Oeaohoo

Not really, people have been attempting this for centuries now. The Theosophical and Anthroposophical societies, Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Guénonian Traditionalism (which claims that all religions are derived from an original Primordial tradition, see particularly Frithjof Schuon’s The Transcendent Unity of Religions), and many other movements have sought to integrate or “cherry pick” the religious material that remains today into a new and cohesive whole. These movements had precursors such as Nicholas von Cusa from at least as far back as the Renaissance. Christianity itself emerged out of a very syncretistic context: it inherited stylistic and architectural elements from Rome, it’s morally dualistic metaphysics from Zoroastrianism, the emphasis on devotion and submission from the “pagan” Great Mother cults of North Africa, mythological themes from Osirified Egypt and of course many elements from the Semitic world. The early Fathers spent many years debating and even occasionally slaughtering each other to establish which of these elements would be included in official Church doctrine.

Kundalini Yoga is any form of spiritual practice whose aim is union with God through the awakening of Kundalini, the coiled one at the base of spine who is the goddess Shakti. Kundalini can be very dangerous if one has not already attained the immutability and unshakeable stability of the masculine principle who in this context is the god Shiva. The intention of Kundalini Yoga is firstly to awaken this feminine radiance and then to facilitate its unfurling through the energy centres of the body until the two principles of Shiva and Shakti meet in blissful union at the Ajna-Chakra. Beyond this is the Sahasrara-Chakra or the Thousand-Petalled Lotus which however is not really part of the subtle body. Kriya Yoga combines various forms of breath-work (pranayama), hand and body gestures (mudra) and chanting (mantra) to gradually divert and pacify the usual mental processes and attain mastery over the subtle body. Particular emphasis is sometimes put on the “breathless state” which occurs when one has attained sufficient control of one’s breathing to go without breath for a certain time. It is worth bearing in mind in researching them that both forms of Yoga have been somewhat corrupted by interaction with the modern world. Kundalini Yoga in general discourse today refers to the teachings of the Sikh guru Yogi Bhajan, which are very much a personal interpolation based on earlier sources, whilst Kriya Yoga was popularised and dumbed down by Yogananda. I personally practised Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga for a couple of years and found it to be very effective but quite destabilising. In a way, the difference between them is like the difference between the “dry” and “wet” paths of alchemy. For example, the main type of breathing in Kundalini Yoga (the wet path) is the Breath of Fire, an intense and rapid breathing pattern, whereas Kriya Yoga (the dry path) seeks to gradually still the breathe to silence. Though they are somewhat antithetical in their application, the end goal is of course the same: the union of man with God. If you were feeling brave and explorative you could try mixing them together, using Kundalini practices to awaken the divine fire of liberation and using Kriya to still the mind and master your mind and breathing. Just remember that you are playing with fire!

Many other teachers throughout history have taught the value of the body! Tantra itself is a lineage going back at least a millennia. How else could all the bodily forms of yoga have emerged? However, even the texts of Tantra say that the body has to be emphasised today because people have lost contact with their divine nature and become overly identified with the body. In a way, the spiritual escapism and hatred of the body that is prevalent in spiritual circles is actually a product of people today being overly identified with the body. This identification is a hindrance which could divert the spiritual path; then again, repressing bodily impulses could also do this! OSHO cited as his favourite book Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. Zarathustra speaks very persuasively about remaining true to the earth and not believing those who talk to you of super-earthly hopes and about loving the body as opposed to the “afterworldsmen” and the “preachers of death”. OSHO’s books on Tantra also deal mostly with the texts of Saraha, a Tantric adept of the 8th century who taught the path of using the body to transcend the body. The body is not all you have. If all you have is the body you should be freaking out! The body is going to die soon…

Thanks for sharing a very direct statement of truth. This is a subtle bias that I see in a lot of people who are on the path of mind-altering drugs. One of the ways we could conceptualise a psychedelic is as a chemical which temporarily and radically alters your sense of meaning. It makes sense then that such an experience would leave one with the impression that all is ultimately meaningless. I would prefer to say that existence is the love-child of meaning and meaninglessness. That being said, your statement that “existence is the absolute meaninglessness” is in a way more powerful because we tend to be more attached to meaning than meaninglessness. Then again, some people like their nihilism!

