Because in the end God is the highest pursuit and purpose. Nothing else really matters. You can't compare God with shooting golf balls or making money. The promise of God is very enticing beyond material rewards.
When all these religions were founded humans were much less materialistic, capitalistic, pop-cultural. There was little to do other than God, family, and farming.

You ask some good questions.
This depends on how you do it, of course.
You can get lost in fantasies, speculation, and mental masturbation.
However, proper contemplation and study can produce serious and valuable insight and understanding into the nature of reality and any systems within it. Do not discount the importance of high quality sensemaking and serious understanding that's grounded in direct experience and genuine insight rather than speculation, belief, and fantasy. The real work is in seeing past the fantasies to see how nature really works.
My solution is to do both. In fact, you need something tangible like artistic work or business to keep you from getting lost in pure theory.
If all you do is philophy you will get too stuck in your mind and it won't feel good. It could even turn into mental illness.
Life is long enough for you to pursue art, business, and philosophy. And they all balance out the excesses and limitions of each by themselves.
Only doing philosophy and nothing else is NOT healthy. You also need pursuits to ground you in the realities of life. This can be business, art, sport, family, pickup, running a community, etc.
For a healthy, happy life you must engage not just pure mind, but also your body and you heart. And you must not only master the theory but also engage in practice. Do practical stuff like art, craft, business, or raising a family.
A healthy life is something like 80% action and practical affairs and only 20% pure philosophy. If you get this ratio backwards you will run into problems.

Learning how to think deeply and well, is crucial.
This strand of Neo-Advaita which marginalizes thinking is a trap. The world is way too complex to get by without deep, serious thinking. Yeah, if all you do in life is just teach others about Neo-Advaita them maybe you don't need to think much. But if you are seriously engaged in human affairs like business or politics or art or science, you better learn to think well.
The reason some guru can get away with this no-mind stuff is because he isn't doing any serious work. It's a very self-absorbed sort of approach, ironically, because that kind of life cannot sustain the civilization which your life depends on.

I don't deny or neglect the emotional aspect at all. Emotions are all about survival. The ego's survival. Of course bias is grounded in emotions. Emotions corrupt the mind almost entirely.
It's not about cerebral, it's about consciousness. You're not going to become deeply conscious when lost in emotions.
Pretty much all human morality is nonsense. It's an unconscious emotional game that the ego-mind plays. It is pure survival. And it must be transcended to reach true morality. The typical human has no idea what morality is or how to achieve it.
Your moral/emotional approach will fail. Because it will turn into corruption/survival/self-deception/bias.
Yes, empathy is hugely important, but not the naive, biased empathy of common people. Something much deeper and more serious is needed because ego will co-opt empathy towards your own tribe. Your morality, your empathy, your love -- all of it will be used against you to deepen your self-deception.
I didn't focus on emotions or morality in this series because it's about post-modern philosophy. I focused on what is needed to make sense of post-modernism. I will have separate videos on morality and empathy.
Of course there is deep emotion behind all of human survival, which is why any time I say something radical or brutal people get pissed off me and come here to criticize.

You are allowed to feel whatever.
The point is just to be conscious of what your feelings are really doing to you and why they are happening, and to not let them distort your understanding.
Humiliation is a pretty rare emotion, so it's not going to have much impact on your sense-making. You should be more worried about other emotions, such as your sense of moral outrage -- that's gonna badly screw up your sense-making.
Anger, fear, hatred, love, lust, excitement, hurt, envy -- all these will trick you badly.

Are you saying you're blackpilled due to Trump?
Certainly it is a disgusting turn of events, but the world must go on.
You don't need any spiritual positivity. What you need is to appreciate how real life is. Life is real in that politics is brutal and serious, not merely a spiritual New Age "the world is on the brink of awakening" fantasy.
The bitterness of society and politics is what makes life serious and worth living.
I do not want to live in a New Age positive fantasy, and neither should you.
It is good to be bummed out by Trump's victory for a few months. But then you use that grow yourself even higher!

