Trump, like a typical capitalist, isn't anything. He's just an opportunist who does whatever gives him more power and money.
Trump would be Satan worshiper if it would get him power and money.
The reason Trump is so successful in politics is because he has zero moral qualms or principles about telling fools exactly whatever they want to hear. When the majority of people are ignorant, this is extremely effective for gaining power. Just tell the most ignorant segment of the population exactly what they want to hear, reinforce all their deepest hatreds and biases and they will love and vote for you.
Trump does the exact opposite of what I do with my audience.
If I wanted to have the most successful YT channel, I would tell fools exactly what they wanted to hear: Here's how to get easy sex, money, and fame by using tricks and shortcuts.

If you think that Musk is some kind of evil, unloving, uncaring mustache twirling Monopoly-man, you should really rethink your understanding of him. Musk genuinely cares about and loves humanity. It just gets expressed through the particular filter of his ego.
Don't forget, Musk has done a lot of good for humanity. Probably more than all of us here combined. It is easy to get distracted by his personality flaws.
You should see the good in Musk, flawed though he is.

Look man, the mistake you're making is that you expect to get philosophical depth from human interaction. Stop trying to do that. Get your philosophical depth from private contemplation and solititude, and then use social interaction for casual fun and entertainment, a palette-cleanser from private contemplation.
Girls are not on this Earth to blow your mind with deep conversation. They're here to be cute and playful and raise your children. Learn to use them appropriately.
Entertainment is a waste of time but also important. Not all of your time can be about work and seriousness.

Everything I understand tells me the situation is very serious. It's not a 100% chance of losing our democracy but something like a 25% chance.
You guys who downplay it with rationalizations, excuses, and false equivalencies are not helping.

Trump did many things and he promised to do many more:
He conspired to steal an election and not leave office He incited a violent insurrection that lead to the deaths of people He undermined faith in the American election system He appointed many corrupt judges to important and crucial positions He staffed his adminisation with grifters and criminals He engaged in crimes to win an election He engaged in further crimes beyond that He promised to be dicator on day one He has no intention of leaving office or respecting any election results He is guaranteed to commit more crimes if elected and abuse his office His radical rhetoric has caused much domestic terrorism and violence, including his own assassination The people he will appoint in his admininsration will be radicals and criminals hell-bent on undermining the government from within. This is by their own words.

Well, part of being intelligent is being able to see things from multiple perspectives and an appreciation for moral relativity.
But he could also just be playing self-deception games.
Probably both.

Hermitage is an escape valve from human madness.

No.
Two things can be true at once: 1) Trump is a dangerous authoritarian, 2) Political violence is wrong and should be avoided as much as possible.
The danger of Trump has not been artifically exaggerated by the left. If anything it has been understated in the media. A natural consequence of being a dangerous authoritatian is that people will want to kill you. This is not the fault of the left, it is Trump's karma.
Hitler too had assassination attempts. So did many dictators. That's why we condemn authoritarians and their ways. Trump is the king of radicalizing and polarizing the nation. Authortarians create chaos and hatred with their corrupt ways. When someone like Trump keeps skirting justice via the legal system as he does, this incites people into anger because they see justice isn't being done. When the Supreme Court itself has been so corrupted by Trump that justice is no longer served, people start to take things into their own hands. Which is why an uncorrupted legal system is so important.

Because the Republican party has slowly decended into bald-faced corruption. That corruption has now made its ways into the courts and the Supreme Court.
There would not be a serious risk of dictatorship if the Republican party behaved themselves and held Trump accountable for his crimes. But they don't want to do that. Instead they want their Christian theocracy. So here we are.
I didn't foresee that Republicans are this shameless. They are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and commit crimes to get their way, and the population is ignorant and brainwashed by a corrupt right-wing media to enable it all.
It's surprising in its stupidity and shamelessness. And the amount of Americans rationalizing, enabling, and gaslighting about this is an embarassment. This election should not even be close.

Hey everyone, I created a search bar for Leo’s blog that you can find here.  

There’s also a “Blog Quote Roulette” button that will take you to a random quote from Leo’s blog.  The “Back to Index” button will take you to the blog index here on the forum.  
The search bar is powered by Google.  It’s just wrapped up in some CSS so that you don’t have to keep retyping stuff.  You should still read his post on how to search the blog using google.  Enjoy!

