Leo Gura

@Shanmugam There is no doubt that's the answer to the ultimate question. But also don't forget that there are other minor questions to be asked and contemplated.

@Maxx The spoon might melt in your hand

@Elisabeth This issue of ignorance still goes deeper than you presently fathom. I have barely scratched the surface of explaining the epistemic and metaphysical errors of most scientists. It's a difficult topic to talk about, because it offends the very people who need to hear it. Even philosophy of science still doesn't understand these issues. Philosophy of science has itself been corrupted by the materialist paradigm. Even Thomas Kuhn -- the philosopher & historian of science who coined the term "paradigm" -- still did not grasp the significance of what a paradigm is and how deep of a paradigm shift is possible. You can have a paradigm shift so deep that the floor beneath your feet will vanish. That is NOT understood by almost anyone. This topic is notorious tricky. It's a deception wrapped inside a deception wrapped inside a deception. But people get very offended when you question the foundations of science. Of course! Because science underpins your very sense of reality. I am not merely questioning science here. Your very life is at stake. Which is why scientists like Richard Dawkins get so heated about this issue. Your mind will conjure up every trick imaginable to keep your reality intact. Which of course means projecting criticism onto me. That's how this stuff works. BTW, I'm not saying you can't continue doing science. Just do it with an totally open mind. You'll see, your science dramatically improves. I am actually a big fan of science. Which is why I want to purify it of its erroneous metaphysical assumptions. And of course you shouldn't take what I say on faith. Contemplate all this for yourself. What is science? What is truth? etc. See, I've been contemplating the foundations of science since I was 12 years old. So to me, it's pretty easy to tell when I'm speaking with a person who has contemplated it for real, or not. I rarely find anyone who has.

@Serotoninluv The issue of what one can test, and what is the case, are two independent variables. The whole point of your job as a scientist is figuring out new clever ways of testing the untestable. Hint: the cleverness you're using to be intelligent, is the very intelligence you're testing for Just how is it that you think you are being intelligent? Randomly? Lol. That's not very intelligent of you to think. Empty space has more intelligence than every human being who's ever lived combined. After all, it did spawn you It's even generating all your scientific skepticism right this very second. Bam! Bam! Bam! Thought after intelligent thought spontaneously arising out of nothingness. One of the beauties of ditching the materialist paradigm is that intelligence is no longer confined to the brain.

@znet It would be outside the realm of human imagination.

So in other words you're no longer a serious scientist, you're a New Ager P.S. Yes, of course I was referring to the idea that mutations are random. They are not random, they are intelligent.

That's your hallucination. You speak so confidently about being fucked, yet you have no idea what you are. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

It's been over 100 years since quantum mechanics has proven to you that that wall is made mostly out of empty space. And the little sub-atomic particles which are there are not particles at all, but clouds of potential -- fields. And what are fields? Nothing. And when you're not looking at that wall, it exists in a state of superimposition: both existing and not-existing at the same time. So even your very own materialist science has disproven you. But of course you never bothered to really contemplate your own materialist science, nor has your friend. Because you don't really about understanding reality, you are lazy and sloppy. All you care about is your survival.

@Faceless Don't confuse not knowing with Not Knowing.

Correction: How come science has NOT explained consciousness? Trying to sneak that materialist paradigm in there, eh?

@DnoReally The alternative is radical openmindedness, and developing awareness of all your metaphysical and epistemic assumptions, and then dropping them all, one by one. Once your mind is free, and you are conscious, your ability to make scientific breakthroughs will skyrocket. You will be beyond Einstein-level of consciousness. You will be able to solve problems that no other scientist knows how to solve. And in your personal life, you will be significantly happier than your typical materialist scientist, who cannot see the infinite magic of reality that's right under his nose.

Math certainly CANNOT say that! Godel's Incompleteness theorem proved that all logic and mathematics is necessarily self-contradictory. There are truths within mathematics which mathematics itself can never prove or grasp. Truth is a much stronger notion than proof. Truth necessarily always eclipses proof, because proof itself is a subset of truth. All these topics that you guys are bringing up are incredibly complex and tricky. You cannot take any of this stuff for granted. It requires decades of research to wrap your mind around all the problems plaguing fields like physics, mathematics, logic, and science. I've spent a lot energy studying these topics. I think about these topics more than I do personal development. It's mostly what I think about.

Except when you separate reality into two domains: physical vs non-physical, or science vs mysticism, that itself is a metaphysical and epistemic position which is false, since in point of fact reality is nondual. So what you will get if you do that, is erroneous science. By splitting itself off from mysticism, science actually damages itself. For example, it is a factual scientific error to say that consciousness is the product of neurons. And it's a scientific error to say that evolution is random. And it's scientific error to say that paranormal phenomena do not exist.

Yes, and a fox likes to say that he's the only one who should guard the hen-house. Mathematics is a projection of the human mind. It is impossible to do mathematics without language.

There's only one thing, really: consciousness. Are you actually being conscious while you're meditating? How conscious? If you're thinking, you're not being conscious. If you're falling asleep, you're not being conscious. If you're lost in a day dream, you're not being conscious. If you're mechanically executing a technique some guru gave you, you're not being conscious. If you're whining and bitching and moaning about having to meditate, you're not being conscious. If you're waiting for the timer to ring, you're not being conscious. If you're eagerly sitting there waiting for enlightenment to strike, you're not being conscious. If you're bored, you're not being conscious. If you're suffering and struggling and ready to quit, you're not being conscious. Just pick one technique and go with it for at least a month. Then evaluate your progress. Don't evaluate your progress daily, but monthly.

