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What's hard here is that, for example in an academic field there are commonly agreed upon standards and you need to get through those first to be able to test you hypothesis and ideas. But in the spiritual field you can't assume any standards so all the critique that you recieve can be dismissed rightfully or not rightfully. So how would a good critique would even look like, i don't know, its very hard and tricky in my opinion. Becuase you can always say, that you haven't got there yet. Or that you can test in on your own. There are a lot of spiritual teachers out there, and it doesn't seem like that there is an agreement everywhere and in every direction. So basically because no one can hold anyone accountable, anyone can claim anything and basically no one can attack anyone's ideas about anything in the spiritual field. And basically anything can be dismissed according to that logic. Basically you can't ground spirituality in anything, because it is the ground itself. I think the main problem lies here.

So according to the definition you use, it seems like actualized.org is a cult. What has to be changed for actualized.org to not be a cult anymore? Please be specific about it, the more specific the critiques are, the better.

I think what he meant, is that they would have the attack of suprise, not the other way around, however you could say now that is wouldn't be much of a suprise if Russia would attack other countries, so arguments could be made on both sides.

i think its time to watch some history videos too

Do you have anything specifically, why their future is not looking very bright? For me right now, the only thing that comes to my mind is maybe because Chinese people become more conscious and won't let the dictatorship to continue forward, however i don't know how much time it will take (I assume it won't happen any time soon).

Yeah, i agree with you, they seem to be ultra focused to be as effective and efficient as they possibly can, and this optimisation seems to work for them especially on an economic level. Of course, there are a lot of tradeoffs from the individual rights and possibilities perspective.

I agree with that.

@Knowledge Hoarder Do you have any ideas about how could China or North Korea become democratic or to what it takes to make them democratic? The reason why i mentioned those two especially, is because those are tightly related politically.

The whole World use so much water it is insane, and we don't value water nearly as much as we should. Here is a Netflix video about our insane water consumption : Here are some stats from the video: To create a bottle of coca-cola we need about 35 liters of water (for ingredients and for the packaging in whole) To create 1 glass of beer we need about 74 liters of water To create a cup of coffee about 130 liters for a T-shirt about 2500 liters To produce 1 kg beef we need 15000 liters of water if we calculate almost everything into it The Water crysis from a google stat: "Unless water use is drastically reduced, severe water shortage will affect the entire planet by 2040. There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we're doing today". The point of this post is not about planting fear in your mind, it is about making you more conscious about this issue. If we were to evaluate really every item's cost you use or what you consume you wouldn't be able to have it. For example, if we were to really put the right price for beef , you would need the price of 15000 liters of water for just only 1kg of beef. In this case were were only evaluating for the water quantity what is needed to produce the beef for you. If we put this lense on we can much more appretiate everything and every item we have. The solution from an individual point of view is that we really need to value basically everything much more, and not waste anything . Be mindful about every action you take or don't take, because overall it would be very costfull for you, to pay the Real price for everything.

