Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 84
I thought this was obvious, but I see some people aren't getting it, so let's make it explicit.
From your point of view, you have no idea whether anything I say is true. From your point of you view, I could be lying, deluded, have some kind of hidden agenda, factually wrong, or just eccentric.
Notice the key words there: "From your point of view". And that's all that matters. It doesn't matter whether I believe what I'm saying it true, or how eloquently I say it, or whether it actually is true.
This is proper epistemology 101. What's true for me is not true for you. Everything I say — especially things like my personal mystical experiences — are MY truths. If you're serious about learning and doing this work, you need to cross-reference all your sources, including me. Don't be lazy. Don't just assume, "Oh, Leo is probably right." No! You cannot know that until you've directly experienced the things I speak about for yourself or at least corroborated what I say with a few other sources you respect.
And I'm not just talking about things I say about enlightenment. I'm talking everything I ever say. Even the very practical self-help stuff like how to run a business.
And this doesn't just apply to my teachings, but EVERYTHING you ever learn from any human being. It doesn't matter how well-respected or well-spoken the person is, or how genuine they appear. It doesn't matter whether it's Einstein, Gandhi, Jesus, the Buddha, Ekhart Tolle, a textbook, your doctor, your life coach, your professor, your Rabbi, your guru, your best friend, a DMT alien, or Zeus speaking down from the clouds. The whole point is that mere words coming out of a being's mouth do not mean jack. You have to do the work of verifying whether those words actually correspond to reality FOR YOU.
If you don't do this, I guarantee you will get things wrong. This is a non-negotiable principle of life.
When I speak of "Absolute Truth" people sometimes hear that and think, "Oh, that means he really believes it. How could he be so gullible?" It makes me sounds like a dogmatist taking a position. No. That's only a surface resemblance. What people don't understand is how much skepticism I go through behind the scenes. You just don't see it. I'm more skeptical than the biggest skeptic you've ever seen. That's precisely why I'm then able to say things like "Absolute Truth". I do not say such things lightly. When I say something like that, I've cross-referenced it with dozens of diverse, high-quality sources. And you must do the same.
If you haven't gone through at least a few years of your life plagued by crippling doubt, you're not doing it right. Don't even take for granted that your mother is your mother. Words are cheap.
One enlightenment experience rarely gets rid of the ego completely.
Here's how to understand why:
No doubt you've heard of the metaphor likening the ego to a droplet of water separated from the ocean, until it finally merges back in. But this makes the process sound deceptively simple. When we look at how water droplets ACTUALLY work, we see the truth of the matter.
Watch closely. Think of each bounce as another enlightenment experience.
"Like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind."
The perfect Absolute Infinity song:
BTW, for those of you doing the Life Purpose Course, study Sting. This guy is a fucking life purpose beast! Selling over 100 million records, net worth of over $300 million dollars, 16 Grammies, 4 Academy Award nominations, a career spanning 45 years. Most of it done solo. One of the most prolific musicians of all time. A man who clearly found his purpose and knocked it out of the stratosphere.
That's how powerful life purpose is. Stop thinking small! Your purpose is bigger than you can imagine in your wildest dreams. It's way bigger than you. Tap into the infinite creative force of the universe. It's right there! Stop dicking around and make it happen.
The ultimate nature of reality is just like a Water Wiggly toy.
When you question what the "substance" of reality is, it slips through your fingers, because every part of it is defined recursively via some other part of itself. No matter how hard you try to grasp it, it will always flip itself inside out. Because you're trying to use IT to grasp IT! But it can't grasp it because it is it! The key is to become conscious of this to such a degree that the master frame — existence vs nonexistence — is seen to be undefined. Everything is undefined. That's the ultimate nature of being. And being is all there ever can be. Being and nonbeing turn into one.
