Apparition of Jack

@Leo Gura I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, because I share many of the same sentiments as Derek does. A couple of months ago when the current trouble in Kashmir kicked up and Sadhguru spoke out on that, you said he intuivitely understood Spiral Dynamics because he put the blame at the lack of a unified Indian identity, not the current ruling party, which seems fair enough. However, again with these recent protests, he seems to be deflecting from criticising the government directly and instead criticising misinformation about the current citizenship bill, but to me - and many others - it can't help but feel like there actually is a sinister toxic Blue ethnonationalist underpinning to this bill that explicitly doesn't include Muslims under its protection. Like, I'm trying to understand the POV Sadhguru is coming from, but he seems way too quick to dismiss criticisms of the policies of the BJP and it almost sounds like he's peddling their propaganda at times. I know he's trying the best he can to create a unified Indian identity based on respect and dialogue and he doesn't want to muddy the waters, but when people's lives are at stake with such a reactionary government in power, it genuinely feels like he's unsympathetic to the plight of the people who are being negatively affected. Go look on the YouTube comments on any of his videos with a vaguely political leaning, and it's just an endless stream of people using his words to push reactionary bullshit blaming the INC / liberals / Marxists / etc. for the sufferings that the BJP has caused. He seems too blase with his words. Am I missing anything here?

I liked the one set in feudal China as it was being slowly overtaken by the British / industrialisation. It spoke to me of how mysticism/magic has slowly died as part of our collective experience of reality, only to be replaced with machines and engineering.

Utter horseshit. Forgive me for the strong language but there's basically nothing to be gained other than low-consciousness mind-viruses by listening to alt-right nonsense like Felix Rex.

Leo has spoken about Plotinus before, and has described him as a "Western Zen master." As much as it's accurate to say that someone can be "enlightened," I would 100% say that Plotinus was enlightened. What's even cooler is that his teachings have pervaded Western thought for the last 1800 years, we've just collectively forgotten how to recognise it. Figures like Meister Eckhart, John Scotus Eriugena and Georg W. Hegel were all influenced by him. Non-Duality is a deeply Western teaching, if you know how to spot it.

@Husseinisdoingfine Deeply stage Blue people tend to dislike anything that gets them to break down their assumptions, like how modern art does, since they're much more strongly identified with their "cultural" ego than stage Orange or Green people. To them, anything that doesn't completely reaffirm what they believe is "solid" and "true" - for example - repainting the Mona Lisa to look like a modern hipster, or creating abstract sculputers that don't perfectly resemble humans - comes across as threatening, hence why they will call these things "Satanic", "Cultural Marxism," and so on. To them, in their reality, the experience of seeing a piece of modern art is so threatening to their egos that the experience literally comes across as the work of Satan. This is why also capitalistic Disney movies designed to make billions of dollars are called "Communist" (the complete opposite of Disney's ideology) in their eyes, because these new movies might have a black female leader, or a hispanic soldier, which goes against what their cultural ego is conditioned to believe is "the truth" - that white males are the "heroes" of stories and anything else is clearly "false". I'm rambling now so I'll end it here. Writing these out helps me understand my own thoughts better.

@Leo Gura Are you naturally bald? If not, why do you shave your head?

Benefits are for fulfilling your short-term needs for sex, food, money, status, drugs, etc if you’re the dictator. Long-term benefits are limited because you can be overthrown and killed. For everyone else’s needs benefits are almost non-existent, instead being replaced with countless negatives. On the whole dictatorship is a very low-consciousness political system. If you’re serious about self-actualising and raising consciousness it is to be avoided at all costs.

@Bno Trump is a conman. He lies and cheats and steals to get his way with no regard for consequences. He'll try to woo you, but only so he can rob your expensive cutlery and screw your wife behind your back. If you call him out on this, he'll throw a tantrum and try to smear your name in the eyes of the world. The Clintons and Bushs are career politicians. They know how to play dirty and have made poor decisions with their power, but they still have a sense of empathy/integrity/foresight that guides their actions. They'll try to woo you, but this time it's just for your vote, and if you disagree with them they'll respect your decision and move on. Both are corrupt, but the degrees of corruption are on two different levels. The Clintons and Bushs aren't popular because they represent the decaying US establishment, but in a choice between the US establishment and a conman like Trump, the establishment is still more level-headed/reasonable/conscious.

