Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 3
This is what I was talking about in the What Is Spirituality? video where I said that spirituality is "developing a deep metaphysical connection with reality."
Yugen! — that's what you're really looking for.
Here's a really interesting look into a heavy version of Spiral Dynamics stage Blue ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism means: "I love my family, people, my race, my religion, my country, my culture, my traditions We are the best!" The world is divided into us vs them. What happens to "them" — other peoples, races, nations, religions, countries, cultures — does not matter. They are basically dispensable. They can be hated, excluded, demonized, slandered, raped, killed, tortured, etc. That doesn't matter because "they" are not "us".
One of the astounding features of the ethnocentric mindset is that it lacks the self-awareness to realize that it is ethnocentric. It literally cannot see outside its own perspective. You must understand: just because you have the capacity to look at the world through different perspectives does not mean that everyone else does! Most people do not have this capacity! This capacity is not a given.
Very few people understand the ethnocentric mindset. Those who have developed beyond it cannot understand it because it looks like delusion of the highest order. To whose who are immersed in it, it looks totally natural, normal, and could not be otherwise. So neither side really understands.
I challenge you here not to judge, not to gawk, but to really seek to understand the mindset and worldview of an ethnocentric person. Get inside their mind. Look at the world as they see it.
Remember, about 70-80% of the world population is at ethnocentric stage Blue. It would be wise of you to develop a deep understanding of how they think.
Important Note: Ethnocentrism comes in many degrees. The example above is a fairly heavy degree. Not all stage Blue people are this heavy. Although, many of them are! — just in more socially acceptable ways.
Correction: In this video I used the example of "Vishnu" when I really meant to say "Ganesha" — the elephant god. It doesn't really matter but I mixed up those two Hindu deities.
Here's a link to Part 1 in case you missed it.
What many non-business people do not realize is just how much corruption, fraud, manipulation, and downright criminality is involved in forging success. Many successful Spiral Dynamics stage Orange people are really just fakes who strong-armed their way to the top through special privilege, backroom deals, and outright theft. Success is not an honest signal because it can be faked so easily. It's much easier to fake being a rich person than to fake being a loving person.
As far as Trump's fraud goes, this is still only the tip of the iceberg. It's a lot worse than anyone's yet disclosed. As predicted by Spiral Dynamics and ego dynamics.
Again, I'm not posting this as a political attack or some liberal talking point. I'm trying to unmask for you just how sneaky and fraudulent the ego is. Because a lot of naive people see a successful-looking ego and aren't able to realize that the success is just a front. It's not merely that Trump is fooling lots of people, first and foremost he is fooling himself. This is not a Trump issue, this is an ego issue. You can think of Trump as a zombified corpse possessed and reanimated by a spirit known as ego. This spirit dictates everything he does, making him very predictable.
It's important to realize that success is mostly a facade. Most celebrities you admire are paper thin. They are not well-developed, conscious human beings. This includes popular self-help authors, business leaders, PUAs, YouTubers, TV pundits, public intellectuals, etc. Even if you manage to become successful, you will still be rotten to the core and hollow inside. Never, ever, mistake success for development, consciousness, or happiness.
In our stage Orange society it can be challenging for people to distinguish between success and development — because most people have done zero deliberate development work. Which is how we ended up with Trump. As you become more developed and conscious of how the ego works, all of this will become totally transparent to you.
The entire stage Orange system of business is built on mass-scale white-collar fraud, exploitation, and manipulation. It's just carefully tucked behind a glamorous facade. This is not some kind of anomaly, this is business as usual. Totally normalized by stage Orange culture.
But you see, the problem with all the ego's lies and deceptions is that the truth always wins out in the end, leading to a tragic comeuppance. This is karma at its finest. Karma will be knocking on Trump's door for years to come.
So what's the solution? Repent devil! Bite the bullet now and align yourself with truth.
There are dozens of different kinds of psychedelics and dozens of different kinds of neurotransmitter receptor sites in the brain. Each psychedelic has a unique neurotransmitter receptor site profile. This is like the psychedelic's unique fingerprint, which determines the qualitative effects you feel during the trip. It can be illuminating to compare the fingerprints for various psychedelics.
The following is a chart I put together that you won't see anywhere else. It maps over 40 receptor sites and a dozen psychedelic substances. Each vertical column represents the psychedelic's receptor fingerprint. Dark squares represent lowest activity, bright squares represent highest activity.
Looking over this data, some interesting observations jump out:
- Notice the unique fingerprints of MDMA, ibogaine, and salvia. Salvia and ibogaine are two of the most unique substances. Ibogaine activates almost all the opposite receptor sites of conventional psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. This should tell us that an ibogaine trip will be unlike any other (as people report). Salvia pretty much only activates one receptor site: KOR, which no other convention psychedelic activates at all. KOR alone is responsible for salvia's notorious craziness.
- Notice how LSD is the most active overall psychedelic. It lights up so many receptors, and it certainly feels that way when you're tripping.
- Comparing ordinary DMT with 5-MeO-DMT we can see that DMT is very active in the Alpha1A - Alpha2C range while 5-MeO is not. This suggests that the Alpha range is responsible for the intensive visual hallucinations that DMT is best known for, but which 5-MeO-DMT almost entirely lacks.
- Pay close attention to the Imidazoline1 row. This receptor site seems to be responsible for the experience of infinite divine love. The 3 greatest activators of Imidazoline1 are: MDMA (219.7), DPT (340), and DIPT (356). But any psychedelic which is active in this row will have a good chance of giving an infinite love feeling during your trip. Interestingly, LSD has no Imidazoline1 activation.