Enlightenment is like picking a combination lock with 5 or 10 disks inside. As you line them all up, some will fall back out of place. Patiently you line them all back up. The final disk is what you consider "existence vs non-existence" or "objective reality". It's the master frame which frames and anchors your ENTIRE experience of life. You believe there is such a thing as objective reality, and you believe, that this belief is not a belief, but objectively true. But in fact, it's nothing more than a groundless belief! As soon as you truly cognize the significance of that, epistemology fuses with metaphysics, and everything becomes up for grabs. Everything becomes relative, including your existence and the existence of the universe. You go into an infinite free fall. The whole house of cards implodes. Everything becomes unknown. As this happens, you will come to the barrier of sanity/insanity. You must surrender to it with grace. You will also come to the barrier of life/death. You must surrender to it with grace. And then you and the entire world will fall all the way down, down, down. Into the Godhead. An actual infinite singularity without dimension or substance.
The most important question is not Who am I? or What am I? The most important question is: What is the substance of reality?
Keep constantly wondering, What is the substance of reality? What is it?!!!
So... I got to the bottom of reality.
Only to discover there's nothing there.
But what a trip it was!
A trip so deep, you never quite come back.
Let me tell you...
Everything is made out of itself.
Like a cat unraveling a yarn that ends up unraveling the cat.
A churning singularity, with no beginning or end.
Everything points to itself. Trying to explain itself to itself through itself, slipping, slipping through itself.
Beyond physicality, beyond the universe, beyond death, beyond awareness, beyond existence & non-existence.
Too insane to care about insanity.
Down, down, down.
Into a dimension unknown.
Like a bottomless floor falling through a bottomless floor.
Into a writhing, bottomless void, denser than the center of a thousand suns.
Into the heart of an infinite-headed hydra.
The Godhead.
An infinite-dimensional fractal.
A runaway chain reaction. An infinite positive feedback loop. Drunk with infinite power. Unstoppable!
OH! MY! GOD!
Infinite universes spawned every nanosecond.
Infinite universes inside every universe.
Infinity flipping itself inside-out inside itself. For eternity.
Nirvana, Paradise.
The Holiest of all Holies.
So empty it MUST be full. So full it MUST be empty.
Absolutely substance-less.
Absolutely relative. Forever unable to define itself to itself because it is itself.
It is what it ain't.
A cosmic circle jerk. So incestuous! Making love to itself for eternity. An infinite orgy.
An infinite human centipede.
A trillion orphans dying hungry on the streets? It's all GOOD!
Too good to be true. And yet it is!
Alive and creative as a motherfucker.
So utterly meaningless it collapses and supernovas into infinite meaning.
The mindfuck to end all mindfucks because it out-fucks them all.
Everything is nothing. Nondual. No Self. The SELF. ONE.
I am Allah, YHWH, Buddha, Christ, Shiva, Krishna, Shakti, Maya, Brahman, Rama, Ein Sof. The Alpha and the Omega.
Meditation?? Lol
Not consciousness, not awareness. BEING. Nameless, unnameable BEING.
All beings are ONE. Immortal. Untouchable.
Nothing to fear.
Reality is an infinite strange-loop. Death by delicious circularity.
Like looking into a microscope and seeing the back of your head.
An infinite hallucination machine, hallucinating its own machinery.
Software so powerful it's virtualizing its own hardware.
Absolutely inevitable. More inevitable than a mathematical proof.
The ultimate hero's journey, without a hero.
Heartbreakingly beautiful. Soberingly beautiful. Too beautiful for tears.
SUBLIME. DIVINE. FLAWLESS. INEFFABLE. STUNNING. IMPOSSIBLE. A perfect miracle.
Irreducibly mystical.
ENORMOUS beyond all measures of enormity.
TOTAL!
TOTAL!
TOTAL!
ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTE.
The only thing there is, yet the one thing that cannot be pointed to.
Mu.
Everything is understood. INFINITE UNDERSTANDING. The circle is complete.
But no one will ever understand!
Infinite ignorance.
As it must be.
You want the Truth? You can't handle the Truth.
Here's a cool website which shows you how to apply systems thinking to environmental problems.
It's a great example of the power and wisdom of Spiral Dynamics Stage Yellow.
Although it specifically focuses on environmentalism, notice how generally-applicable the concepts are.
That site has many pages worth reading.
How could you apply some of these lessons in your life?
Here's another metaphor for thinking about the ultimate nature of reality:
Imagine, if you will, an infinite chameleon.
Oh, common on! It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. Put on your thinking-cap and play along.
