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This community scores on literally all the points that are not "in-person" (except the meditation/chanting one unless you want to stretch it into recommendations to take mind-altering substances to "know what I'm talking about"). Virtually all of Leo's blog posts are about how destructive ("egoic, self-deceived, low-consciousness, stupid, unintelligent, corrupt") the world is and he routinely implies his teachings are an/the antidote (e.g. "Conscious Politics", "Pure Philosophy"). They use highly divisive and emotionally charged language and are highly judgemental, repetitive. I personally am repelled from reading them for exactly that reason. The reaction to this thread is a cult study on its own. Also, in your thread, it was implied I was being disrespectful for having a different opinion and that I "don't deserve his teachings". Emotionally charged communication. Instead of simply addressing my points and showing through argument, Leo will routinely say words like "you don't understand", "you don't know what you're talking about", like in this thread and the other cult thread I linked. It functions to remove my autonomy and belief in my own mental faculties. Statements like "I'm the only authority on epistemology" (see the other cult thread) reinforces that. PMs when I'm acting out and being critical, like here, trying to "talk it out". Happened multiple of times. No incense or eye contact, but a different level of proximity. The emotionally charged communication and autonomy-deriding language happens in a public forum inducing public shaming. Other members will routinely adopt the same style and gang up on you. "You only care about survival, your mind runs on self-deception and self-bias, of course you will disagree with me, that's expected". I would suggest this is a too dichotomous framing. Most sophisticated cults teach you such techniques, that's their appeal. And ironically they tend to use those techniques to protect and validate the ills of the cult. The virtues and the ills coincide, they are not mutually exclusive, and they often work in tandem to maintain the cult identity. That's what make cults so tricky. It's a tug of war between seeing the benefits and the ills. I'm sure you can find autonomy-increasing teachings in MAPLE, as you can in Bentinho Massaro's community, or in the Discord I was a part of. "But it's more ills than benefits in those cases". Well, let's assume you can even make such a distinction, does that warrant a categorical distinction (cult vs not-cult)? If the difference is only in degree, then maybe that's all it is.

Notice how Carl managed to predict perfectly how Leo will respond and notice how Leo's non-answer was a manipulative "you dont understand " tactic for the millionth time. Like this is perfection, Leo doesnt have a single fucking spine in his body. He cant fucking respond to anything with substance without implying that you are a retard or mentally or spiritually impaired. There is no disagreement with him on any issue that he cares about where you must not be dumb or misunderstanding. You either agree or you are just simply wrong. Fucking perfection, and people here will continue to deepthroat this guy. Also the allegedly non-authoritative guy btw, who wants to dictatate how his community should use certain words, and also wants to be the exclusive judge of your level of spiritual knowledge (since there is no one else who knows what they are talking about) and everyone else (inclduing you yourself) is unfit for that (btw you all have perfect sovereignty guys and you are perfectly legit to judge things for yourself as long as you agree with Leo, but if you dont, then we have a problem here, because that shows that you have no understanding and you should rather ask Leo to be your exclusive judge) Contrast current Leo with this past Leo:

I will leave this here and I will stop derailing your thread. This speaks for itself and everyone can judge things for themselves. This is exactly and explicitly how much actualized.org is about doing the work and not about Leo being the judge and an authority: Also take a look at how non-responsive Leo's answer was to Carl's question and how Leo exactly engaged in the dynamic that Carl was predicting based on Leo's manipulative and weasely tactics.

I dont have that kind of disagreement, I rather have issues with his completely firm credence on things given his epistemology. (this kind of criticism is applicable to everyone else btw who is dogmatic about something and isnt open to be wrong). There is a lack of acknowledgement that he can be wrong and there is a lack of acknowledgement that he takes certain things necessarily dogmatically true to even get spirituality on the ground and to start spiritual work. This is btw another interesting thing - you can watch him how he navigates disagreement with Buddhist or nondual people and how he will curiously claim that his teachings are different in a meaningful way and that are a bunch of meaningful differences and that those traditions are wrong about those details, but when it is convenient for him he will claim that those differences are just minutia and arent meaningful. The significance of disagreeing on those details will curiously change depending on what is convenient for him in the given context. Even if you take the dogma stack that Leo takes to be true for granted, you can still give him an internal critique that he doesnt have literally any subtantive response to and hence he should lower down his credence (even granting that his dogma stack is true) in his conclusions.

