Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

This lady's analysis is a prime example of rationalism. Her whole shtick is using rationalism to demystify spirituality, to rid spirituality of nonsense, which is, of course, itself nonsense. You can't use science to frame spirituality because spirituality is prior to science.

(Start at timestamp 24:55)

My commentary:

• Doing a scientific study on experiences of God by using Evangelical Christians is already stupid and wrong. Evangelical Christians are deluded dogmatic bigots. Of course they don't understand God. Why would you assume otherwise? That nullifies the entire study. That is like trying to understand Goodness by interviewing psychopaths.
• She fundamentally misunderstands what experience of God is. Experience of God is not a subjective experience. It is absolute.
• "I 100% believe that when you are talking to that God, that experience is real, but it still doesn't mean, when it comes to metaphysical truth claims, that you are talking to true gods and aliens." That is wrong. That's exactly what it means. The sickness here is that she's speaking about truth and metaphysics, but she's not doing any metaphysics, she's just parroting science. The point is not that you merely experience "god", the point is that you actually do metaphysics and you have truthful insight into what the correct metaphysics is. Realizing God IS the solution of metaphysics. It means you've solved metaphysics.
• "Not all people who talk to God can be right." Of course. This is a bad point because not all scientists can be right either. When it comes to understanding God, 99% will be wrong. Just as 99% of children doing quantum mechanics will be wrong. So what? You have to stop talking to fools and only talk to the people who actually understand God. Imagine if I tried to debunk science by only talking to kids in a 1st grade science classroom, I ask them some questions, they give me some stupid answers, so I conclude that science is false. That is what scientists do with mysticism, and they dare to call this scientific method.
• "People who had unusual or strange experiences, but retained that uncertainty about their interpretation, were doing better mentally." This is a mistake. Who cares what average people are doing or how they are feeling? A genuine experience of God is not an interpretation, but science is interpretation. As long as you "retain uncertainty" then you cannot know what God is. This is a classic mistake that scientists make, they think about truth in probabilities, but Truth is not probabilistic. So, ironically, scientific thinking is being used to delude oneself about God. If Christians can have wrong interpretations, then so can scientists, but this is lost on scientists. Key insight: Scientific interpretations of mystical experience are wrong and delusional. Science does not even understand what a mystical experience is. But science is certain that it's interpretation of mysticism is true, which it isn't, so they commit the very error they are criticizing.
• "Your brain created a God". No. God is hallucinating your brain. "The danger is your brain created the god and you forget that your brain created the god." No. God created your brain and you forget that you are God creating imagining your brain.
• She has mistaken spirituality for cool tricks the brain does to help her survive, rather than as Truth and an actual solution to metaphysics.
• She is misusing the notion of "epistemic humility". She is trying to be so humble that she's unwittingly using humility to deny Truth. Truth cannot exist for you if you have programmed yourself to believe that "I must always be humble". You should be humble until you actually become conscious of Truth, and then you must accept that Truth as absolute. And if you can't do that, you've used science to delude yourself. Notice that in science you do not say, "Well, I see the Earth is round, but I must be humble and not convince myself the Earth is round." No. The Earth is round, period. If you act too humble to say the Earth is round, you've deluded yourself.
• "Once I make that distinction that we can value the experience without getting stuck in the trap of: therefore I know my experience is capital-R Real, then we can steal the technology." This is a total corruption and perversion of spirituality. Spirituality is not a technology to help you survive, spirituality is about getting to the absolute bottom of what is capital-R Real. Real spirituality is when you know for sure what is Real and what is not, not because you believe in something, but because you believe in nothing and you are conscious of Truth itself.
• It is so ironic that she is trying to rid spirituality of bullshit, but she turned spirituality into bullshit by "having fun" and using this "technology" to feel good. Spirituality is NOT a set of tricks to make yourself feel good! That's a corruption of spirituality. She is trivializing truth-seeking. Spirituality is about real truth-seeking, which ends in you finding the fucking TRUTH.
• "I don't believe I'm talking to anything supernatural". That's the problem. Her rationalist mind is bigoted against the possibility of a real supernatural. That is unscientific. If she was truly scientific and rational she would be open the supernatural without always needs to rationalize it away as human delusion.
• "God is just your own brain". No. That's not what God is at all.
• What I am against is the trivialization of spirituality by making it into "cool experiences" which say something about Reality itself. If your spirituality does not give you genuine insight into metaphysics, it's fake. Why? Because "cool experiences" cannot truly solve anything or save you. The only thing that is worth anything, the only thing that save you, the only thing that has the power to liberate and transform you, is TRUTH. Not experiences, not cool ideas, not theories, not science, not rationality, but TRUTH. All of the power of spirituality lies in the fact that you've hit the actual TRUTH. And if you're uncertain about that, then you haven't hit actual TRUTH and so you nothing has really changed for you. You will die like a dog, just like everyone else. But TRUTH makes you Immortal! The entire point of spirituality is actually fucking realize that you are Immortal. If you are uncertain about it, then you ain't Immortal, are you? This is the difference between real spirituality and self-help. This lady as turned spirituality from Immortality to self-help.
• She calls it "truth claims nonsense", but her non-truth claims are the nonsense.
• "It's not magic". Yes it is, but since she's not Awake, she doesn't see the magic of Being.
• If you reduce all mystical and spiritual experience to mere brain states, out of bigotry, you've completely misunderstood spirituality.
• God is not a Lord of the Rings character.
• She is trying to turn spirituality into mere psychology. To her, spirituality is just a bunch of interesting psychological tricks, it is not existential. This is a deep mistake. Immortality is not a psychological trick. The psychological trick is convincing yourself that Immortality is nothing more than a psychological trick.
• "Death is sitting across from you". The point of spirituality is to realize that there is no such thing as death. Death is the self-deception spirituality is meant to cure you of.
• Important point: despite everything I said, I am not claiming Bashar the alien is real. She may be right that Bashar is fake. But Bashar's status is a distraction from realizing you are God.
• God IS Imagination. That's what she's not seeing.
• "I'm entirely science-driven with all of this". That's the problem she isn't seeing. She thinks that's a virtue. Why does she think that? Group-think.
• She is trying to use science to fame spirituality, but that's an epistemic error because spirituality is the realization that Reality has no frame.
• Now perhaps you can appreciate why I went to such lengths in Deconstructing Rationality. So that you don't get bamboozled by these slippery but self-deceived rationalists.

