Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 10

Wild stuff:

Powerful, practical video:

I really like this show's political analysis.

Although it annoys me how much they demonize mainstream media. Could do without that. Otherwise it's a great show.

Go vote to preserve democracy.

This Rogan clip just dropped about the topic of transgenderism. It's a stunning clip.

Here's the thing that neither Rogan nor Walsh nor any human, really, understands: human identity is not Truth, it's fiction! The mind completely imagines its own identity! Let that sink in. Not just your name, not just your gender, not just your birth, ancestry, and life story, but even the fact that you are human! — all of this is imaginary. So, Yes!, this is a battle over defining reality. The reason both left and right wingers are so heated and opinionated about this issue is precisely because there is no objective answer, so the answer will be defined by whoever wins the culture war through brute force. The mistake is assuming that there is one objective answer. Brute force is what creates "objectivity" in this matter. After I kill you, my truth becomes The Truth now. The mistake is not understanding the profound relativity at work in such questions. It's as silly as two scientists arguing over the true length of a football field. Once you understand General Relativity, you understand how silly such a notion is. There is no "true length" of a football field because length is relative to your velocity and frame of reference. Same goes for time.

Let this sink in: LENGTH & TIME are RELATIVE! This is 100-year-old science. Yet when it comes to identity, people are simple-minded enough to believe that it isn't relative. LENGTH & TIME are relative! Just let that sink in!

Now, even though all the above is true, that still doesn't mean you should make up whatever identity you want willy-nilly. Some identities are much more healthy than others. Where trans-activists go wrong is by pretending that their alternative, non-mainstream identities are equally healthy to "normal" ones. They are not. Relativity does not mean that anything goes, anything works. Most constructions do not work. Those that do had to be field-tested and evolved over many years. A 16 year old teenager is not intelligent enough to construct an identity that's better than the pre-made identities supplied by 1000s of years of cultural evolution.

So funny enough, both sides are wrong on this issue. And that is all because people are not properly taught the dynamics and trickery of relativity. Relativity is more pronounced than right-wingers want to admit, but relativity is also more dangerous than left-wingers want to admit.

So here we are: two sides talking past one another, demonizing one another because they are fundamentally ignorant about the nature of identity, and neither side wants to do any serious philosophical work, because everyone thinks they have the answer. This is the tragedy of not doing good philosophy: you are forever doomed to misunderstand life. And people get killed over it. It's the same situation as people killing each other over race and religion. Only the race and religion situation has gone on for 1000s of years with so much bloodshed that most people have wised up to the relativity of those two. But they cannot make the same connection with gender. Because their minds are not open.

If you follow my work, I expect you to be much more intelligent.

Extremely good take by Bill Maher:

Go vote to preserve democracy.

I'm coining the term Pure Philosophy.

Here's how I define it:

• Philosophy done for the sake of pure understanding of reality and Absolute Truth, regardless of consequence.
• Philosophical inquire free of history, named individuals, and famous philosophers.
• An impersonal collection — a catalogue — of all possible ideas and concepts that could explain reality, evaluated purely based on their merit, freely edited, reinterpreted, and blended to create the best possible understanding of reality. Some examples of pure concepts within philosophy:
  • The concept of God
  • The concept of solipsism
  • The concept that everything evolves
  • The concept that all dualities collapse into unity
  • The concept that mind and matter are entangled
  • The concept that science is a cultural construction
  • The concept of strange loops
  • The concept of no-self
  • The concept of stages of ego development
  • The concept that the universe is intelligent
  • The concept of self vs other
  • The concept of infinity, totality, everythingness, or oneness
  • The concept of self-deception
  • The concept of projection
  • The concept of bias
  • The concept of The Social Matrix
  • The concept that capitalism skews scientific research
  • The concept of survival shaping who you are
  • The concept that Love is not a human emotion but metaphysical oneness
  • The concept of recontextualization
  • The concept of Absolute Truth
  • The concept of going-meta
  • The concept of bootstrapping
  • The concept of radical openmindedness
  • The concept of asking powerful questions
  • The concept of relativity
  • The concept of deconstruction
  • The concept of systems thinking
  • The concept of holism
  • The concept of making distinctions
• Open-source. No individual has claim to any ideas as "his own". Ideas and concepts are treated as Universal, belonging to the Universal Mind.
• No debating, no arguing, no proving, no debunking, no ideology.
• No appeals to authority. Eliminate all authority figures. No credentials, no certificates, no PhDs, no Nobel prizes, no institutions, no bureaucracy, no experts. Ideas stand or die completely on their own merit.
• No funding conflicts of interest. No donors, no grants, no sponsorships, no corporate backers, no political backers, no fundraisers. No political ambitions or seeking of power.
• Absolutely all assumptions are questioned.
• Everything must be explained from scratch without any appeals to authority, history, status, cultural norms, or morality.
• Focuses on The Big Picture and takes serious the possibility of answering the deepest existential questions rather than technical minutia:
  • What are the right and wrong ways of doing philosophy?
  • What is reality?
  • Where did reality come from?
  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • What is Consciousness?
  • How to live the best life possible?
  • How to construct the best society for the good of all?
• Radical skepticism. No topic is off-limits for questioning. But also, not privileging skepticism over other perspectives and no turning skepticism into a dogma. Skepticism must also question and doubt itself.
• Endeavors to see reality free of all bias.
• A profound appreciation of and study of self-deception. The studying and documenting of all the sneaky and tricky dynamics and patterns of the mind. All the ways the mind fools itself, with mechanisms such as projection, denial, rationalization, confirmation bias, confabulation, demonization, scapegoating, double-standards, cherry-picking, fear, moralizing, judgment, etc. Mastering the trickeries of one's own mind.
• No dogma, no ideology, no group-think. All answers must be derived from scratch for oneself as though you were the first person in existence to discover them. Focused on profound personal contemplation.
• Integrity and embodiment: your philosophical conclusions must affect and transform the way you live life. Theory must influence practice and practice must influence theory.
• Radical openmindedness
• Truth & understanding as the highest value.
• Clarity,  simplicity, and directness as high values. No academic jargon. No convoluted or arcane writing. Explanations of reality must be phrased so simply, clearly, and directly that a teenager can read it and understand it.
• Cut out all human bullshit, games, drama, pettiness, squabbling, rivalry, etc.
• The ultimate goal is General Omniscience: The complete understanding of reality at the highest level. The goal is NOT the elimination of suffering nor the maximization of happiness.
• Cultivation of one's intellect, cultivating it like a garden. The love of Intelligence for its own sake. Self-education. Taking full responsibility for educating yourself rather than expecting others to give you the answers.
• No worshiping or name-dropping historical figures like Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, The Buddha, etc. Every idea must stand on its own merit.
• Practice of meditation, yoga, and other non-linguistic modes of training the mind.
• Mandatory requirement of experimenting with psychedelics. A commitment not just to try psychedelics a few times, but using them as a serious tool for philosophical inquiry, and not quitting just because you have a few difficult trips.
• Research into and personal exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness, mystical and trans-human states of consciousness.
• Emphasis on self-reflection and going-meta.
• Exploration of radical worldviews and perspectives. With a commitment to never to strawman or demonize any view.
• Fearlessness, courage, and personal sacrifice in pursuing Truth.
• Radical Holism: no siloing or over-specialization. Integration of many diverse fields. Not just traditional philosophy but psychology, sociology, history, science, religion, spirituality, mysticism, New Age, self-help, and whatever other fields are necessary to reach the ultimate understanding of reality. Pure Philosophy includes all the above and no one field gets to dominate or bully all the others.
• No guess-work, speculation, or belief. Inquiry must be based on direct experience, personal consciousness, empirical observation, or genuine insight.
• Integration of thinking, feeling, and non-linguistic awareness or "being". Neither of these is demonized nor prioritized over the others.
• Appreciation for the immense mystery of reality/nature/Consciousness. No naive attempts to demystify reality, quantify reality, or to make it "scientific".
• Integration of science and religion/spirituality/mysticism.
• A deep study and awareness of the stages of ego development. Acknowledgement that individuals, organizations, cultures, and societies evolve from lower to higher stages of development. Science, religion, morality, art, etc manifest differently at every stage and manifest in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
• The recognition that academic philosophy is fundamentally broken because it does not pursue Absolute Truth, Awakening, and Omniscience, and is in denial that these is the proper and ultimate aim of all philosophy.
• Construct-Awareness: recognition that the mind, in some profound way, plays an active role in constructing reality. That mind and reality are fundamentally entangled. That the philosophy/scientist and his investigation of nature are fundamentally entangled.

Pure Philosophy claims that there is a right and wrong way to do philosophy, based on the metric of Awakening and realization of Omniscience or Total understanding of reality. The way you know that you did philosophy properly is by the fact that your consciousness rises high enough to understand that ALL of reality is a construction of your Infinite Mind, that you are God.

The ultimate achievement of Pure Philosophy is the realization that you are God, that you are Infinity, and that reality is Love. This is not to be confused with dogma or belief of any sort. Nor is this to be considered a subjective personal "philosophy" that one has adopted or invented.

Amazing:

This is who you will become if you don't do philosophy properly. So don't think that philosophy is merely academic. In fact, most of our collective problems can be traced back to people not being taught to do good philosophy. Philosophy is not even taught in most high schools, never mind the Pure Philosophy that I teach. That's not taught anywhere. Even Buddhists and Vedantists don't teach it. New Age spirituality, meditation, yoga, and nonduality is NOT Pure Philosophy and will not get you the benefits of Pure Philosophy. No amount of meditation will make you a good thinker. Think about that.

Not doing philosophy is NOT an option. Everyone has some kind of philosophy that runs their life and decisions. There is no such thing as a computer running without an operating system. Acting uninterested in operating systems is not an option. The only question is, how good is your OS?

How good is your philosophy?

Is it possible that your philosophy is responsible for the quality — or lack thereof — of your life? Could it be that simple?