Leo Gura

It matters because these commentators influence culture and they are a sign of the development level of the culture. And if your political culture isn't Yellow then your society isn't Yellow and your Yellow doesn't really matter. And politics is very influential on how your society does things. So if your politics isn't Yellow then your society is not behaving in a Yellow manner. Right now in America we have a 3-way Mexican standoff between Blue, Orange, and Green, while Yellow hasn't even entered the chat.

That's the stage Green backlash we've been seeing for the last 5 years. I bet he consumes a lot of alt-right social media which constantly demonizes Green, and he sees Green as undermining his masculine identity. The easiest way to get young men to buy into alt-right ideology is by telling them that Green wants to turn them all into queer soy-boys. A few years of such propaganda will turn a young guy hard right. That's the whole Proud Boys game.

Hannah Arendt famously interviewed and studied Nazi officers after the war. What she discovered was the shocking "banality of evil." None of them was really evil. They were just being good profressional stage Blue rule followers. Mike Pence types. Your average Nazi was just a pawn in Hitler's schemes. Similar to your average Trump voter. Many German intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers were supporters of the Nazi party. Like Martin Heidegger. Because few people think for themselves about anything. Even awakened people are fucking sheep for the most part. You can be awake but social pressure will still drive you to delusion. People underestimate the power of culture and ideology. Awakening does not make you immune to cultural biases. In 500 years spiritual people will be asking, How could someone have been enlightened and still a capitalist? The same way ya'll asking about Nazis.

@satyajit Other psychedelics can be equally profound and revealing.

Your experience clearly shows you that you are less conscious during some parts of your day. When you are sleeping, watching a movie, sick with the flu, drunk... you are less conscious. Notice this.

Experience it, then let's talk

Be careful not to conflate conceptual frameworks with understanding. Understanding is a much deeper thing than concepts. You can understand beyond concept or knowledge. You will always need knowledge if you care about living or society. I wouldn't want to live a life without learning. That's not an addiction, it's just something I love about life. But also, understanding goes way beyond learning.

Well, any such line will be arbitrary and relative. You can be as theoretical or practical with your work as you like. This will be different depending on what you value most. Be careful not to dismiss theortical work as "merely mental masturbation". Einstein's work would have seemed like mental masturbation to most people in his day. Yet it had enormous applications decades later. And Einstein's work would have suffered if he cared much about practical application. The less practical a thing is, the more universal it can be. There is a trade off here. Being practical is not as great as it seems.

Democracy is increasing -- this is a general long-term global trend. This becomes a problem if consciousness and education does not keep pace. It's analogous to the problem of when technology increases but consciousness does not. Democracy redistributes power into the hands of the many, but if the many are ignorant, this leads to disaster. Which is why democracy did not exist for most of human history. What people don't understand is that democracy did not exist because it couldn't exist -- because people were too dumb to govern themselves. You cannot have democracy in Syria because the people are too ignorant to handle it. They need a brutal dictator to keep them in line through raw force because a dumb person doesn't understand things other than raw force. To have nice things requires first curing your ignorance. Which requires a robust education system.

It actually makes them more rigid, since they are steeling themselves against a communist takeover. This is modern conservatives in a nutshell. It's very problematic when you have 10% of the population who is very high in development but 90% which is still stuck in Blue/Orange. It creates a civil war -like situation because the value sets are so different and the ones in power tend to usually be from the upper 10%. Dumb and selfish people are not content to be governed by wise and selfless people. Dumb people expect the freedom to act out their stupidity.

Psychedelics are not going to reliably raise your baseline level of consciousness. You can't live in a never-ending psychedelic high.

Add Sean Carrol, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennet to the idiot column for completeness And add Newton, Leibniz, Godel, and Cantor to the real scientist column.

I've never claimed to be enlightened.

