Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 33

Stupidity is a beautiful concept:

I've spent my whole life studying collective stupidity and how to personally avoid it, even though I didn't know it had this name.

We are now in a once-in-a-lifetime moment of stupidity.

A hallmark of stupidity is thinking that you can get away with corruption scot-free just because everyone else is in on it with you. That's when the bus goes off the cliff.

And of course the stupid people think that everything is peachy.

The Trump administration will be the most corrupt in American history. This is absolutely certain. What's uncertain is how bad the damage will be. It will be somewhere between medium damage to a bloodbath. I'm going back and forth in my mind about which end of that range it will be. Very hard to say. And frankly it's too depressing to contemplate the worst case scenarios.

Democracy in the hands of the stupid is a recipe for evil. Which is why the ancient Greek philosophers had a low opinion of democracy. The only way democracy can generate good is if the people are well-educated:

"A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?"

-- George Washington

As I write this, the Trump administration has fired 50% of the employees of the Department of Education.

Remember, when the Devil takes charge, the first thing he does is corrupt the highest sources of truth, which is education and spirituality. And of course he corrupts any regulatory bodies that might check his abuse of power and that of his rich and corrupt minions. Then the reign of evil can truly begin.

I just heard this shocking story:

The story goes that the name for kangaroos originates from a time when some British official first arrived in Australia and saw a kangaroo. He pointed at it and asked a local aboriginal, "What do you call those things?" The aboriginal told him, "Kangaroo", by which he meant, "I don't understand."

This story may or may not be true. But either way, it's quite a perfect story for our epistemic purposes.

Nothing you know is real.

This is Kangaroo Awakening. This cannot be unseen.

Update: I have been told that this story is false. But it's a great story.

How is it possible that a human biological emotion like love could play any role in the ultimate nature of reality? This seems childish, unscientific, and stupid. Indeed — it seems that way.

First, you realize that there is no universe, no matter, no biological beings, there is only Consciousness. Then you realize that love is something Consciousness is doing. What is love doing? Love is Consciousness being captivated by the beauty of some finite aspect of itself. Like Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection in the pond. This recognition and appreciation of beauty creates the feeling or emotion humans call love. Then you realize that if Consciousness appreciated all aspects of itself equally it would literally fall in love with itself so deeply that it would move from feeling or reflection to unity with its beloved. The union of Consciousness with the object of its love results in metaphysical identity. The reflection of the observed in the observer merges to the point where the two become one. Consciousness reflects so deeply that it realizes that the object of its love was always identical to itself — closing the open circle. Consciousness achieves metaphysical Unity through self-reflection and re-collection. Consciousness realizes that identity is the highest form of Love. And since all distinctions and divisions are imagined by Consciousness, everything is ultimately identical with itself. A=A. When Consciousness realizes that it has been imagining all differences, all divisions, it drowns in a singularity of pure Love as it reunites with all of itself. The human emotion of love is now radically and existentially recontextualized as the absolute ontological union of all of Consciousness with itself. The tip of the human emotional iceberg is now understood to connect to the one and only substance of reality. A=A is fully realized. Finally, in Absolute Unity, Consciousness discovers its true nature: Infinite Love.

So now you see, Love is not an emotion, it is an Absolute. Finally, you understand that reality is nothing but Love. Love isn’t just real, it’s the only reality. Love is more real than atoms, than universe, than science, than rationality, than biology, than chemistry, than physics, than human beings. Of course. Exactly as it should be. Now, finally, everything makes perfect sense. The only thing that should ever exist is LOVE, and that's absolutely how it is.

The trap of love is that what seems childish and stupid, turns out to be so advanced that it can only be understood by infinite intelligence. It turns out that you projected your own materialist, rationalist, human stupidity on the very substrate of existence. You were so blind — you were such a godless rat! — you missed Absolute Love! You were so busy chasing cheese you never bothered to check whether the whole world was made of cheese.

Reality is LOVE. Nothing more advanced can be understood. This understanding is endless. You will never comprehend it. Love is so deep that God itself doesn’t fully understand it. As it turns out, the movement of every molecule in the Universe is just an attempt by God to understand LOVE — to understand Itself. Love is the telos. You were born of love, you will spend your whole life starving for love, and you will die drowning in LOVE. Because LOVE is the only game in town.

