Of course Plotinus spoke from direct experience. He even says how many direct experiences he had.
Hegel clearly must have had direct experience given things he's written. Not sure about Spinoza. I guess he had some mild amount.

At least temporarily you can. Not permanentally if you are in a human body.
Just deconstructing and questioning all human assumptions and ways of thinking. And psychedelics.
As long as you are alive you will be severely limited in human ways.
But there is much development possible for a human. And glimpses of stuff beyond.
Questioning all human ideas and assumptions is where the real work is. That's the core of what I teach. How far that takes you is uncertain, but it can take you to some very radical places.

Not depressed, but amazed and shocked by the realness and seriousness of life.
It's def challenging, but a good kind of challenge.
These videos show you how much you live in a bubble of comfort and safety.

1) You are correct in that you cannot know ahead of time whether you will ever find truth or whether it even exists. But what you're overlooking is that no such gaurantee is needed. You can explore consciousness without needing any gaurantees from it. That is the way.
2) Why is desire for truth a problem? If you value truth, then pursue it and enjoy the process. Is your desire arbitrary? Even if it is, so what? In a sense, anything you choose to do is arbitrary. And you gotta do something either way. But also, maybe your desire is more than just that. Maybe it has a profound divine source. You don't know yet so don't jump to conclusions.
3) Pursuing bliss is a rather dubious idea. A mature mind isn't motivated by promises of raw pleasure. But there is a more advanced notion of bliss that might be a valid path. If you actually pursue the goal of being unconditionally at peace in all of life's situations, and you go about that seriously, then you will eventually discover that it leads you to Truth. But you must be careful not to confuse this with pleasure-seeking. This would be real bliss.
4) In the end, Truth and Bliss will be identical. But you can climb the same mountain from opposite sides.

There is some degree of systemic corruption and bias within the police as well. But in my view this is normal, expected, and within reasonable range.
Do police protect their own too much? Yes, that is a problem. However, it's also understandable why -- because their jobs are truly dangerous and difficult unlike almost any other job.
I give the police benefit of the doubt because they are necessary for securing peace and order, to protect us from psychopaths, lunatics, and total human scum.
Watching all this cam footage shows just how difficult their work is. So this gives me lots of empathy for their position.
I think that leftists and progressives are not appreciative enough of police because Green people in general are so idealistic and utopian that they do not understand the brutality of life and how to deal with stage Red people. I am in favor of strict punishment of serious crime and stupidity, because being too liberal here leads to serious problems.
I don't think that my view of police inhibits investgation of spots where they are corrupt.
I don't agree that the public should have an inherent distrust of police. This is not how a health society would be. We need to restore trust in police by making them as free of corruption as possible and as fair as possible. Working towards this goal would be the best big picture direction for society. In general I think the US legal system and police is one of the best and fairnest in the world. It's actually amazing how good the system is, considering how bad it is in most parts of the world and how difficult it is to design such a system.
I think what's needed are very practical solutions in this case, not hippie ideals, and not blanket skepticism or cynicism, because the stakes are so high. Because this is a matter of life and death.
I think the leftist position on policing is not sound, blinded by their zeal for social justice, their inexperience, and their naivete.
I think this position is practical, reasonable, and clean.

I def get entertainment out of it. But it's also education and I am mindful of the trap of judging and blaming people. You can see a lot of blaming and demonizing in the comment sections under every video, which is low consciousness stuff.
Empathy has to be balanced against the depraved ways these people behave. You can have empathy but still enforce tough justice. Some people just need a dog to bite them to learn their lesson. Suffering is the best teacher.

Greetings and happy holidays! Thought that I might share a write-up for my philosophy book, the explores the metaphysical assumptions behind Scientific Realism.

