Oeaohoo

@Razard86 I am not against primitivism or “demonising polyamory” as everything has its proper place. It’s just that Stage Green likes to exalt it and even fetishise it as some ultimate ideal, like the “Noble Savage” of that precociously Green Frenchman Rousseau. For example, “What really makes something primitive?” is a classic Stage Green response, and so is your romanticisation of the idyllic peaceful lifestyle of those peoples who were “conquered and killed off to small numbers by those oh so advanced selfish, killing, monogamists you refer to. Those same monogamists who lie, cheat, still, kill, suffer from mental illness, and then kill themselves. Issues that those primitive societies you refer to, barely had.“ I don’t agree with Spiral Dynamics but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. It is so basic anyway! A model fit for children… The common definition of primitivism is misguided: the (mostly) Western historians and anthropologists who formulated the modern conception of history mistakenly assumed that everybody in the distant past was living how Australian aborigines and African tribes lived at the time of their theorising and writing, just because it was a superficially more rudimentary form of life which they had immediate access to. This is an arbitrary assumption, however: those African and Australian tribes could just as well be degenerated residues of ancient civilisations as so-called “primitives”, and why assume that pre-historic peoples lived in the same way as “primitive” people today? I have already defined primitivism above. The examples you gave of polygamy fit exactly the description of primitivism that I described! You suggested that an African Matriarchy practise polyandry and I specified that the primitive societies which practise polygamy are characterised by “cults of the Earth and of the Mother”! African ritual is very much based on frenetic dance whose aim is ecstatic possession (the Yoruba gods who “ride” the intoxicated subject, for example) which is exactly what I when I mentioned “frantic and Dionysian rights involving dance, sex and a ritualistic use of drugs”! I even said that you would find it offensive! You make so many assumptions. I understand that sex is not a merely bodily phenomenon (though it can be and today generally is). After all, sex is a reflection of the fundamental polarity of manifest existence and sexual union is a reflection of the underlying Unity of these twin principles. Even Stage Blue tradition tells us this: Plato’s Myth of Er in which before a metaphysical Fall all humans were hermaphrodites; Genesis, in which it is written ‘In God’s image he made them, Man and Woman he made them’; Purusha/Prakriti in Hinduism, Binah/Chokmah unified as Kether in Kabbalah, the alchemical hieros gamos and so on indefinitely.

This is probably where is important to distinguish between Eastern and Western Europe. I am from the UK and can very much confirm what Bobby_2021 says. Most universities in the UK were created during the industrial period: they have gone from being a factory of workers to a factory for the broke and woke army! I can’t tell you what a disaster UK universities have become: it is a sick joke, a total parody and perversion of education. Of course, France - the home of le nonséns de la postmodérnisme - is even worse and other Western European countries are following the same track. I understand that parts of Eastern Europe are somewhat “lagging behind” but I’m sure they will “catch up” sooner or later! I have noticed though that early Stage Yellow seems to be emergent particularly in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands and many of the most advanced thinkers in Europe over the last few centuries originated from Basel in Switzerland. Yes academics can be quite grounded because the university provides with a safe context in which to apply themselves creatively. Society at large has stopped providing this so many people outside of university today lack this basic sense of containment. The only real option today open to those for whom such institutions could only be a stifling limitation is to create such a context for oneself. The Boomers are the ultimate degenerescence of Stage Blue and there is a lot of Orange in them too. Real Stage Blue doesn’t make silly jokes about women in the kitchen and so on, it appreciates and respects women in their proper place in the hierarchy of human existence. There were many highly respected women in the Catholic hierarchy, for example. They are certainly one of the real issues but my guess is that they will be dead soon; then you might have some new real issues to deal with!