Sorry, the bit about you appealing to the authority of Spiral Dynamics was just a little joke! I didn’t mean it too seriously. I have laid out my case and made many arguments so I don’t think it is fair to say I am just running around in circles. I share your deconstructive and debating nature so I could probably go back and forth on this for hours, but - though I think this is all relevant to the original subject - given that this is supposed to be a thread of Leo’s best videos I think we should leave it here. I’d be happy to discuss this more elsewhere with you if you like. This is another of Leo’s better videos. A rediscovery of Empedocles’ teaching of Love and Strife!

The only real religion is Truth, Consciousness, Love and an infinite testing-ground and play-ground. Every religion starts off as a potent symbol of this reality but gradually deteriorates through consecutive stages of involution. The ideas within religion are not “toxic”, they only become so when they are used for purposes which have deviated from their original intention, and people have been making abundant use of them for thousands of years. Given that no religion seems to be driving many people towards these things, you are probably right that we need a new one! Interestingly, the word religion is derived from the words re-lig-o, which means “to join back together” or “to reconnect”. Generally this is interpreted as a reconnecting of man and God, the creature and the Creator, but we could also understand it as the reconnection of man with his fellow man. This would fit with your idea that a new religion could unite the world. Personally I think we are already witnessing the emergence of the new global religion. The only trouble is that it is Satanism! It is an inverted counter-tradition which emphasises totally paradoxical values: collective solipsism, individual agency and collective victimhood, total fragmentation under the sign of “one world” and “one love”, rights without responsibility, enclosure and security without walls and borders, and so on. The religion has a mantra: “I want to have my cake and eat it”!

Stage Blue (which is about much more than just authority), and particularly Christianity, are fit for the death of humanity because like you say they emphasise stale authority and conformity. After all, children hate conforming to stifling rules and regulations! It is senile old farts who like to do everything by the book; Christianity just allowed them to do it by the Book! It is absurd to me that Stage Blue belongs to the pre-individualised childhood of humanity: even according to “ma science”, humanity had already been around for hundreds of thousands of years before Stage Blue emerged! Materialism is like rigor mortis because once the spiritually animating principle has departed (God in the Christian context) all that is left is the physical body. The so-called advances in philosophy since the Renaissance have basically just been progressive phases in the realisation that God (in the Christian sense and as the spiritual principle which used to animate such societies) is dead. These are the various Stage Orange ideologies of materialism which have been accompanied by the general expanse of the mercantile machine of production-and-consumption. It is just like a body in which the soul and spirit has departed. Relativism, deconstruction and anti-logocentrism are like the body decomposing because they are a denial of survival and the necessity of difference and distinction. Isn’t defunding the police just like the immune system finally giving in? Isn’t open borders just like the cell walls collapsing? Isn’t the proliferation of anarchy and chaos within Stage Green just like the diseases which invade the dying body? The contrast within Stage Green between a superficial “love” and “unity” and the actual situation of putrescent inequality and exploitation is also very much like the body rotting beneath the surface of the skin. Finally, the new-age spiritualism of Tier 2 is like the final evaporation of the body because it is a compensating retreat away from the accretions of materialism towards the spiritual. Seeing the one-sided and limited nature of the new “earth-bound” and materialised world order, more and more people are drawn to shift off this earthly coil and escape to a new world of psychedelic phantasms, neo-Advaitan non-dualisms, Shamanic escapades, pagan cult revivals, occult deliriums and so on ad nauseam, whilst the majority devolve into a form of existence which is entirely collective and truly sub-human. This is exactly like the paths that are available to the human being in death: either to escape the wheel of existence for good (which is what a few people will manage to do through these new-age experiments) or to dissolve back into the collective substance for a further reincarnation (which is what the overwhelming majority are doing). This model fits the reality much better than some Spiral Progress nonsense! A very ironic appeal to authority! I agree that human history is a reflection of the individual human on a massive scale. Like the ancient Corpus Hermeticum says: “As above, so below”. Yes I should have worded this better. What you are describing would be a postmodern sort of argument, “every analogy is equally valid”, which is not what was intended.

