood, where everything was fresh, magical and beautiful, you can get that back through spiritual practice.

A few people will devote their whole life to it because nearly nobody wants to pay the horrible egoic cost that comes with it.

 

Answer all these questions to assess how much spirituality is right for you? Give notes from 1 to 10.

-How much do you care about the Truth?

-How much do you care about understanding existence?

-How much do you care about seeing beauty everywhere?

-How much do you care about Goodness, being good and seeing goodness everywhere?

-How much do you care about being universally loving?

-How much do you care about being emotionally, psychically and physically healthy?

-How much do you care about living in a healthy environment?

-How much do you care about overcoming anger fear, anxiety, depression, jealousy, loneliness, sadness?

-How much do you care about being authentic?

-How much do you care about joy and peace of mind?

-How much do you care about being infinitely creative, having profound insights in domains like business, art, science, philosophy, spirituality?

-How much do you care about exploring reality, physically or internally?

-How much do you love being mindfucked?

-How much do you love wisdom?

-How much do you care about reducing the suffering of mankind or animals?

-How much do you love the feeling of being conscious?

-How much do you want to be a kid again?

-How much do you care about transcending disfunction?

-How much do you want to go beyond petty, mundane human issues?

-How much do you want to be passionated about life?

 

If you have a lot of 10’s, a lot of spirituality is for you. If not, stay away from it but this is why people do spirituality, and you might want to continue shopping, food, having sex, porn, TV, Youtube, video games etc… If you wonder why life sucks, there is your answer, you’ve invested your points in the wrong areas.

 

 

The beauty of the work is that it is self-validating, you don’t have to believe anything, you only learn through experience, this is a science, you are seeing with it your direct consciousness what is really going on. Skepticism is good, you just have to use it in the right way, you have to use it on yourself and then begin the process of spirituality, do the research and the practice. You still have to listen to somebody like for every complex topic like calculus and you have to do the homework. Your goal right now should be to have your first mystical experience. Using LSD or mushrooms, if used in the proper manner, will take you there quiet rapidly. Like for discovering the world of sex, you need to have your first orgasm. Psychedelics are a good entry point to having your first mystical experience. They cannot be true spirituality without hardcore practice. You need a lot of hardcore practice before you realize that we are all enlightened and so on, from an enlightened point of you that is true, not from our common point of view. In the same way that for a calculus professor it is easy to solve some equations and for a child it is impossible. Educate yourself about spirituality, read many books to try to understand spirituality.

Edited October 11, 2018 by Nic

[Nic]

Advanced Tips For Self-Inquiry 

An analogy for self-inquiry would be to try to erode a rock (the matter of observation) with a feather (your attention) until the rock is completely gone. 

Who Am I? What Am I? What is reality? What is existence? They point to the same thing, you are just approaching it from different angles. Some questions might resonate with you more than others.

When you do your self-inquiry, what is it what you are looking for?

You are actually looking for formlessness, the opposite of all you have ever encountered in you life. No emotions, no form, just nothing, formlessness. To imagine something that has no qualities, has already the form of a thought, that is a quality that we try to detach from, until we reach a state of formlessness. You have to find a needle in a haystack which is not there, the process of looking and to find out that there is no needle is the whole point of doing this work. Not looking is the mistake everybody is doing.

-Stop looking for answers of other people. Self-inquiry is not looking for a logical, verbal or a mental image answer. You don’t have answers to these questions until you become enlightened. No one can help you, you have to find out for yourself. The whole rest is a distraction. You have to notice yourself distracting, trying to get the verbal answer, stop yourself and turn inward. Any shortcut you look for is going to make the journey longer. 

-All ideas and perceptions are not the thing you are looking for, enlightenment cannot be symbolized, everything that you can imagine, is not it.

-Nothing is hidden and nothing is elsewhere. 

Right here right now is enlightenment. It’s not far away from you, you are to close to it. It’s about being present with existence. Enlightenment is not a mystical state or a positive feeling, it is the very fabric of reality itself, it is infinity. This should be reminded before anyone of your self-inquiry seating. That is the essence of the self-inquiry process.

-You are not the body and you are not the mind. Enlightenment means that the construct of ourselves are just illusions, that reality as whole is an illusion, and that what is happening right now is just a dream, like the one you are having when you sleep. It feels more solid but it is possible to see through that solidity and to awaken from this dream, that’s enlightenment in a nutshell. The statement that you are not the body and not the mind is the most significant statement that can ever be told to human being. Pursuing enlightenment is pursuing the dis-identification of yourself with the body and the mind. It’s not a typical goal, you have to believe that you are completely ignorant. 

-Use the monkey mind, your thoughts, for something good. Question everything you hold for certain about reality. Challenge your very identity. How do you know that you are you? How can you trust your bodily feelings of a signifier of yourself?

Only feeling that you are you is not enough, you got to look deeper. Ask yourself: How do you know that the feelings that are being felt right now by you which you claim are evidence for your existence, are actually are you? How do you know you are made out of feelings, body sensations and made out of thoughts? I Am this body, these feelings and these thoughts?

Pinch yourself and ask yourself if that is really you… but when you see a table, you don’t identify with it. What criteria are you using to identify with things? But more fundamentally, how is it that identity comes about in the first place? How is it that a thing becomes a thing? Labeling is not what God, the universe, reality does, it’s what the mind does. Could it be that the mind is concocting identities on the fly? Do you still exist when the image of yourself isn’t present anymore? You are suppose to exist all the time but the image is only there sometimes.

Challenge the core of your identity first, and then doubt reality … or you are going to trick yourself. When you become nothing, you become everything. But holding the concept of God or Nothing is actually holding you back.

-Focus on what is actual. Train your awareness, become conscious on actuality, do this every single time you seat down to self-inquire. When your mind goes into fairytale land, bring it back to actual. Enlightenment is not: an idea, a belief, a theory a model, a speculation, an emotion, an intuition, a state, a logical conclusion, a feeling.

-The distinction between content and existence itself, the context. The fact of existence itself is not a content, it is just the fact of existence itself. You can’t really point to what existence is but nevertheless, there is this overwhelming sense of existence.

-Remind yourself that enlightenment is the one and only one constant that is constant across every single moment of life, it is eternal, it is one thing, invariable across all of time and space. What you are is what existed before you were born. Note that all your perceptions are not constant, objects appear and disappear out of sight, out of perception when you move your head from left to right, the perceptions of your body are not constant.

-The distinction between observation versus trying to figure it out. Observe existence itself, It’s awareness trained upon itself. Trust in pure observation, the benefits will happen slowly and gradually. 

-Make the difference between what is consciousness and what is thinking.

You can think about consciousness which is different from consciousness itself. Psychedelics will show you the difference between thinking and consciousness. But for now, become conscious of the fact that you exist, train yourself for that shift of consciousness, from normal state of thinking to being conscious of existence.

-Make sure you challenge the naive realist paradigm, materiality, the physical reality. Question physics itself. You are inside a hallucination machine. Everything you experience right now is an hallucination. There is nothing real in reality, it is a set of hallucinations, dreams, your brain, your birth, your entire life is a dream. A hallucination is “perception without substance”, that is exactly what reality is, it just feels different than last nights dream. Physicality is part of the dream, believing you do physics or that you have a brain is a part of the dream. Those dreams are taking place absolutely nowhere. Reality is just dreams without infrastructure, software without any hardware, there is no reality, there is only illusion.

-There is no way towards enlightenment. No techniques will get you there, but they increase your odds of getting there, it’s a discontinuous jump. 

-Follow your own path. Don’t criticize other paths, it’s complete nonsense.

-Enlightenment is totally outside your rational mind.

-The moment of enlightenment is not up to you, you can’t will it, it’s a fortunate accident. Doing spiritual practices increases your odds of getting struck by lightening.

-Remember that no-self is equivalent to the true-self. The You not existing is the only thing that does exist. Both can be useful depending on the student that the teachers work with.

-Be careful with mechanical meditation and/or inquiry, stay aware.