_______________________________________________________________________
Parting The Veil Of Scientific Realism
In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hangs a deliciously subversive 1929 painting called ‘The Treachery Of Images’ by René Magritte. At a glance, the piece is unassuming enough - just an ordinary tobacco pipe set against an empty beige background - hardly the type of composition to turn heads when set against the museum’s masterworks. So why did this piece cause a fuss among art critics when it first appeared? And how does it continue to rub people the wrong way a century later? 
Well, there's one other detail about this painting we've yet to mention. Just below the pipe is a meticulously lettered declaration, written in French: 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' - 'This is not a pipe.’ Thus does the aforementioned ‘treachery’ fall into place. Little wonder that critics bristled at the provocation, which had all the subtlety of a slap to the face. No one likes admitting they’ve been deceived, especially by something that feels like a joke at our expense. Nor do we appreciate being disabused of our comfortable illusions - all the more when the rug puller seems to take pleasure in the act. 
While ‘Treachery’ is more brazen about it than most, such fourth-wall breaks have a long history. Like Cerventes stepping into the tale of Don Quixote to remind us that we’re not living out grand adventures but reading a book, the medium is the message here. In an age where metatextual commentary is a well-worn trope of popular media - from stand-up comedy to comic book films to memes - we might be tempted to write off this century-old painting as the equivalent of an internet shitpost and leave it at that. 
Yet beneath its banal presentation, 'The Treachery Of Images' is deceptively simple - a philosophical sleight of hand that cuts to an epistemic truth that’s as fundamental as it’s easy to miss. Much like the parable of the fish who’s oblivious to the water he swims in, we’re habitually oblivious to the constructed nature of our abstractions. Over time, we forget that they’re abstractions at all, and our scientific models are no exception to this. And here we arrive at the heart of the matter, which brings us full circle to our orienting metaphor: the model is not the manifestation. Like a plastic airplane on our desk, models serve us best when we remember that they’re impressions of Reality, created for a specific purpose - not Reality itself.
Would you try to eat a picture of an apple? Drive a blueprint? Travel to a simulated city? This isn’t mere wordplay - it cuts to the category error inherent to Scientific Realism. A category error is a logical fallacy that occurs when we mistake one kind of thing (a model or representation) for something altogether different in kind (the reality it represents). When Margitte states that ‘this is not a pipe’, it’s exactly this distinction that he’s highlighting.
The fallacy of Scientific Realism isn’t intrinsic to scientific inquiry itself - it stems from how we overextend its successes. Our habitual grasping for an absolute ground upon which our knowledge can safely rest can lead us to extend these models into ontological domains that lie beyond their explanatory reach. Science constructs predictive models of natural phenomena, but it’s not a shortcut for the embodied familiarity with the world that makes those models meaningful. It excels at precise mechanistic investigation, but raw data isn’t a replacement for the interpretive lens through which we transform information into understanding. It can tell us how things behave, but it’s not the arbiter of what things ultimately are - since ‘things’ are constructed distinctions, not fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. 
The takeaway? In spite of its considerable explanatory power, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its usefulness comes from its integration with the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. It’s this Life-World, in all of its visceral immediacy - with its pleasures and sorrows, its mysteries and mundanity, its straightforwardness and complexity - that science is downstream from. 
By this point, an astute reader may have picked up on a seeming contradiction, stemming from our account that knowledge lacks an absolute ground. By emphasizing the primacy of this Life-World, aren't we falling into the same performative contradiction that we criticized earlier, substituting one absolute ground for another? The distinction here is subtle but decisive. 
The difference lies in how the Life-World isn't some hidden metaphysical domain behind appearances - this isn't Plato's Realm of Forms repackaged or 'The Matrix' with a fresh coat of paint. Rather, the Life-World and the material reality that science investigates are mutually constitutive - like how hot and cold aren’t isolated properties, but give meaning to one another. The Life-World is the canvas for our lived experience, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the material reality it presents. There is no absolute ground here - trying to find one would be like searching for the ‘true’ pole of temperature in either hot or cold. 
So why even bring it up then if the Life-World isn’t some privileged vantage point for what’s ultimately ‘real’? Because when we neglect our access point to Reality, we stumble into the fallacy of treating our constructed distinctions as ‘more real’ than the embodied experience they’re meant to illuminate. Thus does the veil of Scientific Realism blind us to the lived context that gives our models meaning.
A vivid case study for how these two poles - the Life-World and material reality - arise together and give meaning to one another can be found in how color is disclosed to us. Here we find a powerful demonstration of the folly inherent to Scientific Realism, in treating physical properties as the ‘true reality’ behind appearances. When we treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ or ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as absolutes rather than constructed abstractions, we tend to miss how our everyday world is seamlessly given before our distinctions divide it.
The sweeping tango between these two poles is central for how our minds construct color - yes, color is constructed, it’s not an inherent property of objects. At a glance this might seem counterintuitive, but recall our earlier point that ‘constructed’ does not mean imaginary! Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, color emerges from the interplay of mind, body, and environment. Color isn’t ‘out there’ in some mind-independent Reality, but neither is it an independent fabrication of the mind. Is color a property? Yes, but not in the way that mass and charge are properties of atoms. So if color isn’t a physical property and it’s not purely mental, then what is this taken-for-granted chimera? It’s an interactional property that we enact through our embeddedness in the world.