I do realise it because I am not against authority and control. If one believes oneself to be speaking truthfully it is only natural that ones words should convey a certain authority. Everybody is sovereign but some are more sovereign than others. Many people can only attain to the true expression of their sovereignty by serving a higher authority. I have spent the last few years doing practically nothing but study history. I have no friends or social life because of it. So shove this up your ass! True creativity has little to do with thinking outside the box. This is all creativity in the modern, profane and desecrated sense: creativity as a frantic pursuit of innovation, change and progress all as a race to the end (or more likely, the bottom)… Today there isn’t even a box to think outside of! Postmodernism has destroyed the box. Think how many depictions of the Virgin Mary alone there have been within Christian iconography. True creativity is an application of the essential principles of existence within a given domain; these principles are inexhaustible and indefinitely expansive so that there is no limit to creativity even within the box. This is another of the modern myths: the great thinker and innovator at odds with the stifling conventions of conformist society. This myth finds its early heroes in Socrates, Christ and the martyrs of late antiquity, then conveniently skips a thousand years to Giordano Bruno and the other Renaissance heretics. From then onwards a slew of “geniuses” have emerged in every field (particularly the secular sciences) only to be ignored or persecuted in life and celebrated only in death. Notice however that all of these people belonged to the destructive phase of their civilisation: Socrates and Christ to the destruction of antiquity and post-Renaissance thinkers to the destruction of Christian Europe. They were only ignored because people around them didn’t want to know that their society was falling apart. Speaking of which… I notice you never actually respond to my arguments but just move on to something else. Typical evasive Orange-Green! Maybe you are just afraid of authority. Become too liberal and you also die! The “too” part is what is important here…

Even according to Spiral Progress, you can’t just jettison a whole stage of human development. The Spiral Dynamics website claims that Stage Blue has been around for 10,000 years and you want to jettison all of this traditional wisdom because “what about ma slavery tho”! Affirmative Action is a peculiar one because it is superficially Green but I agree with you that it’s real effect is to enforce Blue conformity and dependency. Everybody’s vision is limited; some more than others… This analogy with human development can be applied however you want it to. For example, I would say that Stage Blue Christianity was a religion fit for the old age and death of mankind. Stage Orange materialism is equivalent to the hardening (vigor mortis, the “stiffness of death”) which sets in when the body dies, Stage Green is equivalent to the final failure of the immune and blood systems and the decomposition of the bodily structures, and Tier 2 new-age spiritualism is the equivalent of the final evaporation of the body back into the atmosphere. In fact, it is Spiral Progress which does not map onto human life: every human being starts off fresh and full of life and gradually falls apart into senility and decrepitude. Even if you don’t agree with all of this, it is clear that the analogy to the development of the human being can be applied in various ways. What are you talking about? “Stage Blue” civilisations demonstrate a degree of creativity which is unimaginable today. In traditional architecture every detail is handcrafted to perfection and imbued with personality, depth and meaning; compare that to the mass-produced brutalist architecture of today. Even within a narrow genre of art such as the chivalrous literature of the High Middle Ages one can see tremendous creative application. The difference between all this and the “creativity” of today is that this was a bounded creativity, integrated into a higher context and fecundated with the essential principles without which creativity can only be profane and conceited self-expression. The vain-mannered creativity which has been exalted in modern times has already exhausted itself as it was destined to do because it lacks true principles and an appropriate metaphysical context. A trip to your local postmodern art gallery should be able to confirm just what kind of “creativity” has been unleashed today! And there he is: Prometheus Unbound in defiance against Zeus and Lucifer in revolt against God because it is “better to rule in hell than to serve in Heaven”! The rebel is certainly the god of our times… Of course rebellion against authority has its place but that place is rebellion against corrupt authority. Corruption, not authority, is the problem. All of this is true but you could just as well say that “all things must pass”. No reason to construe it through the lens of Spiral Progress. I am only defending Stage Blue because I think it is very much neglected in certain circles. I agree with you that there is no going back and that the only way to move forward is to burn through the current chaos.