-Long stretches of focus are required to make serious traction with this work. Do a ten day retreat, mix them with daily seats.

-Terror and fear are good signs when doing self-inquiry.

-A flash experience is not enlightenment. Your job is to have a constant experience. Always assume that you can go deeper until your life is over, it’s infinitely deep.

-Train your mindfulness abilities with the mindfulness with labeling technique (see the mindfulness episode).

-Watch out for distractions, the more progress you make, the more distracted you will want to become. Commit to never letting a distraction knock you off the path permanently.

-Keep reminding yourself at a beginning or after every session that this will be worth it. This is the answer to life and reality, the answer to everything, the entirety of reality given to you all at once, that is what you get from that leap of faith, the most challenging work a human being could do.

[Nic]

This must be one of my favorite... this is absolutely amazing! Leo, thank you so much for sharing,  you are outstanding! As non native english speaker, to write it and read it gives it another dimension of understanding than just by looking at a video. I'm also amazed by how clear everything gets in my head after all those times I tried to imagine infinity, referring to my childhood where I already was dreaming of it a lot. I'm really happy I did this one! Enjoy it!

 

Understanding Absolute Infinity Part 1

“Infinity is where things happen that don’t” Anonymous schoolboy

“How is it possible that the universe can be infinite? How is it possible that the universe is finite” Giordano Bruno

 

What is existence? What is reality? What is Truth? What is being? What is a distinction? What is God? What is death? What is awareness? What is consciousness? What is the biggest picture possible for our understanding?

All those questions try to answer the same thing. The answer to all these questions is … absolute infinity. To say that those questions cannot be answered is arrogance in disguise, as it is a definitive statement.

What is the substance of God? Religious people would say it is beyond our understanding, so we are left without an answer.

How can anything come about from scratch? It’s the chicken and egg problem.

 

We are going to look at all those notions to unravel this puzzle: limits and physical laws, standards foundation and grounding, arbiters and who’s, perspective and relativity, duality, boundaries, contrasts and distinctions, relationships and hierarchies, form and formlessness, impossibilities, powers and weirdness. 

 

Imagine a infinite object for 10 seconds…

What did you imagine? A big sphere, a long bar? Normally we imagine something very large in one dimension. So it is finite object that you gave a infinite length, or radius… So basically you gave it infinite spacial dimension. This is actually only one dimension. It has a form and also a specific color. 

An infinite object has infinite colors with all the colors we can not see with human eyes, that would be the second dimension, infinite smells would be the third…Now imagine an object that has infinite dimensions. Take your time, as that is as close that you can actually get to imagining God or absolute infinity.

What form did this object take? It needs to contains all forms within it, sphere, bar, pyramid and so on, and it can’t be just large, don’t confuse infinity with largeness, it’s also infinitely small. Every single property and characteristic possible needs be in this object.

So whatever image you have of this, it isn’t it.

 

-Limits and physical laws

Reality is defined by physical laws, objects have limitations. But reality as a whole… Science would say that we have the physical laws likes gravity, mechanic laws, some constants…. They make the way the universe is and these are what gives the universe its limits. But the real question is: What enforces these constants? A scientist would say that there is nothing more fundamental. So are those forces outside reality and constraining it? But what is beyond that limit, and beyond that limit and so on? 

To say that the universe is just the way it is because of a gravitational constant, is the same as saying that it is the way it is because of God… Basically, it’s just an entity, we don’t know what it is doing there and it makes everything else be the way that it is.

 But we want to know what is reality as a whole. Science and religion both ignore this question. Maybe infinite regress is a feature of reality, it could be that it has no ultimate limit

 

-Standards, foundations and grounding

What is the standard by which anything is judged or assessed? Not your personal judgments. But, what standards shall we use to make sense of reality. Any standard that we use is itself part of reality, part of the problem, we cannot measure reality from outside. Science and religion, reasoning or logic are part of reality, are subsets of the superset. 

What could ground anything? How could anything be a foundation for anything else?

What’s the grounding of where you stand? The carpet, what is the grounding of that? The building, the earth, vacuum of empty space, space time continuum. It ends there but is that really it? What is the grounding of molecules, atoms, quarks, maybe strings… but what are they made out of? We can always find more foundations.

We might want to be open for the possibility that there is no ground for all of reality, maybe there is an infinite regress, an infinite chain of objects. 

If it is infinite in both direction, what is reality made of, the substance of everything? It might have to be nothing… literally so.

 

-Who’s, arbiters, perspectives and relativity.

Everyone is looking at reality from its limited perspective, a view point is not the whole. So who is the arbiter of what is real, of objective reality, whose perspective shall we use as the standard between all other perspectives?

Even if you take several opinions, how do you know that it is what’s right? It’s just another perspective. A perspective is partial, wether it is scientific or not. If you take a close look it is always your perspective. The perspective of science is a conceptual notion and a lot of scientists disagree on many things. Based on what are you saying that your perspective is correct? It is based on your perspective. 

What might the ultimate or God’s perspective be like? It would have to incorporate the perspective of all humans, animals, animated and unanimated objects.

Time itself is relative. So maybe, all those perspectives are what constitutes reality? Reality might not some objective physical world behind the scene but rather an absolute relativity. Everything you’ve ever known is absolutely relative, it is that way from your perspective and is completely different from another perspective. That’s not just an appearance or a subjective thing, but that is reality. That sums up to an elegant solution to some of theses tricky problems. It might allow us then to bootstrap everything from nothing. All we need to do is actually create a perspective. That in a sense is creating reality. As we create more perspectives, we create more reality. And without perspective there is no reality, the reality is that reality is absolutely relative.

 

-Duality boundaries, contrast and distinction.

Everything you know is actually a set of opposites, dualities, distinctions, ups down, big versus small, pretty vs ugly, smart vs stupid and existence vs non-existing. The only way you know or experience anything is by contrast. Without contrast you become one with the thing you are pointing at. What kinds of distinctions you make shapes the kind of world that you see. 

Wood is just wood for a regular person but it is not for a carpenter, he sees all sorts of distinctions, something different and more refined. But what if all contrast are relative? How do we arbitrate between different possible distinctions, how do we tell who is right? How the opposite are joint? Everything in your experience is in unity. When you look at a coin, we say that tails and heads are opposite things, where exactly does tail and head begin or end, there is no clear demarcation and notice that they can’t be separate from each other! 

Maybe all these polar opposites and dualities has to be together, there are all unified in our experience. How can anything be separate from anything else? Who says what constitute a legitimate boundary? Is the air going into your lungs part of you? The oxygen in you cells? The notion of boundaries is something we create. They don’t exit, we project them onto reality. The notion of boundaries is more subjective than you have thought. 

 

-Who is to say which contrasts in the world are of any significance. It’s a matter of which boundaries we give significance too! Science keeps making more boundaries, as we learn we make more distinctions. Maybe boundaries and their significance are both relatives. What is the substance of a distinction, of a boundary or a contrast? What is the substance of what contrasts your hand from the background? Contrast are not made of molecule, atoms and molecules are themselves a contrast!

What kinds of distinctions Gods makes? Maybe reality is just distinctions, so what would reality be to God if a perspective is only made out of distinctions?

What if there is no difference between existence and non-existence? After all, the difference between the two is a distinction.

Who arbitrate between existence and none existence? There is a clear difference between the two… from your perspective… You firmly believe in clear distinction only because you think of yourself as existing and you fear non existence above all other things.

Everything you do in your life goes against non-existence, so that you may exist, isn’t that just your perspective and that could be a relative perspective?

So from God’s perspective, is there a fundamental difference between existence or nonexistence ? God’s perspective being the most unbiased, the most “objective” Perspective possible. 

Science tends to assumes that boundaries are objective things, but that is not the case at all. Science draws relationships and interconnections between different boundaries that it itself draws, that it self says that are significant and descriptive of reality and yet, all of these boundaries are relative!