Exactly. In my experience modern universities are nowhere near Yellow. Some of the sciences are till stuck in Orange (they have even fallen back into an even more intense version of objectivism and positivism to defend themselves from Green deconstruction) and the humanities are just an indoctrination into postmodern nihilism and Frankfurt School anything-but-Hitlerism. Not to mention that the life people lead at university is barely even Blue. Naturally, people like to pretend that partying every night, having promiscuous sex and taking dangerous drugs is Green love and openness to experience but I don’t think so. I was at university for 3 years and I didn’t meet a single systems thinker, mostly just Orange nerds and Green hippoids. Also, the university structure itself is a sort of Blue-Orange hybrid (traditional hierarchies integrated with capitalist superstructure). All of that being said, I have come across some academic writers and thinkers around today who are at least intimating Stage Yellow. Even someone like Mircea Eliade in the last century was moving in that direction from within the academy. It’s just very rare and personally I don’t believe that most people are up to the task of rising to that level; maybe they can prove me wrong! I would even say Purple! People generally have a very disenchanted worldview today. Yes, this world needs a good ol’ fashioned conquering!

In most parts of the world today the same phenomenon of mass male failure are observable: in Japan, for example, there are the “Herbivore men” who have lost the capacity for traditional masculine assertiveness and directionality and in extreme cases the Hikikomori who isolate themselves from society altogether. In the West we see a society becoming more feminised by the day, emphasising safety, security and material comfort above all else, so that masculinity is actively discouraged for young men today except in very crude and degraded forms like the “Real G”s of modern music and celebrity culture. It is the ‘dominance of women in the household’ during ‘extreme forms of democracy, characteristic of tyranny’ which Aristotle spoke of. There are a few women who will lament this loss of virility in men and seek out a real man, but many will laud over it as the “new man” who is not afraid to express his weakness and his sentimentality, probably because they like having their man as a little dog they can use for their own vanity and pleasure. In all of these places it is most generally reflected in declining birth-rates and the loss of any desire to assist in the preservation of one’s society. There are very weird and sad male sub-cultures today such as the anime waifu, multifarious fetishes for muscular and masculinised women representing a deferring of the masculine role, exponential increase in varieties of sexuality which deviate from the norm, and so on. I don’t think it is enough to simply view all of this as men falling into traps who just need a little self-help advice. They are symptoms of the broken nature of modern society which no longer adequately encourages people to contribute to anything greater themselves. After all, this would be “toxic masculinity”!

It sounds like you have aroused Kundalini somewhat but not so much as to stir up a Kundalini awakening. It is worth bearing in mind that Kundalini and Shakti are just the way that one tradition refers to this energy; we are really just talking about the latent power of the Goddess within the body. It is always moving through you to some extent otherwise you would be dead or you would be some sort of pastiche James Bond Super-Man with no femininity at all! Even practises like meditation can amplify this energy. In other traditions, it is like the Snake which enticed Eve (whose name literally means “Living”) and then Adam to be thrown out of Eden and thus thrust into the suffering and turmoil of mundane life (that is why it is sometimes called the “life-force”, and it is very significant that Gnosticism reinterpreted this myth so that the God of Eden Jehovah was actually an evil Demiurge whilst the Snake in the Garden was guiding them towards liberation and transcendence.) It is therefore also somewhat akin to the Holy Spirit in orthodox Christianity which is guiding people back to the real God. You can also see this symbology on Hermes’ Caduceus and even in Zarathustra’s two animals being the snake of chthonic wisdom and the eagle of proud freedom.