if it is truly just about the work, then I would not expect him to judge and demonize other leaders and other traditions and to waste time on that and I wouldnt expect him to consistently and continously claim to be the most developed person (especially when literally no one asks for it) and I would expect him either again to provide an indepdent process from him by which you can judge whether you are wrong or not and an indepedent process by which you can judge your level of understanding or If he cant do that, then I would expect him to be actually open to the possibility that he is wrong (not just claiming that he can be wrong, but actually seeing that he qualifies his satements and that he leaves room for others to be right and him being wrong) and I would expect him to qualify his statements and I would expect him to treat spiritual disagreements as something that potentially in principle both party can learn from (and not automatically think from the get-go in literally every single exchange that the other person is necessarily wrong or self-deceived from the fact that they disagree with him)

Its not about the styles, its about the unchallengeable starting premises that are taken to be true from the start and that shadows all interactions and all judgements going forward from there. There is no amount style change that can fix that. This is not about rhetoric, this is about the actual substance that is taken to be true by Leo. Again his actions and judgements flows from the unchallengeable starting premises that he takes to be true.

Leo created that trap and Leo made the work about himself. Its Leo who made it so that the "work" necessarily includes taking his words seriously, since his body of work is depedent on his subjective judgements about what is the highest awakening and what is the highest level understanding and there is no independent guiding process that is given to you that you can use to judge your progress other than his words and judgements. There is always this implication that the actual work can be done and judged independent from his stance, but in practice thats literally never the case. There is literally no option or scenario where you doing the work can lead you to the conclusion that he is wrong and that you are right, because that will automatically mean that you are self-deceived and that you need to do more. -------- Also the implication of your statement is that there are literally no cults as long as the judgements and the behavior of the leader is ignored. Like even if the leader claims explicitly or implcitily to be an authority on the subject, that still wont make it a cult, because you are free to ignore those claims and words about authority.When the Heaven's gate leader said that you need to unalive yourself to spawn on the spaceship, given your stance on this that wasnt cult like (as long as you didnt automatically take that claim to be true ), because he just simply descriptively outlined an action that you can use and try and test for yourself and you unaliving yourself there and then is just you doing the work and testing the waters for yourself and not necessarily taking his words on belief. (You unaliving yourself there and then is compatible with you being agnostic about the leader's words and just testing it for yourself).

Very good faith engagement right there and you dont come across at all as someone who is mindlessly sweeping for him and emotionally and defensively reacting to the points that are said.

I dont and others dont, but the point is that thats the expectation given that its taken to be true from the start that he is more qualified to make that judgement than literally anyone in the Universe. That would be the expectation from a leader who takes self-deception seriously, but thats not what happens here. Given the epistemic issue of circular justification and the issue about self-deception, I would expect him either to again give an indepdent norm that everyone can use or concede that he needs to qualify all his knowledge and stance on spirituality and lower his credence way the fuck down in what he takes to be true and especially in the premise that he is more developed than everyone else. The conclusion isnt what you said there, the conclusion is that you are self deceived and not that you have simply a different take on spirituality.

Like he is the most conscious being in the universe and that there is no one else who actually knows what God is and how deep it goes and what are the aspects of God. Yeah, the claim is to not believe him and to do the work, but if you do the work and the study and you happen to disagree with him, then you suppose to do more work and more study up until the point that you actually agree with him. Again the norm that decides what kind of work and how much more work and study you need to do is judged by him and disagreement means that you are wrong and that you need to self correct and that he is right. Okay, so give me the norms that he provided that arent directly dependent on his subjective judgements (that I can use to indepdently judge whether I am or him self-deceived about things and that I can use to indepedently judge who is more developed).