- Notice how unique and "mild" mescaline looks compared to 2C-B and 2C-E (its closest chemical cousins). Perhaps this is why people report that mescaline trips (despite the initial nausea) are some of the most pleasant trips, with few reports of bad trips.
- Notice the differences and similarities between Psilocin & LSD.
The chart would be even better if I could find some data for 4-AcO-DMT, 4-HO-MET, AL-LAD, DXM, ketamine, bufotinine, and datura.
In the future, with more research, we should have really accurate maps like this for all psychedelic substances. We could even design new psychedelics to uniquely target specific receptor sites.
Data Source: Psychedelics and the Human Receptorome, Thomas S. Ray, Feb 2010
This is a very important video. Watch it all the way through while doing the following:
- Be very mindful of your judgments.
- Be very mindful of how you separate yourself from these Mormons in your mind, taking a "me rational", "them irrational" attitude.
- Contemplate how your current place in life, and all of your beliefs, are the result of cultural indoctrination
Do not think you are any different than these Mormons. Fundamentally, every human in the world is just like them. All of your cultural, political, spiritual, rational, and scientific preferences were programmed into you in a very similar manner, just less obviously so. Think about all the ways you were indoctrinated: kindergarten, family, school, church, high school, university, friends, social circles, parties, sports, books, magazines, radio, TV, internet, video games, commercials, grocery stores, shopping malls, etc.
Contemplate the notion that ALL of your beliefs about reality are cultural programming. You didn't believe them because they were true, you believed them because you knew of no other possibility. Of course this includes all of your so-called "scientific" and "rational" ideas. Hardly a single idea you have came from independent contemplation of reality. And to top it all off, you basically run around infecting other people with your ideas just like the Mormon zombies above. And if anyone tries to point all this out to you, you will of course vehemently deny it.
Who would you be, what would your life be like today, if you had not been indoctrinated with all the ideas present in your head? Imagine if you were born into a Mormon family, a Muslim family, an orthodox Jewish family, a polygamous family, etc.
Watch out! You may think to yourself, "Phewwww! I'm so lucky I wasn't born into one of those fundamentalist families. I really dodged a bullet!" Except you haven't! All of your secular liberal ideals are also just cultural indoctrination. If you believe in the value of democracy, freedom, goodness, equality, justice, truth, etc. — all of that is cultural indoctrination! You did not invent a single one of those values/ideals. Notice this! Stop bullshitting yourself. Carefully trace where each of your ideals came from. Not the myth of where they come from, but where they ACTUALLY came from: someone indoctrinated you and you swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
Only if you understand this will you have a chance of breaking free.
Try to imagine what it would take for those Mormons to break free.
Now you have a sense of what it will take you to escape The Matrix.
Eye-opening documentary about the intersection of ego, health, and environmental regulation.
Notice how the ego-mind rationalizes and adapts to unhealthy conditions as long as it serves the ego-mind's way of life. The ego-mind is not going to admit that its entire community and city are built on a toxic premise.
Notice how this is really an issue of collective ego.
Spiral Dynamics stage Orange and below turns a blind eye to these kinds of environmental concerns. This is all very predictable.
Here's a really good analysis by Fareed Zakaria of what's going on in global politics:
He is talking about transitioning Europe and the US to Spiral Dynamics stage Green.
Politics is basically about evolving our identity as a nation. The turmoil we're seeing in politics today is the result of old, ethnocentric, nationalistic identities struggling to evolve into new, more global, more multicultural, more cosmopolitan identities. As the world gets smaller due to digital interconnection, ease of travel, migration, and inter-racial relationships the old national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries will inevitably get blurred, leaving many traditional egos feeling their identities threatened.
What is required is an openmindedness to a new, wider identity. You can no longer just be an American, a German, a Muslim, a Jew, a man — you must open yourself to being a global citizen, a human. It is not sustainable to maintain isolationism and nationalism in the face of a rapidly evolving global marketplace. The globe is only going to interconnect more, not less. Diversity will be thrust in your face whether you like it or not.
Zakaria cites political scientist Francis Fukuyama as saying, "Identity is the deep-seated psychological need to be recognized as possessing dignity." But this fails to appreciate the depth of the problem. Identity is not merely a psychological need, identity is an existential, metaphysical imperative. Threats to one's identity are not merely perceived as a psychological annoyance, but life-threatening. Because identity is not a physical, objective fact but a conceptual construction. One's identity and one's reality are deeply enmeshed and mutually reinforcing.
This is why stage Blue and Orange egos resist stage Green with such passion. To the ego this feels like battle to the death. Because it is death! Death = loss of identity. And the ego will always lose!
But it is also a rebirth into a larger, better, truer you. Your true identity is infinite.
The trick is to get over yourself. (Which of course no one wants to do.)
What people fail to understand about politics is that it's not merely a personal preference for various "good" or "bad" social and economic issues. No! Politics is a battle to invent "good" and "bad"! Politics is a battle to the death to define one's identity, reality, and to rig the structures of society to maximize the survival of one's ego. This is why you don't find much truth in politics. Its purpose is the opposite of truth: survival through fabrication.
Politically in the US and in Europe things are going to get worse before they get better. Stage Blue & Orange are entering their sunset phase in the highly developed Western countries, but they are not going away without a fight. Be prepared for backlash and desperate death throes over the next 50 years. Be prepared for lots of propaganda, fake news, demonization, and disinformation campaigns. This is how the devil plies his trade.