Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 3

This is an interesting video debating the philosophical validity of Buddhism. Neither the Christian nor the Buddhist understands God in this case. I make corrections to their points below.

My commentary:

• What is the thing that gets reincarnated? Not a thing, but Consciousness itself. Consciousness is Infinity, so Infinity is the thing that is incarnating. Infinity is not a thing and it has no shape. You can think of it like space is reincarnating.
• Mind is not just a series of unrelated phenomena, Mind is the ever-present void in which all phenomena takes place. Mind is the Eternal backdrop of everything. This backdrop unifies all phenomena.
• The Buddhist says, "These two consciousness are not the same but they are causally linked." This is false. Consciousness is always the same Consciousness. There are not multiple consciousnesses across time because consciousness exists outside of time.
• The Buddhist says, "Due to its similarity across time we misapprehend it to be a single entity that continues through time." This is false. Difference is the misapprehension, not similarity. Consciousness is a single entity because it exists prior to time. Time does not divide Consciousness from itself because Consciousness is more real than time. The single entity of Consciousness hallucinates time, past and future.
• The Buddhist says, "God, we need that even less." This is false, showing that Buddhists have no clue what God is. Consciousness is God. Of course you need God. God is the observer of all Buddhist phenomena and views. God is the hallucinator of Buddhism.
• The Christian says, "What was the thing that reincarnates as Nancy, Bob, and Jimmy?" The answer is God/You/Nothing/Mind/Spirit. Nancy, Bob, and Jimmy are hallucinations God (the infinite subject) is dreaming.
• The Buddhist says, "The continuity is that each episode has awareness." That is not quite correct. The continuity is ontological. The continuity is that all things are ontologically One because all difference is imaginary. Consciousness is inherently continuous because it is Unity.
• The Buddhist says Brahman is not needed. This is false. Consciousness is Brahman so it is definitely needed. Brahman is God. Brahman is everything.
• The Buddhist says, "Just because there is awareness does not mean it belongs to the Cosmos." This is false. Of course awareness belongs to the Cosmos. The Cosmos is Consciousness.
• If awareness does not belong to an individual, then it belongs to Reality/Cosmos/God.
• The Buddhist says, "Buddhists reject the idea of God." That's because Buddhists aren't conscious of God. Buddhists are not Awake.
• The Buddhist says, "There is no single cause of the universe." Yes there is. The single cause is God.
• The Buddhist says, "It doesn't seem like Reality is a thing that can be separated from its constituents. It's just a concept." This is wrong. Reality is an infinite field that exists independently of its constituents. Reality is not a concept and cannot be reduced in the Buddhist way to constituent sensations. Reality is not just a bunch of sensations, that is very wrong.
• The Christian says, "Reality has some sort of endogenous native awareness so it." That's right. Reality is Truth, and Truth is natively self-luminous and self-aware. It is not really "aware", it is Truth being true. What both of them think of as awareness is actually just Truth being true. Neither one of them understands what awareness is.
• The Buddhist says, "We don't posit any Eternal things that reincarnate." That's the problem. He does not understand that Self/God/Truth/Reality is the Eternal thing.
• The Buddhist says, "It is not the case that there can be a permanent thing which is reincarnating." False. God/You are the permanent thing which is reincarnating. YOU is Eternal and permanent.
• The Christian dislikes that life is meaningless. Of course he dislikes that. Ego's job is to invent meaning. What he's missing is that meaning exists, but it is self-created. Meaning is something God is hallucinating for itself. If meaning is not hallucinated, it does not exist. Being has no inherent meaning.
• To answer the Christian's question: The point of incarnation is for God to dream. God wants to experience dreaming so it can better understand itself.
• The Christian wants Reality to have a cosmic purpose without realizing that God/Being itself is more profound than any human purpose. Just being conscious of God is more meaningful than any human purpose.
• The Christian says, "Personally, I need a reason". He is conflating survival with spirituality. God does not exist to give your mind meaning or purpose. God exists to give you existence itself.
• The Christian says that Buddhists lacks a ground for truth claims and that all truth needs to be grounded in something. This is false. In fact, the opposite is the case. Truth cannot have a ground because Truth is the ground for everything else. You can't ground Truth because Truth is the groundless ground.
• The Christian says that "human sense are fallible". Actually this is false. Experience is absolute. What you see is absolute Truth itself. Sensation is not fallible, it is true by definition. All Being is Truth.
• Christianity cannot be grounded in anything outside of human senses because Christianity is entirely human senses. If you cannot trust human senses then you cannot trust Christianity.
• The Christian says, "We know that logic exists because it is grounded in the mind of God." The problem here is that this still assumes the reliability of experience and the senses. The problem is that the Christian does not know that God exists or what God is. You can't know that logic is truthful just because you believe in God because your belief could be wrong, and even if God exists, logic could still be wrong. God's existence does not guarantee the validity of logic. The notion that if God existed God would no deceive you, is very wrong. Of course God is deceiving you, that's what life is. There is not life without God's deception.
• The Buddhist says, "Let's say there is God. How it is that we know there is this God, unless we do it through our senses and through logic?" You know through Being. You know God by Being God. God is knowable because your Being is God's Being. You can know God only because you are identical to God.
• Neither the Christian nor Buddhist understands what Truth is.
• The Christian says, "Buddhism has a grounding problem." But Christianity has an even bigger grounding problem. Every worldview has a grounding problem, this is not special to Buddhism. Even science has a grounding problem.
• On the topic of suffering: Is suffering bad? No. Bad is an invention. Nothing is bad.
• The Christian asks, "Why should I want to escape suffering?" There is no reason. If you want to suffer, go ahead. The Christian is looking for normativity, which is wrong. Nothing about God is normative. Buddhism does not require anyone to escape suffering. Buddhism is a path for those who are sick of suffering and looking for a permanent solution. No one is forcing you to be a Buddhist, unlike in Christianity where everyone must be Christian or go to Hell.
• The Christian does not understand that bad has no ontological reality at all. Nothing is ontologically bad.
• No one is forcing you to escape the cycle of suffering if you don't want to.
• The Christian is intuitively right that escaping suffering is not the highest goal of spirituality. The point of spirituality is not to escape suffering but to be conscious of God. But consciousness of God tends to reduce suffering. But the Christian is right that Buddhism's over-focus on escaping suffering is misguided.
• The Buddhist says, "Reincarnation only makes sense in the absence of an Eternal subject." This is false. The Eternal subject is Buddha-nature/God.
• The Christian says, "Suffering leads to a greater good." That's a good point, which is why it is wrong to demonize suffering. Suffering isn't wrong or bad, suffering is essential to life, which is why it exists.
• Christianity is dumber than Buddhism, but Buddhism is dumber than God.