 

-Relationships and hierarchies

Everything around us is composed of relationships, everything we describe scientifically is also relationship based, so your head is in relationship to your body, your body in relationship to earth, earth in relationship with Pluto with the gravitational force, so you are in relationship to Pluto.

Every single atom in the universe is in relationship with every other single atom in the universe. We like to forget a lot of relationships like these, about 99% of all the relationships that exist and the question is, who is selecting which relationship is of significance, which ones we should be focused upon.

 In fact all objects are infinitely related with all other objects within reality! Even science cares to describe certain types of relationships. The things that you find formulas for in science, what are those but a finite number of things out of a infinite number of things which exist. What makes one relationship more important than another? Well it’s nothing but our own biases. If the boundaries are being defined by me, then objects are defined by me, then their relationships are also defined by me. 

There are no relationships, it is all operating as one unified symphony. One thing is not more important than another thing when thingness itself is subjective.

 Science tends to say that a bird for example is not foundational to reality as an atom would be. But all of reality depends on every other part of reality. From God’s perspective does hierarchies exist or is it something that the human mind projects upon reality? Perhaps from God’s perspective everything is equally important. The human mind likes to simplify reality, because it can’t deal with its complexity, it likes to think as though we could change circumstances around and make them however we want. We can get rid of this or that, like some stuff is essential and some others are not, including the stuff you don’t like, including the stuff you hate. To survive, we have to dislike certain things which threaten our survival. Maybe all reality needs all the pieces, nothing is expandable, nothing unnecessary or unimportant.

 

-Form and formlessness

All the objects are formed, they have a shape, it’s a certain distinction. As opposed to it being formless, not that it is amorphous like a cloud. Form is synonymous to being finite. What might the formless look like? 

You might think of the formless to be the potential versus the actual. Like having the potential to draw a painting, it’s a possibility. 

Everything that is formless is indistinct. Notice that even the distinction between the form and the formless is also a distinction, and of form.

 

-Impossibility, power and weirdness

How can anything be impossible for reality? When we are talking about reality as a whole without limits on it from the outside, everything is possible.

 It’s hard to imagine because we know that finite object has certain kinds of possibilities and powers that is limited by the law of conservation of energy, you can’t get something from nothing, there are no perpetual motion machine, you might say that its impossible. 

But people make that mistake to cary that logic over the whole of reality and claim things about reality that are supposed to be impossible, they think of reality like it would be a human being.

Why would it be different for reality to create one atom versus a trillion atoms? How are you judging this difficulty, this limitation in power, where is this coming from? Reality might not be finite as you are. 

How can reality be so weird? Weirdness is also a relative thing. Who are we to say what is normal and what is weird? This is entirely determined by your own experience, it is completely subjective. The fact that you exist is a very weird thing. Everything is weird!

 

 

Let’s put all these domains and put them together. Imagine that they are no who’s or ultimate who in reality. God is not seating outside of reality, God is the absence of who’s, it means that reality is groundless, that reality is an infinite regress of infinite regresses in infinite dimensions with no limits. 

It is so relative that it is absolutely so. The relativism goes full circle into absolutism. A lot of people don’t like the idea of relativism, but we don’t talk about a light form of relativism like moral relativism, this is about metaphysical relativism, this is about the structure of what anything can possibly be. God’s perspective is the no perspective perspective. It’s a symmetry of all possible asymmetries. 

-It’s like having an infinite block of sand, in that sand there is already all possible forms you can imagine, forms don’t need to be cut out, like a sphere or the Statue of David. Not only does it contains all forms, it contain also all that can possibly be, all potentials.  

It doesn’t matter if its actual or potential because those two are really identical, it exists and doesn’t exit at the same time, that is also included, it’s not small or large, it’s both and neither at the same time, it all possibilities superimposed upon itself and that is what existence or reality ultimately is. You will never separate yourself out from this, even if you have your own perspective, you are a part of this.

-Imagine a zip file, a file containing 100’s of compressed files. Is that zip file one thing or hundreds of things… ? It’s both, that’s its function. We can unzip and zip it back up. It depends on your perspective. It doesn’t really matter what it is, the information is all in there.

Imagine a zip file containing all the files, possibilities and properties you could ever create. The file zips itself up to such an extend that it exist and doesn’t exist at the same time. Where is this zip file located? On a computer? The computer and zip file are all zipped up together with space and vacuum into one. One file containing all contrasts, distinctions, shapes that can possibly be. This is what you are living right now. 

You are finite and infinite at the same time. You can keep zooming in on an object or zooming out into space, it will continue forever and ever, and the substance for everything is ultimately nothing. Nothing is everything. That is the zip file nature of reality. 

The infinity can be seen right here. Existence and non existence are right on top of each other, they are not separate things. Infinity must contain all finities. If things were not the way they were, infinity would not be absolutely infinite. You are a consequence of the fact that reality is just everything, as to really be everything it has to become nothing, if you exclude nothing from everything, you don’t have everything. Everything cancels everything else out.

It’s like God would take out a shotgun, load it with every possibility, shoots him self in the head and in the same time it never even happened…. but all analogies are finite. 

But who is experiencing existence? Nobody is! Have you ever considered that what you call existence is actually nonexistence? What if it is both superimposed on top of each other? How wood you know what non existence look or feels like?

Reality is a groundless infinite singularity that contains absolutely everything. It is at a substance level, rather than molecules and atoms, it’s a system of contrasts, everything is a contrast to everything else and those contrasts consist of nothing, that is its substance. The hole thing is just a hologram, it’s just one giant hallucination. It’s a collection of phenomenas or contrasts without any substance underneath them. 

How can there be contrast without a mechanism creating it, that is too weird? As previously said, weirdness is just a point of view and impossibility not being a problem for reality as a whole. Reality has so few limits that it is a-mechanical, it doesn’t need a mechanism for it to be. Appearance is the mechanism of what you call reality. Science is just exploring more content within reality but it doesn’t boils down to what the content is made of, because science doesn’t want to admit the mystical nature of reality. It is the only way you can encapsulate everything into one. There is nothing left unexplained by this, it is total. 

What we’ve done here is going to the limits of what the intellect can do, to the limits of concepts. but if you really understand, you will fall in tears, you need to have a direct experience of this, an experience beyond all experiences, to become God. Your job is to find anyway you can in life to experience this. Everything that was said here is not the truth, it is just words, it’s just concepts. This where the road ends. This is just poetry, this is not science, hoping that this poetry strikes the right chord for you to experience this.

Edited October 18, 2018 by Nic

[AleksM]

65 Core Principles Of Living The Good Life

1. No Ideology / no dogma of any kind 6:00.Religion (but it's not only a problem of religion), give you some idea that you must just blindly accept.  The thing you are really after is the highest truth and freedom from mind. People who are dogmatic and idealistic have a hard time changing. If we put all epistemology in one principle then that is it.  (watch video on ideology)

ideology - a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
"the ideology of republicanism"
synonyms:    beliefs, ideas, ideals, principles, doctrine, creed, credo, teaching, dogma, theory, thesis, tenets, canon(s); 

ideology - a set of beliefs or principles, especially one on which a political system, party, or organization is based:

dogma - dogma
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.
"the dogmas of faith"
synonyms:    teaching, belief, conviction, tenet, principle, ethic, precept, maxim, article of faith, canon, law, rule; Več

2. Big picture thinking is greater than technical knowledge and always trumps technical knowledge..... you can have all the technical knowledge but no sense of the big picture and your life will be miserable.

3. Direct experience is king. Experience is the only thing that exists and that is real. ... everything else is fantasy/imagination. Usefull to cutting the bullshit society feeds you and the bullshit that your mind feeds you, your own imaginations, theories, ideologies...so you ground yourself in direct experience. If it's not present i nyour direct experience it is not real. 

4. Self-experimentation- you won't know what techniques will work for you, resonate with you until you try them. Because we realize that direct experience is king we also do a lot of self-experimentation because by only experiencing different things we can know what works for us. And this is basicly how you solve all your problems in life.