@Dazgwny It's trickier still, because if you stop making the distinction between nothing and something then you get thrown back out right where you started -- which is with something. But now that something is identical to nothing, where previously it wasn't.
See, ordinary humans think something isn't nothing. But the Awakened see something and nothing as identical.
In this way you can hold a table fork in your hand and realize it is nothing, as you hold it.

There is no way around independent thinking. Consume many sources but then piece it together yourself like an autonomous mind. Stop wanting some human to give you the understanding.
Enjoy the process of manking sense of reality. There's no better game in town.

I share every source of mine in the book list and blog.
My approach is not to look for meta big picture thinkers but to assemble that meta view myself, but consuming hundreds of quality, narrow, specialized sources like historians, spiritual gurs, scientists, philosophers, etc.
If you read 200 books, you will have a very good foundation.

That's right, independent thinking is no guarantee of proper sense-making or truth. It's just the bare minimum to even stand a chance. Independent thinking easily turns into corruption or distortion.
1) In your case you can clearly see through a bit of self-reflection that your worldview is strongly colored by hurtful traumatic events. This kind of emotionality creates bias and distorts sense-making. So a simple answer to your question is to not ever make an worldview based on hurt, bitterness, or suffering, since such a worldview will be distorted and dysfunctional. Basically, don't construct worldviews based on negative emotional states.
So in this case, proper independent thinking should have led you to see that your worldview was constructed from a place of trauma, which is not a sound way for constructing a worldview. Imagine if I constructed the entire Actualized.org worldview based on my mother abusing me as a child. Would that be an accurate worldview? Clearly not. I would first need to heal that trauma before I could construct a proper worldview.
2) There cannot be any formula for avoiding self-deception. The only solution is live consciousness and active intelligence. This intelligence must be active at all times and self-reflecting. It cannot be a one-and-done thing. You must keep being intelligent as long as you live.
3) Practically, in your case, therapy would be a good way to gain more clarity over your worldview. Psychedelics as well of course.
4) If you have deep Awakenings or realization of Infinity/Love/God, then you will realize that self/other is an imaginary duality which must collapse. From this understanding you can know that your bitterness and hatred of mankind cannot be truthful, because mankind is just an aspect of God/Infinity/Love/Self. The truth is that the same people who killed your dog are metaphysically identical to your dog and yourself, since there is no difference between self and other at the highest level of reality. So in order to heal yourself from this tragedy would require connecting with that disowned, shadow aspect of yourself. The thing you hate the most -- the people who killed your dog -- is the thing that you will ultimately need to realize as identical to yourself. That would be the conclusion which results in the healing. But that is a tall order. I'm not tell you to necessarily just do it right now. You probably need much more time to pass before you are ready to face such radical integration.
I'm sorry, this is difficult to tell you, but the following applies here:
https://www.actualized.org/insights/actualized-quotes-090
The entire challenge of spirituality is to integrate that.
To integrate that basically requires complete Awakening beyond what a human mind can imagine. It would be an Awakening so deep that you would basically die and return from the grave. In that moment of death, death itself would heal you. (I am not talking about suicide.)
When the self dies, God's love cleanses your psyche of corruption by melting you into pure Infinity. An ocean of love where your dog, yourself, and your enemy are One. This Oneness is Absolute Truth. From this Truth all sense-making must derive, otherwise it will be corrupt.

That's not a judgment. That is generally the case. Which is why teenagers socialize like crazy and old people do not. Because a teenager doesn't understand anything deeper. A typical teenager has the mind of a rat. To a rat going to a party to get drunk is the point of life.
This has everything to do with why monks become monks.