@trenton Yeah, we could definitely argue, that paradoxically the more efficient we get thanks to the technology, the more resources we use. Before the industrial revolutions, we only used a very small portion of resources and energy to maintain out lives.But inventing new technology is not neutral and it has a lot of impact on our lives, and we don't know before the invention how its going to affect us, and we are not interested in contemplating before we drop the new tech, that what impact it will have, and what it will cause. The more efficient we get the more resource we use due to a lot of reasons. Firstly, we require more and more resource to build more and more machines, if we replace humans with machines, which we already did in many cases, most of the time to run those machines we use energy sources that need a lot of time to reproduce for example oil. Thanks to the efficiency some workers lose their jobs they need to be applied somwhere else, its immediately changes up the workplace, and the economy. With more efficiency we produced more food, built better security, started bulding up new systems, at one point we started building everyone a lot better and more abundant life, which wasn't required or expected before. Population growth was somewhat connected to the efficiency as well. Nowadays, you could argue thats not the case, but before, when the conditions were so much worse and most people died because of diseases and lack of food and nutrition, the population growth couldn't be as fast as it is now. We can see now, that at one point this dynamic changes up, and after that point it doesn't matter if you have better lifestlye and more abundant life or not, because you don't want to have more kids than before, rather we could argue we want less and less kids now. Just because of the invention of the plow, that invention itself drastically changed our lifes and our view on ourselves and on the world. Before, there were more religions and traditions that admired some animals as gods. But we realised that we could use them to work for us ,so we immediately had to change our view about them because we can't use gods as our slaves. Because we could make more food, population growth started to emerge. Thanks to the more rapid growth of population we had to build better systems to produce enough food, shelter, water, jobs and so on. Because we had to build a new infrasturcture, new jobs were coming up, new problems emerged, new and more developed thinking and mindset had to be taken place. We could go down more deep in this rabbithole, but yes it is very interesting, how just inventing one tech can change up everything even on a fundamental level. I could add here, that now because we could use animals to work for us , now we felt that we are a superiour creature compare to them, because we can make them do what we want. Our expectations and requirements to survive is vastly different compare to the past. Ironically, we need so much more resources to survive in this ages, than what we needed before. So overall one big reason for the growing energy consumption is thanks to the development of new tech, and the better efficiency. I agree with this 100%. We can manipulate some things to achieve some result, but that result won't be sufficient or it doesn't look like that it could be sufficient enough. This shows us how much we should change just the economy system. The biggest problem here is that if only one nation is conscious about this problem, and they change their prices up(to make it harder to accumulate certain resources that are scarce) then they will be in a worse geopolitical position immediately and also it will hit that nation on an economic level as well. This could only work, if every nation would change up their prices simultaneously, but it sounds ridiculous right now just to say that. Yes, it is very complicated and nuanced. The first time i listened to it, most of the stuff went over my head as well. It requires a lot of attention and studying to start to understand and to make sense what is really going on and why. The more you study it, the more you realize, that it doesn't have one big cause, but a lot of different causes that are all interconnected with each other. No, i don't. It seems to me , that it is too much to ask for right now, but i need to study this issue a lot more. Thankfully more and more conscious person is thinking about these global issues. I think we managed to collect a good amount of tactics and ideas to use. Not any of these ideas is really effective, but maybe combining them and using what we can , maybe we can achieve some results. We use what we have and do our best and thats what we can all do. I think even if we are really pessimistic (as we should be, rationally), we need to use what we can if we really want humanity to survive the 21st century.

@somegirl Yeah thats a great point. If we just think about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, then we can immediately realise, that we would be doing the same thing probably too. Maybe the lesson here is that we shouldn't try to require too much from these people who is in a dangerous situation, we should be more empathetic, and not necessarily engage with the emotional responses, rather with their ideas and points.

@somegirl Yes that is totally understandable. The ephasis here is on understanding other people's point of view, without making moral judgements on them. It is totally different to be able to see why someone is operating the way they operate, without calling them stupid or biased or other things. But there is the other spectrum, where we can call everyone stupid, who don't agree with our positions. Everyone has its own biases, but i think we should focus more on evaluating the ideas, rather than attacking always the person, who makes the claims.

@Scholar I think what he wants to achieve here, is that he doesn't want to take any limited position that has been provided. I think the reason for that, is that he wants to see this issue from as many sides as possible. If he takes up one position, he will operate from that view, but if he leaves it open, he can search for more. The "tearing down other people's positions and ideas" has its own purpose, but i can be wrong about that, the purpose could be that he wants to incourage us all, to not be lost in any position and be open to explore more and more, to have a more total view of the happenings. Of course this could maybe done better by attacking the content itself not the structure. I think you have a point there, where you said something about really engaging with the points and not invalidating the whole structure where the content placed in. The point would be to recognise all the assumptions we operate from to understand this issue, and then switch up the fundamental ones, to see other perspectives.

