Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights
Miscellaneous bits of wisdom and resources on personal development, life purpose, philosophy, epistemology, nonduality, psychedelics, etc. Published randomly throughout the week.
- penetrating mental vision or discernment.
- the sudden act of grasping the inner nature or truth of a situation.
- a deep understanding of a person or thing.
Insights here are meant to be quick and half-baked. Consider these food for thought.
I've deliberately disabled comments to keep the blog streamlined. If you want to discuss any of the blog posts, you can do so here: Actualized.org Forum
This is a nice contrarian take:
Perhaps it is better to say that history is written by the survivors. Hard to write history if you're dead.
The real point though, is that the history you are taught is the history that serves those in power. Which history becomes popular is not neutral or objective, it's a political decision that serves someone's survival.
The question is more nuanced than who writes the history. The question is more about which history becomes mainstreamed and popularized, and why. Winners tend to have the political power to popularize history that favors them. Case in point: Christianity and Islam.
The notorious televangelist Jim Bakker died last month. Here's a nice summary of his shameless fake spirituality:
Notice that epistemic perverts end up as grifters. Why is that? Because they have nothing else to live for. When you aren't living for truth, you have nothing else to live for but grifting. Living without truth is like living without a backbone. Any kind of mental gymnastics become acceptable for the sake of survival.
Hypocrisy is largely unconscious. The hypocrite’s mind is not self-aware enough to see its own hypocrisy. When the hypocrisy is pointed out to it by outsiders, the mind is caught by surprise because it saw no hypocrisy there. So the mind gets defensive and tries to rationalize away the hypocrisy rather than owning up to it. Mind is so vast, subtle, and hairy that its hypocrisy goes unseen, because it is hard for the mind to keep track of all of its positions and beliefs. It is easy to see hypocrisy from outside, it is very difficult to see it from inside. The mind does not have conscious access to all its positions, utterances, and beliefs at once. Thanks to this, hypocrisy has plenty of room to hide in the shadows of the mind. Being a hypocrite is automatic, by default, unconscious. Not being a hypocrite requires lots of self-reflection, which is tedious, boring, and threatening.
The more conscious I become, the more hypocrisy I see in myself. It is unpleasant to catch one's own hypocrisy because one doesn't think of oneself as a hypocrite. Seeing one's own hypocrisy is ugly, but it is healthy because you can't fix what you can't see.