This whole video is a great example. I love it because it demonstrates deep self-deception goes. Notice that she plays the role of someone who is supposed to be the cure to spiritual self-deception, but everyone who takes her explanations seriously will end up as self-deceived as her. As I've said elsewhere, the cure is the disease.

The bottom line is: do not allow scientific bigots to gaslight you into trivializing spirituality. Real spirituality is more true than science.

Thanks to forum member Natasha Tori Maru for sharing this video.

This is what self-inquiry feels like. At the center of your head, is an infinite void. That's Infinity/God. Behind your human costume is an Infinite I, the I of God.

This is a chunk from the book I am writing:

All human intuition is trained on, and for, dealing with finite objects. But Reality as a whole is not a finite object. So human intuition fails when reasoning about Reality as a whole. Perhaps the biggest mistake of science is assuming that finite rationalistic intuitions apply to Reality as a whole. All scientific intuition is finite. Reality is Infinite. That’s why science is stuck. Scientists have no problem accepting that human intuition does not apply at the quantum scale. To a simple-minded person, quantum mechanics is irrational nonsense because he is judging it using intuitions built on experience of classical mechanics. But scientists have a huge problem accepting that human intuition does not apply at the Infinite scale. The logic of Infinity is weirder than quantum mechanics. But scientists mistake that as evidence of its irrationality and therefore unreality. No. No. No. Just because it violates your finite intuitions does not mean it’s unreal. Scientific intuition tells you that Reality can’t be mystical or magical, but that’s wrong because that intuition was built from dealing exclusively with finite objects. Finite objects don’t have magical qualities, but Infinity must be magical. That’s not irrational and that’s not unscientific. The scientific mind cannot wrap itself around Infinity like it can with everything else. But scientists have been wrapping themselves around finite objects for so long, with such success, that they have become arrogant and taken for granted that nothing else exists. But something else does exist. Reality as a whole is of such a radically different nature than what scientists are used to dealing with that science cannot wrap itself around it. Science can wrap itself around parts of Reality, but not the whole of Reality, because — obviously — Reality precedes science.

This is good philosophy. Some good insights here.

This is a lecture series on Marxism, the professor is a Marxist, but I'm not sharing it with you to make you a Marxist. Even if you will never be a Marxist, it's important that you study and understand the Marxist position without strawmanning it. There are many important ideas in Marxism, even if it's totally impractical. You don't need to be a socialist to benefit from hearing these ideas. Capitalists need to understand this stuff.

This professor is really good. I recommend watching most of this 29-part series. There's a lot of great insight there about Marxism, human development. economics, history, and more. The series starts slow. The heavy Marxist stuff comes in the second half of the series. It starts with general philosophy and history. This is like a full college course on Marxist theory. Good stuff!

Marxism Lecture Series Playlist - 29 episodes

In particular, Lecture 14 & Lecture 15 are outstanding. You can start there if you want to jump into the deep Marxism. Don't be afraid to watch stuff like this out of order. You can always go backwards. In fact, watching stuff like this out of order is better than watching it in order. Skip right to the stuff that's valuable. Don't waste your time going through formalities.

All explanation is circular. It’s just a question of, How long is the circle? Why? Because Reality is a Unity, so you can never appeal to anything outside of it to explain it. All explanation is ultimately solipsistic because Mind is solipsistic, and Reality is Mind. You can't reach outside of Reality to explain Reality. You are always explaining Reality in terms of Reality. Reality is like one continuous sheet of fabric and every explanation is the fabric folding in on itself. But the fabric can never penetrate itself.