5. Radical open-mindedness 16:40 - we recognize that we come into this world not knowing anything and that we need to fully explore every look in reality without pre-judging it, so we don't lock ourselves from great discoveries and amazing insights and truths. And we also recognize that the mind loves to be close-minded to new experiences and to challenging new ideas. So you have to be open to any idea, any perspective, teaching no matter how bizzare it sounds at first.  Because we recognize that our mind will judge prematurely and cut us off from all these avenues that we can explore. And we also recognize that most truths in life are counter-intuitive and seem ridiculous and silly on the surface until they are deeply explored and it can take a lot of time to deeply explore these various truths and topics before we realize just how true and powerful they are which means we need to stay open-minded    during that time.  Otherwise we will just say this is stupid, this is irrational, criminal...so we'll do all that without exploring all that , is much better to explore all that which is not the same thing is becoming dogmatic and clinging to anyone of those things, we are interested in exploration and you don't know what you'll find.

6. You don't judge things that you haven't experienced. 

7- Questions everything. Especially the most obvious stuff, assumptions, every teaching 

8. Care about methaphysical and phylosophysal matters. Most people don't study these becasue they perceive them as abstract and not aplicable but no it just takes more effort and study to find the applications. If you don't follow this, you will get lost in the transactional, pragmatic way of life, business of doing chores. The depth of life is found in this stuff and having this stuff resolved.So that means you are not chasing just pragmatic self-help advice, that stuff is fine but you need to go deeper. 

9.  Genuine intent for truth at whatever cost. You must genuinely care about the Truth as one of your highest priorities and values no matter what the cost is to get to this Truth. Without this you will keep falling back into falsehood and delusion because if you are not willing to accept the costs that come from seeking the ultimate truth, you are gonna get sucked into lesser things in life- sex, money, comfort, luxury... and all of that is best pursued with falsehood and you will end up deluding yourself

10.  Genuine intent to understand every point of view. Most people judge other points of view without caring to jump into their shoes and look at the world through their perspective. You recognize that the world is nothing other than different points of view, there is no such thing as understanding the world without a point of view. And your point of view is not the most important or the best so you recognize that by looking at the world through multiple points of view you can learn a lot, you become passionate about exploring them. 

11. Integral thinking. 29:00 It boils down to the realization that every point of view or perspective contains  some kernel of truth and it's your job to discover what it is. it's not somebody elses job to convince you of that truth. And this is where open mindedness comes in where you can integrate these multiple point of view, glue them together and really see what is going on - what is the methaperspective where we combine all of these points of view. What does that tell me about life, about myself, about humanity, society. .. by doing that you gain so much more than jsut sticking to your points of view and defending yoru points of view.  This is the opposite of ideology and dogma because the point of ideologyand dogma is to limit your point of view and defend a rigid perspective on the world. So it's the opposite of integral and holistic. So these people understand so much less than they could. Integral thinking is the recognition that  every point of view is partial never the ultimate truth, so we are exploring so many of them because evry perspective has a little piece , every point of view is like 1% perspective on reality. So we need to explore hundreds of them to add up to something substantial.

 
12. It all boils down to inner game . The quality of your life come down to your psychology. That means that all problems and suffering is Self-created and Self-inflicted. ANd this is very difficult for most people to believe because it runs counter to the idea that we are living in some sort of rigid, fixed, external reality. A material reality with unbreakable physcial laws, where it seems like all problems are out there in the world. And all suffering is created by the world outside of me and I have nothing to do about it . What is that other than an aspect of inner game, a belief, a paradigm. Master the inner software of your mind. 

13. Life long learning and self-education. 34:00 You need to be compassionate about learning . You need a system for taking notes

14. Observation. The essence of learning is observation. How do you learn something? By patiently observing it for long periods of time , very methodically.  Observe people, animals, nature, trees, your own behaviour, your own thinking process, motivations, fears, problems and neurosis, oberve when you suffer, when you are in pain, observe when you are happy, observe what makes you motivated, oberve what makes you depressed and through this process you will learn about yourself, the world , the mankind, business. Anything that you observe, you will learn to make finner distinctions in. Observation is related to the principle of direct expeirence is king and the opposite of that is accepting what people tell you. To embody the stuff that actualized.org teaches you need a years of observation. It's through observation that insights come. 

15. Plan to meditate for 1 hour a day for the rest of  your life. Meditation is basicly observation, you are observing the present moment and that ties us back to direct experience is king. Meditation is just pure direct experience on whatever is happening in the present moment. You are observing the functioning of your own mind , various body sensations and emotions and its only through this observation that you will understand how your mind and body work. And this is why most spiritual teaching cannot be directly related to people and you cannot sell spiritual adancement, psychological maturity, wisdom because the only way they can get those things is by doing the observational work that is required to have those insights   and understandings, to have that base of experience. You cannot give me money and in turn become a master piano player, the only way you can become a master piano player is by going through all the direct experience and practice and observation that a master piano player has that makes him a master. No amount of listening to me  or paying me any amount of money will get you the observational experience that you need to understand the functioning  of your own mind-body.  Meditation is one of the most important habits for personal development 

16. Ego is the roof of all human problems and suffering. 44:45 The ego is just that sense of you that you were born, that you are that human being right there and that you will die one day, that you had a personal history.

17. Self-deception. The biggest thing you need to be worrying about. How your own mind lies and tricks you and deceives you. 

18. Self-bias. You need to be able to see in yourself your own biases and selfishness, you need to see within yourself how the ego self distorts everything that it perceives because the whole purpose of the self is to survive. And therefore you will be looking and manipulating circimstances in order to serve yourself and therefore your perceptual system is self-biased, filled with conflicts of interests and double standards. 

19. All fear, all judgement, anger and suffering are delusion and falsehood. When we realize the truth all fear,judgement, suffering will turn out to be false. 

20. Do not demonize anyone. Anytime you think of somebody or something as evil you are wrong. 

21. Reality is perfect. 

 

22. The purpose of life is to raise your consciousness. 
 23. The purpose of life is to raise your capacity to love
 24. The purpose of life is o take in the beauty of life. Notice the beauty in the hard things . It's very hard to see the beauty when yo uare dealing with a situation that is affecting your survival needs. 
 25. The purpose of life is to feel alive everyday. To live proactively. Being more conscious and less robotic and mechanical. 

 26. Build your metaphysical connection to reality. Video: what is spirituality. It'c connecting to yourself as the entire universe. 

 27. Counter intuitiveness - reality is counterintuitive. That means that reality will work the opposite of how you think it will work. Examle: Attracting women. Bragging and trying to impress the girl makes ger run away. Happiness, fear, emotions are counter intuitive. 

A counterintuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition, common sense, or gut feelings.[1]
contrary to what one would intuitively expect.

28. Do the opposite of what people are doing. Most people are not happy and neither successful, most people have mediocre results in all areas of life.

 28. Non-duality is the ultimate truth, reality is nonDual soo all boundaries, categories and distinctions ultimately collapse. They are all relative.
There is no distinction between inside, outside, physical-nonPhysical, me - other, good-bad, black,white, living-nonLiving.... And as you keep doing consciousness work, all will collapse in one unity, one Truth.

relative - considered in relation or in proportion to something else.
"the relative effectiveness of the various mechanisms is not known"
synonims:    comparative, respective, comparable, correlative, parallel, corresponding, reciprocal
"the relative importance of each factor"

 29. Absolute truth exist but it cannot thought, believed, imagined, communicated, spoken, written, proven or argued

 30. Reality is not material. Reality is not a physical object of any kind. Reality is a giant mind. 

 31. Life is a dream. There is no external world beyond this dream that you are in. It's the same as with dreams, you have to awaken . This principle helps you disidentify from all of the attachments that you have to this dream. You start to take the dream less seriously. 

 32. Reality is infinite and god is a real thing

 33. You are god, you are the entire universe. 

 34. God is the devil. Inmportant so you are not bothered as much by evil becasue you see that behind that evil is a higher intelligence, it exists for a reason, it's part of infinity, it's part of the stuff that you have to love and embrace. 