This is an interesting formulation but I think it would be good to clarify what it means for values to be unchanging and fixed from the Traditional perspective. T.S. Elliot said an interesting thing about the Christian Church: It is a mistake to conflate tradition with blind conformism and submission to authority which can therefore never change or adapt to new circumstances; it might have become that in recent times but that is largely to protect itself from the modern cult of Change. Tradition in a higher sense only seeks to conserve that which is eternally true: the ultimate truths of existence must not be discarded but the expression of these truths may change. After all, every tradition in the world has changed over time and has a system for comprehending these changes: in Buddhism through the turning of the wheel of the Dharma; in Christianity Joachim of Fiore spoke of the Age of God, the Age of Christ and the Age of the Holy Spirit (incidentally, we are now in the fourth unspoken Age: the Age of Antichrist! See Carl Jung’s best book Aion for more on this); in Hinduism through the appropriate forms of spiritual practice for each Yuga (Hinduism gives a very sophisticated description of how spirituality changes to fit the conditions of cyclical time); and so on. The traditional religions already understood that everything in this world is changing. The aim of religion is to get to “the other shore”, the shore of eternal principles which is Being purified of all craving for the wheel of mundane existence, i.e. becoming. After all, the Platonic Ideas or eternal forms that went on to be so important for Christian thought are only meaningful in opposition to ordinary things with have a life-cycle of birth and death; the term Samsara can be translated simply as “the world of change” and, though Greek thought shows embryonic forms of the vanity and intellectual confusion that has become so rife today, the Heraclitean school saw clearly that aspect of things from which everything is mere flux and becoming. The mistake of postmodernism is to claim that the eternal (when I say eternal, I only necessarily mean for as long as this world and particular form of existence lasts) principles of existence themselves change. This mistake justifies itself by appealing to the vague discrepancies in world mythology but these can all be explained through reference to the same universal principles. Like you said, the Mother archetype has changed throughout history: however, it is only the expression and the emphasis on certain aspects of this function which have changed, and they have only changed in exact accordance with the principles of cyclical time. The essential nature of motherhood could never change, it simply Is and is a reflection of one aspect of the feminine polarity of existence Herself. I think in its own way this demonstrates that every religion is itself a cohesive whole. It does not need to be “integrated” in with insights from secular science, psychology, sociology and the like because these sciences are all approximate and meandering; they are like nets which close in ever-more-tightly around the essential things which they will never comprehend. So many of these “Stage Yellow” theories are rooted in the dumb conception of tradition that secularism and atheism had already prepared for it.

Haha! I always thought this obsession with survival was one of the weaker aspects of Leo’s teaching. It seems to degrade everything to a sort of spiritualised Hobbesian state of nature and overlooks the fact that survival is only really valuable so long as it is facilitating a certain function. When an organism is no longer serving a spiritual, practical or material Dharma it dies; therefore, Dharma trumps survival. For example, many today would say that sexuality is merely about survival, but what about Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde and all the others who died for their romantic love? The Troubadours and the other chivalrous poets used to play on the relationship between the words amor (love) and mort (death) because they understood that these two impulses are closely related. Likewise the Hara centre in Japanese subtle anatomy and the Svadisthana-Chakra of Tantra is the centre of sexuality and death. Even Freud saw that with his Eros and Thanatos. There is much more to existence than mere survival.

Here’s a few: analysis paralysis, unjustified (or at least unproven) sense of superiority over others or chronic inferiority and consequent social anxiety, lots of big ideas that amount to nothing or taking every day as it comes without living up any larger vision, being too serious or too frivolous with life, glorifying women (“simping”) or resenting them, becoming overly obsessive with personal interests or failing to hone in on a skill set, turning back on society and a “know-it-all” mentality or blindly following the herd, not being open to guidance from others or failing to take initiative, damaging extent of frantic masturbation and porn-watching in youth followed by phase of extreme no-fap, failing to purge negative emotions by communicating and offloading with others and becoming embittered with life or getting lost in the labyrinth of relationships, failing or not even attempting to integrate the feminine polarity or being out of touch with the masculine nature, and so on. A bit of a cobbled together list but I think many of these apply. It is worth pointing out that many of these superficially contradictory attitudes often go hand in hand with each other and inhabit the same one man. Usually, one of them will be exteriorised while the other will be internalised, e.g. hates women externally but glorifies them internally is very common amongst “manosphere” types. All of that being said, I don’t think it is good enough to view this all through a self-help “falling into traps” lens. Many men today are falling into these traps because they correctly see that present-day society is not worth contributing to.