However, there’s an interesting psychological trick being played. If you make the explanation long enough and complex enough, the finite mind will become so overwhelmed and exhausted that it will stop asking questions and never recognize the circularity. All of science is just one endlessly long circularity which ultimately explains nothing, but since the circle is so long, no scientist sees it. Science is a dog chasing its own tail, never to catch it. God is when the dog catches its tail. Science is a mind-game that scientists don’t even know they are playing. The game of science is to keep elongating the circle, but this makes them rats running faster in a wheel, getting nowhere. It's the perfect distraction, an endless distraction. The fraud of science is the sense that it explains anything at all. Every scientist is slowly bamboozled into this fraud from childhood, like a frog boiled alive in water. Science is the illusion that one day, if you just do enough hard science, everything will be explained. But the truth is, nothing will be explained.

When the snake is long enough, no segment of it sees that it's a circle. That's the genius of Maya, that's the devilry of it.

The circularity of something like Christianity is so obvious a child can see it. But the circularity of science is much more devious. Science is a tar pit that traps even the wiliest, swiftest, and strongest creatures. Religion is a trap for fools, science is a trap for intellectuals. The intellectual ends up ensnared by his own intellect, which is a kind of poetic justice for his arrogance.

The reason that I do philosophy is to have insights like this. To me, this insight is more beautiful than owning a private jet. It took me something like 20 years of intellectual work to be able to articulate it so clearly, so it is more meaningful to me than a private jet.

This is one of my fave documentaries. Ahead of its time.

Any philosopher driven by politics will be a corrupt and deluded philosopher. Why? Because politics is survival, philosophy is the search for truth, and survival poisons the search for truth. When you enter philosophy with any political agenda you’ve already committed an epistemic error because you do not know whether your political agenda is true or not. To know that, you’d first need to master philosophy, but you’ve just started philosophy. You’ve already been blinded by survival. You’ve already put the cart before the horse. You’ve already assumed you know when you don’t. You cannot know your political agenda is not self-deception until you’ve solved philosophy first. Philosophy is much more fundamental than politics or survival. Philosophers who place politics first are bad philosophers. It cannot be otherwise. After all, politics is the dirtiest things human do. How dare you bring that filth into truth-seeking? Truth-seeking requires no agenda other than knowing what’s true. Your Marxism, your libertarianism, your conservatism, your religion, your ideology, your agenda, your survival — is poisoning your philosophy.

What's a clear example of this? Aleksandr Dugin. But there are many others, many Marxists and post-modernists on the left. Leftists do shitty philosophy. Conservatives do even shittier philosophy.

To think well about politics you first need to master thinking well in general, which requires a mastery of epistemology. If you skip this step, you will fall into common kinds of self-deception, which all these political philosophers do. Jumping into political philosophy is amateur-hour. Jumping into political philosophy is like walking into a clean house from the rain without taking off your muddy shoes.

Why do so many people have such poor politics? Because they never cared about understanding self-deception. If you do not care about self-deception, I promise you will end up self-deceived. There's no other way it could be. You are not going to get lucky and magically stumble into truth.

It's not complicated: Do not politicize philosophy. Do not weaponize philosophy against your enemies, because the notion that you even have enemies is a delusion which you should use philosophy to cure yourself of. How do you know that your enemy is truly an enemy? You don't know that. If you think you do, that's because you haven't done enough philosophy.

I am in the middle of reading a book called By Way Of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. He is a former Mossad officer who writes of Mossad's inner workings and corruption. It's a great book, but unfortunately it's old and out of print, so it's expensive unless you buy a digital copy.

Here's an old interview with him:

(Start at time-stamp 11:50)

Mossad's official motto is amazing: "By way of deception, thou shalt do war."

Intel agencies are a prime example of how corruption spreads like a cancer due to lack of transparency. Of course intel agencies are corrupt, how could they not be when there's no transparency? Making intel agencies more transparent, by law, is a sorely needed reform that no one is even talking about. These agencies have written themselves a blank check to be devils.

Note: I have many other great books about politics and intelligence agencies on my book list. And I will be adding even more in the future. I read a lot about politics. That's because politics cannot be understood through direct experience. Spirituality does not require reading but politics does. I read so much interesting political history.

Consider how hard it is to create a society. You need to gather a bunch of strangers and get them to all agree on following your arbitrary rules. Can you see that this is almost impossible? Why should anyone care about following your rules when they could kill you and rape your family instead for fun?

So, because of this, society and culture must resort to a lot of manipulation, construction, and fakery. Without fakery, society would fall apart. Society is an inherently fake project from day one. But we’re 2000 years into it, so we can’t just stop or we would all die. Do you understand that the very precondition of your existence, of your human life, is fakery? Unless all your ancestors were full of shit, you could not be alive today. You are the child of bullshitters, liars, con-artists, fakes, and criminals. Your existential life project is to somehow rise up from 2000 years of fakery and make yourself True.

Now you understand why its so hard. You are not standing on the shoulders of truth-tellers, you are standing on the shoulders of liars. Lying is baked into your DNA. You are a liar not just by culture, but by DNA! You have the DNA of a devil, and our work is to somehow transcend that. The Devil has woven himself into your genes! Quite the challenge. To become spiritual you are literally fighting your own biology, your own psychology, your own culture, your own species. To be loyal to God, you must be disloyal to all of that.

Genuine spirituality is you pulling yourself up out of human devilry by your bootstraps. Not easy, but rewarding.