Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 76
Funny to find that there's a StackExchange about Buddhism. Maybe some of you will find it useful.
I'm a big fan of Noam Chomsky's political analysis, but when it comes to his thinking about metaphysics and religion the following video shows just how crude it is:
This is one of the world's greatest scientists, yet he's clueless about metaphysics and spirituality.
Here Chomsky is basically parroting the standard paradigm of scientific materialism / realism, which fundamentally misunderstands why religion exists.
The source of religion is NOT wishful thinking nor superstition, as many scientists believe. The irony is that holding such a view is deeply unscientific. Such a belief can only be held by people who have never engaged in serious spiritual practice or metaphysical inquiry.
Ignorance like this is unfortunately common among some of our greatest scientists. And that is because they do not make a serious study of epistemology, metaphysics, or spirituality. And the reason they don't is because their belief that spirituality is bullshit is an example of confirmation bias. If you believe that spirituality is bullshit, you will never do the spiritual practice required to discover that it's not bullshit. So from your POV it will always appear as though there is no evidence that spirituality isn't bullshit. Because your fundamental premise — that reality must be material and non-mystical — is wrong. Yet you are not openminded or intellectually curious enough to question it.
All of that is just an example of terrible epistemology and sloppy science. If you are a serious scientist you understand that you cannot pre-judge the results of an experiment before running it. But why then do you pre-judge spirituality and metaphysics before practicing it? Can you see your own hypocrisy here? This is no different than refusing to look into a telescope to see if Jupiter is a real planet because you have already decided that Jupiter isn't real, therefore it would be a waste of time to look. It's viciously circular logic. This vicious circularity isn't just a bug, it's feature. Such circularity is necessary to create a paradigm lock, which is necessary to construct a worldview, which is ultimately necessary for your mind to construct "reality". There is no "reality" without circular logic. Circular logic is how you construct the "physical world"! Ta-da!
Here's a fun example of strange loops from the Rollercoaster Tycoon game:
See, I told you this stuff has real-world consequences.
Strange loops are fundamental to the structure of reality.
If you're gonna be doing lots of psychedelics, you better have a solid theoretical understanding of what strange loops are because your mind will encounter some hairy ones and they will mindfuck you.
So when one day you realize that you crawled out of your own vagina — remember, I told you so ;)
The trickeries of the mind never cease to amaze. Case in point, this article by David Kupelian:
Democrats And The Dark Art Of Projection
Which is a master class in how to project one's own projections onto others by accusing them of projection! The boldness of it is impressive.
In this article a stage Blue worldview is projecting it's limited cognitive, moral, and spiritual development onto a stage Green worldview, thereby seeing Green as lower than Blue — which is precisely backwards. Green appears to be lower than Blue when seen from Blue's limited POV. But since Blue doesn't acknowledge that POVs are relative, Blue isn't aware of itself as a POV, thereby confusing itself with truth. A big part of what it means to be at stage Blue is that you cannot see your POV as just one POV among many others. If you were conscious of that, you'd grow out of Blue.
Notice that the reason this can happen is precisely because all points of view are relative, so there is no baseline to ground any point of view. So if you imagine that your opponents are projecting, they are! — according to your projection, which you imagine you are not doing. If you imagine you aren't projecting, that's enough to make it seem like you're not projecting. But of course all points of view are imaginary to begin with. Which is precisely what projection is trying to deny: "No, I'm not making stuff up, I'm just stating the truth while you're making stuff up!" << Yeah, that's something you're making up! "No I'm not! You are!" << You made that up too!
The #1 rule of projection is: the more you project, the more you accuse others of projecting, the more you deny your own projections.
To be really effective at projection you must attack the person you're projecting upon for projecting onto you before they've even made that accusation. By accusing them first, you deny them the ability to call you out for your projection. This is classic, classic gas-lighting.
So, for example, if you're cheating on your spouse, you must accuse your spouse of cheating on you before he/she accuses you. This makes it much harder for him/her to accuse you, even though you're the one who's cheating. You'd think that the cheater wouldn't be so obnoxious as to accuse the person he's cheating on of cheating on him (only a shameless asshole would do that), but its precisely because you think he wouldn't do it that he does do it! Because he can use your expectations of decency to cloak the truth from you. That's devilry 101. Devilry is all about finding bold ways of presenting falsehood as truth and truth as falsehood.