This is actually a mistake in leftist thinking.
Musk is not driven by money as leftists want to believe. He doesn't need any more money. The average Marxist is more driven by money than Musk. What drives Musk is power and the desire to reshape the world to his ideas of how it should be. He believes his ideas of how the world should be are the best, and that this justifies any means. He needs power and money to reshape the world to his vision. That is the point. The real currency here is not money, it's influence.
His worldview is not so wacky. What is wacky is that he thinks his vision should crush everyone else. It is deeply anti-democractic. He wants to be a benevolent monarch. But he doesn't understand that the ego which runs him cannot be benevolent because it is the very root of corruption.
Musk thinks he can be a benevolent monarch without doing personal, spiritual, or epistemic development. That is the real issue. For Musk to be benevolent monarch he would first need to cure himself of his wild narcissism and corruption.

Contemplation applies to all domains, all activities. But it must not be used to avoid experience or getting hands-on with things.
Whatever limits contemplation may have ought to be contemplated to be understood.
Good contemplation requires experience as grist for the mill.

Yesterday, I took 260 micrograms of LSD at around 8:00 in the morning. I began with a 30 minute meditation, focusing deeply on the questions, “What am I?” and “What is existence?” After about 30 minutes, I felt the urge to go for a walk and enjoy the morning sun, so I went to get a decaf coffee.
As I was returning home, the effects of the LSD began to intensify. My sense of physicality started to dissolve, and the world around me took on an ethereal, almost divine quality. It felt as though I were walking in the Garden of Eden a place of pristine beauty and interconnectedness. I gradually lost the concept of myself walking on planet Earth in London, and the experience became more direct and immersive.
When I got home, I sat on my couch and decided to listen to Leo’s “God Inquiry.” As I followed his guidance, my consciousness began to rise to unprecedented levels. It felt as if I were shedding layers of my ego, and I started to experience a dissolution of self. This was a level of awareness that I don’t believe is attainable through meditation alone. There was resistance a fear of letting go completely but I consciously decided to surrender to the experience and dive deeper.
The first thing I noticed was that perception is a fiction. There is no one perceiving anything; there never was a human looking out into the world and perceiving it. Instead, the world is constructing everything and creating the illusion of perception. In lower states of consciousness, you mistake this for you perceiving a world. Here, I reached a profound realization: everything simply is. There are no distinctions, no separations. My body, the room, the world everything is one unified reality, manifesting itself without differentiation. It is self-aware and conscious of itself. The reason there is no perception is because everything is already aware of itself. I like to think of it as an analogy: a picture of a man looking at the world, but underneath, they are actually connected.
My hands fascinated me. As I looked at them, I could see how they were materializing out of nothing that nothingness is pure divinity. Everything is absolutely divine; it’s the divine spark that created all of existence. I realized that my hands extended infinitely, and I am inevitable because there is no other way I could be. I am doing this because I can. I broke down in tears, overwhelmed by the realization that I am creating everything.
I could see how everything is unified, and I finally understood that this is what love is: total love, God’s love for everything because it is everything.
As the peak began to subside, I saw clearly that all the hatred and negativity I had ever harbored were products of my own selfish agenda my ego clinging to separateness and self-preservation, refusing to surrender to the flow of being. I started crying uncontrollably, overwhelmed by a sense of love and forgiveness. I apologized to life, to existence itself, for all the hatred I had held onto. I saw that life is not something to be fought against but something created out of infinite love. Even the separations we perceive between body and mind, self and other are born out of this love.
This experience has completely transformed my perspective. It wasn’t just an intellectual understanding; it was visceral and undeniable. Everything is simply being itself, perfectly and exactly as it is meant to be. There is no judgment in reality, no right or wrong just infinite love expressing itself in countless forms. I emerged from this journey deeply humbled and profoundly grateful, with a renewed sense of purpose and connection.

Just seems unnecessary and even insulting. Rogan and Lex make tons of money. They don't need Musk to directly pay them. That would make them feel corrupt. The corruption is far more powerful when they don't even realize it's happening.
The more scary thing to consider here is how easily elites makes friends and how totally blind they are to the corruption that their "innocent" friendships promote. This is the very heart of how society is corrupted: it's just rich, powerful, and famous people all getting super friendly with each other, and in so doing screwing over everyone else without even an ounce of self-awareness. They are so blind to it that it's terrifying when you realize that this is how all elites function.
They are literally doing the corruption live on TV while complaining about how society is ruined by elite corruption. The lack of self-awareness is staggering.