@Bno Trump is more corrupt than the Bushs and Clintons.

@Alyosha Trump has had way more long-term corruption than families like the Bushes or Clintons, it’s just that prior to his political run, they didn’t matter in terms of the national interest, so most people didn’t care about them. Now that he’s POTUS though all of his corrupt behavioural patterns (and his lack of finesse in hiding them as you point out) are coming back to bite him in the ass.

Stage Orange scientism misunderstanding spirituality:

@Bno Impeachment is hurting Trump. A major evangelical newspaper just came out retracting support for Trump because him being impeached highlighted his corrupt behaviour to them. He's feeling the heat.

A rather amusing example of Stage Blue superstition:

@Leo Gura What can you envision conscious, self-actualising human beings doing in order to make this transition easier? I sometimes tremble at the thought of the potential right-wing backlash the world could go through as Orange exhausts itself, and I wonder to myself what it is I could do to help navigate humanity through such trying times. I understand on some level that it's all out of my control, but at the same time I feel compelled to try and do.. something.. to help the world make sense of what its going through?

We need more information - where exactly in southern Mexico are you moving? Why are you moving there? Who will you be with when you’re there? What sort of advice are you looking for specifically? Also this really should be in the Life Purpose forum.

@Bno Should we call out Bernie for working with both Corporate Dems and Republicans during his 40+ years a politician to push policies that help working Americans too then? He co-authored and signed dozens if not hundreds of bills with these two parties up and down the decades. Does that now make him not a true progressive? Should Bernie2020 ditch Bernie and instead put some other "purer" progressive in charge instead?

@Bno Some of the Buddha's work was counter-productive too, but that didn't stop him from making a massively beneficial impact on the world. Should we be suspicious of the Buddha for not being "enlightened" enough now and dismiss all of his teachings?

@Bno With all due respect, and feel free to accept or deny my observations as you wish, but from what I've seen you say here I get the gut feeling you may still be dealing with some degree of a Blue/Orange shadow. This is perfectly fine, we are all at the level of development we need to be at right now, but if you're serious about Green progressivism then it may help you to think about facing and integrating these Blue/Orange aspects of your psyche, so that you become more clued in on and more effective in harnessing the dynamics of the Green progressive movement, IMO.

If you want to include them, I've heard the Seychelles and Mauritius have relatively high levels of economic development, putting them probably at at a blue/ORANGE stage. Also, I'm sure there are relatively developed parts of countries like Kenya or Namibia, but these would be relegated to the wealthier areas of bigger cities. I'd say overall Africa is still stuck mostly at a Purple/Red/Blue level of development, for a large number of reasons. One thing developed countries could do to help African countries to develop would be debt forgiveness.

Have you noticed how those blonde haired blue eyed Nordics only maintain their beauty standards by pushing this image onto the rest of the world as "THE" most attractive racial type though? Have you noticed how most Hollywood movies involve fair-skinned actors in the lead roles, despite neither Hollywood, nor California, nor the USA, nor the developed world at large, nor even the entire world, still exclusively resembling these features? How many dark-skinned, dark-haired tech gurus, lawyers, politicians, models, actors, singers, philosophers, journalists, scientists, sports stars, celebrities etc. are out there in the West today? MILLIONS! And yet our culture doesn't reflect that. Why is that? Because blonde-haired Nordic people have a specific survival reason for wanting to make sure mainstream culture resembles "them" the most. Why would you want Asian, Indian, African, etc. people getting fame and status when you can horde all this for yourself, especially since it gives you access to more money and sex than you could ever deal with? The ego-mind finds sharing to be completely abhorrent to its survival agenda. The problem is, this attitude is untenable. The future is not white, but mixed. No matter how much ethnonationalists may fight and protest this, the effects of globalisation and multi-culturalism are inevitable. The law of non-duality makes this so. Whenever a power imbalance arises, nature will come to correct it out. The question is not how much will the future be mixed, but rather how quickly are we going to adapt to it? The longer we delay making the conscious transition to a multi-racial global civilisation (which will involve shifting our attitudes around sex, the media, dating, beauty, and so on), the harder the social disruptions will be for everyone.