I personally dont think that Leo is nefariously planning these things, but I dont think that is necessary for actualized.org to be considered a cult. I think that he genuinely thinks and has a belief that he is doing good by what he does, but thats part of the issue. Its enough if you have a couple of delusional beliefs and a self image that makes it so that you genuinely think that you are doing good and that all your actions contributes to the greater good. And this is going to be true for a lot of other instances that most actualized.org members would consider to be cults, where the leader dont necessarily have any specific nefarious intention behind his actions and where the leader wont consider his actions to be exploitative or bad in any meaningful way. For instance - for you to start a sex cult, you dont need to have any nefarious or explicit bad intention to start one - its enough for you just to start with the delusional premise that by having sex with women you will provide them spirtual knowledge and or certain spiritual abilities and or awakening. Relating that back to actualized.org - if you genuinely think that all other people except you are cognitively and spiritually impaired, and that you are the most conscious being in the universe and that no one even comes slightly close to your understanding - then of course you are going to use his rhetoric and some of the tactics that Leo use. Aside from the issue that he has no indepedent justification to demonstrate those things to be true and he has no indepedent justification to justify for himself that he isn't self-deceived about those things (that btw he just inferred to be the case), the effects that comes from him taking that starting premise as true is that he undermines the sovereignty of all other people the moment they disagree with him on spiritual matters and he will use language and rhetoric that will continously and consistently undermine their confidence and their sovereignty. Actualized.org is selecting for people who are open-minded and that is used as a crack and as an attack vector to completely and consistently undermine the confidence of people who disagree with Leo on spiritual matters. You are consistently presented with a false dichotomy, where you are either closed minded and self deceived or you are open minded and agree with Leo on all spiritual matters. All the norms that can help help you to judge whether you are self-deceived or not, necessarily come back to him and to what he takes to be true and there is no room for him to be wrong about any of those things (he might claim that there is room for him to be wrong when is cornered, but again he will immediately pivot back to a behavior where demonstrates the exact opposite). From a non-cult I would expect there to be self-correcting norms (that are applicable both to the members and to the leader) that can be independently judged and evaluated from the subjective evaluation of that leader and where the leader dont have an explicit authority on those norms. And I would also expect there to be norms that can be used to hold the leader accountable for his actions that are again indepedent from the subjective evaluation and opinion of the leader and where he doesnt have an authority on what those norms ought to be.

Unsafe? No. Manipulated ? Yes. (disagreement means you are dumb or you are self-deceived or you are disrespectful). Read some of the links that I gave you (it specifically leads you to my posts in those threads). Leo has a bunch of plausible deniability moves which he uses so that he doesnt need to take responsbility and if you manage to corner him on that then he will admit that he was wrong, but not for the thing that he supposed to give an apology or acknowledgement for (he will give you apology for using bad words , but he wont acknowledge the deeper underlying judgemental and behavioral problems that consistently and systematically come up over and over again and cant be simply explained away by being unhinged sometimes). The other interesting thing is that once you manage to corner him , he might acknowledge that thing, but he will pivot back to the exact same tactic that he was cornered for in the past if that tactic becomes convenient for him to use given a new context(he will try to redo that tactic given the new waters up until the point that he is cornered for that same thing again).

Yes I have with the murder scene analogy and you havent addressed it (you havent shown that the bit that you picked out is false, you just said that that one bit being true in and of itself doesnt make something a cult). But even if you could show that that bit is false and isn't applicable to actualized.org (which again you havent done yet) - Cult is a cluster concept and this is not the kind of concept where you can just find all the necessary conditions and if you manage to shot down one of those, then the thing is not a cult anymore. There are many different configuration of facts that can make something a cult. This is why you need to analyze this in clusters of facts and not just bit by bit.

Read:

No you havent, because the claim never was that that one thing on its own is problematic or that its sufficient to make it a cult. Try to actually turn on your brain for once. You are like dude at a murder scene saying "wait hahaha do you think blood being on one guy definitely makes the guy a killer" - no it isnt, but if that fact is true in conjuction with that guy having a knife in his hand, telling you that he did the murder, having background info about the guy that he hated the other guy who got murdered, then given all of that info - the "having blood on him" fact gets an entirely different light and weight. This is not a kind of thing that you can just shot down going bit by bit, you need to attack the whole thing.

Dude just on this very page (not just in this thread) you can find more criticism bits than what you presented in your initial reply (just take a look at Carl replies just on this page). You are either dishonest or lazy or both, but one thing is for sure , you dont give the slightest fuck about any of this.