When it comes to situations of mass delusion of crowds, you should consider what happens when the hype breaks and the delusions collide with reality.

Because only a psychologically damaged mind would sell itself for sex.

Marry a prostitute and find out
Contemplate the difference.
Development of war just comes with the package of development as a whole.
The more developed a society will be, the more powerful their weapons will be.
Note that less developed nations are not rejecting weapons, they all desperately want bigger weapons, they just aren't capable of making them, or can't afford them. But if they could afford them they would buy them. So your lower nations are not some hippie, noble, spiritual, pacifists. They are warlords and warmongers, just less developed ones.
Not as much, but still, girls doing OnlyFans are not sharpest tools in the box since it is not good for them in the big picture. Making easy money from sexual exploits is not a good career choice in the end.
The buyer is healthier usually. Because buying prostitution is a lot healthier for a person than prostituting oneself. It is asymmetrical.
Would you rather be a prostitute or the buyer?
Being a prostitute is psychologically damaging. Paying for a prostitute is much less so because you're doing it for your own pleasure at your own convenience. It's the difference between buying a hotdog vs being butchered to make the hotdog.

Higher than China, Middle East, Russia, and the non-Western world.
The West still has the highest values of what's found around the world. You gotta keep things in proper perspective.
Neoliberal tech-bro democracy is still more advanced than Putinism or Islamic theocratic monarchy or Chinese communism.

Not so easy.
His worth goes way beyond that.
He's rich for a reason. He provides a lot of material value to people. Don't forget that.
Just because he's a political pervert does not mean he doesn't provide serious value elsewhere.
That is the paradoxical nature of people.
Elon could murder 10 babies tomorrow on stage, and he would still have provided more net value to the world and to American society than anyone on this forum. That's the mindfuck of it that leftists do not comprehend in their drunken self-righteous socialist stupor.
Musk is a disgusting egotistical character, but he also generates enormous material survival value.
It's important that your worldview accounts for all this.

Infinity/God/Consciousness is not a conceptual matter. It's more fundamental than perception.

@Something Funny
"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of an eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Because American leaders have no real understanding of terrorism. Because it would be too inconvenient.
They see terrorism, they rally against it in a simplistic and mindless manner.
Most Americans regard Palestinians as savage terrorists.
And also, Palestine has no economic value to offer the world. Politics is built on exchange of economic value. Palestine has no chips at the poker table.

Material success, power, and fame do not interest me, since they can never satisfy me.
What you regard as mediocrity I regard as one of the deepest minds on the planet.
All depends on your values and what will satisfy you. Only you can figure that out.

That's right. That's because I've become much more grounded, shredding through fantasy. The world is much bleaker than people want to believe. Especially than leftists and spiritual people want to believe. Reality will beat your liberal ideals out you. The only reason liberals and spiritual people can be so delusional is because they live in a bubbles of fantasy disconnected from reality. But eventually all those bubbles will burst, like with this Trump victory.
Just notice that you liberal spiritual lovey-dovey ideas do not match up with how the world actually runs.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't have vision. Vision is vital. But it needs to be grounded in what is realistic. Good intentions, high ideals, and love are not enough.
I have made this calibration in my worldview and it has made my view so much more potent. But it also more biting. My view of mankind is more accurate than ever before.
The aim is not liberalism, the aim is accuracy. Wherever that leads is where I will go. Your political view needs to accurately predict political happenings.
You will notice, I predicted this Trump win would happen right before it did. Because I wasn't operating off my ideals, but what I saw in real life. This sort of predictive power only comes from grounding your view and cutting through all the fantasy.
In fact, I will be teaching you guys how to do this because it is so powerful and core to our work. We are not spinning New Age fantasies here. We want a stone-cold sober view of mankind's true nature. This is a painful, disillusioning process  but vital to our commitment to truth-seeking and epistemic rigor.