LOVE.

Of course. It's so fucking obvious in hindsight.

It is logically impossible for anything to exist but LOVE. Such is the brilliance of God.

Imagine God performed just one miracle, ever. The greatest miracle imaginable. A miracle of such staggering genius and beauty that no one but God had enough vision to recognize nor understand it. And that miracle was called: The Universe.

Don’t you see? God only ever needed one miracle. The miracle of its own existence. Just think about it: Why would God be so stupid as to only do a miracle here or there in time and space? Obviously everything God does should be a miracle. God is just ONE endless infinite miracle. What do you call a Universe from nothing? God pulled a Universe out of a hat for you, and you sit there asking, Where are the miracles?

Out of ignorance humans keep hoping for local miracles, for miracles within The Miracle. It never occurs to them that the only reason God doesn’t grant you personal miracles is because you don’t have enough intelligence to see that if your wish was granted it would make the Universe worse, breaking its Perfection. Any miracle you can think of would make the Universe worse. You’re just too ignorant and selfish to understand why.

God’s miracle is complete when you realize you are the miracle. Don’t you see? Your life is the miracle. Which is why the greatest impiety is taking your life for granted. All proper living stems from the answer to this one question: How can I live to honor the miracle that God gave me?

Does living like an epistemic pig honor the miracle of Mind?

The reason these teachings work is because they properly identify what is most fundamental and important. These teaching are grounded in ultimate first principles thinking. The first principle is respect for truth. The first principle is to treat truth as though it were God — because it is. From living in alignment with the first principle, everything else good follows.

A moderator (Integral) on the Actualized Forum created and shared the following AI-generated song with truth/metaphysics based lyrics, per my earlier quote about how humans sing about the wrong things.

It's very good and shows you the power and potential of metaphysical and epistemic lyrics as an untapped music niche:

What I hope you learn is that this philosophical work we do is not just theoretical or spiritual. Once you jailbreak your mind, your creative intelligence can be unleashed to advance mankind in any field. In music, film, art, novels, comic books, game design, therapy, coaching, healthcare, business, technology, science, politics, engineering, invention, etc.

What I'm teaching you is not merely to realize God, but to connect your mind to God in such a profound way that it inspires you creatively to unleash innovative forms of art, business, craft, and human endeavor. You can use these teachings to become a world-class innovator and creator in any domain, and of course, earn millions along the way. If you want to become a millionaire, you better take creativity and innovation very seriously. And nothing will unleash your ability to innovate more than jailbreaking your mind. The key to innovation is reaching autonomous mind. I can show you how to do that.

If your mind was connected to God, you could write a hit song that could sell millions of copies and set you up for life. So make sure you deeply consider the massive potential here. This work is not just about enlightenment. This work is about unleashing the full potential of the Infinite Mind that you are. You could pursue this work just for the sake of doing better art.

If you jailbreak your mind, you can invent entirely new genres of music, or any art.

God is creativity. God is Beauty. God is an artist. God is design. God is innovation. God is endless imagination. God is cleverness. God is genius.

Nathan Jacobs is an academic philosopher with surprisingly excellent analysis of philosophy and theology. He's an example of high quality philosophical perspective, non-ideological and epistemically careful. He's an Orthodox Christian, which is an interesting twist on the usual. He has some deep knowledge of Eastern Christian theology as well Western analytic philosophy. His videos are worth watching. Lots of value there. I don't agree with all his views, and you certainly shouldn't expect a Christian to have a full understanding of God, but he does a solid job overall.

If you're looking for a steelman of Christianity, Nathan Jacobs is it. This is about as high as Christianity gets before you realize you should abandon it entirely.

More good videos from Nathan:

• The Case For Realism
• The Problem Of Divine Hiddenness
• Is Rational Unbelief In God Possible?
• The Anatomy Of The Religiously Unaffiliated

A lot of commentary can be added here. I will just make some random comments to spur your further contemplation:

• The more fundamental question is, What is real? What does it mean for anything to be "real"? These guys can't ask, "But do you think these things are real?" because none of them have ever seriously questioned what "real" means. What does it mean for anything at all to be real? Of course, if they had an answer to that they would be Awake and none of this philosophy or debate would take place.
• In a sense, anything that you can imagine is real, and the deeper you can imagine it the more real it is. That's what it means to say that reality is a dream/Mind.
• Consider the possibility that there can be various degrees or levels of realness. The ability to construct a conceptual category, distinction, or abstraction has a kind of reality to it, but conceptual reality is different from non-conceptual reality. Or, more accurately, Mind imagines that difference.
• Realism vs nominalism is ultimately a false and misleading dichotomy. Neither one is strictly right. The way things actually are is that you are dreaming up reality, but this dream has layers to it which are beyond your control. Those aspects of the dream outside your control are what realism emphasizes, and those aspects of the dream which are within human control, like social reality, are what nominalism emphasizes.
• As a good rule of thumb you can cut through the noise of this realism vs nominalism debate by thinking of reality as 50/50. Half of reality is structures which humans do not control, and half of it is social constructions. And these are blended so much that you cannot easily tell which is which. It is a mistake to operate in the world as though reality is mind-independent, but it is also a mistake to operate as though reality is entirely dependent on the human mind. 100% of reality is Mind, but not human mind and not social mind, a deeper Mind which humans don't understand or control.
• Jordan Peterson is gonna waffle between realism and nominalism because he's confused. On the one hand he needs to say that religion is right, but he also wants to say that science is right, and he doesn't know how exactly to reconcile those two things because he doesn't understand that science is imaginary. That's too radical of a notion for him to admit. On the other hand he cannot claim that literal religion is right because it sounds too unscientific and absurd. So he has to dance around in the middle while being evasive and vague. Because the structure of Consciousness is not clear in his own mind.
• Is Jordan Peterson a realist or nominalist? You're not going to get a meaningful answer to this question. The answer is, he's confused and poking around in the dark. As are most Western philosophers.
• Studying Kant is such a waste of time. Kant did not understand what God, reality, or morality were. Trying to understand Kant is like trying to understand a deeply confused man while thinking he's saying something profound. Trying to figure out whether Kant was a realist or anti-realist is a waste of time. And the same goes for trying to apply such labels to other philosophers like Plato, etc. You're just not going to make sense of reality this way. You're going to get lost in academic distinctions.
• Marxism is a profound corruption of Hegel. Marxists do not deserve to smell Hegel's shit. No Marxist understands Hegel. To call Marxists Hegelians is absurd, even though Marxists like Zizek dare to identify themselves as such.
• Mind is 100% constructing all of reality, but that doesn't mean it's your ego-mind, and that doesn't mean that anything goes, that there are not consistent and crucial patterns and structures which can be changed at the ego's whim. Gravity is imagined by Mind, but that does not mean it is within your human power to unimagine. You do unimagine it in your nightly dreams, but those dreams are beyond your control. You don't control your transitions for dreaming to waking, and you don't control your need for sleep, even though sleep is imaginary.
• What all sides are missing is that imagination IS reality. When you imagine men and women deeply enough, that difference becomes real, serious, and important. But that difference is not some eternal structure, it can easily be unimagined by Mind at large, and it can even be unimagined to some extent by human social conventions and consensus. Man and women are complex figments of Consciousness with aspects which are within human ability to unimagine and other aspects which are not. There is no clear cut easy answer here. In order to create a man and woman universal Mind is doing so very heavy serious imagination which is beyond any human mind to understand or undo. Which is why a trans person is not able to just unimagine their sex. The reason that trans people want hormones and surgery is because unimagining sex is beyond the capability of a human mind, because sex is so deeply imagined by universal Mind on your behalf. It's like trying to unimagine the moon. The moon is 100% imaginary, BUT, 1) imagination IS reality, and 2) a human ego-mind does not have enough consciousness to unimagine or reimagine the moon. Which is why humans build rockets. Rockets are imaginary, but they are necessary for humans to travel to the moon because the human mind is incapable of the levels of imagination necessary to just teleport to the moon. You could use your mind to teleport to the moon, but you're not conscious enough to do so.
• A better question you could ask here is, Are abstractions real? What is the reality of abstractions? This is not an easy thing to make sense of because you cannot think your way to the answer, you need massively higher consciousness to make sense of it. The answer is, if you can imagine an abstraction, it is real, as an abstraction right there in your mind. But you want to be conscious of the difference between an abstraction and a material form. "But which one is more real?" That's not such an intelligent question, because they are each real in their own way, with their own trade-offs. The abstraction of a cat is real, but it is different than the cat sitting in your lap. Then again, even that difference itself you can recognize as imaginary. It is not that some abstraction of a cat exists somewhere in heaven, the abstraction of a cat exists right now in your experience if you just contemplate it. And when you stop contemplating it, it stops existing.
• Is the archetype of a dragon real? Look! Everything you experience is real. If you pull up a dragon in your mind right now, it's real! There it is! It's a figment of consciousness. What does it mean? Well, whatever you imagine it means. It could just be a hollow mental picture, or it could be the cornerstone of some elaborate worldview with rich survival and even mystical significance. But it's up to you to construct/imagine that worldview. If you so desire, a dragon could be your God. Is that real? Is that true? It that useful? It could be, if you want to imagine it deeply enough. But were there actual dragons who walked to Earth? Well, don't forget that Earth and the history of the Earth are figments of Consciousness too. According to your imagination of the Earth, dragons probably are not part of the historical record, unless you wish to consider dinosaurs dragons. Were dinosaurs dragons or not? Well, that's up to you! Don't got asking God to tell you.
• If you were seriously Awake you would deeply appreciate the reality of dragons, as figments of Consciousness. I live in a reality where I appreciate demons, because they are beautiful forms within Mind. To me, a demon is no less real or beautiful than a chair. I can look at AI images of demons and wonder at their beauty and reality. But to a typical materialist human this makes no sense because they have such a narrow comprehension of what reality is. But I understand that the image of a demon in my mind is as existentially significant as a demon gnawing on Richard Dawkins' leg. Does Richard Dawkins comprehend this? No way.
• Not only can I appreciate the reality of abstract human categories, I can appreciate the reality of higher level meta-abstractions which the human mind can barely imagine. I can blend various abstractions in my mind, invent entirely new orders of reality, and appreciate them. But only because I have a serious grasp of what Consciousness is and how it works, and only because I am not sitting around fruitlessly arguing over whether Kant was a realist or nominalist or whatever. To me, a demon has more importance than Kant. While humans sit around arguing over what Kant said, I sit around appreciating demons in pure abstraction.
• But do dragons exist? Not for me on Earth. But dragons exist within Infinity/Mind. Everything exists within Infinity. That's what Infinity is. If you can imagine it, it exists within Infinity. And if you can't imagine it, it also exists within Infinity, you're just too weak-minded to see it ;) But what is this Infinity? Is Infinity more or less real than Earth? Infinity is maximum realness. You can't get realer than Infinity. Infinity is so real that it's too real to have a form. And yet, it's not different than form. If you were conscious enough you could realize that there's literally no difference between a cat, a dragon, and a demon. But good luck learning that from Kant or Jordan Peterson.
• A more interesting line of attack against Dawkins would be ask him, But are atoms literally true? Or better yet, Is Richard Dawkins literally true? See, Dawkins wants to be a simple literalist with regards to science, but that must ultimately fail because science is not a literal description of the world. Dawkins will have to do mental gymnastics to treat science as literally true. That's not going to fly under serious philosophical scrutiny. When we say, Richard Dawkins is real, what does that really mean? What is the reality of Richard Dawkins? That's far less obvious than Richard Dawkins wants to believe.
• JP wants to be a realist about God, but he doesn't know how to pull it off. How do you get God to be real and yet square that with the Bible being full of human bullshit that contradicts modern science? Unfortunately JP is so attached to the human bullshit that he doesn't know how to separate God from it. What really ought to be said about the Bible is this: "The Bible is full of human bullshit but God is real. Don't get distracted by the human stuff and focus on realizing God directly for yourself, which has nothing to do with Jesus, mythology, Christianity, humanity, or even morality. Do not try to be a good person, or a Christian, just realize what God actually is through contemplative inquiry and deconstructing all human stories, fantasies, and biases." That would be a crazy powerful teaching. But of course it requires surrendering the Christian identity — which is the whole game here. Ironically, to realize God you must stop being Christian. How profound, yet also entirely obvious, since for God to have any worth it cannot be limited to any human invention such a Christianity.