Leo Gura

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.

Maybe that's true, for you. But this topic is not about you. Just because you managed to dodge the ideology says nothing about the vast majority of Christians. We are not talking about you. We are talking an entire religion. Just because you are the most Woke person on the planet says nothing about the religion. Even in North Korea there are people who manage to do well for themselves. The issue is North Korea, not that one person's success. The argument being made by advanced Christians is like this: "Hey, stop talking shit about North Korea. Look. I'm North Korean and I managed to do so well for myself. Stop hating on North Korea." This kind of reasoning would never be acceptable in any neutral and objective situation. It is only acceptable when one has a profound bias towards Christianity which requires it to be true. Just the bias created by being Christian is already a profound corruption of Mind.

Here's a prime example of Mark Zuckerberg just being utterly stupid about government and politics. Obviously Zuckerburg is not a stupid man. But in the domain of politics he's like child. This is how many intelligent people are when it comes to understanding government. To understand government actually requires serious philosophy, which is why the US founding fathers were all philosophers and deep students of the ancient Greeks and Romans. You can't build a nation like America on the childish libertarian ideas of Joe Rogan and Zuckerberg. Their level of understanding of polity is just embarrassing. And these guys have relatively high IQ. Imagine how a low IQ voter thinks.

These people are not stupid. I was talking about the average voter. However, you have to remember that politics is a very special domain. Intelligence does not directly translate into knowledge of government and politics. So you can be very intelligent in other areas but then stupid specifically on politics. So while I would say that those people are intelligent, on politics specifically they are stupid. And they are also corrupt. You have to take into account how much corruption shapes one's politics. Rich and famous people, especially, prefer to side with power vs challenging. Beautiful.

https://www.actualized.org/insights/the-danger-of-stupidity

Of course that's what I'm saying. I've been saying that for years. When I call people stupid, I truly mean it. I'm not just being arrogant or immature. You have to realize just how stupid the average human is. This is like an existential realization. It's not polite to ever say in public because of course people will hate you for saying it. But be careful because not everyone is stupid. But if we are talking about the average voter, then yeah, the ignorance is so deep that it will be hard for an Actualizer to understand. It is a mistake to assume people are more intelligent than they are. This is a mistake that many progressives make and one of the key reasons they lose elections. It is a deep paradox that mankind is both so intelligent yet so stupid.

Obviously! Of course vibes and popularity is relative to your opponent. Kamala had vibe problems.