The Suffering Of Development

By Leo Gura - March 17, 2025

One of the reasons very advanced cognitive and moral development is so rare is the insane suffering you must incur to reach it. I mean here a very specific kind of suffering that is usually not even understood by people. It is the suffering of understanding how wrong you were, how corrupt you were, how selfish you were, how self-deceived you were, how immature you were. There are levels of self-deception in you which are so advanced and so ugly that you can’t even imagine them right now. I mean, truly understanding how flawed you’ve been and still are. Reaching the highest stages of development requires forcing yourself to confront and admit all this to yourself even when there isn’t a strict need. Because others around you will be too ignorant and unconscious to even understand your level of wrongness. You will recognize you are wrong in ways that most people don’t even comprehend. People around you will be telling you how great you are, but deep down you will know you are wrong. And so you have to do it for yourself. No one is going to force you and it will be very painful. This explains why truly good people are so rare. You’re not born good, you have become good by recognizing and eliminating all of your personal corruption and ignorance.

Just try to imagine if someone like a Trump or a Musk tried to become a good person. Not because they were forced, but just by their own desire. Put yourself in their shoes — knowing everything you know from studying all the Actualized.org concepts and being on this journey yourself — and try to imagine how painful it would be for them. Try to empathize with that. The pain of admitting all the stuff they are wrong about, and all the suffering they’ve caused people, would be unbearable. They would break down in tears, they should feel suicidal, they would go through depression and nihilism — just to admit their own corruption to themselves. They would need someone to hold them. But this isn’t unique to them, it will apply to you too, just hopefully to a lesser degree. And this process of realizing your wrongness and stupidity needs to happen more than once, over and over again for each higher stage of development.

By the time you’re done with all that, you will become profoundly compassionate towards the ignorance, immaturity, and corruption in others because you will know how hard it was for you to come to accept yourself. To develop serious love requires not just acting well, but participating in evil. Consider that serious love doesn’t come from avoiding murder, it comes from being a murderer and then redeeming yourself from that, learning to love and accept yourself after that. Only then can you understand and love murderers. Unless you go through that process, you will not have enough depth of empathy to understand the grotesque moral situation that a murderer is in.

Consider this: The reason that God is the ultimate Love, is because God is a Mind which lived through every possible perspective and personally participated in every possible evil, but through recognition and consciousness redeemed itself and learned to love itself anyway. So, literally, the reason that God is the highest Love is because God was every murderer who ever lived — and fully conscious of it. Only by going through all that ugliness consciously does one reach God’s degree of Love. This is, literally, a super-human Love. A Love that cannot be achieved without infinite perspective. As it turns out, for profound metaphysical reasons, you cannot love something you haven’t personally been through because you will not understand it. To love a thing requires understanding it. And understanding it requires living through it and becoming One with it. So there is a very profound relationship between love and evil. You won’t get high degrees of love just by being nice to everyone, acting proper, and following the rules. That’s far too shallow. You have to really experience oneness with evil. The most loving person will not be the one with the cleanest hands, it will be the one with dirty hands who went through hell and came out the other end a saint.

Note: Obviously this is not a license to start doing deliberate evil just for the personal development benefits. If you did that you’d very much regret it.

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