This brings us back to our earlier discussion of relevance realization - how living minds filter and prioritize information from their environment, based on what matters for their survival and flourishing. Crucially, the bulk of relevance realization isn’t a conscious ‘choice’. When we make a conscious decision to prioritize one thing over another, this is but the tip of a much larger iceberg that’s largely hidden from view. Instead, the bulk of relevance realization is largely pre-reflective and automatic - a consequence of how the world is disclosed to us due to our physiology and past experiences, long before conceptual awareness enters into the picture. When it comes to our perception of color, we can see how this process shapes our construction of categories in a fundamental way.
We don’t perceive the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form - this would  be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Color perception interacts with only a small portion, which science has termed ‘visible light’. And even within this minute slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, color vision isn’t a replication of this territory. It’s more akin to a highly involved form of curation, that’s tightly coupled to our needs and capacities. Our perceptual system doesn’t retrieve pre-existing boundaries in nature - it actively creates those boundaries through the dynamic coupling of mind, body, and world.
To understand this interplay between mind, body, and world, let's look at what science tells us about color - and where it leaves holes that can’t be fully probed by its methodological tools alone. Consider the color ‘red’ - science can precisely model the wavelengths of light that evoke this perceptual experience. Through mechanistic investigation, it can describe how light enters our eye through our cornea, is focused by our lens, and reaches specialized photoreceptors in our retina. From here, it can tell us how these cone cells convert light into electrical signals that travel via the optic nerve to our brain, and map out the neural pathways that process this information. 
While these investigative insights are hard-won and essential for an understanding of color, an ‘outside-in’ vantage point can only get us so far. No amount of scientific data can fully capture what it’s like to see a ripe strawberry that’s very, very red. If we’re describing this experience to someone without vision, we can explain its mechanics, we can try analogizing it to other senses - but something essential about seeing red remains stubbornly ineffable. Just as something is lost when we transcribe a song to lyrics on a page, or when we have to explain the punchline of a joke, color must be experienced to be understood.
In sum, while lived experience is irreducible to mechanistic explanation, science has an prominent role to play in how we reflect upon this experience. Science and the Life-World aren’t opposed to one another - they’re two sides of the same coin, standing in a relationship of mutual illumination. Just as it’s nonsensical to ask whether our coin is ‘really’ heads or tails, neither science nor the Life-World should be treated as an absolute ground. Which of these two sides we choose to prioritize in our attempts to make sense of the world has everything to do with what we’re trying to understand. 
Moreover, both halves of the coin have much to gain by being in dialogue with one another. Scientific inquiry benefits from the knowledge that its theoretical constructs aren’t an approximation of a ‘view from nowhere’, but are a reflection of our embodied experience within the Life-World. On the flip side, our navigation of the Life-World is enriched by how science grounds our assumptions in verifiable realities and extends our understanding beyond the immediacy of our direct experience.
This brings us to a deeper truth about the nature of understanding itself. Every perspective, whether scientific or experiential, both reveals certain aspects of Reality while necessarily obscuring others. Consider the parable of blindfolded people touching different parts of an elephant - its trunk, its tusk, its ear, and its tail - and coming to widely different conclusions about what they’re examining. Like these blindfolded observers, each of our vantage points comes with its own insights and limitations. As we’ll discover in the next chapter, this isn’t a ‘flaw’ of human reasoning that can be neatly excised by adopting progressively larger viewpoints. So-called ‘theories of everything’, while useful for getting a rough lay of the land, aren’t a shortcut around this limitation. As we zoom out to a larger field-of-view, we take in more of the territory but also lose essential detail. And as we’ve just seen, recourse to an absolute ground is another dead-end - for there’s no final arbiter for what’s ultimately ‘real’ that can transcend our human perspective within Reality.
The path forward isn’t to chase an impossible ‘view from nowhere’, but to understand how these different vantage points can complement and enrich one another. Just as the blindfolded observers would gain a fuller picture by sharing their experiences rather than arguing about whose view is ‘really real’, we make progress by bringing our diverse perspectives into good-faith dialogue. Yet this openness to multiple viewpoints must also come with the recognition that not every perspective deserves a seat at the table.  Some perspectives are grounded in bad faith, intellectual dishonesty, or the willful denial of verifiable realities. We need not lose sleep over excluding Nazis from weighing in on public discussions about the Holocaust, nor do fossil fuel companies need to be given additional opportunities to spread climate change denial. Learning how to parse this difference between legitimate disagreement and willful distortion will be crucial as we navigate the challenges ahead.
Moving forward, we’ll examine how the inherent partiality of perspectives isn’t a bug but an essential feature of our sensemaking frameworks. Coming to grips with this partiality will help us thread a more constructive course between rigid absolutism and inconsistent relativism. Rather than seeing this partiality as a problem to be solved, we’ll discover how to leverage it to develop more nuanced and adaptable ways of understanding.