@Knowledge Hoarder Yeah this is true for sure. Most of the catasthrophes are happenning, because the lense is too narrow and the governer wants to optimise for one or two characteristics and ignore all the other ones, not realising that it creates more chaos overall especially in the longterm. But one example could be, China. They are really good on an economic level, and i think arugments could be made that it is somewhat because there is no democracy there. But again i am not advocating either for any authorian governship, but it has value to see the differences and trying to puzzle things out.

Yeah, its fair to say that democracy is higher, however, what would be interesting to think about , is that, how useful would democracy be, back in the middle ages? I think it definitely requires a certain type of development first, to be able to even think about democracy. Sometimes, when the political sphere is so polarized most people can't agree on basically anything, even on the facts, then the development is really hard to continue. Of course, that does not mean that dictatorship would be better, but from an dictator's pov, it is better because by excluding people decision making,because the country can develop easier on an economic level, especially when every issue is radically polarized (assuming that economic power is the most important for that dictator).

You and Leo come to this war issue from different angles and with a different kind of epistemological package. Its clear that this diasgreement won't be solved here, because its a fundamental disagreement about how to even start to understand this issue, or to what fundamental assumptions one can make to try to understand. We can switch it up, and sometimes use different kind of assumptions to operate from, and to come to our conclusions. We can just use your assumption (that psychologist can remotely accurately diagnose Putin), when we do that we can come to the same conclusions as you, but it will be just one explanation from the many. Now we can switch it up and we can operate on the assumption that he is not a psychopath or sociopath or a narcissist, and we can travel this road all the way down, lets see what conclusions we can derive from this.

@hello1234 You can only use the information what you have on your table. Most people behave differently at home , compare to their public life. Most of the time real diagnosis doesn't happen without enough information, you don't see psychologists diagnosing randomly people remotely using only a handful amount of information. Would you be happy if we captured your most angry moments and we only showed those moments to a psychologist. What do you think their diagnostical outcome would be? It would be really distorted of course.

@Blackhawk Most of us here is not interested in the moralizing part, but more about the understanding part. In fact, if you try to understand our positions and our actions better, then you will realize this on your own, that we are here to understand the situation better. @hello1234 I think most of the time, its better to search for some nuance, rather than trying to explain complex situations and behaviour with one or two labels.

Here is a brief interview with Putin

What do you solve, or what can you achieve by demonizing Putin? By demonizing him, you are shutting down the understanding path. Because of the lack of understanding, we basically won't know how to handle a person like Putin. Only by trying really hard to understand him , can some progress be made into the 'handling Putin better next time" direction. Trying to understand him does not mean, agreeing with Putin's morals. No one is denying that war is bad, and initiating a war is bad, but you don't achieve anything by saying that over and over again, when others are trying their best to make sense of the situation.

One thing we can say for sure, that he is not dumb. He was a KGB agent, that in an of itself shows, that he has some brain.

Thats a fair point, that we won't ever see Putin in a therapy session. However, the reason why i bringed it up is because, we have to be careful how strong claims we want to make, without any proper diagnosis. As i have said before, this will be just one more perspective among the other ones, so we can't capitalize only on this perspective. Problem is ,that this perspective closes down the understanding expolartion because if what you say is true, then we don't really need to analyze Putin much more. But we don't know if its true or not, its just a speculation, so in my opinion we shouldn't count it out, but we shouldn't focus on it too much, and we should gather more and more perspectives.

I don't know the exact numbers how many people admire Putin for his actions, however we can see how many Russian people were on the streets protesting to stop the war. So there could be some hope, at the end of the day.

@hello1234 Do we have any psychological evidence for Putin being a sociopath or psychopath? I am not talking about his actions ,but about a real diagnosis. The reason why i ask is because it is very different when some psychologist assume, that someone has this or that, and when there is a real diagnosis of something. If we don't have any, then this claim that he is doing what he is doing is because he is a psychopath will be just one more perspective among many that tries to describe the reasons behind his behaviour.