Of course. Awakening is only suitable for a few rare people.
Awakening is amazing. But very few people are mature enough to appreciate it or reach it.
That is true. But even those gurus you mention don't live like monks. They have famalies, they make money, they have fancy houses and cars, they run a business, etc.
So in a sense you have made up that myth/ideal of an enlightened person being a monk living in a cave. That is definitely a fanasty which you should drop.
I have underscored many times that the pursuit of truth is itself a bias and that you need to customize self-actualization to your own values and unique personality.
In no way do I say that everyone should follow my personal path. That would be wrong.

Christians are ideological zombies. They are engaged in defending a fantasy. Which means they cannot be wise.
Being wise requires indepedent thinking and freedom from fantasy and ideology.
There is no such thing as good or bad, there is only level of consciousness. Lack of consciousness = devirly.

No one is.
Your whole life is built on the exploitation of others in ways you don't wish to know.
That's the problem with all this morality stuff. The mind wants to paint itself as good and others as evil, but this will never work in the end because self is evil. And that's what morality is hiding. There is no such thing as a consistent moral system or life. Because it's a fantasy in the end.

@5driedgrams The common thread that's revealed in all others is ignorance. Which of course is in you in spades. How this ignorance gets manifest is really irrelevant. For one person it might be anger, for another violence, for another pettiness, for another jealousy, for another greed, for another people-pleasing, for another dogma, for another gluttony, for another drug addiction, for another lying, for another cheating, for another killing, for another preaching, etc.
Negativity itself doesn't actually exist. You created it, and projected it onto the world. So yes, you're fully responsible for all the evil you see out in the world. Your mind literally created the category "evil". Without first creating it, you couldn't see it.
It really is that simple.
Simply to be a self is to create things you hate. This is a core part of self-survival. A self needs to fabricate things to hate in order to survive. That's what a self largely is: a collection of reactions against the environment.
If you've taken 5g of mushrooms, you should have seen that Being has no value, meaning, or charge. Ponder the significance of that.

Lol
Enlightenment explains evil perfectly. It's the simplest thing possible: evil doesn't exist!
The problem is, the ego doesn't want to accept that. Because the ego feels threatened by things like murder, rape, and theft. The ego's job is to be biased, to favor itself at all costs. So this notion that rape isn't evil offends you. Because you don't like the idea of absolute freedom. It's literally too much freedom for you to handle. It's so free, it will kill you. So you want to constrict infinity to a manageable, finite size which your mind and psyche can easily handle.
The cost of that, however, is that you are very easily disturbed and you suffer. As soon as reality goes against you, you cry and shout and get angry. That's because you refused to surrender to the fact that your very life is worthless and meaningless in the big picture. The whole point of your life might be to be a cum receptacle for a rapist, or fuel for Hitler's ovens. But of course you don't like that idea. It's too REAL.
Yet nonetheless, no matter how much you resist all this, the fact remains that reality has all these freedoms. There is a real possibility that one day you will get raped or thrown into an oven. And even if you don't, no matter what, you will die. So you will lose this ego-game you're playing no matter what! The only question is, will you resist the freedom of reality or accept it?
Of course there is nothing wrong, bad, or evil about ego. You can be selfish if you want. Reality doesn't care if you remain lost in untruth, or rape a horse. To reality, there is no preference for one thing over another. From the enlightened perspective, ego isn't bad or evil. Ego is confusion of the mind. And there is also nothing bad or evil about confusion.
Of course! You are one with all the rapists who ever lived, and ever will live. They are literally you, and you are literally them!
Which is why judgment of people is pointless and delusional.
Jesus told you to love people, and not to judge them, for this very reason. He wasn't telling you to be cute or lovey-dovey, or "a nice person" so that Saint Peter could let you into the gates of Heaven. He was telling you to surrender all of your attachments to self, until the point where someone could nail you to cross, and you would be happy about it, because whatever happens to your body doesn't matter. It's not you, and it will die anyways.
Enlightenment literally means: self-less-ness. No self, no evil, no resistance, no problem.
vs.
Self, evil, resistance, suffering << the way you live now.
Heaven is not a place you get to for being "a good person". Heaven is just the state of being without a self.
This is True Religion. Mainstream religion corrupts this truth because it's too unpalatable. The whole point of culture is to serve the ego's self-biases. So a truth like this cannot be transmitted uncorrupted through mainstream culture.