Serious chronic health problems that have no solution. Or very old age.
I read about a case of an Iraq war veteran who got so badly wounded in battle that he could not walk, could not sleep, was in constant physical pain 24/7, had to be taken care of by a nurse every day, and had to shit in a bag because his intestines were too damaged. He lived in hell for several years, his girlfriend left him, no doctors or medicine could help him. His only realistic solution was suicide and so he killed himself.
That to me is a legitimate case for suicide. Not getting laid is not. You don't even realize how good your life was until you have a woman to constantly deal with. You will be begging to be single after a while of girl drama.
Sex with the same girl will soon get boring. And many other factors will diminish the quality of real-world sex: from problems with timing, to girls who are bad at sex, to condoms, to pregnancy scares, and more.
Of course sex is nice, but it's not as nice as people make it out to be.
Don't forget that sex ain't free. You'll be paying for it somehow. Usually with crazy drama. You will have to deal with all sorts of girl nonsense just to get that sex. Some degree of that is okay, but it does get old after a certain point.
I'm not saying don't pursue sex or relationships. Pursue it. But don't exaggerate its importance to your happiness. A day will come when you will wish you were single and free. When you finally realize your need for girls was largely a fantasy of your own making you will finally find some peace and happiness. Don't confuse horny excitement and drama for peace and happiness.

