Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 88

Extremely good take by Bill Maher:

Go vote to preserve democracy.

I'm coining the term Pure Philosophy.

Here's how I define it:

• Philosophy done for the sake of pure understanding of reality and Absolute Truth, regardless of consequence.
• Philosophical inquire free of history, named individuals, and famous philosophers.
• An impersonal collection — a catalogue — of all possible ideas and concepts that could explain reality, evaluated purely based on their merit, freely edited, reinterpreted, and blended to create the best possible understanding of reality. Some examples of pure concepts within philosophy:
  • The concept of God
  • The concept of solipsism
  • The concept that everything evolves
  • The concept that all dualities collapse into unity
  • The concept that mind and matter are entangled
  • The concept that science is a cultural construction
  • The concept of strange loops
  • The concept of no-self
  • The concept of stages of ego development
  • The concept that the universe is intelligent
  • The concept of self vs other
  • The concept of infinity, totality, everythingness, or oneness
  • The concept of self-deception
  • The concept of projection
  • The concept of bias
  • The concept of The Social Matrix
  • The concept that capitalism skews scientific research
  • The concept of survival shaping who you are
  • The concept that Love is not a human emotion but metaphysical oneness
  • The concept of recontextualization
  • The concept of Absolute Truth
  • The concept of going-meta
  • The concept of bootstrapping
  • The concept of radical openmindedness
  • The concept of asking powerful questions
  • The concept of relativity
  • The concept of deconstruction
  • The concept of systems thinking
  • The concept of holism
  • The concept of making distinctions
• Open-source. No individual has claim to any ideas as "his own". Ideas and concepts are treated as Universal, belonging to the Universal Mind.
• No debating, no arguing, no proving, no debunking, no ideology.
• No appeals to authority. Eliminate all authority figures. No credentials, no certificates, no PhDs, no Nobel prizes, no institutions, no bureaucracy, no experts. Ideas stand or die completely on their own merit.
• No funding conflicts of interest. No donors, no grants, no sponsorships, no corporate backers, no political backers, no fundraisers. No political ambitions or seeking of power.
• Absolutely all assumptions are questioned.
• Everything must be explained from scratch without any appeals to authority, history, status, cultural norms, or morality.
• Focuses on The Big Picture and takes serious the possibility of answering the deepest existential questions rather than technical minutia:
  • What are the right and wrong ways of doing philosophy?
  • What is reality?
  • Where did reality come from?
  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • What is Consciousness?
  • How to live the best life possible?
  • How to construct the best society for the good of all?
• Radical skepticism. No topic is off-limits for questioning. But also, not privileging skepticism over other perspectives and no turning skepticism into a dogma. Skepticism must also question and doubt itself.
• Endeavors to see reality free of all bias.
• A profound appreciation of and study of self-deception. The studying and documenting of all the sneaky and tricky dynamics and patterns of the mind. All the ways the mind fools itself, with mechanisms such as projection, denial, rationalization, confirmation bias, confabulation, demonization, scapegoating, double-standards, cherry-picking, fear, moralizing, judgment, etc. Mastering the trickeries of one's own mind.
• No dogma, no ideology, no group-think. All answers must be derived from scratch for oneself as though you were the first person in existence to discover them. Focused on profound personal contemplation.
• Integrity and embodiment: your philosophical conclusions must affect and transform the way you live life. Theory must influence practice and practice must influence theory.
• Radical openmindedness
• Truth & understanding as the highest value.
• Clarity,  simplicity, and directness as high values. No academic jargon. No convoluted or arcane writing. Explanations of reality must be phrased so simply, clearly, and directly that a teenager can read it and understand it.
• Cut out all human bullshit, games, drama, pettiness, squabbling, rivalry, etc.
• The ultimate goal is General Omniscience: The complete understanding of reality at the highest level. The goal is NOT the elimination of suffering nor the maximization of happiness.
• Cultivation of one's intellect, cultivating it like a garden. The love of Intelligence for its own sake. Self-education. Taking full responsibility for educating yourself rather than expecting others to give you the answers.
• No worshiping or name-dropping historical figures like Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, The Buddha, etc. Every idea must stand on its own merit.
• Practice of meditation, yoga, and other non-linguistic modes of training the mind.
• Mandatory requirement of experimenting with psychedelics. A commitment not just to try psychedelics a few times, but using them as a serious tool for philosophical inquiry, and not quitting just because you have a few difficult trips.
• Research into and personal exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness, mystical and trans-human states of consciousness.
• Emphasis on self-reflection and going-meta.
• Exploration of radical worldviews and perspectives. With a commitment to never to strawman or demonize any view.
• Fearlessness, courage, and personal sacrifice in pursuing Truth.
• Radical Holism: no siloing or over-specialization. Integration of many diverse fields. Not just traditional philosophy but psychology, sociology, history, science, religion, spirituality, mysticism, New Age, self-help, and whatever other fields are necessary to reach the ultimate understanding of reality. Pure Philosophy includes all the above and no one field gets to dominate or bully all the others.
• No guess-work, speculation, or belief. Inquiry must be based on direct experience, personal consciousness, empirical observation, or genuine insight.
• Integration of thinking, feeling, and non-linguistic awareness or "being". Neither of these is demonized nor prioritized over the others.
• Appreciation for the immense mystery of reality/nature/Consciousness. No naive attempts to demystify reality, quantify reality, or to make it "scientific".
• Integration of science and religion/spirituality/mysticism.
• A deep study and awareness of the stages of ego development. Acknowledgement that individuals, organizations, cultures, and societies evolve from lower to higher stages of development. Science, religion, morality, art, etc manifest differently at every stage and manifest in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
• The recognition that academic philosophy is fundamentally broken because it does not pursue Absolute Truth, Awakening, and Omniscience, and is in denial that these is the proper and ultimate aim of all philosophy.
• Construct-Awareness: recognition that the mind, in some profound way, plays an active role in constructing reality. That mind and reality are fundamentally entangled. That the philosophy/scientist and his investigation of nature are fundamentally entangled.