In one of Leo's recent videos, he mentioned he was going to do an episode on non-violent communication. I wanted to get ahead and see what the fuss was about before he made the episode, and found this gem:
It's a 3 hour video, so a great time killer for us self development nerds.
Seriously this has already totally changed my way of thinking about social activities and how we relate to people for the better. 
Very keen to see Leo's video on the topic, I think it will make the episode extra juicy having a little bit of extra background knowledge before diving straight in.

I am not infinitely conscious right now.
But I don't need to be in order to understand that you are in a dream.
It's not like I'm saying anything that serious spiritual traditions haven't said. You've been told that reality is a dream by every major serious spiritual tradition. The Hindus have been saying it for 5000 years. What more do you want?
My teachings do not contradict any serious spiritual teachings. The only difference is that I give you the 100% undiluted version of it, without sugarcoating anything or playing to any of your human biases.
I don't assign any special priority to our physical universe/dream. You could dream an infinite number of various dreams. Just because you're not dreaming some particular dream right this second doesn't mean you cannot dream it in the future.
Yes, some people can do astral travel.

@nuwu Research Gotlieb Frege, the downfall of logicisim and logical positivism, Russell's Paradox, the work of Douglas Hofstadter, Tarski's incompleteness theorems, paradoxes within set theory, paradoxes of infinity, and the necessity for meta-logics and meta-mathematics.
Basically, logic and mathematics is trying to grasp itself but it cannot ever do so because it is infinite, so it has to invent meta logics and meta mathematics to try to do so, and this goes upward ad infinitum. And all of that is still just one drop in the ocean of Infinity.

@stephenkettley It's impossibile to say. 
Could be tomorrow or you could spend 20 years doing it and never reach enlightenment. And enlightenment would just be the tip of understanding Consciousness.
But if you're doing psychedelics you should have already had some mystical, nondual experiences. What are you experiencing there?
If you wish to reach enlightenment through manual practice you really need to do week-long hardcore mode retreats. Breakthroughs in consciousness require insane levels of focus. Every time you break focus you lose all your momentum and must start from scratch.
Realistically to generate a manual mystical experience requires 100 hours of intense consistent focus. That's one week-long retreat's worth of meditation. To do it faster would require spiritual talents, which most people do not have.

@Ero Then we are on the same wavelength.
The sick irony is that if these logicians actually bothered to read Godel's writings on philosophy they would see that he himself was critical of people who do math and logic without any philosophical considerations. In fact, Godel attributes his theorems to his philosophical intuitions. And same goes for Einstein and many of the founders of QM.
Because to do groundbreaking work requires philosophical depth.
You cannot number-crunch your way into profound understanding.

Again, you make the mistake to equating these things with consciousness.
You have no idea what that guy was conscious of or not.
The transcendence of pain is a very narrow specialized form of consciousness. It doesn't mean you understand anything about the higher functions of God.
To reduce consciousness to such material tests and gimmicks is reductionistic and simple-minded. Consciousness is way more complicated than that and because be measured or reduced in such ways.

You (as God/Universe/Reality) is imagining the physical world into existence. This does to mean that you do this consciously or deliberately, or that you can change the doing of it.
Physical objects are your imagination. Just as they would be inside a dream.
The only difference between dream objects and material objects is that material objects are imagined with greater consistency.
Pick up any small object in your hand, like a pen, and look at it closely. And try to notice that you are imagining it as you look at it.
And of course when it comes to your inner world, your conceptual world, all of that is your imagination. And you have some control over that, over how you picture yourself.

@ElvisN If you find absolutely nothing fascinating or interesting about reality, it's impossible to help you.
It takes extraordinary arrogance, blindness, and ingratitude, not to find all aspects of reality deeply fascinating.
A miracle is happening all around you every minute and all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say, "Meh".

"Shared objective reality" is a sort of construction.
However, for human purposes there is much in common between our dreams so that's what makes "objective facts" possible.
How this situation looks really depends on your level of consciousness. If you have human levels of consciousness then things appear objective when they would be relative at higher levels. Objectivity depends on how deep you are dreaming, so some extent.

You are correct in that qualia itself cannot decay. But your level or state of consciousness, and how conscious you are, can decay.