Leo Gura

Black should have taken my bishop but I made a mouse click error the previous move with my rook. My top rook was supposed to be right over the bishop to protect it. So the two errors canceled each other out. I lost a whole move with that mouse click error. Black had a better move by using his other light square bishop to attack my top rook from blocking the queen. Black's queen would still have been lost but black could have taken out both my rooks which would have made for a more even endgame. Black and I both made some simple errors which made for a close game.

Cyberpunk minus all the cool technology.

The search for meaning is the search for consciousness of yourself as God. Last night I sat for an hour on my couch just stunned by my consciousness of God. This is a level of profoundity nobody understands. You are God and you just sitting there is infinitely profound, if only you develop enough understanding to inferface with it. It's not even about truth, it's about being God. Being God is more meaningful than any human meaning. Nothing has meaning next to God. Your experience of reality becomes divine and metaphysical, not human. That's what I suffer for. Suffering is just the ticket price to God's Disneyland.

There is no other option for me. I will always pursue truth and understanding no matter what the suffering. Yes, what you call meaning is the point for me. The real reward of this work is not minimization of suffering, it is the profound appreciation of God. If all you look at is suffering vs pleasure, this work doesn't make sense. But if you factor in the comprehension of God, it's the only path that makes sense. It's debatable if all you're looking at it pleasure vs suffering. I don't do this work for those reasons. I do it for truth and understanding. --------- People who frame this work as about suffering or even happiness do understand the depth of the work. This work is about metaphysical connection with God.

I cook. Activities like cooking, showering, driving also present good opportunities to keep practicing your meditation while in action. Pickup was very challenging for me. But pickup is also fun. The awakening work is very boring. Yes Yup. Of course. I did that math and found that I would have suffered less had I just never did spirituality. Maybe in 20 years that calculus will change. Life can be made very comfortable these days. The problem with Shinzen's analysis is that 6 months of meditation will not end your suffering. It's debatable what the actual benefit is. That will vary wildly by person.

If I ever share something I received from a forum user, I give credit. That's all that was. You have a twisted mind.

Psychedelics have their own suffering. But psychedelics are not enough for this work. Psychedelics are just the beginning. You cannot skip the tortures if you want serious embodiment.

I mean two weeks of non-stop meditation. 200hrs of meditation in two weeks. That's what this path requires. Over and over again.

It's not primarily physical pain. It is the emotional pain of the ego struggling and dying.

Have you ever meditated for two weeks straight? You know what that feels like? It's basically self-torture. And you may not get any awakening out of it.

Self-help has a much lower cost than serious Awakening. Most people can tolerate the cost of self-help. Very few can tolerate the cost of Awakening. The cost of self-help is like a bee sting. The cost of Awakening is like getting mauled by a bear.

If you knew the amount I have suffered on this path, you would wonder why do it at all. And my suffering isn't over. The reality is that Awakening involves more suffering than ordinary life. Which is why people are not Awake. If Awakening was purely a net positive then everyone would cheerfully do it. It's an investment, just like starting a business. You suffer a lot to build a business so can have fruits decades later. Everything great requires serious long-term investment. The Universe doesn't just hand out greatness for free.

Do you know how many times I've thought: my life would be so much easier and happier if I never started this. I could have just made money and fucked. That could have been my life. No headaches. But no, I had to figure out all of existence. Clawing my way up God's asshole.

Doing self-help comes with its own burden. Self-help has a cost. Which is why most people don't do it and remain common fools. You want to know what happens when you don't do self-help? Look at Elon Musk. He's hyper-successful externally, but he's a man-child internally. That's why we take on the burden of self-help. It's not really self-help, it's the philosopher's life. The ancient Greek philosophers lived in pursuit of The Life Of Virtue, The Good Life. This requires cultivation of character. Which requires deep inner work, which is a burden. They took on this burden because otherwise you will become a corrupt, animal-like man who lives for nothing more than sex, money, power, fame, and pleasure. This is the life of a beast. Religion and philosophy is about elevating oneself towards the Good, towards God, towards Truth, towards Love. Those who do not do the work remain children. There are many different ways of doing the work. But no one is forcing you to do the work. You can choose to remain a child.

It depends on how you think about it. People think about the same things in various ways. It's partly a function of how you personally define your terms. I tend to use awareness and consciousness interchangeably. Although not always. For the purposes of that quote you can call it awareness or consciousness, makes no difference there. Humans generally hold that awareness/consciousness is a "thing" that a "living being" "has". We are trying to deconstruct that frame and radically recontextualize what awareness/consciousness is seen as.

What is tagging?

No elite is going to give up his power willingly. You have to rip it out of their hands like ripping a baby away from his mother. You are talking about redistributing trillions of dollars in wealth. There is no way to do redistribution without taking away from someone. That's what redistribution means. It cannot be win-win from their POV. Elites don't even want to pay the taxes they currently pay. There is no low they won't stoop to, to avoid paying taxes. You have to understand how serious this is. You are talking about taking away trillions of dollars from people. There is no way they will just sit back and let it happen.

A few rich people just had a stroke reading that.

I love the idea of collective ownership of automated labor. Unfortunately this feels like a pipe dream because robots and factories are super expensive and the capitalists who pay for them will never give up that property to the public without a bloody Marxist revolution. The problem with Marxism has always been that factories are expensive and some private people had to pay for their development. Publicizing private property is basically like theft, which is why elites will oppose it furiously. I think it's just easier to tax the rich. There is no getting around the problem of elite resistence to redistrubution of wealth because they are all addicted to hoarding money and power.

Plot twist: the demon who clawed Tucker was himself. OMG, I am too funny.

It's certainly possible to have a weird or scary mystical experience and then seek answers to make sense of it. Quite logical. It's just that his Christian answers are not gonna be much good. They're going to be very corrupted.

You don't have to develop at all if you don't want to. But if you follow Actualized.org then it's assumed that you care about developing. And if you are going to undertake the goal of developing yourself to high stages, that will involve emotional labor and suffering. It certainly won't be easy or automatic. Can you be happy without developing at all? That's an interesting question. It much depends on your psyche. Some psyches can be happy living unconsciously, others cannot. Could you just live a happy life of career, family, sex, success, travel, etc. and never think about development? Maybe. But you might also get stuck and unhappy doing that. Realistically, your life will stall out at some point and you will seek for solutions. Those solutions will involve development, which will involve work and suffering. It's like if you wanted to start a business. Starting a business involves suffering more so than if you didn't. Doing difficult things is difficult. There's no way around that other than not doing anything difficult. Which will ironically create its own kind of suffering. As the Buddha wisely said, life is suffering. This work is not about me or anyone telling what is good. It's about you recognizing the Good using your own conscious intelligence. The highest intelligence in you sees the Good, at least to some degree. The more development work you do, the clearer you will see the Good. Do you have to be good? Nope. You can be a psychopath. But you won't be happy with those results. The reason for being good is not because you're told but because your intelligence recognizes that it is objectively the best way to live. Living badly is not intelligent.

I think most people who lack social intelligence are just lacking massive social experience. They could also be neuro-divergent which makes their brains slower in seeing reality from a social point of view. Picking up social cues has a genetic component. Even caring about the social domain has a genetic component. Some brains just don't care. You can't be great at someting you don't care about.

Sure, that's part of the package.

Bernie's whole appeal is he has the vibe of a genuine decent human being who truly cares about working people. Which is very rare in among politicians. He has vibe of a genuine authentic populist. Bernie also appeals to voters who care about policy. Such voters do exist.