A regular chameleon is only able change itself in one way: by changing colors. Which equals one degree of freedom. But imagine a creature which is so flexible that it's able (somehow) to be a chameleon in every way possible. Meaning, it has infinite degrees of freedom. Imagine it could freely morph its size, shape, texture, temperature, smell, bones, cells, molecules, atoms, and even the physical laws which govern its entire being.
How could it do that?
Well... it would have to actually be limitless. As in: without limit. As in: an unlimited, all-powerful chameleon. (Don't worry, he's only a danger to pesky flies.)
What would such a creature look it?
Well, not much like a standard chameleon, that's for sure. It wouldn't even be right to call it a creature because a "creature" is a label we invented to refer to a set of certain constrains upon infinite degrees of freedom. To be a "creature" precisely means that you're not free to be something else, like a coffee table. So this thing is not really a creature. But it's also not a "thing", because to be a "thing" is also a set of constrains upon infinite degrees of freedom. So this infinite chameleon would most closely resemble no-thing. Why nothing? Because, imagine that every property sort of cancels itself out by its negation, like the positive and negative integers might if you tried to add them all together.
But notice, this would not be your ordinary notion of nothingness, like some kind of black, lifeless void. Instead, imagine this "nothingness chameleon" as having infinite degrees of freedom, allowing "him" to masquerade as everything. He would be bursting at the seams with infinite potential, ready to actualize into something concrete.
So why bother calling it a chameleon then?
Because, the essence of its nature is chameleon-like to the Nth degree. Its very structure exudes illusion and misdirection, for which I think the label "chameleon" is apropos. Plus, everyone knows chameleons are cool.
Could a monster-sized infinite chameleon be hiding right under your nose right this very second?
Impossible! Unscientific! Illogical! Just a silly thought experiment! Mere philosophy! Balderdash!
Maybe. Or maybe... if you stop for a second and consciously look around you, you'll notice that you're inside the infinite chameleon right now! After all, where else could you be?
Perhaps you are the infinite chameleon, hiding from itself!
Granted, such a discovery would be rather implausible, outrageous, and embarrassing to admit. After all, how could a chameleon hide himself from himself? But then again, it is a chameleon we're talking about here. Have you seen how regular chameleons hide in the jungle? They're pretty good at it. And they've only mastered 1 degree of freedom. Imagine what an infinite chameleon could do to hide himself from you.
Maybe you can spot his hoof-prints in the sand ;)
P.S. The nice thing about chasing down infinite chameleons is that there can only be one of him to find ;)
P.P.S. Please don't poke or worship the infinite chameleon. It makes him cry ;)
Here's some political analysis you'll never see on the evening news: Trump acts the way he acts because he is at Spiral Dynamics stage Red/Orange.
Trump is a really interesting case study of applied Spiral Dynamics. I hope you're seeing this as it unfolds.
Here's a quick chart of the Spiral Dynamics Stages of Consciousness which will help you make sense of all the "Red", "Blue", "Orange", "Green", "Yellow" words I'll be using.
If you're a student of Spiral Dynamics, and you really grasp that model, it should have allowed you to predict that Trump would behave as President, PRECISELY as he is now behaving. There's nothing surprising about it. It perfectly correlates with his level of consciousness, which is not so much Orange (as people assume), but Red.