That rhetorical question already shows me that you disinterested in actually engaging and you dont give a fuck about this and you only give a fuck about sweeping. I dont know what you think you are doing here if you dont bother to even read through a few pages of this thread (or let alone the "Leo" thread)before you chime in with your completely uninformed stance on the matter and where you pick out one single bit from the criticism and then pretend that you managed to respond to the meat of the criticism.

it triggers me that you are not honest enough to try to engage with the actual crticism and you are here to downplay things (you know, like a good cult member doing work and freely sweeping for the leader).

Notice that you try to ignore all the other parts of the criticism and you cant look at it holistically so that you can downplay things. Its so silly that you dont even try even the slightest to try to engage with the whole criticism. Some of us here are like "here is a list of things that applies to actualized.org and all of these things in conjuction being applicable to it makes it a cult" and then you are like "okay here is 1 thing from that list and let me now pretend that they think that that 1 thing is sufficient to categorize actualized.org a cult and that there is nothing else on that list". But regardless, I dont have issue with labeling a bunch of other spiritual groups as cults ,so I dont take that entailment of my stance to be a problem.

Thats literally what happens in practice though. Spiritual disagreement with Leo never ever ends up in a place where you are treated as an individual who isn't self-deceived and or needing to do more work and or treated either as a cognitively impaired or a spiritually impaired person. Disagreement for him is a sign that you need to be told whats up and you need to be corrected rather than him having a discussion and a disagreement with a potentially mutually developed person from which both person can learn from (he never looks at it as a disagreement from which he can learn from or that he might be missing something or that he might be wrong ) And he has been consistently claiming to be the most developed person on Earth and that no one else (including all other spiritual leaders) know what they are talking about. (for close to a decade now) You arent self-deceived and you are sovereign as long as you a lock step with Leo's spiritual views, but if you diverge from it you are self-deceived and you need to do more spiritual work. Your level of development and how much you are self deceived and how much you are sovereign - all of those things are defined by how much you agree with Leo's epistemology and with Leo's spiritual views. Demonization of other groups and other school of thought - You happen to be in groupthink (if you doing practices and philosophy happens to lead you to a different group of people or to a different school of thought), but if you are lock step with Leo's epistemology and all of his spiritual views, then you are free from group think and you are exercising your sovereignty. Bro you are totally free to leave if you are happen to be the undeveloped loser who are dinterested in Truth and more interested in wasting his time and exploring other school of thought that obviously and must be aiming for falsehood (which just means disagrees with Leo on spiritual matters) and if you want to engage with other group of people and other spiritual leaders who must be less developed and more self deceived than Leo.

Aside from the fact that it is very interesting that he is supporting platonism (vervaeke had a big impact on him I think), his claims and some of his papers about algorithms are super interesting as well. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10597123241269740 Its such an insanely out of the box thing to suggest and to empirically test. This group of people being in one place is weird as hell

@Human Mint How much philosophy and spiritual work have you done before you discovered Leo's content?

Any large group project that involves resources and people working together is gonna be messy , especially if millions are supposed to work together to figure out things about the world on a global scale. You will never find a scientist who can start from scratch and figure out everything from 1st principles on their own, becasuse people dont have the time and the money to validate every single past experiment and research question on their own and they also lack the cognitive capacity to do so. Now go ahead and propose a system that will afford millions of researchers and scientists to work together on a global scale in a way where they will have the necessary funding and tools to do their experiments without getting cultural and political distortions involved. Also propose a better system where each droplet of research that is provided by other researchers can be handled and validated better by other researchers without needing to force an impossible task on every single researcher - namely, to validate every single past and present droplet of research.

Most of them dont explicitly endorse logical positivism and roughly 50% of them are physicalists. But its true that most of them are scientific realists.

This is very low tier apologetics https://actualized.org/insights/why-the-universe-cant-be-eternal The dude there dont have enough spine to represent the non-theist side well. And of course he also doesnt steelman the infinitist view (which btw some physicists take). Even if we go with the assumption that the Universe had a beginning , you would still need to establish that it had to have a cause and even if you managed to do that (which isn't trivial btw), you would still need to rule out many different versions of infinite regress and even if you managed to do that, you would still need to rule out a bunch of non-theist non-personal alternatives .