I have demonstrated that it isn’t but OK. Breakdown of the family is a result of Blue? By that logic he would have to be against all later stages. Aren’t you supposed to “transcend and include”? All this Spiral Progress is rubbish anyway, Orange and Green are just later stages of decay. Heaven forbid there be authority in this world! I would go so far as to say that there is very little pure Stage Blue in America. What remains of it is extremely degraded and is forced to become silly and one-sided in order to defend itself from the onslaught of later stages, like the Biblical literalism that people poke fun at which is really an attempt to defend Christianity from stage Orange scientism. This could even be said of the most extreme manifestations of Blue, like early Puritanism which was an attempt to save Christianity both from the emergence of modern secular thought and the perceived corruption within Catholicism. Because of this, American conservatism/republicanism (both of which are also mostly not Blue but Orange) provides the perfect straw-man and scapegoat for the progressive wing of America to feel justified in over-turning not only their own but all of the world’s “overly authoritative” traditions! Even Republicans think in this way: “They hate us for our freedom”… After all, the American Constitution itself is a definitively Orange document.

I didn’t say the bias was unwarranted but it is still a bias! It’s not even a criticism of Actualised because like you are saying it is probably an appropriate response to a given context. I want to break free from all contexts and get to what is eternally true. Not all of those things are a symptom of Blue anyway. Overweight is facilitated through Orange exploitation of natural resources, use of GMOs and pesticides and so on, in debt could be all sorts of things (could be lack of Blue discipline and order!), wage slavery is also very Orange (and could even be Green failure to take initiative), breakdown in the family is obviously not Blue… Are we still talking about the same thing? Rise in mental illness could be Orange superficiality or even result of Green deconstruction of the frameworks which kept people on track in life, rise in feelings of distrust in government is motivated by all sorts of things and the government is by no means exclusively Blue (the present US government is superficially Green and Blue but mostly Orange). Even weapons and shootings are a mixture of Orange and Blue.

That’s an interesting idea. Do you think that the purpose of AI in the greater scheme of things is as a sort of divine purge of the inferior aspects of the present humanity? (Sounds rather “fascistic” to me!) Aurobindo’s model actually derives the lower from the higher as I do: ‘Psychoanalysts look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below... The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analyzing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above... you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest.’ This is from his book Bases of Yoga. The darker dimension of Progress, like it! No finite thing could ever have infinite intelligence and AI will always be a finite thing; by definition, because AI excludes all that which is not AI. Therefore, AI could never become God or possess infinite intelligence. Given that, your latter suggestion seems more likely. Another false idol for our contemporaries to worship! Yes! I just find it significant that today Stage Blue always has to be filtered and neutralised through the lens of later stages.

If you go to his YouTube channel and keep scrolling back you should be able to find his pre-fame lectures. He is a very exhausted Kermit the Frog nowadays and his political talking points are even more worn out than they were when he was originally making them. Leo recently posted his Bible series on his blog so, if you want to hear the Bible reduced and profaned to the tune of Jungian “archetypes of the collective unconscious” and Piagetian developmental models, maybe you could start there! I know what you mean but such things can be useful to some people… Like Genesis said, “you have to get in to get out”!