The following is a list of characteristics of Spiral Dynamics stage Red which I pulled straight from the book and various Spiral Dynamics charts. You be the judge of how well it applies to Trump:
- Egocentric, Warlord Level, Express Self Impulsively
- Worldview is: "My needs"
- Focus: I want to be in charge
- Feudal, exploitative
- Be what you are, do what you want, regardless
- Stands tall, expects attention, demands respect, and calls the shots
- Enjoys self to the fullest right now without guilt or remorse
- Conquers, out-foxes, and dominates over aggressive characters
- When confronted with obstacles: fights tooth and nail, takes no prisoners, gets down and dirty
- Coercion and offers one cannot refuse with fear or pain or even death
- Quest for: heroic status, power, glory
- Method: align with power, take what you need
- Pitfalls: anxiety, depression, guilt, cannot build stable nations
- Gratification, glitz, conquest, action, impulse and ruthless, lives for the now
- Courageous, determined, and powerful
- Leadership style: the big boss
- Organizational style: exploitative empire
- Stimulates the impulsive self while generating powerful images of aggressiveness, conquest, and predator/prey relationships
- World is like a jungle where the tough and strong prevail while the weak serve; nature is an adversary
- Power/action; asserting self to dominate others; control; exploitative
- Excitement, proving individual prowess, cunning dominance
- Fight to survival despite what others want
- Excited by stories of company heroes, by celebrating feats of conquest, and by evidence of respect
- Where the "Big Me" leaves his personal mark
- Basic motives: Enforce power over self, others, and nature through exploitative independence
- The thinking is egocentric, the structures are empires, the process is exploitative
- Triggered by: potential shame, loss of control, disrespect
- Exploits the masses to accomplish the desires of the few
- Things tend to be physical, emotion-laden, and gut-level
- Examples of stage Red: the rebellious teenager, gang members, mafia bosses, drug lords, dictators, frontier mentalities, Atilla the Hun, James Bond villains, soldiers of fortune, wild rock stars, con artists
Read the descriptions of stage Red here, and compare them to descriptions of stage Orange.
The reason that many people were/are surprised by Trump's behavior is because they mistakenly confuse him for a stage Orange businessman guy. But he's not nearly that evolved. He actually exhibits many heartless, impulsive, thuggish, stage Red characteristics. Trump is a blend of Red/Orange. Which is why he's so dangerous. People assume he's just like your typical businessman, but he's not. A typical Fortune 500 CEO is stage Orange, perhaps even starting to tap into stage Green. Which why many of the best business leaders do not support Trump.
Why did Trump win the election? There were many factors of course, but in the big picture, it was because a good chunk of the electorate is at stage Blue/Orange consciousness, and they saw him reflecting their values. Trump cleverly exploited these stages by hitting at their weakest values and fears, and by pitting them against stage Green/Yellow values which flourished a bit under Obama's presidency.
A collective ego backlash was rather expected. Nations are huge systems with huge inertia and homeostasis. Any dramatic move towards Green/Yellow will create a lot of hooting and hollering because stage Blue/Orange doesn't just not understand Green/Yellow, they view Green/Yellow as idealistic lunacy. A large part of Blue/Orange identity is defined in opposition to Green/Yellow. As in, "I'm not like those weed-smoking hippies & academics".
Ultimately, many conservatives (stage Blue) are gonna be disappointed with Trump because they think they made a deal with a stage Orange guy, but he's actually half stage Red. Trump doesn't value conservativism, religion, morality, ethics, law, or tradition — he values SELF, power, and glory at all costs. He is the victim of his own level of consciousness, as we all are.
American society is drowning in stage Orange materialism run amok. The upper limits of stage Orange consciousness should be abundantly clear if you're doing this work. The only way forward will be to stage Green, but the resistance from stage Orange, and Blue, will be fierce. One of the most dangerous scenarios is electing leaders who want to double-down on stage Orange. More materialism and success will NOT solve our problems because that IS our chief problem. Success, like almost any other quantity in a complex system, backfires when it goes unchecked.
People vote — first and foremost — based on their level consciousness. Because consciousness underpins psychology, values, judgments, motivations, ideals, and fears. If we want to elect better leaders, we need to help the populace raise their own level of consciousness first. Helping them understand Spiral Dynamics — by teaching it in schools around the country — would be a good first step. But of course, even the effort to modernize our education system will be viewed as a threat by stages Blue and Orange.
I hope you're seeing that all the complex, academic-sounding topics I talk about — like Spiral Dynamics or systems thinking — are totally practical. As I hope this example shows you. The deeper your understanding of the fundamental dynamics of systems and consciousness, the better you'll be able to navigate life.
Perhaps one of Trump's most dangerous qualities is that he is not a system's thinker AT ALL. And yet he is trying to make changes to one of the largest and most complex systems in the world: the U.S. government. If you've studied systems thinking even a bit, it should be obvious why this will be disastrous.
Credit: Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck & Christopher Cowan, and the research of Clare Graves
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