 35. All identity is relative and fluid. There is no identify within reality other than oneness. And this is how god or the devil works through creating these identities, but all of these are malable, changable. And that's a good thing because then you can change what you identify with,  you can disidentify with your body mind and identify witrh the ultimate, the absolute, the truth.

 36. 99.999% are deluded and asleep. And don't know about any of the things that I'm explaining here. Most people are so asleep that you cannot look for advice or guidance from them, if you look at them you see they do stupid stuff and if you emulate them you will do stupid stuff.

 37. Society is still in the dark ages. And that's why you are not getting all the confirmation from society, you are assuming that society is more advanced than it is. So don't expect for society to give you these answers through social media or TV, society is not about how to live the good life. The stuff you learn from society is how to live a mediocre, miserable life.

 38. Development and awakening. BOTH. You want to awaken from the dream that you are in but you also have to master how to live in the dream and develop yourself within the dream. If you only develop yourself but not awaken, you will get lost in the dream and you will suffer. If you only awaken but not develop, you will not have any mastery or excellence of living ion the dream. You need both and initially you will need a lot of development prior to thinking about awakening.

 39. Figure out who you are and what do you want out of life. This allows you to make decisions and allows you to channel the energy to those things that you want.  You will not randomly get the stuff good stuff and a good life by not knowing what you want. You want to be very clear and decisive about what you want. 

 40. Authenticity. You need to be striving to be mroe and more authentic in your life. It's only when you are being authentic when you are satisfied and happy. And a lot of what society programs you with reasons  and incentives to be inauthentic, all during school, when yo uare dating people and when yo uare at work ... you were thought to be inauthentic as a survival strategy. So you don't even know what it means and feels to be authentic, how you should hold your body, speak, smile... all of this stuff is so fake for most people. So you need to get in touch with your authenticity, strip away all the layers of social conditioning that is preventing you from being authentic and all the fears, worries.. such that you are able to express your deepest being, values... you need to be able to express that effortlessly. You career needs to be authentic, your speech has to be authentic, your eye contact , your relationships. But to do that you first need to discover who you are and what you truly want very clearly and also you have to discover the fears and incentives that  keep you inauthentic. 

 41. You need to develop a life purpose. A sense of what your doing in life

 42. Take 100% responsibility for your life and don't blame anyone-. Observe yourself blaming people and stop doing it. By assuming responsibility yo uassume the burden of solving every problem that comes your way and that makes you very resourceful and creative. Most people come up with excuses and blame others.

 43. Be a leader. Lead yourself, lead others around you. Don't wait other people to inspire you, to motivate you, to tell you what to do. Be proactiv,e be decisive. Take risks it also connect to the principle of living a life and feeling alive. This is how you feel alive. By being a leader, proactive and decisive. 

 44. Be a creator. Tap into the joy of creativity. Provide massive value to mankind as a creator. How do I contribute to society and improve the world? People who don't have a a life purpose will pick a life purpose unconsciously and then become nazis that fill that need with demonizing others instead of spending it on the real deal.

 45. Reason and rationality cannot be trusted all the highest insights and truths and trans-rational, not irrational, not less than rational but beyond rational.

 46. Embrace paradox confusion and not knowing. Reason feel reasonable to the one who is reasoning, this is self-deception and bias. Reason in not a vehicle toward truth. Reason in used to justify your egoic agenda.

 46. Embrace paradox, confusion and not knowing.  - video how to deal with uncertainity

 47. Emotional mastery. To develop emotional mastery you have to feel deeper into your emotions, to become mroe conscious of what those are. An angry person does not feel their emotions, they  just act them out robotically. It's the emotions that are ruling your thinking process and behavior. Reasons and backwards rationalizations come after the fact , Your left brain confubulates these reasons later to justify whatever you are doing emotionally, driving you emotionally.

 48. Integrate the masculine and the feminine

 49. Non-manipulation

 50. Everything is realtive (except the Absulute,(T)ruth.). That means it's only known in relation to something else. 

 51. Context over facts. - video understanding reContextualization. 

 52. Pull from hundreds of diverse sources (so you don't get stuck in any one perspective or paradigm

 53. Satisfy your base needs so that you stopped craving - video how to self-actualized using the maslows hiearchy of needs

 54. Master your basic survival and livelihood. Learn how to to business before thinking about enlightenment. How to pay you rent, buy your own food..learn how to survive on your own  so you can be self-sufficient. This is ideally what you should be doing in your teens and 20s, and you should have this solved by 30 if not sonner. 

 55. Mastery. You need one thing that you will commit to become a master in. - video Mastery

 56. Beware of distractions - video

 57. Systems thinking. Learn to think in terms of systems, learn to see systems at work everywhere and develop awareness for the ecological interconnectedness of things. - video Intro to systems thinking. 

 58. Be a good citizen  and be conscious of your ecological footprint. You are the part of the whole and your connected to the whole. Are you contributing to the lowering of consciousness or highering? Are you contributing to problems or are you helping to solve the problems?

 59. Be strategic - how to be a strategic motherfucker 1:56:00 - most people don't know what they want in 10 years and don't know what will move them towards that. They don't connect small goals with big goals

 60. Happiness is only possible with enlightenment

 61. No material possession will ever make you happy

 62. Be happy all by yourself

 63. Keep your life simple and spartan - not just objects but also social obligations, family, obligations - video minimalizm

 64. Without practice, exercises and techniques there will be no results. Theory in and of itself will not produce much results. 

 65. Do not turn actualized.org into an ideology

 

Edited November 10, 2018 by AleksM

[AleksM]

35+ Subfields Of Self-Help

1. Success/Productivity/Goal Setting (stage orange, most appealing to most people, most people discover it through that)
2. Law of attraction (visualization, affirmations techniques, confidence you need to achieve your own goals)
3. Time Management
4. Career and Life Purpose
5. Creativity
6. Business and Entrepreneurship (generic advice or specialized advised) - a lot of people enter here
7. Marketing and Sales
8. Leadership and Management
9. Money Management
10. Dating and Attraction - how to meet people and connect with new people , a lot of people enter here
11. Relationship - how to develop long-term relationships - different from the previous one
12. Love - how to be a more loving human being - distinct from relationships, dating and sexuality. You can use love in all areas. 
13. Family and Marriage
14. Sexuality, Masculinity and Femininity  - how to please your partner, what it means to be a man/women, how they think, how to own our masculinity, understanding the other sex thinks and feels
15. Health/Fitness/Nutrition/Alternative Medicine - becomes more important as we age, can save your entire life, orange people take this for granted
16. Body-Awareness and disciplines like Bio Energetics - becoming more conscious and aware of your body and the mind-body connection, how to leverage the mind-body connection to heal yourself
17. Self-esteem and confidence - really important for most people, most people have terrible self-esteem, they have self-image issues, they lack confidence, they are shy, meek ( quiet, gentle, and easily imposed on; submissive."she brought her meek little husband along"), they don't know how to set boundaries, they turn into dormats, they get abused by others in relationships, they don't know how to assert themselves, they don't know how to be decisive, they don't like their physical appearance, they have some sort of trauma from the past because they were ridiculed or bullied in school
18. Emotions - emotional mastery - all about the quality of your life, we are not though how to recognize our own emotions, how to deal with our emotions, we don't even know how to be aware of our own emotions and label our emotions properly - most people don't even know how to label fear,anger, jealousy,  depression and anxiety. If some emotions are holding you back you have to study this sub-field. Developing your emotional intelligence will be life-transforming. 
19. Shadow work - closely related to the previous one. working with repressed aspects of your psyche and of your ego. 
20. Addiction and Recovery
21. Trauma recovery - people who have been abused/molested. who have various kind of trauma, some sort of disease...chances are that you repressed and it's making you depressed, ruining your emotions, it might even wreck your ability to keep a career or be in a relationship. You need someone to help you with this. 
22. Mental disorders - bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, depression, ADHD - requires specialized knowledge. Be willing to do the research to find experts who have knowledge that you need. 
23. Personality Types - MBTI, Enneagram. Even after you get enlightened you will still have a personality and you want to understand it. 
24. NLP and Hypnosis. - ways to program your own mind. 
25. Religion
26. Spirituality - meditation and mindfullness, nonDuality, yoga, 
27. Psychadelics
28. New Age/Paranormal/Psychic abilities (astral projection, chakras, OBEs, clairvoyance, near death experiences, auras, healing, channeling,  (stage orange people stay far away from new age and spirituality because they view it just as some sort of delusion or some new form of religion, the materialist culture denies all this stuff, which is why it will require extra work from you to research into these sub-fields)
29. Shamanism and Occult - make sure you get in order first the basics - emotions, career...before you jump into this stuff
30. Healing - psychical, emotional, spiritual...
31. Psychology
32. Trans-personal Psychology (stage torquise) - incorporating spirituality into psychology
33. Lifestyle design
34. technical how to books

 

Fields that I hesitate to call self-help but are still important.