I mean the contemplation of all the stuff I talk about in the videos and having existential insights.

Just keep in mind that that hesitation could be the biggest mistake.
Success requires making bold decisions, bold investments, and strategic risk.
Sitting around doing nothing is also a risk.

Impossible things are cool and important, but still not the same as Awakening proper.
Awakening is self-validating, obvious to itself. The most obvious thing about it is that you will say to yourself, "OMG! I'm Awake!" There won't be any doubt about that. It will be shockingly clear and obvious.
However, keep in mind that this clarity and obviousness does not mean that an Awakening has to be crazy radical or intense. It can still be mild.
There are mild awakenings and very extreme intense awakenings. And both are obvious, clear, and self-validating.
You could still be confused about an awakening you had. But generally speaking it will be obvious enough to you that you won't need to ask us.
Yes, there is such a distinction.
A small awakening would be very clear but your visual field won't change much. You'd be awake but everything would look pretty much like normal. Nothing otherworldly would be going on. It would feel like your visual field became crystal clear.
A very intense awakening would not only be very clear but so radical that your visual field should start to do impossible things and you would have such profound insight into the nature of consciousness that it would terrify you. It would be so intense that it would be deeply uncomfortable and you would experience it as physical reality melting before your eyes. It would feel like drowning in Infinity. Infinity would beat you over the head mercilessly, to the point of a traumatic experience. You might feel like you've lost your mind and gone insane.
The key aspect of Awakening is clarity. It's like the clarity of your perception got cranked up by 1000x. This pure clarity is distinct from seeing weird mystical shit. You can see weird mystical shit without this clarity, or with it. And when this clarity reaches a high enough degree it starts to warp your visual field and spawn weird mystical shit too.
Awakening feels sorta like having all the air sucked out of the room. It's like you're seeing through reality and reality feels hollow. You can look at a coffee table and its just feels like nothing/infinity.

Scandinavia, Switzerland, Netherlands.

Mainstream media simply reflects how the society is actually run, as opposed to fantasies of how it ought to be.
You are never getting rid of elites or hierarchy. Never. If you think you are you are just ignorant of how society works.
If you want to improve the status quo first you must understand it clearly. You can't just assume that your utopian ideals will work.
What you see with progressives and leftists is this constant struggle and denial that their ideas are unfeasible. Which is why they aren't already enacted.
Progressives want the world to be better but their minds are totally underequipped to face the realities of the world. The world is not better for very deep reasons, not shallow ones.

In a healthy, developed society corporations would place the betterment of mankind as their highest priority and profit as secondary. Until that happens society will be sick and corrupt.

It's not strictly necessary but struggling through failure is usually a big part of developing anything. Much of learning is just trial and error.
It's hard to say how exactly to avoid it since corruption takes many subtle forms. Mostly by paying attention to fundamentals like consciousness work, epistemology, contemplation, truth.
Being very diligent about truth is the foundation for seeing corruption.

It's really a Wall Street problem. The incentives of every public company is to maximize profits for shraeholders. This is always done at the expense of customers. Until that is changed this will continue.
 

Problem is, for this to make any difference you'd have to kill a significant chunk of the capitalist elites, which is not gonna happen.
Killing a couple of Fortune 500 CEOs is not gonna solve the problems of Stage Orange. They are not gonna suddenly lower your prices.
These CEOs are part of a vast corrupt Orange system. And if you are the kind of person to assassinate them, you are not less corrupt than they are.

