Leo Gura

You have to read between the lines. Yes, they speak about society as a whole, but its a projection of their personal anecdotal experience, like their kid had a problem, therefore vaccines are bad, or someone they knew died so vaccines are bad, or they eat health food so vaccines aren't needed, or they believe in God so what God gave us is enough, or their doctor pressured them into getting vaccines, so healthcare is corrupt, or their child is healthy, so no problem, or they know someone who got a vaccine side-effect so vaccines are bad, or they deserve personal freedom over their body so no vaccines needed. These anti-vaxxers cannot think statistically and scientifically, they think by personal stories and anecdotes, and they parrot crap they heard on Facebook or from RFK. Epistemic Nitwits.

You need to start with smaller problems/questions before you try to grasp the ultimate nature of reality. Start with smaller, more grounded questions which you can experience immediate success with by having genuine insights. Over years the small insights will accumulate and open doors to deeper insights. Make sure you keep your philosophy grounded to direct experience. Investigate and make observations about the workings of your own mind. Here's an assingment to get you started on the right track: Observe and categorize every function of your own mind. What are all the things your mind does or can do? Don't speculate. Observe it and write them down. Make philosophy more like science you do on yourself. Ultimate reality is so radical that it cannot be understood from your normal state of consciousness. A change in state is required. Smaller questions don't require a change in state.

No, that line of questioning is misguided. Stop trying to reduce it. It's like I'm trying to get you to recognize the ocean and you're saying, "Oh, H2O, yeah, I know that." No! H2O is not what I mean when I say ocean. If you equate ocean with H2O then you missed the ocean. God is the ocean, not H2O.

That's not what I'm pointing to when I say God. Again, of course you can reduce everything down to emptiness, but that's not the same as consciousness of God. A reductionist mistake is being made. If you are equating God with emptiness you're got grasping the significance of God. You're just conscious of emptiness and calling it God. Which is not what I'm talking about.

No, the ground for me is the same as for the Buddhist. Consciousness/Mind is emptiness when reduced down. But realizing God is not about realizing emptiness.

I think that would vary a lot from person to person. You need to find what makes you feel most creative. For me, about 5 days of nonstop meditation makes me very creative. So I'd start with that. Just force yourself to sit and do nothing all day long. Eventually your mind will start to fill the void with creative thoughts.

Just have something more important to worry about. When you're not doing anything important with your life, then your mind will be consumed with petty worries. You just need a big picture that drowns out the noise. Teaching people about psychedelics is just far more important than feeling shame about what trolls think. Of course if your job would fire you for talking about such things then don't talk about it until you get a better job.

@zurew Rationality is still better than pre-rationality. Of course rationality turned into rationalism is not enough. But it's better than not. All these anti-vaxxers need to start by learning basic rationality. Then we can talk about what comes next.

Share perspectives here about the American economic situation under Trump.

You can notice that these anti-vaxxers are so selfish. Their entire understanding of public health policy is just a projection of whatever they feel is right for them personally. They don't have enough cognitive development to distinguish between what is healthy for them as individuals vs what is needed for the health of 100s of millions of people. Their minds are so narrow they cannot think beyond themselves and their tiny circle. You can just see that all these anti-vaxxers have low cognitive development. These people pre-rational. They have notdeveloped rationality. So you cannot reason with them.

Oh gawd. I'm too afraid to click on it. I can smell the epistemic cringe.

Problem is that in the US any legalized drug is marketed with hyper-capitalist zeal. The marketing of drugs should be made illegal. It's crazy to allow marketing of weed.

I get all sorts of powerful new business ideas and art project ideas in the middle of a retreat. It's quite frustrating because you're not supposed to focus on them when you're meditating. But you could really flesh those visions out. It's powerful way to hone your life purpose.

Those tornadoes are freaky.

Killing people in cold blood is so repugnant that if you're actually going to do it, there's a lot more involved to that than deconstructing reality. There's some kind of twisted emotional trauma element which has, ironically, not be deconstructed. You can jailbreak your mind but you'd still need some compelling reason to go out of your way to murder people. It's just a dumb way to live.

Hard to say. Ideally they would be decriminalized but not marketed and commercialized like weed. I don't like the commercial weed industry.

There's not really room during a hardcore retreat to indulge in creativity. However, I notice that I get crazy creativity about 3-4 days into a retreat. You could design a kind of retreat specifically for creativity, but that's different than a meditation retreat. Try both and see which one suits you better.

Although Mark will soon find that his long ass episodes will get very little views and require so much more work than interviewing people that he might not like the drop in success. The reason everyone does interviews is because it's 20x easier and more profitable.

That's why I never interview people. It's lame.

I don't think he's gonna appreciate you regarding him as that. Problem is, if you regard people are beneath you, they will feel it and close down their minds to your ideas. So this Spiral Wizardry stuff is really tricky. It's saint's work.

Of course. There is no authority to tell us what the right development pathway is. We have to figure that out ourselves and we will disagree about it. For example, Don Beck thought that Trump is just what America's development required. Was he right? Who's gets to say? Does America need more Blue? More Orange? More Green? More Yellow? You could answer that 4 different ways depending on your biases and purposes.

@Joel3102 Hardcore MAGA basically requires cult deprogramming techniques. You could try teaching him just about stages of cognitive and ego development. Rather than arguing over content, try to explain structures of the mind. You don't want to get drawn into a debate about trans stuff or guns. You want to keep it about meta mind stuff. But you're never going to change the mind of someone who doesn't want to grow. The reason my work works on you guys is because you want to grow. Which is rare. Most people do not want to grow mentally. They just want to survive as they are.

Spiral Wizardry is basically the answer. You have to empathize with their level on the Spiral and be respectful and lower yourself to their level rather than preaching advanced things down at them. That's not something I'm practiced in because I just assume my audience are epistemic masochists like me. That works online but not in real life.

@abc123 I don't have a good answer. I teach advanced things for advanced people. I don't really know how to drink beer with your local Joe and talk about football. The ideas I teach would offend the hell out of most normal people.

Trump def qualifies because of how much bullshit he spreads. He dumps horseshit into the epistemic pool by the truckload.