• Politics and government
• Phylosophy, methaphysics, epistemology
• Social Psychology , cognitive psychology, antropology
• History and Science
• Biographies

 

 

There is a lot of stuff, don't go around just reading about this, you want to be strategic about what you're reading. keep it to things that you can you can take action on, stuff that engages you

 

Fields for newbies:

1. Success/Productivity/Goal Setting
2. Self-esteem and confidence (if you have a problem here ,it will carry into your career, relationships, into your feeling about yourself...)
3. Emotional Mastery (because emotions run your entire life)
4. Relationships
5. Spirituality (possibility of completely changing your life and where you find your deepest growth), payoff is huge but the downfall is that it takes time

 

homework: pick 3 sub-fields that you don't have a lot of experience in, and commit to purchasing 3 books for each of the sub-fields.

 

 

Most people live their lives for 30 years with the same problem without realizing the answer is sitting there in a book

 

that's how learning is, it's not obvious until it becomes obvious, it's always obvious after the fact. In the book there are more details to understand a topic in depth. 

 

[AleksM]

 

Mankind Is The Bullshitting Animal

Homework:

How am I full of shit? (different categories from your life)

How am I a hypocrite?

How do I make excuses for my bullshit?

Whose bullshit do I complain about to distract from looking at my own? (this is why people fundamentally bitch, complain, moan, judge, criticize and demonize others so they don't have to look at their own bullshit which is difficult and unpleasant... and that takes all their time so they don't have to self-reflect. 

 

How am I in denial about my own bullshit?

you need to self-reflect to get rid of your shit

there cannot be health, happiness, decency or  effective governance without truthfulness, honesty and authenticity. 

when you think you are convincing other people of your positions what  you are really doing is just convincing yourself, the reason you want to convince others of your position, ideology, religion...is that the more people agree with you , the more peole you persuade to agree with your bullshit, the less you will feel like your bullshit is bullshit and the more you will feel like it's reality.... that is why a lot of religious people spend a lot of time preaching their religion, converting others

when you have solid truth you have no need to preach it to anyone, truth is solid it makes you detached and dispassionate in a good way

 

the only solution to this bullshit problem is:

1. personal direct experience
2. independent contemplation
3. lots of diverse research, looking at and  exploring many diverse perspectives
4. personal investigation into all of the most important aspect of life and reality

 

when something is truly important to you then you owe to yourself to do a deep personal investigation, to contemplate about this subject as independently as possible, free from the influences of other people and various kinds of group think  and social dynamics

independent questioning

 

[AleksM]

How To Shop For Healthy Food

Avoid:

• wheat
• diary
• corn
• sugar
• soy
• artificial chemicals

Ignore the calorie and fat label on the box, calorie counting is completely useless and unnecessary, looking at the calories of a food is irrelevant, looking at the fat content is irrelevant.

Only look at the list of ingredients on the back of the box. they are listed from the most present to least.

What you will be asking yourself at the grocery store is : which ingredients are here and are these natural and whole ingredients or are these artificial chemical type of ingredients? what you are looking for is foods with 5 ingredients or less per box. ideally your food isn't even in a box or can.. all of the 5 ingredients need to make sense to you

Never assume an item is healthy by just looking at the front of the box, you always have to look at the ingredient list. 

Cans have long shelf life because they have packed them with full of chemicals

You want food that deteriorates very quickly. food that lasts less than a week, that is raw, fresh, alive. 

• Avoid all hydrogenated fats and oils, if it's a complicated oil, not a natural sounding oil like olive oil or coconut oil, then it's probably some of these chemical created oils, these oils are very unhealthy
• avoid sugar and corn syrup 
• avoid all boxed and processed foods (can are okay but still not the best), what you are looking for is fresh
• avoid complex preservatives and coloring agents, your food should not have any coloring agents in them
• avoid cheap meat and eggs 

What you are shooting for is as fresh and alive as possible, plant based as much as possible, plants containing different pigments and colors

Look for organic as much as possible, go for least cooked as much as possible and single ingredients as much as possible. 

 

Good labels:

• organic
• grass feed and pasture raised (eggs and meat)
• vegan
• dairy free
• gluten free, 
• soy free
• non-GMO

Stuff you should never buy again in the grocery store:

• soda
• vitamin water
• pasterized (cooked at high heat) fruit juice k so v steklenicah, škatlah... raw cold juice is good very short shelf life, it only lasts for a few day, a week max)
• no bread of any kind and wheat containing products... wheat is the number 1 cause of all autoimmune diseases and chronic fatigue... which also means you have to avoid everything in the bakery, also includes pasta and cereal
• dairy... milk, cheese, ice cream, yogurt, butter... and all of the products that use that such as pizza
• all corn products
• soy products (also soy sauce)
• pre-made meals, all frozen meals
• chips
• meat (salama, ham, bacon, sausage and all processed meats)
• frozen deserts
• sendwiches and pasta salad
• avoid all pre-made salad dressings (make your own)
• dried soups and noodles (ramen noodles are terrible for you)
• ketchap  & BBQ sauces (contains a lot of sugar)
• wey protein (the body can't process it)
• protein bars and protein shakes 
• atlantic salmon, tuna 35min (big fish are often contaminated with heavy metals), canned tuna
• farmed fish (most are feed corn) - it's okay, it's not the end of the world but try to go for wild fish
• coffe, alcohol, 
• candy or milk chocolate
• sunflower oil, canola oil or spray oils
• butter substitutes (margarine...), just use olive oil or some other oil for that
• artificial sugars and artificial sweeteners (splenda, aspartam...)
• corn feed meat or vegetarian feed eggs

List of all of the ails on the grocery store that you should never visit again in your entire life:

• the candy ail
• daily meat ail
• cheese
• soda and juice
• bread and bakery
• cereal
• chips
• alcohol
• protein bar

What you can actually buy:

• fresh fruits and veggies
• frozen fruits and veggies (organic as much as possible,)
• pre-washed salad mix
• 100% pure canned fruits and vegetables (not ideal but okay) - just make sure they don't have too many artificial preservatives there
• fresh cold juices
• fresh or frozen meat (organic and grass feed)
• pure nuts (don't buy nuts in nut mixes), raw or roasted with as little salt as possible
• nut butters (almond, hazelnut, peanut butter
• organic pasterized eggs
• organic spices. vinegar, hot sauce, mustard, real ketchup (low sugar quantity, low sugar)
• olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, flax oil and  sesame oil
• almond milk, coconut milk
• seaweed, olives, pickles, capers, papers, hummus
• grains: gluten free oatmeal, kinwa, rice, beans
• meat and vegetable stocks in cans or in box cartons (good but not ideal)
• wild seafood
• sardines
• coconut yogurt
• dark chocolate 80%+
• raw honey
• unsweatened tea, green tea
• pre-made meals: sushi

Wheat and dairy - the worst by far

[AleksM]

Enlightenment Experience Explanation & Key Lessons

Projecting ideas onto teachers. ... careful projections and expectations..(my reputation is on the line...) 6 -11min