I have been analysing Brexit/ this latest election from a SD perspective too, and the only conclusion I can come up with is that I've underestimated the strength of the ego backlash against Green that Blue/Orange would have in the face of globalisation / changing environmental realities and so on. I thought that the election of Trump in the US would force the rest of the developed world to push more strongly towards Green, but clearly Blue/Orange simply has too much cultural sway over the industrialised countries these days for there to be a smooth, straight-forward transition. Still, Bernie remains a strong possibility in 2020. In some sense this prolonged Blue/Orange backlash may be what's needed for the global noosphere to manifest enough Green goodwill to finally see a Green president enter the White House (which would then drag the rest of the world closer up to Green in the coming years.) It sucks for the individual countries manifesting these Blue/Orange politicians for the time being (UK, Australia, Brazil, Hungary, etc.), but then again human evolution has never been easy. I'd say it's still up to us here to fight the good fight and continue to propagate Green causes, because sooner or later they will arrive. Things are still up in the open. We can harness this opportunity.

Brexit was simply too strong in the British public’s psyche to make running a campaign on anything else but it worthwhile. Also, too many powerful interests had a vested stake in making sure Brexit passed and keeping Labour out of power, hence the constant demonisation of them in the media. This is a huge step back for Britain, but all the conditions were there for it to manifest. The collective denial of both climate change and neoliberal social destruction is paradoxically what compelled people to vote for the party most likely to make these issues worse. As I said in my previous post on the issue, Brexit is neither here nor there so long as the country is poor and sick. But here we are. Let’s look forward to more cuts in public spending, more entrenched greed and more inaction on environmental devastation.

Weird. I saw this on my news feed yesterday and was going to watch it, but now when I go to click on it it says that the video is unavailable. I wonder why.

@Leo Gura From what I understand you spend most of your time in your house / your meditation cabin these days since you’ve been able to set yourself up rather successfully and to continuously pursue awakening, but do you still have “worldly” obligations to family/friends that you engage in? Do you ever attend a cousin’s wedding, or a grandparent’s birthday, or have an old friend contact you online and ask to grab a couple of drinks to catch up? If so, how do you handle these situations, do you just go along with the ride or do you use it as a chance to get some people thinking about self-actualisation? If you don’t do these things, how do your family/friends take it? Do they understand what you’re doing on some level or do they get annoyed with you for being some hippie hermit? What does “social balance” to you look like?

First of all I'm not from the UK, so I can't speak to what life is like on the ground there, and what I'm about to write are just my own observations, so feel free to accept or reject them as you please, but from what I've seen on the news, from YouTube videos, and from some friends/family I have other there, life seems to have gotten a lot tougher and a lot greyer since the Tories got in around 10 years ago. This has been the result of years of austerity cuts and attacks on crucial public institutions, which has left British society much poorer as a result. Yes, some billionaires get to party with their mates in Dubai, but we're not talking about billionaires here, we're talking about the well-being of a country of tens of millions of people who have to live and work in the real world. This is also on top of the climate situation which isn't getting any better, and which needs to be dealt with if the UK wants to stave off the worse of the social/economic/cultural etc. damage that will result otherwise. With all this in mind, a vote for the Tories is a vote for further decay. They are a party without any vision and a unhealthy lack of humanity, and have really screwed over the British people since their time in office. They have a lot of powerful friends, but these powerful friends really don't give a rat's ass about the actual well-being of the country. Now, if you're adamant about defending the Tories, I'm sure there's hundreds of examples of minor policy things they did that helped the British people since their time in office, but this ties in to Leo's video on Structure vs. Content. Getting too caught up in the tiny details of Tory governance (content) misses the point, since it's their structure (party for the elites, by the elites, at the expense of the rest of us) that's the problem. This is not to mention their ties to Russian money, US multinationals, Saudi despots, and so on. Labour's policies are about actually making the UK a livable country again, using empirical tools to do so, as well as changing the structure of politics to better give the people a say in how their country is run (this is why they are so hated by big businesses and the Tories.) All of their economic policies are based on hard evidence, and have been shown to work in the countries they're implemented in. Funding hospitals, funding schools, giving worker's more rights in the workplace and so on is good, and Labour has the best chance of making this vision a reality. As for Brexit, I'm neither here nor there. If it happens or it doesn't happen is irrelevant if the people in the country are broke, sick, unemployed and depressed. The most important thing for the people of Britain nowadays is to make it a liveable place again, and, in my best estimation, that's what Labour will help accomplish.