Incidentally, Islam is an interesting exception in this regard. We must remember here that everything in Islamic civilisation is oriented towards Submission (the literal meaning of Islam) to Allah. Those who would tell you that Islamic attitudes towards women are rooted in a crude and blind domination of the male “patriarchal” principle are very misguided, not that one can blame them given the present-day Western indoctrination into the cult of so-called “freedom”. Of course, it is also possible that present-day Islam has largely lost its original spiritual potency and devolved into an expression of one-sided male supremacy, but that doesn’t mean that it always was one! Anyway, in Islamic civilisation the paths that men would take towards God were those of action (particularly of a war-like variety, Jihad) and contemplation (murāqabah in Sufism, for example) whilst women would generally take the path of Love (to the man) and Devotion (often to children). Because practically all women in Islamic civilisation were taking the path of Love and Devotion, the original intention of the harem (the polygynous institution of the man taking multiple wives) in Islam was as a test of the woman’s love. Even the promiscuity that the men in this order practised served this purpose: could the woman lovingly accept her man engaging in sexual relations with another woman or would she fall into the petty possessiveness of the nafs-ul-ammarah (the soul commanding to evil)? Naturally, none of this is to say that we should all adopt the Islamic institution of the harem! It is just a short explication of the oft-misunderstood principles that one polygamous traditional society was based on. After all, such self-sacrifice and dedication to another is pretty much unimaginable to modern Westerners.

Some of this is true but it is important to distinguish between primitivism and pre-history. Many ancient and non-Western cultures also practised monogamy: Hindu India, Traditional China and even ancient Egypt largely practised monogamy (of course the realities of sexuality are always more complex and some people within these groups practiced polygamy). Some might find it offensive but polygamy generally goes along with a primitive mentality: worship of the totem, pantheistic naturalism, a cult of the body and of matter, paths towards transcendence which are hysterical and Dionysian - often involving the rhythmic convulsions of dance, sex or ritualistic drug use - a feminine spirituality emphasising the Earth and the Mother, and so on. Polygamous promiscuity can be witnessed even in the West, particularly today given the neo-primitivism of modern Western man. Forgive me for pointing out that your argument here is very narrowly Stage Green, appealing to the wisdom of the primitives as opposed to the domination and oppression of the modern West. This too is a bias. Also, Stage Green should remember that polyandry (a woman having multiple husbands) was much, much rarer than polygyny (a man having multiple wives). Of course, though, you might be right that the traditional monogamous family has exhausted it’s utility.

@Aimblack That sounds like an interesting opportunity because it has emerged naturally through meditation as opposed to being forced through bodily practises. Given that it has emerged naturally it is quite possible that it will resolve itself naturally but it might be worth researching ways of using this energy for spiritual ends. I know, for example, that serious Kundalini practitioners seek to force this energy to explode beyond even the head into the infinite blissfulness of the Sahasrara-Chakra. Naturally, this has certain dangers from a human perspective! That being said, it sounds like you did the right thing in guiding the energy back down the spine. Kundalini Yoga is based on the basic polarity of Shiva (the masculine principle) and Shakti (the feminine principle). What you are doing when you guide the energy back downwards is using the active Masculine principle to essentially “calm down” and ground the feminine Kundalini energy. It is perhaps mildly controversial to say but I would say that meditation is an essentially masculine activity facilitating detachment and self-overcoming; as such, it sounds like it has already helped you to control the emergence of this built-up energy. Activities such as meditation which are based on becoming the witness of one’s experience and detaching from the eternal flux of ordinary reality can actually arouse Kundalini in themselves. To use a mundane example, it is like how a woman will be attracted to a man who is detached and doesn’t need her. The increasing lucidity and detachment which comes from meditative practice creates a sort of metaphysical polarity which stirs and arouses the feminine principle within oneself. Incidentally, this is exactly why I originally noted that it is dangerous to engage in Kundalini practices when you are not grounded in a stabilising masculine energy. What happens to people who engage in this practice unpreparedly is that the feminine Kundalini energy forces it’s way up the spine and accumulates in the head which can cause extreme discomfort, and because they lack preparation they are unable to do anything about it and the effects can be disastrous. This reminds me of something I forgot to mention above. It would be very useful for anyone working with Kundalini to have a good understanding of the principles of polarity and balance. This is actually an extremely rich and complex area because there are so many different levels and areas of life (and more-than-life!) to be harmonised simultaneously. It might sound a bit odd but I think for me it was useful that I had many years of experience as a musician before getting involved in Kundalini: after all, music is essentially composed of consonance and dissonance and tension and release, the task of the composer being to harmonise these into a beautiful whole. Additionally, I think I might have overstated the difficulty of engaging safely in these practises today. In a way, the present time is a very opportune one. There is more information than ever readily available to anybody who needs it and residual spiritual influences are likely to guide the serious seeker towards the appropriate material for their growth. However, every so often you will come across somebody saying how Kundalini has ruined their lives so it is always best to proceed with caution.

