Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

Why are there more mentally ill people in the spiritual field than the general population? Atheists and rationalists like to believe that it’s because religion is a mental illness. No! That’s wrong. It’s because people with mental illness have looser minds, which makes it easier for them to be conscious of the mystical aspects of Consciousness/Reality. Mental illness really means that there is no material Reality at all, but the rationalist mind is so rigid and dogmatic that it needs to deny this to maintain its solidity and sanity. The scientific, rationalist mind is terrified of discovering that its own sanity is just a hallucination. That’s why it dismisses mystical insight as mental illness. Mentally ill people have less scientific and rationalist minds, the scientists and rationalists take this a bug, but it’s actually a feature of Consciousness. This is not to say that mental illness is a good thing, it isn’t, but mental illness exists because Consciousness is much broader than scientific rationality. Mental illness has access to more of Reality can science does because science artificially limits itself out of fear of delusion. This is ironic, since science's fear of delusion causes science to end up deluded. But then again, that's exactly how fear works. Excessive fear causes the realization of the thing feared.

There is also more mental illness in artists than the general population — why? Because art requires connection to creativity and spirit, which requires more loose states of mind than science or academia. The kind of looseness of mind that’s required to create the best art would get your career killed in professional academic circles. But the problem for academia is, that kind of creativity is also required to do ground-breaking, revolutionary science. Which is why most science is so stale and lame. In theory, scientists and academics love ground-breaking new science, but in practice they are bigoted towards the states of mind required to generate such breakthroughs in understanding. Breakthroughs in science require breakthroughs in Consciousness, in perspective, not just more measurement, more math, more data, and more technological gadgetry.

Mental looseness vs mental rigidity is in a trade-off relationship. The looser the mind the easier it is to have crazy new ideas, but the easier it is to just become crazy and deluded. But the rigid mind has locked itself in cage and thrown away the key. It's really a question of, How adventurous and risky is your mind? The more adventurous your mind is, the more advanced things you can discover about MIND, but the more likely you are to become crazy in the process. Exploring MIND is a dangerous game. You can explore MIND so deeply that you stop even taking death seriously, which is more likely to get you killed. Ultimately, the reason scientists are so closedminded is because they are terrified of death and insanity. Ironically, the attachment to rationalism is fear-based, not logic-based. Logic does not tell you that you should cling to logic, the ego's fear and insecurity does. Logic itself does not regard itself as king, the scientific ego does. "Everything should be logical", is not a logical statement, it is an egoic statement.

Note: No, I am not mentally ill, in case you thought I was rationalizing my own mental illness. I wish my mind was more loose than it is. I suffer from mental rigidity, not looseness. I am too rational. I have to work hard to make myself less scientific. I spent decades undoing science in myself, which is why I can outsmart scientists.

The problems with democracy:

Note: I am pro democracy. It's just important to be realistic about its challenges. Democracy requires that we don't take it for granted.

The challenge for every genuine spiritual teacher is that they know they can’t tell you what God is, they need you to realize it yourself. Teaching God is no different than teaching math: the student has to do the homework and grok the equations for himself. God is no more a belief system than math is. This is why religion is so harmful. Imagine if we turned math into a religion. That would be bad math. If you love math, the last thing you would want is for math to be turned into a religion. A religion of math is not more mathy, it’s less mathy. Dogmatizing and ideologizing math destroys the purpose of math. The purpose of math is to be directly conscious of the truths of math, not to memorize and believe in math. Memorizing math ruins math. Preaching math ruins math. Indoctrinating math ruins math. Pushing math on others ruins math. The purpose of math education is to teach the student to love the beauty of math. So it is with God.

God is a beautiful thing, and anyone presenting God in an ugly way is doing it wrong. All of the religious versions of God are much uglier than God really is. Humans take something so Beautiful and present it so ugly, soiled by the ugliness of their own minds.

God is the Beauty of Mind.

If you think math is beautiful, wait till you see God. Math is just a subset of God's Beauty. And religion is ugly as a pig caked in its own shit. If you love God, you should hate religion.