That's what I call paradigm blindness. To be inside a paradigm is to be unable to see any other valid alternative. Paradigms are self-fulfilling prophecies. They validate themselves through confirmation bias while excusing and dismissing all counter-evidence as "not real evidence." What's not understood is that one's paradigm determines what counts as "evidence". Which is why you cannot argue a Christian, or a Muslim, or an atheist out of his belief that there is a God, or there is no God. No amount of reasoning will do the trick. Because the very mechanism of thinking has been corrupted by the paradigm. It's like trying to rid your PC of a nasty virus. A really good virus will disable all the mechanisms for uprooting it. It will block access to all administrative functions, it will disable CTRL+ALT+DEL, it will disable the task manager, and it will hide itself in a dozen different places so that you can never delete it. A really clever virus will infect your system so thoroughly that you will not even know you're infected because you will have nothing to contrast it with. And a clever virus will have you get passionate about infecting others with your virus all the while having you believe that you're not really infecting them, but rather curing them of other bad infections. That's how the Devil does his work. The Devil's first move it to make himself look like an Angel. He flips the script on everything so much that evil becomes good, and good becomes evil. If you think I'm talking about somebody else -- not you -- you're kidding yourself. This mechanism of corruption is actively at work in every single human being: especially YOU! And especially scientists. The more Nobel prizes they have, the more infected they get. Welcome to the world of epistemology

But they don't understand that "reality" is a theory! "Proof" is a theory. "Science" is a theory. "TIme" is a theory. "Space" is a theory. And all theories are NOT reality! The whole problem here is that there IS an Absolute. So a "this is the best we've got" approach is not nearly good enough. And it's not the best we've got. Human beings have been conscious of the Absolute for over 5000 years. The reason scientists aren't conscious of it is because they refuse to surrender their flawed paradigm. Scientists THINK they understand that theories aren't absolute. But they don't grasp the significance of that. Take a close look at people like Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carol, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris. << These people claim to represent science but they have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to understanding the ultimate nature of reality. They are factually wrong. But good luck convincing them of their ignorance. The ignorance is so deep it's hard to even know where to begin curing it. It's like cancer of the entire mind. And precisely because the cancer is so total, it goes unnoticed. Every belief you have about reality is wrong. I don't think you grasp the significance of this.

What you're taking for granted is how much the materialist paradigm blinds the scientists. You cannot do an honest investigation into anything which your paradigm assumes as impossible from the outset. The issue with science is that it refuses to take seriously its implicit metaphysical assumptions. Science says, "Assumptions? What assumptions? Metaphysics? What metaphysics? We don't do any of that. We fairly investigate all of reality." No! You don't fairly investigate all of reality, you only investigate the stuff you think is real and only using the methodologies which agree with your existing paradigm. That is not objective, that's highly biased. To do science properly, one would have to have zero methodological preferences. Your methods and metaphysics literally limit what you can discover. You cannot discover a thing which you hold to be impossible. In such a case, the mind will just dismiss the discovery away by saying something like, "Oh, well, that's just a hallucination. It's just taking place inside a brain, so that doesn't count." I am not merely speaking about scientists not living up to some impossible ideal. I am making a point about a deep epistemic ignorance which permeates not only science but all human systems of knowledge. People do not realize how problematic their paradigms are. The enlightenment approach doesn't make sense. It's just TRUE. Truth doesn't care one bit about making sense, or about proof, or about convincing you. Truth is just what is true. It is actually impossible to access Truth through science because science is a symbolic system, and Truth is nonsymbolic. But good luck getting a scientist to understand that.

@AleksM Existence vs non-existence is a duality, a distinction. Reality is nondual. So all distinctions collapse. Since there are no boundaries in nature, every thing is made out of one thing: itself. (A strange loop.) That which exists, also does not exist. It's quite the mindfuck to look at a chair and realize: "Lol! It doesn't exist!" This takes a pretty big leap in consciousness to see. A good exercise to try is to sit down on your couch, take a pen in your hand, and stare at it for a long time, trying to notice that it does not actually exist. Try doing that on a psychedelic, otherwise it's really hard to see. You'll start to laugh once you see it. "LOL! Of course it doesn't exist!" It's the most obvious thing in the world.

Perceptions are to consciousness what matter is to empty space.

Most scientists seriously claim that consciousness takes place inside a brain and reduces down to nothing more than the firings of neurons. If you tell a scientist that paranormal phenomena are real, he will say you are nuts and tell his colleages to kick you out of the scientific community. If you tell a scientist that reality is mystical, he will call your a superstitious Creationist. If you tell a scientist that science doesn't access truth, but is a human invention, he will think you are crazy. There is an enormous difference between the ideals of science and the actual closedmindness of science. In practice science is not objective and it does not care about truth. It cares about doing science-as-usual.

@Nexeternity Thanks for the feedback

Yes, with every update I delete a few of the lowest books on the list so overall quality rises. I want the list to be tight.

@Finn If you get stuck like that, just skip that part and move on. Don't be perfectionistic. You can always revisit a part. The key is not getting paralyzed. That's the worst of all possible scenarios.

Eric Maisel has a lot of books around that subject.