@Aimblack My sense is that, unfortunately, for most people today the only real option is to throw yourself in at the deep end and deal with whatever issues emerge as they do. Even if there were a hearty supply of fully-realised Gurus today offering initiation into the path of the Fire Snake, nobody would be willing to practice the kind of selfless commitment and radical dedication to another person that such a context demanded. I’m sorry if this sounds hopelessly nostalgic or like a naive and romanticised portrait of the past, but it is what I strongly believe to be the reality. The trouble is that the practices of Kundalini Yoga are designed to heighten sensitivity and awaken within the body itself a liberating and burning fire of transcendence. Any remaining complexes or human attachments (samskaras) will be drastically inflated by this process, making them now much harder to overcome and much more dangerous. Remember that Kundalini and even the general Tantric model of the subtle body (Chakras, Ida and Pingala, the Nadis) were highly secret teachings. I would say that anybody interested in Kundalini Yoga should not start the journey until they have a fairly steady understanding that they are living in a dream whose ultimate purpose is to awaken out of. They should be relatively stable and non-reactive with a meditative and contemplative temperament. Most importantly, they must understand that they are essentially doing when practising Kundalini Yoga is taking their ordinary experience and amplifying it exponentially. Everything which is ugly about you will also seek to be amplified! I hope I don’t sound melodramatic; in a way, these are just the requirements for engaging with any spiritual path. I hope this answers your question! It is worth pointing out that my path has been rather heterodox and combined numerous different elements. Someone else on here might be able to speak more precisely about Kundalini specifically. Personally, I had already been on the spiritual path for a few years and had a single awakening to God as Divine Love before I started practising Kundalini Yoga. It is only a vain personal digression but in a way my whole life felt like a preparation for the awakening of Kundalini. It is possible that the practitioner will be called to the practice when they are ready for it. For example, I have always liked music with an evocative and liberating character. This Sonata by my favourite composer Scriabin very much captures the feeling of Kundalini moving through the body:

@Preety_India You are unable to understand hate because you are a highly empathetic person. I understand hate very easily because I do not have much empathy with people! You are failing to see that hate is really an expression of love. When I hate somebody it is always because I love something else. For example, if I am trying to convince someone of something that I believe and they are stubbornly resisting me. This makes me feel hate towards them but it is really an expression of love towards my beliefs (the word belief comes from the root leabh, to love or to hold dear). Forgive me if I say that the hate I have just described is more of a masculine form of hate. For women it is probably more something like: “I hate somebody because they haven’t been the right sort of friend to me” (in this case, hate is a love for the right sort of friend), “I hate somebody because they ruined my life by doing something horrible” (in this case, hate is a love for an idea of what your life would have been without the horrible thing that the other person did), and so on. Hate is always an expression of love because everything is an expression of Love. Spirituality is not about being the perfect person right here and now. It is about consciously setting as your ultimate ideals Truth and Love and gradually working through the ways in which you fall short of that ideal.