I like this image because it encapsulates Survival. It makes me think of how this duck is just a survival machine. Is this duck conscious of why it's having these ducklings every year? No. Animals are survival machines, and humans are hardly better.

The entire challenge of development is not about chasing success and fame. That's not what development is really about. Development is about making your own survival conscious. That's different from hustle culture, business, getting rich, making it big, pickup, pop-psychology, or even the New Age.

Development is not just whatever you want, whatever dreams you have. Development is when you stop being an unconscious survival machine. That's why there are right and wrong ways to go about development. Are you conscious of your own survival? That's the key.

Here's the key insight: You cannot be a moral person without becoming conscious of your own survival. Being "Good" is not about following moral rules, it's about being conscious of your own behavior. That's why ideological people are never Good people. Ideology is unconscious survival. Goodness is conscious behavior.

When people wonder, "If God is Good, why didn't God create Good people?" Because being Good is not a magical property that God snaps his fingers and gives you. Being Good requires being conscious of your own selfish behavior. That is a developmental process you must go through, grow through. Goodness is not something you are born with, it is an ordeal to earn. Not because God is withholding it from you, but because Goodness cannot be forced on another. You must come to Goodness through your own effort and recognizance. Consciousness has to look within itself and realize through introspection that it is behaving selfishly, untruthfully, and wrongly. This must be an internal, subjective process, not something God programs you with. If God programmed you like a robot to be Good, then that isn't Good, because mechanical programming, even if it is "good" programming, is not truly Good! Good IS Consciousness. God himself cannot force you to be Good. Both religious fundamentalists and atheists miss this point. They both assume that God can snap his fingers and just make a "Good" universe, which is why they are puzzled why there is evil in the world. But if God could snap his fingers and make you Good, then you would just be God's slave, God's zombie, which is not Good. Good is not a material property! Good is a function of Consciousness/Spirit.

For example, in order for a rapist to become Good, he would need to introspect and recognize by the light of his own Consciousness that rape is wrong. For Andrew Tate to become Good, he would need to introspect and realize within himself that treating women the way he treats women is wrong. Do you see that this cannot come from outside of himself? It does not matter what the law says, or what the courtroom says, or what the Bible says, or what I say, because even if he followed all those external standards, as long as he internally thought that rape is cool, then he's a bad person. Bad not because I judge him, but bad because he lacks self-awareness. Rape is bad because it is unconscious survival. For Andrew Tate to become a Good person he would need to make all of his unconscious survival behavior conscious, which would be very painful for him to do because he would feel so bad about his past behavior. Which is why he's stuck being a bad person. Bad people are stuck in a vicious cycle of denial about their own behavior.

This is true spirituality. It's not about your beliefs. Your beliefs in Jesus or Allah are irrelevant! Are you conscious of yourself? That's the true metric. A duck can rape another duck and not see anything wrong in it. That's why ducks have low development. Moreover, the wrongness of rape is not objective morality, it's about you recognizing how your behavior hurts others. Rape is not wrong in any objective sense. Rape is wrong because you are not conscious of how it hurts others, and treating others that way is incoherent. Immoral behavior is incoherent behavior. Rape requires lying to yourself that you did not hurt the other person when in truth you did. Lying to yourself is the low development.

There is no sin, there is just conscious and unconscious behavior. Do you want to behave consciously? Not because I tell you, but because you genuinely want to? If not, then that's what makes you bad. "But Leo? Why should I care about behaving consciously?" You don't have to. But then you don't love Good/Consciousness/God/Yourself/Truth. Being Good isn't about your behavior, it's about whether you love Good or not. If you don't genuinely love Good, then you're bad. That's what bad IS. See, if you actually loved Good, you would automatically correct yourself without needing anyone to force you.

Don't you see? God is not Good because someone or something outside itself forced it to act a certain way. God is Good because God loves Goodness itself. For no selfish reason. The highest stage of development is loving Good as much as you love sex. Don't you see? If you loved Good as much as you love sex, you would have the highest stage of morality. Why doesn't everyone love Good as much as sex? Unconscious survival has them distracted and confused.