Everything is in the present moment, everything I need , every lesson i need is right here in the present moment, I don't need a trip to go somewhere, I am inside the absolute (consciousness) I) just need to slow my mind down to connect with it 

Of course my psyche and neurons,all habits and emotional reactions didn't get completely rewired in one day after some of these peaks your mind comes back and kicks in

Whatever experiences you have it will require a lot of integration work and a lot of follow up work for the full embodyment because the absolute is independent of your mind but your mind still has a lot of momentum behind it it has an entire lifetime of the stuff that you do

There are different methods to trigger enlightenment and different methods work for different people and every method has its pros and cons

I am blown away by some of the substances in my own life not just for having peak experiences but for really transforming how I behave on a daily basis

Potential of substances (most people don't speak from experience, all they have is dogma)

The broader your research goes, the more you will see how tricky this subject is and just how non-trivial it is to determine which teacher or teaching is deluded or not deluded or which one is deeper than another one

Don't think you got to the end of the rainbow if you have some deep experience on psychedelics or not, great but don't think you are done, whatever experiences you have be open that it could be more 

I don't claim to be fully enlightened or partially enlightened, I don't  wanna  play that game it doesn't really interest me what interests me the profound experiences that  I am able to have, how consistently I am able to have them how much are  they able to transform my life 

50min

Key Lessons:

• one thing that is lacking in peoples lives is authenticity, what you want in your life is 100% authenticity, because it feels good... what is the point of life? to feel good.
• significance of fear as a pillar of all personal development, overcoming your fear, facing your fears head on and using your heart, the power of love to break trough all of your fears.
• power of radical honesty - we are very rarely honest with other people and with our selves, its hard for you to look at the truth because the truth disturbs you so much, it irritates  you emotionally it makes you uncomfortable, that's because that's something that needs to be cultivated. Self-honesty needs to be cultivated in a radical way where every single day you open yourself up a little bit more to the stinging truths (they sting your ego - that which is inauthentic within you-so let it sting you and let that kill your ego every single day). Every single day, hour you are presented with little opportunities to either kill off your ego and suffocating it or  expanding it, and this is where this principle comes to mind - authentic suffering. There is 2 types of suffering authentic suffering and inauthentic suffering. 57min
• you can face truth a little bit every day...  face the truth with your relationship, your own physical body -how you feel about it, face the truth about your financial situation, face the truth you have been procrastinating on... procrastination is not willing to face some legitimate suffering and so we invent distractions and this is where addictions come from... this is huge
• the importance of no-mind - working towards a state of no-mind - shutting down all of your thoughts... (that's why buddhist stress the importance of mindfulness on a minute to minute basis - because the absolute is right here...)
• selfless living...if your passion is grounded in your heart, that passions will not get extinguished by these awakenings it will actually get strengthened but if your passion is grounded in ego than those will certainly get extinguished but that is actually what you want, that is what you call spiritual purification, this is where you deepest growth comes from...your passions need to transition from being shallow egoic passions to being deep, Devine passions, passions that are much larger than yourself, that involve the entire universe not just your little self, your little family, your little group of friends, your little company or something like that. 
• -non-doership - What you need to become conscious of is that you are not in control of anything in this life. every single word coming out of your mind, every single though you are having is completely inevitable and couldn't be otherwise. I am not in control of what I am saying here to you, this is being fueled by a higher source  and what I need to do is just purify myself of my own personal bullshit, my personal lies and deceptions so that I can be a better vehicle for this devine force working trough me. I am conscious right now that God is looking trough my eyes. Your entire visual field is God looking trough your eyes. Every little scratch you make  is God working trough you. It's just a question if you are conscious of it and if you are surrendering yourself to non-doership or are you struggling and fighting. What you really want is your life to be effortless. How do you do that? Start practicing it. The way you get effortlessness is by relinquishing doership, this illusion of that you are really have a choice  about things, you don't.  There is no self to be doing any doership. The universe is acting of its own accord trough itself without anybody in control, the more you notice that, that is the place you wanna be living from.  Life is so much easier. When all of the pressure is on you to be in control of everything, the fact is, you don't have control but you are afraid to give up control, that's egos whole agenda to maintain this grip and control over your life because it tells itself "hey, if we don't keep this control then everything is gonna fly apart, that is not true but is a really powerful fear . 
• the importance of slowing down my life - self feeding feedback loop - you live a fast paced life because you are unconscious to begin with, but then the fast pace at which you live your life makes you even more unconscious, it deepens your unconsciousness, which makes you think "ohhh the problem with my life is that I am not accomplishing enough, I am not doing enough, fast enough, so you live an even faster paced life" and then it becomes a vicious circle. The counter intuitive move is to simplify your life and to really slow down- doing less work. You need to appreciate what you are doing and not just look for the next thing to do. 
• why people fail with enlightenment, what their obstacles are - you actually think there is such a thing as a physical world,universe and you think that enlightenment is something other than physical death (ego death = physical death)
• the feminine version of this path will be different from the masculine version of this path, the introverted version will be different from the extroverted version of this path, people who are into love and emotions, very emotional intuitive people your path will be very different from cold heart, rational people.... and I am excited about exploring the whole field so no matter who comes to me I can say... oh you are this type of person and you have this type of problem, oh okay then this technique will be best for you.

 

 

[Leo Gura]

Adding a "feature" tag to this thread because it has some really solid summaries.

Great work!

[herghly]

Thank you! This is pure gold

[AleksM]

The Deep Problem Of Marketing

Society and culture is very resistant to new ideas

Modern society is very materialistic

It's not just about providing evidence

Marketing is no just about sales, marketing is about influence and eye balls, it's exposing millions of people with certain paradigms, assumptions and ideas

and then those ideas become reality, they define what reality is, reality is not just something you find out there, it's something you construct - marketing, society , culture, business are constructing it

So the question is what type of ideas are most people exposed to.

Status quo is always interested in maintaining it's power and will fight for it

It's a construction of beliefs, concepts... and most people will not think of it like it's just a story, they will think it's reality

This current reality is mostly constructed by science, academia and business

Business is only concerned about maximizing profits, it doesn't care about truth and consciousness

Marketing is important anywhere where your trying to get a consensus, for people to agree on anything

Those who have control and power, they control access to eyeballs

Education is a big propaganda, and after you go trough it, you are indocrinated in a certain box, paradigm and anything that then goes against it you will think of it as insane, non-mainstream stuff

People in power want their ideology being spread trough education

"I will exert my power to push my self-agenda trough" - this is what ego all about, ego is power hungry.. why? ... because it is no conscious, if it were conscious it would surrender all desire for power, but it doesn't know any better, so it's life is all about acquiring more and more power and than using that power to satisfy and fulfill shallow ego gratifications like buying stuff, taking vacations

Notice that nothing high consciousness is ever advertised on TV, or taught in schools

Modern marketing is selfish, it's all about maximizing sales (every little word is tweaked to push all your emotional buttons)

Marketing  is any way to influence any body and getting eye balls and then you can use those eye balls to earn money, to pitch a religion or you can use it to enlighten people.. you can use it for good or evil

Word of mouth is another way of marketing

Notice that nobody is talking about real solutions to mankind problems

What modern marketing is pitching you is fake solutions to very real problems  and those solutions are designed not to work so that you can come back and get more (example:  pharma that sells you "medicines"  that dont' cure anything, jsut so that they can sell you more medicines)

44 min - marketing is directly responsible for causing 

•  obesity,
• disease,
• mindless consumerism,
• mind numbing entertainment,
• dogma,
• tribalism,
• misinformation,
• war,
• laziness,
• anti-mastery mindset,
• suicide,
• anger,
• depression,
• ignorance
• cancer,
• every form of addiction known to mankind,
• materialist paradigm,the growing gap between the higher and lower class, pollution and poison

Materialist paradigm is gross by it's very nature, it doesn't recognize anything subtle (creativity, consciousness, beauty, truth, love)... it recognize only the most base forms of human desire (need for sex, need of greasy food, easy stimulation, shortcuts and quick solutions and get rich quick schemes).