I think he removed his latest solipsism video for precisely this reason. When has Leo ever told you you’re an NPC? You are the Player himself! Other people do have their own consciousness. It is the same consciousness as yours. It is just consciousness. How could consciousness ever belong to any body? Haha, you are upset about solipsism because now you are only trolling yourself? Bummer! I sense that this itself is a troll. Quite a funny one I might add!

Of course… So is holding grudges! Spiritual refinement is a process of letting go of the limited human identity. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be human on the way. In fact, by definition, for us humans the human level is always the starting point for the journey back to God.

A beautiful description! Maybe we don’t disagree so much after all as this is exactly how it seems to me. I just see it as an exhausted and decrepit mankind being forced back towards the Light from which it originated. I was thinking about our previous discussion about progress and Spiral Dynamics. Spiral Dynamics is a fairly accurate model in terms of describing a development in the complexity of human organisation. However, it is very obvious that every development in complexity comes at the cost of a loss in simplicity. I would say that simplicity is a higher value than complexity. After all, the truth is simple: everything is God. What else do you need to know? Society becoming more complex just means that it is becoming a more complex distraction from God. Today, society has become so complex that most people have forgotten about God altogether!

Ironically, this feels like a passive aggressive jibe at somebody (or even everybody)! Yes, no person who is fully awake will be able to hold anything, let alone a grudge. In a way, though, the grudges that people do hold are also part of the path towards the dissolution of their identity. After all, a grudge negatively effects the person holding it much more than the person who is it’s victim. That is why it is an excellent phrase, to hold a grudge. It is you that holds it. Remember what the Buddha said when someone was getting angry with him:

Yes that is basically what I mean. Only that which is grounded in meaninglessness can fully explore the infinite variety of meaning. Technically speaking, you are the only thing which doesn’t exist. To exist means to stand out, to be apart, to take a stand. God is that which everything else stands out from. God is the only Reality and the only thing which doesn’t exist!

I understand why you would say this but this is actually not the case. The masculine principle is impotent without the feminine. Masculinity is assertion, direction and will; if there is nothing for it to direct or assert itself upon, however, it is impotent. The feminine principle provides the potency of existence and the masculine principle actualises it. That is why the alchemists metaphorically referred to the male seed as the “Living Eve”. This is also why women without an animating male principle in their life will often just sort of marinate in themselves in a sort of directionless abundance of energy. It is potency without actuality. It is also why men without a grounding feminine principle will have all sorts of big ideas but they will all amount to nothing. I agree though that this is perhaps not the best word to convey this meaning. The concept of Power conceived as the religious terms Shakti, Sekhmet (she-who-is-powerful) and Shekinah (Divine Glory) captures this idea better. Yes, social constructivism and postmodern culture is a sort of organised insanity. Maybe that’s why they are always accusing people of “gaslighting” them! To be more charitable, you could say it is the misapplication of advanced truths by people who have not been adequately prepared to receive them. After all, there is a sense in which all identities and all of reality is constructed: it is not a social sense, however, but a metaphysical one! Your point about social security made me wonder: maybe that is why “Stage Green” postmodernism is in love with the welfare state and socialised healthcare. They need these things to prop up their ideology which is alienated from reality. This society is becoming like one big crazy collective who needs their social security to survive! Well, of course that’s how any given society defines insanity! But what if the society or the consensus is itself insane? As is the case today. That definition of insanity seems to be subtly nihilistic in the sense that it denies that there is really a truth to the situation. A sound definition of sanity must involve being in relative conformity to the truth and not just to society. Absolutely! If anything, it has to do with love.

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”!