Again, I am warning you, Buddhism is not God-Realization. This is obvious because Buddhists reliably do not understand what God is, and they have certainly not transcended God. Buddhism deconstructs experience into sense phenomena, which makes realizing God problematic. Buddhism also dogmatically rejects God a priori without even bothering to look for God. Deep down the Buddhist believes there is no God, which is wrong. The Buddhist is God but never understands himself enough to realize it.

Corruption is question-begging and circular. Look at this: If we tell a corrupt person, “You are corrupt”, he will look at himself and say, “What are you talking about? I’m not corrupt, you are corrupt for calling me corrupt! How dare you!” He does this because his mind is lost in self-biased question-begging and circularity. When mind is corrupt, mind looks at itself and sees itself as not corrupt precisely because the criteria it’s using to judge itself is corrupt. In this way mind becomes lost in its own wrongness. Mind is so wrong that it sees its own wrongness as righteousness. The thorniness of corruption is that the corrupt entity is too lost in unconscious survival to recognize its own corruption. A corrupt entity is like zombie that can’t be reasoned with.

Corruption is an epistemic and ontological issue. Mind lacks an independent anchor point outside itself to ground itself in truth, but mind does not know that about itself. Mind assumes that it is grounded in external truths like science, “reality”, religion, objective morality, social justice, evolutionary psychology, or something like that. But the real truth is Mind has no external anchor points, ever. When mind thinks it has an external ground, mind starts committing evil because it doesn’t take self-reflection, self-bias, circularity, and self-deception seriously. But when Mind knows that it has no external ground, it understands that Mind is entirely the source of its own reality, which makes Mind take self-reflection, self-bias, circularity, and self-deception seriously.

Morality is the opposite of what people think it is. Morality does not come from being grounded in an external source of truth or right & wrong. Morality comes from understanding that there is no reality outside your own Mind, so anything you believe is right, is right. True morality only comes when Mind understands that if it convinces itself that genocide is good, then that becomes reality. Understanding that, Mind becomes very careful and construct-aware. There cannot be morality without construct-awareness. Which is why religious people are so immoral. Morality is not about adhering to objective rules of right & wrong, morality is when Mind realizes there are no rules at all! The 10 Commandments are not morality, morality is when Mind realizes that Mind invented the 10 Commandments. True morality dawns when Mind realizes its own absolute power. Without that, Mind does not fathom how dangerous Mind is. God is the highest Good because God knows that anything it imagines is Reality. The less humans understand that, the more bad they become. Good is when Mind takes complete responsibility for its Creation.

Ta-daaaaa!

The entire problem of corruption is the problem of a corrupt judge judging himself to not be corrupt because he is corrupt. How delicious!