Modern marketing sets the bar so low that when you hear the truth, the truth sounds like insanity... because you are always judging anything you are hearing by what you heard before, and what you have heard before is what you have heard from every single marketing channel that is popular ... so you are always judging truth against untruth and there is always a giant mountain of untruth with a little tiny grand of truth, so that giant mountain easily outweighs the little tiny grand of truth if you are not vigilant about it (and in a sense this is how it should be because society must evolve trough the spiral dynamics stages.

What can be marketed is very much limited by the audiences paradigm, it's very much limited by the limits of human language and by what can be communicated, if a thing cannot be communicated, it's hard to market it. It's also limited by the predominant needs and desires of the population, so it creates this kind of vicious circle where unconscious people will only buy things that are unconsciously marketed to them but then because companies have to carter to that and market unconscious things that makes the people even more unconscious and then those unconscious people are themselves the ones who are running the marketing companies .

Even if you think you are not doing marketing, you are doing it by working for a company , so you need to look at what marketing is your business doing. If you are working for Mcdonalds look at what kind of marketing it is doing. Most people are like zombies, cogs in the machine who are contributing to the marketing of Mcdonalds and then what that is ultimately doing is poisoning human beings

It's not easy to find conscious work, most work is unconscious. To break out of that unconscious cycle it take vision, ambition, higher consciousness values, takes a lot of work to work towards those , takes work to move trough the spiral dynamics stages

Here's what we can do: you can take control of your own life, you can stop using society as the gold standard against which you judge other paradigms and other ideas , you can stop assuming that society will deliver truth and health to you, you can stop sucking on societies tits and take ownership over the kind of media that you consume, over the kind of businesses that you shop with  and the kind of companies that you are willing to work for and kind of marketing that you are willing to do and willing to support, that's within your power and that's exactly what a conscious person will need to do.  Most people don't exercise this power because, they haven't really thought about it, they are just ignorant about it. They are unconscious.

High consciousness stuff is hard to market. It's much easier to create a business which sells poison than it is to create a business  which actually elevates people. It's hard to convince people to buy good stuff. 

Are you gonna appeal to people most base and unhealthy needs and desires or are you gonna have a larger vision for the world?  

A lot of spiritual masters will never be famous because they don't write books and don't know how to market to the masses.

You tend to take marketing that you are exposed to as the entire possibility space of what's out there, of what's possible and that is an enormous distortion of the truth. There is a whole world out there beyond mainstream marketing that most people have no clue about. 

1h - Leo wants, that you on some point outgrow actualized.org. So, that you don't need that material for personal development and that you can get all the answers from within

 

What would responsible marketing look like?

1. marketing what elevates the user, taking the users agenda as your number 1 priority rather than money. Is the thing you are selling going to truly, honestly elevate the user? Is your product elevating the user? How can you improve your product so that you would be really proud of the fact that you are elevating your users consciousness? 
2. responsible marketing cares about improving peoples lives
3. cares about marketing health and not disfunction. It doesn't want to addict people. It wants to offer permanent solutions to their problems. 

 

Key takeaways from this episode:

1. Start to notice how marketing is unhealthy, just how much of it  around you there is and start to notice that marketing doesn't just pertain to TV adds but to a lot of other stuff that you normally don't consider as marketing
2. Start to notice a few of healthy marketing out there that exist and try to see what is the ratio of healthy to unhealthy. Ask yourself is that elevating me or is this dragging the humanity down?
3. Stop expecting that truth will trickle down to your from up above. That society will speed feed you with truth - it wont. 
4. Go out of your way to  find the unmarketed gems (the books, the seminars, the teachers) . This is really how you advance yourself in life. You don't sit back and wait for gems to come to you, you don't wait me for tell them to you

 

[Nahm]

@AleksM Excellent man! ❤️. 

[SoothedByRain]

A gift for those of you who are sharing with everyone
 

 

[Dan Arnautu]

How to Stop Being a Victim - Part one

What is a victim?

A person who gives away control.

 

Ask yourself this:  "Who is ultimately responsible for the quality of your life?"

Is it your

• Parents?
• Family?
• Environment?
• The country you grew up in?
• Friends?
• Coworkers?
• Boss?
• Husband/Wife/Kids?
• Girlfriend/Boyfriend?
• Genetics?
• Economy?
• Political climate?
• Media?
• Society?
• Entertainment?
• Hollywood?
• The news?
• History/how you were raised?

 

If you answered anything but "me", you are thinking like a victim.

 

You need to take responsibility of your own:

• Success
• Relationships
• Most people will take responsibility of these two
• Failures
• Ex. A diet or a relationship that did not work
• Emotions
• They are not caused by external environments
• Accidents
• Circumstances
• People love to use circumstances as excuses

 

Stages of consciousness

• The Victim
• The Fighter
• All about conflict
• Thinks it's a dog eat dog world
• That there always think life is a zero sum game
• Always fighting stuff
• The Creator
• Someone who realizes that life is what you make of it
• Focused on making stuff
• Being at Peace
• You don't have any control at all
• Life force flowing through it
• Everything goes smoothly, without resistances

 

Responsibility vs Blaming

• You don't need to BLAME yourself. You are not TO BLAME for your genetics, family, etc.
• You just need to take responsibility
• You need to choose how you react
• If you were born in a not so developed country, you have the capability in the present moment to change your own situation and attitude towards that circumstance
• Your brain is really good at creating excuses that will prevent you from going out of your comfort zone
• It's almost like you can not trust yourself
• If you are a victim right now, you need to be cautious of believing what you think and your excuses

 

Why do people become victims?

• Because it's scary to admit to yourself that you are responsible for everythingAnd that means that you suddenly have a lot of work to do
• A lot of personal development has to happen

 

The problem is that you are not taking enough action

MASSIVE ACTION

Without action, you won't overcome any obstacles

Don't trust your brain to tell how much action you need to take

It will always be too little

 

A list of common phrases victims say to themselves and other people:

• I can't
• This is maybe the worst one
• It's impossible
• It's too hard
• Life is unfair
• I must/I need to/I have to
• I've never done that
• What if I fail?
• It's his/her/it's fault
• I already tried that
• Most people haven't really tried that much
• This will never happen
• But this always happens
• I'll give it a shot
• Maybe/I think
• I'm not good enough (at x,y,z)
• But what's the point? There's no point
• It's too much effort
• Great for young people, but it's too late for me
• Sure, it's easy for you. You had this and had that. I have this and that handicap
• But how?

 

How to Stop Being a Victim - Part Two

 

What makes a victim a victim?

• A victim thinks that  the external world is a much bigger obstacle than he is to himself
• YOU, ARE, THE ONLY, OBSTACLE
• It's your mind that's the problem
• The problem is, if you are a victim, you won't believe this
• Victims don't realize that the mind is the only obstacleVictims don't appreciate the possibility of self-deception
• They don't take this very seriously

 

What you should really worry about:

• The internal world. Your
• Mental filters
• Attitude
• Limiting beliefs
• Judgements
• Unquestioned assumptions about reality
• Lack of introspection
• Visualizations
• Monkey mind
• Model of reality
• Emotional reactions
• What you view as right and wrong and good and evil
• The habits that you cultivate
• Your self talk
• The words you use, the tonality etc.
• Awareness/Consciousness
• Ego and it's relationships to other people

 

Instead of this, you worry about the external world.

Truth is, your internal world shapes your external world.

Problems are not things that exist in the external world.

They are projections of your mind.

Until you become aware enough of this fact for yourself, you won't be able to let the problems go.

Until then, the world will appear hostile, unfair and cruel.

[Dan Arnautu]

How to Deal With Depression - The Key to Breaking Out of Depression

[Dan Arnautu]

Is there any way to copy the notes from OneNote with all the formatting intact?

When I copy-paste it screws up all the formatting (bulleted lists, bold text etc.)