True morality is just the love of Good, for its own sake.

Good cannot be forced on God from the outside because God has no outside. And you are God. God's Goodness comes entirely from its own self-awareness. Think of it like this: Just assume for a moment that God existed and God was Good. But how did God ever come to know what the Good is? Who did God ask? Did God look it up in the Bible or Koran or Google? Where did God get its ideas of Good from? Obviously it could only get it from self-reflection, since God has no other. Being Good involves realizing that you are the final authority in what Good is. This makes Good 100% your responsibility.

In order to be a Good person, God has to be able to look inside itself and say, "I raped someone, and that was wrong." Now you see why Good people are so rare. Being Good is the most psychologically difficult thing there is. God cannot magically make you Good. You have to make yourself Good by being responsible and conscious.

This is why you cannot fake being a Good person through lofty religious beliefs. And this is why religious people are not Good. Religion is not Consciousness and it is not responsibility. Religion is unconscious mechanism.

Good cannot be turned into a set of material rules or properties because Good is not material, Good is Infinite. Being Good requires being infinitely open. Which is why conservatives are never Good people, because they are all too closedminded.

Note: By the way, I am not claiming to be Good. I just understand it. I just explain the mechanics of how it works, I don't embody it perfectly. The primary problem is that people are profoundly confused and misinformed about what the Good is. Your survival is NOT the Good. The Good is not about you, it's about YOU.

A good discussion about anarchism. Watch the whole thing before you read my acerbic commentary.

Watch before reading.

The problem isn't that anarchism is an ideology but that it's a fantasy. A leftist rationalist academic fantasy. No anarchism will exist in a thousand years, and the fact that leftists take it seriously as a form of governance demonstrates how completely ungrounded their conception of politics and society is. Only someone who has never done actual politics thinks that this could work. Human beings are corrupt mindless apes who need government to force them to act semi-correctly. These leftists talk about the province of God, but they don't even understand that God is real, and they try to ascribe these qualities to average mouth-breathing humans. For anarchism to have a chance to work, everyone would need to be as developed as The Buddha, and even then it would still struggle to fly. Completely unserious. No understanding of human development levels.

Leftists who think anarchism could work have no clue how civilization is organized and why. This is precisely what Michael Oakeshott spoke against. You cannot invent a better form of government by theorizing in your office. All of that will fail because it is not intelligent enough. Anarchism is childish next to the intelligence of civilization. Academic types don't fathom this. This is how academia makes you stupid. The real social world operates in a totally different way than your academic, moralistic ideals. You want anarchism? Go live alone in the forest with your friends, because you are not talking about civilization. Civilization requires strong hierarchy. That's the cost. Intelligence is understanding the true cost of things.

The point of government is that it needs to handle the behaviors of hundreds of millions of people with the development level of children, and worse, bloodthirsty delusional psychopaths.

Anarchism is a childish ideology born from a profound inexperience with governance.

My God, it's so irresponsible and unrealistic. Michael Oakeshott was so right. Leftists have no idea how civilization works. It's such profound group-think that they aren't even ashamed of themselves. Wow.

This is a fascinating example. Vlad reacts to Hunter Biden's description of God. Watch, and then read my commentary below:

Commentary:

• Hunter Biden says, "We are all literally connected." Not only is that true, that's more true than Vlad or even Hunter can fathom. Not only are we all connected, we are identical.
• Overall, Hunter Biden's description of God is very good. Of course it's still rather shallow, but for him it's good enough.
• Hunter Biden says, "I know that there is not a sentient being that is not literally me." Correct! Everyone is the same being. Everyone is God under the sock-puppet.
• Vlad responds by saying that he's open to Christian and Islamic mystical experiences, but not the New Age. Quoting Vlad: "It's very difficult to give an account of that which is not a kind of fantasy wish fulfillment."  This is backwards. Hunter's description is more accurate than most Christian and Islamic ones. So Vlad is mistaken here. It is popular to poo-poo the New Age, but the New Age is often more right than anything else, so be careful. You will get a better understanding of God via the New Age than Christianity or Islam, because the New Age is less dogmatic. Dogma cripples the mind's ability to comprehend God.
• Vlad dismisses Hunter's description as stemming from Hunter's emotional weakness as a drug addict. This is wrong. Hunter's description comes from direct experience from all the drugs he's done. Which shows you that a drug addict will have a deeper understanding of God than a trained philosopher. This is a great lesson. Drugs beat academia every time :)
• Vlad says he has meditated twice a day since 2004. Then he says that he understands the experience of the dissolution of the self and that there is a certain sense of "everything being connected", "but that's not the same as sitting at the dinner table and claiming that metaphysically everything is connected." Wrong. That's exactly what it means!
• Vlad says, "It does not follow that you can say, without sentimentality and kitch, that everything is everything." Of course Everything is Everything! Lol. That's exactly what God is! That is the highest truth.
• Vlad says there's no such thing as meditating well. This sounds true but is false. There are definitely right and wrong ways to meditate. In fact, most of the stuff people call meditation is not meditation at all, it is daydreaming. Good meditation requires extreme rigor and focus, which is why its so hard and rare. Which is why Vlad has not realized God after 20 years of it.
• Overall, this example beautifully reveals how easy it is to mislead yourself with meditation and academic philosophy. Vlad has studied so much academic philosophy that it has made him metaphysically and spiritually dense. And his 20+ years of daily meditation have not brought him any closer to realizing God. This is why I am critical of meditation and insist on psychedelics. With the right psychedelic, Vlad could realize God in 10 minutes.
• The reason I endorse psychedelics is precisely to avoid Vlad's situation. Without psychedelics, most spiritual people and meditators will end up like Vlad, which is heartbreaking. 20+ years and still no Awakening. Actualized.org is designed to preempt that trap.

Note: I enjoy and respect Vlad's work. Lots of love to him. He is just speaking about a topic outside his wheelhouse (which is another lesson in self-deception). The point of this post is not to criticize Vlad but to teach you a lesson.

A very subtle self-deception of capitalists is that most of them are workaholics, which makes them feel like they earned their excessive wealth through hard work — since they do in fact work long hours. For example, Elon Musk works long hours, works hard. Wall Street investment bankers work crazy long hours. However, that’s still a self-deception because the wealth they get for their work is entirely disproportional to their labor. Yes, Elon Musk works long and hard, but he does not work 1000x longer and harder than one of his engineers. Yet he is paid 1000x more. Just because you work hard does not mean you earned or deserve your wealth. But the capitalist conveniently makes that conflation. Many capitalists work very hard and long hours to screw over their employees.

The core self-deception of capitalism is that anything you can get away with through financial manipulation, you deserve. Hollywood celebrities work long hours on films, but they do not deserve nor truly earn a $20,000,000 paycheck. What these deluded capitalists overlook is that the lady cleaning toilets all day long at their hotel also works hard. The construction worker building their luxury mansion also works hard. The school teacher also works hard. But none of them get compensated fairly for their hard work. This is the problem with capitalism: Just because a few jobs pay insanely well does not mean most jobs do. But society requires those non-well-paying jobs.

The core incoherence of capitalists is that they expect to be paid insanely well for their hard work, but they expect everyone else to be paid shit for their hard work. Insane compensation for me but not for thee.

The only reason capitalists are so rich is because they rig insanely disproportionate compensation for themselves at everyone else's expense. Why is Elon Musk so rich? Because he left Paypal with a $100M check. Did Musk do $100M worth of labor at Paypal? Fuck no. That idea is laughable. The most important secret skill of capitalists is engineering crazy compensation packages for themselves in secret. Very few professions allow you to do that, which is why its unfair.

We could easily pass a law that says that you cannot get paid more than 100x your average employee. But see, the capitalist class will cry that this is unfair. Is it unfair? What's the truth?