Case in point:

(Skip to timestamp 1:40)

My biggest frustration with writing my book is that I write some amazing stuff, but then I have to sit on it for years until the book is finished. Today I wrote some amazing stuff, I am excited to share it, but I can't share it for years to come because it needs to wait for the entire book to be complete. I have 100's of thousands of amazing words to share, which are already written, and 100's of thousands more words to share which have not yet been written but will be written soon, but I must keep it all hidden for a long time. It does not feel good, but it also feels good. I wish I could share it immediately, but that would spoil the impact of the book.

Writing a magnum opus is frustrating :o(

This channel has very good counter-arguments to much of the alternative Egyptology that's popular on YouTube, like the channel UnchartedX.

I like to study the alt-Egyptology scene because it's a good source of epistemic pervertry. There is much epistemic slop in alternative Egyptology. This is the Graham Hancock crowd. These people mostly believe in an ancient advanced lost civilization that had advanced machinery and even computers. To me this just smells patently false. But they run their entire understanding of Egypt through that paradigmatic lens, which leads to all sorts of bad science and history. I think most of alternative Egyptology is false. I don't know for sure, but that's what seems most likely to me. I do not think that Egypt was built by aliens or a mysterious lost civilization. I think alt-Egyptologists are mostly just confirming and rationalizing their own biases. Which again underscores the importance of being aware of your biases and rationalizations.

Scientific rigor is not all bad. It exists because it is necessary in much of science. Be careful not to take my critiques of science as me rejecting scientific rigor. I am a fan of intellectual rigor, obviously, since I am a fan of truth. My beef with science is that it lacks intellectual rigor. Materialism is not rigorous. Denial of God is not rigor, no matter how much they frame it to be.

Do I believe that ancient Egyptian granite vases were made with computerized machinery? Hell no. They were made by hand using clever techniques that alt-Egyptologists lack the imagination to imagine. I also think the Pyramids were made with clever but simple techniques. Do not underestimate the power of simple but clever techniques. You do not need a modern lathe to make such a vase, in my opinion. Granted, I am not an expert in any of this. These are just my intuitions.

If there was a lost advanced civilization, I find it hard to believe that zero of their machinery survived. We would have found at least one advanced machine. But we've found none. And no, the Antikythera Mechanism does not count. On this basis I reject the Graham Hancock paradigm of archaeology. It is a trap akin to conspiracy theories. People just can't resist doing wild speculation about Egypt. Yes, mysticism is real, but we need to be more epistemically conservative.

A very toxic, sadistic new online cult:

Thanks to forum member Thought Art for sharing the video.

How did I originally deconstruct science? Where did the idea for it come from?

Here’s how it happened. This is the genealogy of it for me:

In high school I was an atheist arguing with Christians about God when I saw that they were not interested in questioning their own beliefs but just rationalizing them. So I said that’s obviously wrong. But then when I looked at my own atheist arguments against God, I realized that I was also rationalizing. I saw my own double-standards. If it's wrong for Christians to do it, it must be wrong for everyone to do it. And so I realized that every perspective, every worldview, behaves in fundamentally the same way as Christianity. I saw that the question-begging present in Christianity is present in every ideology, every philosophy, every worldview, including science. This made me realize that if Christians could delude themselves so badly with Christianity, scientists could delude themselves with science. Not because science is a religion. Science is not a religion. I am not saying that. I am saying something more threatening. Science is question-begging and does not care to examine that because it assumes it can’t be that wrong. But that’s exactly what Christianity does. Christianity refuses to look at its own question-begging. But so does everyone.

The key insight is that the problems of Christianity have nothing to do with the content of Christian beliefs. It doesn't matter if you believe in angels, or unicorns, or quarks. The problem is deep and structural. It is a structural problem of Mind at large. The problem isn't even just epistemic, it is ontological because Mind has nothing but itself to ground itself in. You can't escape this problem just by being scientific. But every scientist thinks he can escape it by being more scientific. This was my fundamental disagreement with science. I saw that every scientist was wrong on this point because they weren't taking epistemology seriously. I saw this very early, before I turned 20 years old, but I did not have the words and skill to articulate it as clearly as I can now. I just knew there was something deeply true there.

In arguing with Christians I realized that the stupidity of Christians is not unique to Christianity or to religion but inherent to the human mind. This is the essence of true philosophy and why science cannot replace philosophy. It is ironic that the reason I found God was because at 17 years old I realized that if Christians can be that stupid, so could everyone else, including me. The Christian was my mirror to see my own double-standards and question-begging. Whenever you see someone being really stupid, rather than laugh or criticize, stop and reflect on how your mind uses the same bag of tricks. Philosophy is not rocket science, it is about being a stickler on proper fundamentals.

It is valuable to study the genealogy of your own ideas, to see where they came from and what motivated them. But you have to be accurate and honest about it, otherwise your self-deception will deepen. The mind will bullshit itself about why it holds the view it holds because it holds it as true.