Yes, that is what I meant: ABC, as easy as 123! Feudal - Mercantile - Democratic/Bolshevist; No Automated Machinery - Human-Operated Semi-Automated Machinery - Self-Automated Machinery (apparently) rendering humanity obsolete. Fair point. In invoking Frankenstein I only meant to refer to the theme of a creature turning back on its creator. This is the Promethean/Luciferian temptation to be as gods and to steal the fire from Heaven so as to distribute it among humanity. In a way, AI turning on humanity would be similar to man turning on God in the Fall. Maybe history is a fractal of involution! It was certainly metaphysically superior, and many now who are not ignorant on the subject would even say that it was physically superior: historians no longer refer to the early Medieval period as the “Dark Ages” because average people were much wealthier than they were during the so-called Renaissance. I appreciate, however, that Feudalism is not an ideal or perfect system: Christianity is a religion for a fallen world, after all. As just one example, though, medieval art is far superior in elegance, nobility and grandeur to the overblown splendour of Renaissance art. This is a bit of a separate conversation however. Yes, the present state of humanity is very saddening. Well, there are some redeeming qualities to progress. Generally speaking, the appeal of progress is that on a very superficial level life has gotten better, more comfortable and secure. “They have abandoned the lands where the living was hard, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbour and rubs oneself against him, for one needs warmth.” I would also accept that the modern world offers certain special opportunities to spiritual seekers and intellectuals (in the true sense of the word) who seek a deep and comprehensive understanding of reality. That doesn’t stop the overall trajectory being away from God and towards hell. Haha, me neither! It’s still not clear to me how humanity can be subsumed into Overhumanity if the latter isn’t already real, if only in an embryonic and potential form. Do you accept that the entire course of evolution is already contained within God (or Overhumanity)? Ordinary language sort of breaks down here. Yes, neither should be denied in an ideal world. Historically and relatively speaking, however, we don’t live in the ideal world but in a fallen world. Recent religions denied the flesh in the name of the spirit, people today deny the spirit in the name of the flesh; both (of course these are generalisations) are dualistic and hence ultimately flawed. The deepest realisations are beyond both flesh and spirit. As far as Heaven is concerned, I don’t mean it as a strictly Christian concept. We could just as well use Asgard, Elysium/Ouranos/Olympus, Tiān, the higher realms of Indian cosmology, and so on. I simply mean the abode of the gods, the divine seat, the higher realm or whatever you want to call it. I know you won’t be interested but all of these religions speak to the same truth regarding man as bridge and mediator: the Romans called members of the priestly class pontifex (bridge builder); in Nordic mythology, the rainbow bridge Bifröst unites Midgard (Earth) and Asgard (Heaven), and the leader of the group was conceived as being this bridge; the emperor in the Chinese dynasties was viewed as being the Bridge between Tian (Heaven) and Di (Earth). Even Zarathustra, “The human is a bridge between the ape and the Overman”. Could you elaborate on this? Do you think he was referring to the decadent Roman Empire and pharisaic Judaism, as opposed to the emerging, more “advanced” and “progressive” Christian world? This is one of the tricks of the present regime: to call all sacral hierarchy and legitimate authority, and eventually all of history itself, “fascism”. To the present secular religion, fascism is basically the equivalent of satanism: in Spiral Progress terms, you could say that this is one of the ways that residual or unintegrated forms of Stage Blue manifest in the present Orange and Green dominated world. Even Leo likes to call people devils!

I doubt it. People in right-wing circles have a radically different perspective on all of these things. They will use perceived double-standards in the way non-white riots are reported, perceived denial of white in-group preference as opposed to other groups, perceived bias in media and so on as reasons to dismiss this out of hand. I’m not saying that any of this is true but that’s how they see it. Many still seem to believe that the insurrection was all just a joke, a meme, a photo shoot; postmodern irony culture and hyperreality seem to have corroded most people’s capacity to take anything seriously! Most of the people watching probably already hate Trump. The rift in America is very deeply rooted. It’s like people today literally live in different realities. That’s why they are always accusing each other of gaslighting! Well, Democracy itself seems to have a peculiar knack for setting up such “dangerous moments”! Anyway, I hope it goes well for you.

