The Renaissance Man

I'm seeing many absolute and certain claims that are based on hearsay at best and vibe at worst... you know reality is more complex than that, that goes for every area, not just ego or spiritual development.

I'm very... not surprised lol The title says "protein intake is a complete joke and a farse" don't forget that. He's not just saying it's not necessary for his goals. Don't fall yourself into the trap of making absolute statements. IT DEPENDS on your goal! Useless for health (and it depends, some people need to count macros in order to lose weight effectively and consciously), not useless if you're an athlete, actually, very much necessary if you're an athlete especially in strength or bodybuilding.

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It's really not. And how is 2500 perfectly reasonable and 3000 not? There are skinny people who need to eat 3500 calories just to maintain their weight.

This does not disprove the advice of calorie and protein intake. That advice is specifically for optimizing muscle hypertrophy (muscle gain). It is not necessary for health. It's not deleterious either by the way, it's just preference. But if you try gaining muscle after 5 years of serious training without eating a lot of calories and protein... good luck with that. If you're untrained (or few years of experience) even just walking in the gym will make you gain muscle. That's not what this advice is for. Don't be so quick to judge, just because you didn't like it it doesn't mean it's bullshit.

@What Am I I discovered this document because my father in 1983 saw a massive UFO (like 50 meters/150 feet or something), disc shape, full of lights, completely silent, flying low and super slowly. Then after 40 years I checked the name of the city and the date, and I found it in this database. He did not report it, nor knew about the existence of a list of reports. He just told me the story, and apparently someone else saw it as well (there were hundreds of people, it was a town event about midnight) At the same time I do think how the fuck did nobody take a picture???? But my dad isn't crazy, he's a chill, normal guy, and he was 18 at the time, not 8... He's not even into UFOs at all nor conspiracy theories. He just treats it like a cool fact, that's it.

@Spiritedness Leo's video is more on general principles on how the possible traps and self-deception that can happen in the research process. You can read the summary here. Here's a process you may like: First, develop a moderate (not just basic) understanding of the topic. Otherwise you won't be able to judge all the possible sources validly enough. This can mean months or sometimes years (depending on how much time you dedicate to it). Then, once you feel like you don't get much benefit from "traditional sources" (and getting there is already a lot, but it doesn't make sense to skip this), you make a list of key words about the topic, and use Google, YouTube, PubMed, Amazon books, or whatever, to create a massive database (1.000 to 5.000) of possible sources. That's how you get to the niche stuff, possibly. You then (or in the moment you collect them) make a quick evaluation, and only go deeper with the ones above a certain "score". The evaluation will be very quick by the way, don't be scared by the numbers. This can be done periodically (every 3-5 years for example) to make sure you can leverage potentially new sources and developments. In practice the process is more organic, your understanding and lack thereof may inform the direction of your research for a good while, before you really create a database like this. This is a process I derived from stumbling randombly on very powerful but niche sources, and then asking: how could I have found this on purpose and reliably?

https://www.centroufologiconazionale.net/avvistamenti/CasisticaCunItalia1900-2008.pdf Sightings in Italy only from 1900 to 2008 (50 per page, 212 page document = 10.000 sightings), and 99% of them are from 1950 onwards, so 10.000 sightings in 60 years In more recent reports they explain how they have a procedure of asking further questions to determine if the sighting was not Starlink satellites, airplanes, the ISS, camera defects, drones, natural phenomena, etc.

Do you have any techniques to raise consciousness that can be systematically applied. It's clear to me how practice, repetition, and lots of it is a requirement for serious change, and so I'm looking for ideas for "consciousness/self-dev practices" one can do, and create a sort of training program to follow 1-2 hours every day. Some practices: I recently learned about Nathaniel Branden (six pillars of self esteem) and his sentence completion exercises, where you complete a sentence with 6-10 endings rapid fire, without thinking. For example: If I bring 5 percent more awareness to my impulses to avoid unpleasant facts... I haven't done this practice yet. Tracking my time and all activities I do during the day Keeping a list and noticing what activities made me happier or unhappier

By mentor I mean finding someone with wisdom in whatever you're interested in, but I'm mainly thinking about regular personal development, not even spirituality, although I'd like to hear about that perspective too if you have experience. And then developing a personal connection with the mentor where you can directly learn from them. I don't mean going to a seminar, or watching videos, or reading books. I don't even mean going to a retreat (although I've never gone to one so I don't know how similar a months long retreat could be to having a mentor) - Have you ever considered finding one? - Is it realistic? - Do you have experience with a mentor? I don't know if trying to find a mentor is a worthy pursuit, or how hard finding a good one can be.

I found out about Holosync from Leo's book list, but last time Leo has mentioned Holosync on the forum was 7 years ago. In 2020 he said the word "LifeFlow" when asked for recommendations on Binaural Beats, but that was without further context or explanation, and that's the only time that name has ever popped up in the forum. Since Holosync implies a time commitment of an hour every day for months and years (that's no joke), and since "low effort" tools like this one have a history of never working, I want to be careful about making such an investment. So @Leo Gura do you still recommend Holosync, or this "LifeFlow" that wasn't mentioned anymore after that one time? Or are there better ways of going about emotional mastery, aka Binaural Beats are not worth the time? I'm not expecting it to do all the work for me by the way, but we can agree that an hour every day is not a joke, especially if there's a high risk of being totally useless (that's why I'm asking you folks who have experience with the program). I did my research on the forum before making this post, and honestly for such a commitment there wasn't enough volume of experiences to make a judgment, and all of Leo's mentions were either very old or vague. If this tool really is a powerful one, then it should be mentioned more, and the fact that it hasn't adds to my added carefulness in embarking in something similar. Thanks to everyone who replies

@bambi I feel like it's a critique of the whole recurring subscription model when there's the alternative possibility of a one-time payment. Software (Adobe, Microsoft, SaaS companies, Spotify, YouTube Premium) and courses are typical, where you pay monthly or yearly. In the long run a recurring subscription is probably just more profitable in those cases. It's a subtle way of making people pay more. I don't think it was referring to amazon recurring purchases for example.