A) You have to remember that most Nazi's are not putting babies heads on pikes or burning Jews in ovens. Your typical 1930's Nazi was basically like today's Neoliberal corpo professional class. The pop-cultural image of Nazis as these evil murderers is not true to how Nazis actually were. Your typical 1930's Nazi was like your grandma who would bake you cookies. Need I remind you guys that Ramaji and Ananda were/are Trump supporters? There's your enlightened Nazis of the 21st century All that Nazi really means is nationalism/stage Blue. And you can certainly be enlightened at stage Blue. Most of Japanese Zen masters are like that. B) The binary label of "enlightened" in this case is very problematic because again it removes the many degrees and facets of consciousness which are possible and are highly important. When you use the word "enlightened" in such a binary and simplistic manner it leads to all sorts of absurdities. The bottom line is that being "enlightened" doesn't mean as much as you think it means. It's a very low bar to clear. The mistake here is that people hear that someone is "enlightened" and then they automatically assume that this equates to perfection and sainthood. Not. At. All. Imagine if we called all boxers "boxers" without any further distinctions in the quality of their boxing. So a kid at your local gym is a "boxer" and Mike Tyson is a "boxer". So they are equal. That's how absurd this "enlightened" label is. Or imagine if we called everyone who went to school as "educated". So your kid who finished 5th grade is "educated" and Albert Einstein is also "educated".

I'm calling bullshit those estimates. I see no valid science behind them. Someone is pulling those numbers out of their ass, or however they do their surveys is highly biased. Show 10 Yellow political commentators for every 100 Blue/Orange/Green ones. You will be hard-pressed to find 1. You certainly will not find 5 or 10.

That's already a bias. For me, understanding is its own end. It does not need to have any practical value. Although of course often it does have a practical value, but I don't really care whether it does or doesn't. To me understanding is like art. I enjoy it and I don't need a utilitarian justification for participating in it. But how will looking at art grow me? The correct answer is: It doesn't matter! Of course embodiment is very important. But it should not be the only thing. Most understanding does not require action per se. Some does, but most doesn't. All human advancement is predicated on correct understanding of a thing. You can't land a man on the moon without understanding physics. You can't cure a virus without understanding how viruses work. You can't fix your life without understanding what's wrong. You can't vote for the right person without understanding politics. Etc. There is no formula for not getting lost. You must remain forever conscious and flexible. In the end, growth for the sake of growth becomes just another tail-chasing activity. There is no end to growth and devoting your entire life to maximizing growth is really not a good attitude because you'll be running like a hamster in a wheel until you die. Chasing growth is not much different than chasing money or women. Grow as much as you feel you need to in order to be satisfied and enjoy life. For me, what I enjoy is understanding reality. I don't do it to get something out of it other than joy. If you don't care about understanding, then do whatever you care about.

@James123 Watch your closedmindedness or you'll be kicked out of here.

The thing is, as much as enlightened folk poo-poo conceptual understanding, human society is only going to become even more conceptual in the future. Avoiding concept is not a solution. The way out is through, not around. Humans need to learn how to use their minds properly. And that's where I come in. Telling people not to use their minds is not a solution to our problems.

Of course culture has been controlled by elites and intellectuals in many ways for a long tine. But as democracy increases this will become less true. Stupidity will be more represented, as we have been seeing in the last 5 years. The days when elites fed you ideology from the top is starting to give way to grass roots ideology from the bottom up. And there is backlash. 10% is really flimsy. The other 90% will be unconscious and rebel and demonize those 10% even if the 10% are good and true. Also we are very far from 10% wise Tier 2 people. I think all the Spiral percentages are over-inflated. Less than 1% is Yellow, realistically speaking.

That's what happens when you get stuck in ideology and don't bother to think deeply about epistemology.

Reality is infinite regardless of how much you embody too. There will always be a neverending amount of spiritual work.

How can such a thing be quantified? I certainly have a lot deeper to go with my embodiment. You have to keep in mind though that my primary focus is on understanding, not necessarily embodiment. You can understand far more than you will ever be able to embody in one lifetime. To me, conceptual understanding is not some dirty word. It's the bulk of my life's work.

They are and they aren't.

Except it can. That's the whole point. It does not matter that content is present. Enlightened people have content in their experience all the time. Content does not hinder enlightenment. It would be silly of it did.

You expect a lot for nothing. Good luck with that. That kinda thing is what coach training programs are for. Coach training for someone who's in high school or college is not really appropriate. People that young lack the wisdom and life experience to coach others. Of course you can learn coaching at any age, but it's gonna be hard to get people to take you seriously.