Projection is one of the trickiest mechanisms of self-deception. A Spiral Dynamics stage Blue mind especially tends not to notice its own projections.
Do liberals engage in projection? Of course. Most people do. But conservatives engage in it far more. And conservatives are much more likely to deny that they are projecting. Part of what it means to be more cognitively and spiritually developed on the Spiral is that higher stages are more aware when they are projecting while lower stages are totally in denial about it. It takes a lot of consciousness work to escape projection entirely. 99.9% of people cannot escape projection because they simply haven't done enough serious self-reflection. Transcending projection requires a profound understanding of how Self-Bias works, which again, most people are in denial about.
We'll talk more about projection in a future video since it's such an important topic.
All of my teachings are worthless unless you validate them in your direct experience. This stuff is far too profound to be heard or believed. Belief in what I say is a great obstacle to this work. You will spend years believing me only to realize that you made a big mistake. Yet at the same time, actively disbelieving me — trying to debunk me or debate me — is an even greater mistake. The correct method is to listen to what I say, consider it as an advanced possibility, and do the work to validate this possibility and feel it as your living reality. This work is about transforming your experience of reality.
I have no desire to make you believe in God or my teachings. What you believe is such a shallow level that it is irrelevant as far as this work goes. What matters is what you're conscious of, what state of consciousness you're in, and what the meta, cognitive structures of your mind are. This work is not about the contents of your mind. This work is structural. Think of this difference as the difference between apps vs the OS or BIOS on a computer. In our work here, we're not interested in changing the apps of the human mind, we're interested in changing the OS & even the BIOS. This work is meta work. This work is experiential. This work is about changing what reality is for you. You don't even know what that means yet. It will take you years of work just to appreciate what was just said. And that's as it must be. You can't know what you're missing until years of trial and error.
It would speed things along greatly for you to realize that we are not interested in getting you to believe things here. Anything you believe is far too shallow to help you. Belief is like a veil of fakery which obscures the doing of the real work. So be careful not to get tricked into thinking you are doing the work when you are merely rearranging your beliefs. The real work requires hours upon hours of precise mindfulness and accurate self-observation. Precision and accuracy in this work is important.
Towards this end it would help you greatly to distinguish between what is a belief, and what is not. Spend some time observing in your direct experience what is a belief, and what is not. Get really clear about this without getting caught up in the trap of judging whether a belief is true or false. What's more important than whether a belief is true or false is that you are conscious that it is a belief regardless. For example, "The Earth is round" is a belief regardless of whether its "true". Just because a belief is "true" does not mean it isn't problematic or doesn't distort your experience of reality. In this sense, scientific beliefs can be more problematic than religious ones because scientific beliefs are not usually acknowledged to be beliefs, or problematic — yet they are both.
Notice the distinct difference between believing a thing and direct experience. Notice that experience does not care what you believe. Although of course your beliefs greatly distort and color your experience.
And even though I call all this "work", you must find a way to do it so that you enjoy the process, rather than making it some chore that you must do. You will never be successful in this work as long as it feels like a chore. You must find a way to connect it with your passion for life. It must become an organic part of your life.
People often associate Love with happiness and sweetness. But they overlook the brutality of real Love.
You are never going to understand Love at an existential level until you confront Love at is rawest form, as shown above. Don't mistake Love for something that pleases your ego.
Another textbook example of devilry:
This sort of stuff happens on Wall Street every day. Ordinary people don't understand how much white collar crime goes on in America (and all over the world).
I just love finding juicy examples of devilry like this because it's so illustrative of how devilry works:
I have discovered a powerful new chemical which allowed me to have a direct communication with Infinite Intelligence.
Download the transcript below:
Infinite Intelligence Communication #001
Warning: radical openmindedness required.
If you're an avid gamer you've probably noticed the corruption which has infected the video game industry over the last 10 years: micro-transactions, loot boxes, gambling, season passes, games-as-service, bullshit limited editions, pre-mature bug-ridden releases, and other scammy tactics. Well, that's the epitome of stage Orange.
Here's but one perfect example:
As a gamer, make a distinction between Stage Orange vs Stage Green games. Stage Green games are more about heart and artistry than profits and milking gamers.
I love this example because it shows you how down-to-Earth and relevant Spiral Dynamics is.