@Jayson G True, he did give examples. "AI" is an example, but it would help to clarify how AI is theft, or "marketing", how is exactly theft? How am I supposed to make my offer known, in a sea of sharks? I can do my best to make it honest and valuable, but am I forced to steal to survive or is there an alternative I'm not seeing? Is actualized.org theft in some ways? So I meant more examples of the dynamic of theft: what is stolen, why it's stolen, what even is theft in this subtler sense... Also, what's the solution? And each example is quite different in nature and level of corruption. If I hide research on UFOs, am I committing theft? What if I am a hacker and give that all out for free, am I committing theft because I stole and divulged the information without those people's consent? I mean I'm asking about Robin Hood here lol. Is it possible that Robin Hood like behavior is a net positive in corrupt societies, but compared to super mature societies it's still a net negative? Like Spiral Dynamics, where lower levels of development are necessary for the survival in societies at those stages? Maybe Leo isn't even saying to not be a thief at all (because it would mean not surviving), and we're misinterpreting it.

@Jayson G Yes I agree that some examples would really help here, and with corruption as well. It's quite abstract and subject to one's interpretation of the words "theft" and "corruption", which I'm sure have a lot more depth in Leo's mind after reading all those books.

Is the main symptom of corruption the self-justification of despicable behavior? And are corrupt industries (like Leo mentioned, pickup, or wall street) identifiable as culture that makes it even easier or even encourage self-justification of despicable behavior? Is this a decent definition? I'm trying to corner this concept of corruption and how it looks like in practice.

@Yimpa lol just put some heavy ass weights on your back

@Jacob Morres Yes he watches Leo, he doesn't hide it either. He said explicitly he thinks it's the most valuable channel on YouTube. He often mentioned the video "65 principles for living the good life" and recommended watching it once a year. He has endorsed actualized.org multiple times publicly, both recently and years ago.

Quote from Leo's last blog post The Melian Dialogue & Zionism, it's incredibly deep:

@Carl-Richard Yes I'm not saying the problem is that the game becomes easier and easier, I'm saying why progress in the game will probably not translate to other areas.

Great one. Also "how to do research". There was an old episode on this but it wasn't practical enough IMO, it didn't touch on finding sources for example, and then evaluating them. Even just practical tips and tricks gathered over years of studying and finding sources, that may seem obvious until you aren't aware of them.

@Ninja_pig Thank you. What kind of meditation? Also, can you help me understand it better? Even though it's super popular, I never quite understood the practical connection. For example, let's say I have social anxiety, and consciousness over its false nature could solve it. How would meditation help? Or maybe I lack motivation because I'm not conscious enough of my goal, the process, or I distort the unpleasantness of the action. How does meditation help?

@Majed It's an issue with quotes in general. They're brief, they don't provide context, and for this reason they can be interpreted in many ways. Plus, Leo loves being dramatic lol

@Rafael Thundercat Are you looking for ways to filter out and recognize those people? Or is it more of a societal question, to "punish" these scammers?

Are ya'll familiar with mnemonics and their competitions? There are people and techniques that help you excel at this kind of stuff extremely. Is their working memory really improving? Debatable. They'd all be Tesla right now. And even if you don't use any technique, the brain over time just becomes able to develop specific pattern recognition and chunking abilities, so it's not really the working memory that's expanding, but it's the "slots" occupied by each bit of information that "shrinks", or becomes more manageable. As soon as you change field radically enough to make the patterns useless, you're back at zero. This is what goes on if you train for IQ tests for example. This to say that progress in this kind of exercises doesn't necessarily mean progress in your working memory, it's just that your brain has developed better and better specific chunking and pattern recognition abilities.

@Leo Gura since you recently wrote a blog article on learning, what I've written above may be interesting. It's pretty much an introduction to models that map the complexity of your cognitive processes, and they've been used to evaluate learning outcomes (the SOLO taxonomy is the main model I cited) because they're able to reflect quite accurately your level of understanding. And since we're interested in understanding, this can be quite relevant. Especially the concept that I've learned from Justin Sung that if you purposefully operate at a more complex cognitive level, you'll speedrun both learning (as in remembering) and understanding. His model (I've taken his course and studied meta-learning for 2 years) is actually is built on how survival works, and not dogma or parroted understanding techniques, although this is not directly apparent from watching a couple videos of his on YT (I'm still talking about Justin Sung). There really is a lot of juice to be extracted if you deeply understand how the mind learns anything. How it puts anything from being outside, to being long-term memory. And you'll find that the same principles that deeply encode beliefs in your mind are the same that make you remember stuff at school. It's the same "learning system" that's used, so I suggest anybody reading this to explore this topic because it's quite the meta-skill.