Pure Philosophy claims that there is a right and wrong way to do philosophy, based on the metric of Awakening and realization of Omniscience or Total understanding of reality. The way you know that you did philosophy properly is by the fact that your consciousness rises high enough to understand that ALL of reality is a construction of your Infinite Mind, that you are God.

The ultimate achievement of Pure Philosophy is the realization that you are God, that you are Infinity, and that reality is Love. This is not to be confused with dogma or belief of any sort. Nor is this to be considered a subjective personal "philosophy" that one has adopted or invented.

Amazing:

This is who you will become if you don't do philosophy properly. So don't think that philosophy is merely academic. In fact, most of our collective problems can be traced back to people not being taught to do good philosophy. Philosophy is not even taught in most high schools, never mind the Pure Philosophy that I teach. That's not taught anywhere. Even Buddhists and Vedantists don't teach it. New Age spirituality, meditation, yoga, and nonduality is NOT Pure Philosophy and will not get you the benefits of Pure Philosophy. No amount of meditation will make you a good thinker. Think about that.

Not doing philosophy is NOT an option. Everyone has some kind of philosophy that runs their life and decisions. There is no such thing as a computer running without an operating system. Acting uninterested in operating systems is not an option. The only question is, how good is your OS?

How good is your philosophy?

Is it possible that your philosophy is responsible for the quality — or lack thereof — of your life? Could it be that simple?

So I was basically going through the entire history of Russia, making a study of it, when I stumbled upon a late 19th century philosopher and theologian by the name of Vladimir Soloviev who coined the phrase "All-Unity" (in Russian). As soon as I heard that phrase, I knew this guy got it! So I started digging into his work and found the following paper, which has one of the best articulations of God that I've read.

Read The Paper for more.

It truly is amazing when you start digging into the esoteric writings from all cultures and all eras and you find descriptions of God which all align with each other. This is one of your biggest clues that God isn't just some religious fantasy for soft-minded people. I feel like at some point I should compile a book of just the best descriptions of God from all cultures and all eras. That book would be the best answer to atheists. God gets strawmanned a lot in mainstream culture. Modern culture has extremely juvenile descriptions of God which would make any serious theologian of the past cringe. Mankind has turned God into some kind of joke that only a moron could believe in.

I watched a news report of a young poet in Russia who wrote a poem to protest the "special operation" in Ukraine. He then live-streamed himself reciting it outdoors in Moscow.

The next day a SWAT team broke down his door with a battering ram, arrested him, threatened to rape is girlfriend, stripped him naked, beat him all over his body, raped him with a metal rod from a weightlifting dumbbell, and finally made him record a video apologizing and recanting his poem.

That's how business is handled in Putin's Russia.

Leftists have no appreciation for how politics truly works when things get real. These are the realities of creating and maintaining a state that almost nobody appreciates. Maintaining a state is no game. People are so naive about how civilization is built.

One of the things I hope you learn from my work is the utter gravity of collective survival. Your shock, horror, demonization, and moral judgment is preventing you from learning this lesson. I want you to stop judging long enough to really savor this lesson. And integrate it into your notion of God, Truth, & Love. There's poetry, free speech, and civil rights, and then there's the cold, hard reality of survival. That reality demands respect.

Be ware of Care Bear spirituality which ignores harsh realities such as these.

Here's a perfect example of someone talking about enlightenment who has no clue what it is, misleading many people:

There is so much of this kind of bullshit within the spiritual community. This is why I stress God-Realization so much. Otherwise you're gonna turn into that guy.

That whole channel is full of smart-seeming people who have no clue what they are talking about. A master-class in scientific, academic self-deception.

These days computers beat the world's top chess players 100% of the time. However, even computers are not perfect.

I've seen a lot of interesting chess games and positions, but the following one takes the cake!

See if you can solve it before you hear the amazing solution: