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.
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What the intelligent, highly rational mind misses is that it’s simply overlooking things. Rationality does not solve the problem of simply overlooking things. A very intelligent person can just overlook very fundamental, basic, obvious things. Doubling down on rationality does not solve this problem because Consciousness is more fundamental than rationality. Rationality cannot factor in things it is unconscious of. Rationality can only work on things Consciousness is conscious of. This ends up dooming rationalism and scientific thinking. Scientific thinking cannot even imagine what it is overlooking and taking for granted. When the mind is overlooking something fundamental, no amount of scientific evidence or argument is enough to change that. A scientific experiment or a scientific apparatus cannot force you to recognize something fundamental you are overlooking. You have to recognize that you are overlooking it, which requires deep self-reflection. So, Reality cannot be understood without self-reflection, which is what dooms science.
What is the rational mind overlooking? That's the key.
The rational mind does not understand, and does not factor in, the significance of what it is overlooking.
It's the things you're overlooking that will be the cause of your self-deception. The deepest self-deception is about what you are overlooking.
Reality is not understood by being anally rational, it is understood by paying careful attention to what everyone is overlooking.
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.