You have to be careful about how you interpret things I say. You might think I said something which I didn't say.
For example, I didn't say that you should not socialize, not have friends, not pursue money or business, or not work on a technology related to crypto.
I say a lot of things generally, in the abstract. That doesn't mean all of it applies to you or that what you're doing is even what I'm talking about.
Obviously the crypto field is full of scams and nonsense. But saying so does not mean that there is zero legit use of that technology. Maybe you are working in a niche which isn't a scam. Then again, maybe you are fooling yourself about the usefulness of your work. You shouldn't rely on me to determine that. You gotta think for yourself. I speak in generalizations and abstractions. It's up to you to figure how and where these generalizations apply and where they do not.
Much of how humans achieve success IS evil and corrupt. But, again, not everything. There are better and worse ways of doing business and making money. Obviously I'm not against doing legitimate business in alignment with your values. Again, I cannot know whether your business is legit or not, or how corrupt it is.
Corruption is a serious problem that afflicts all of mankind in various ways. Much of it is even unavoidable. Then again, much of it is so excessive that it is avoidable and unnecessary. It just all depends on your specific situation. When I speak of corruption I make broad general claims and explain the principles by which corruption works. It is then up to you to decide what kind of values you wanna live by and how much corruption you're willing to stomach. I have a complex view of corruption. I don't believe that all corruption can be avoided, because it's entangled with your very existence and survival. So I'm realistic about it. I don't expect moral purity from humans.
Becoming conscious of mankind's corruption IS psychologically challenging. That's not a mistake. But you have to be careful not to dwell too much in cynicism because in the end that becomes counter-productive, dysfunctional, and untruthful. You have to find a way to integrate it, not just moralize about it. Blaming everyone for being evil and selfish is not high development. Moralizing is its own trap. Then again, living by higher values is possible.
As I came to understand the extent of mankind's corruption and untruthfulness, yes, I did blackpill/disillusion myself somewhat. That's part of what happens with deep understanding. There's good reason why humans do not do this work. But also, I'm keenly aware that becoming too cynical and blackpilled would be a trap. So this requires balance. I go through phases where I'm more negative and then phases where I'm more positive. It's part of the development process. Especially over the last year I've been through some dark realizations. But that doesn't mean that's some permanent position I occupy. But I have shed many illusions in the last year especially as my understanding of things deepens and becomes more realistic.
It's confusing because actual growth and understanding is happening. This means old views have to be reconsidered and changed. It's easy to not be confused just by not doing any serious expansion of your understanding of reality. That's what most people do. Confusion is a sign that you're actually rethinking things and changing your mind.
Life purpose is still valid and valuable. Corruption is that which will veer you off your highest purpose. So there's a deep connection between these two topics.
Be careful with the "distance yourself from people" thing. That's not something I recommend.
I am not against:
Business Money Sex Dating Socialization These things have their place and are necessary for most people in their development. Especially young people. Skipping or avoiding these things out of a sense of moral purity is more likely to lead to problems than something great. If I'm negative about these things it's because I've done them and seen through the illusion that they are. Which is different from not doing them out of fear, laziness, discomfort, or whatever.

It's much deeper and more nuanced than that.
I've had profound insights into the workings of mankind, society, civilization, culture, politics, social hierarchies, etc. I understand the fantasies and illusions that govern all of mankind's ignorance and behavior. That's no light thing to stomach.
I want to make some videos about it but I'm also careful not to blackpill you guys. I haven't even released videos on this topic yet and you guys already saying I'm too negative and cynical. If I actually laid it all out, you guys would get super bummed out.

Insanity is a domain of consciousness which could be explored.
Of course you don't wanna become mentally unhinged. Which you could if you explore those realms too much.

This doesn't make sense because you are still left with relative ethical dilemmas. You still have to decide right and wrong ways of acting. Even a mafia boss has rules for how he behaves. You can't just behave like an animal.
You can't appeal to God to rationalize your unconscious behavior.

Is that really true though?
Be careful that these kind of narratives don't become your own self-constructed illusion.
Dealing with people has always been difficult. Nothing new about that.
Don't forget to double-check whether your cynicism is actually true.

Fear is not insanity. And insanity is not generated by fear.
If you actually experienced insanity you would be rightfully very afraid.
Higher consciousness does transcend sanity. But almost nobody understands that.

Yes.
Perhaps a better way to look at it is to realize that sanity is just an island within an ocean of insanity. That island is where most people live and dare not step beyond.

No. It's much more fundamental.
It's more profound than that.
It's a new domain of consciousness. A domain beyond human comprehension.
No matter what a human thinks or believes, that's not radical enough for insanity. Insanity isn't happening at the level of thoughts and beliefs, it's happening at the level of reality itself.