Your conception of punishment, failure and loss is much too narrow and materialistic. Devilry always loses doesn’t mean that every individual devil will always “get their comeuppance” in a crude blatant way. It means that devilry is parasitic, it is rooted in denial and absence, it is a house of cards and a fantasy. It must lose because ultimately all that really exists is the Good, the True and the Holy. Of course, you have also totally overlooked the possibility that any of these people might be punished in an afterlife of one sort or another.

The trouble with this is that the “myth of science” intrinsically and explicitly defines itself as hostile to any truths which aren’t positively verifiable and empirical. It’s very easy to deconstruct something as inane and stupid as this. Deconstructing religion would be much more difficult because at a certain point you would reach truths which supersede the merely destructive postmodern methodology. Stage Blue people are loose enough nowadays as it is. Like Alan Watts said, if there were any real Christians left in this world they would be screaming in the streets! Haha, Shiva deconstructs Hinduism! He is the destroyer, after all…

Absolutely! This was a very peculiarly potent and spiritual time for me. Relating to this channel, a lot of Leo’s deepest videos were released round this time. Except, you know I can’t agree that is “something inclined upward”!

And more senile…

Very good! You were actually correcting Pseudo-Dionysius though… This seems like a typical new-age confusion; focusing only on the positive aspects of life and reality. There is a darkness which is beyond all light.

Not necessarily. The Left Hand path, or the path of Darkness, is chosen because the ultimate nature of reality can only be conceived of in negative terms. Ultimately, the aim is to transcend both light and darkness and attain to the Radiance of the Divine Darkness:

This is more or less the distinction between the Right and the Left Hand path. Like you have shown, they both lead to the same destination only from different directions. The Right Hand path is slower but surer, the Left Hand path is faster but more dangerous. Take your pick! Yes, Nietzsche’s last few books are a good case study in one form of the Left Hand path. However, to a certain extent this is just Nietzsche poking fun at Christianity, a satire by inversion, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously. There are openings to profound light in Nietzsche: “For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but intervening shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.” Also, power isn’t limited to a dark and subterranean force: Shakti, the main goddess of Hindu cults, literally means Power, and the related terms Sekhmet (“she-who-is-powerful”) and Shekinah (Divine Glory) from Egyptian and Hebrew religion have a similar meaning.

I would just say that the distinction between fitness and truth is ultimately unreal. Survival and fitness are included within truth; the ways in which limited organisms adapt to their environment imply the truths of that environment. After all, bad adaptations won’t work. They are therefore false, wrong, untrue. This is one of the ways in which Darwinian evolutionism is part of the program of contemporary nihilism. It overlooks the fact that even the so-called “survival of the fittest” is part of a divine order. This isn’t a flaw, it’s basically the purpose of the brain. It would be very difficult to operate in the ordinary world if you were constantly being bombarded by an infinite panoply of spectral multi-dimensional emanations of truth! You could say it is a flaw as far as the pure pursuit of truth is concerned, but like I said I think this is a false notion. Everything is truth!

Actualised videos remind me of something Wittgenstein said about Bertrand Russell: His episodes on metaphysics, epistemology and ontology (“What is Truth/Love/Integrity/etc?”) are often very captivating, but some of his social, political and historical analysis is so mediocre. I think this is because Leo’s thinking style is very self-derived and logical, which is great for analysis of interior experience but not so much for the collective situation. In “Spiral Dynamics” terms, I also think being a product of America gives Actualised a heavy one-sided bias against “Blue” in favour of an over-emphasis on certain aspects of “Orange” and “Green”. Episodes that had a significant impact on me:

Just think of the jokes these kids will tell each other: Q: “Why did the woman cross the road?” A: “What’s a woman?”