Whitney Edwards

@Oppositionless The highest wisdom is realizing that life is meaningless. Life and all it's contents itself are a trap. To clarify further, The inherent structure of life, the relentless pursuit of money, power and survival is meaningless But the purpose of life should be raising consciousness of all souls That's not a meaningless purpose. The soul is starved of high consciousness experiences, we are our divine selves, the sooner we realize, the better. Our true selves resonate with liberation.. That's what it wants

The highest wisdom is realizing that life is meaningless. Life and all it's contents itself are a trap.

Yes. This. Would you mind if I took this for my journal note.

Deconstructing suffering is a trap too.

Compassionate delivery. Awesome.

The quality of sleep was compromised a bit with lucid dreaming.

I had a recent out of body experience. Obe. I had a lucid dreaming adventure. I was in the middle of nowhere and i felt like souls were leaving the body. It was surreal. These souls appeared like vanishing smoke, appearing and disappearing. I could hear giggling and cackling sounds. Like children laughing in the distance. Endless laughter. It was frightening sometimes, my head was heavy. It seemed as though fear was the only thing that bound our bodies to physical existence. Everything else was illusory. Nothing made sense. Our physical reality was warped. Everything was cloudy. Most souls were happy, giggling and laughing genuinely,effortlessly. The atmosphere was joyous. I'd like to research this obe in more depth. I could hear giggling sounds. Then there was interruption. Quite often in fact. I couldn't figure out what was real and what was not. In all of it, reality appeared meaningless. As if it were manufactured through space and time, it was man made and anchored by fear of existence, a real primal fear. Some souls were upset, sad, sinister and seemed to be under some karmic influence. It's hard to tell. But these were imprints. I don't know. But they were like dna imprints. Like finger prints and palm prints. That's how the souls appeared. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. The feeling of fear was awful. A gnawing sense of attachment. Pure existential fear. It seemed as though karmic influence was bad for the souls. The best way to describe the mental state was an unusual state of calmness and unaffectedness. It was like being in the middle of a bad psychedelic trip. It just didn't matter. Nothing mattered. There was no flow. No meaning. Only peace.

Feeling shame is a trap. It's one of the biggest traps. You cannot get out of it easily, it locks you in. It can make you miserable and turn into a vicious trap. Those have lived in shame will know it. Too much debating or arguing. The internet is a blessing as well as a trap. Validation is a huge trap. It's a poison to the soul. It's worse than addiction.

Wholeheartedly.

Found a good video on digital minimalism.

I see. I can understand how false positivity can cause inaction. That makes sense. I'm wondering how to balance positive and negative self talk or positive and negative visualization because both seem to help in different ways, only the timing needs to be perfect.

@trenton the one thing that you need is a solid structure. Once you have that it's easy to ward off most traps.

Can positive self talk ever be a trap? So far it has only helped me.

It's not like everything is a trap. There is no gift here. Just lessons. Those lessons are still a gift because they prevent you from future traps. Your problem is quite complex and a bit general. You're facing problems with strangers, this is obvious. You need to stop trusting strangers and invest your time with people who have some credibility, in the sense that you have known them for some time and they have shown some degree of courtesy, trust, availability and decency. That way they won't scam you because they are obviously not the ones to put others in unnecessary trouble. You need good leadership skills to weed out bad apples in a group. They might not be genuinely bad, just not good for your health. Being selfish is not evil. Being moderately selfish is an essential necessity to survival. Hope you take better decisions next time and everything is a lesson for something bigger. Then there are some common traps that go along with socializing and assimilating with human nature in general - Overly Optimistic View Having an overly optimistic view of human nature can lead to the following traps - Naivety Trap: Assuming the best intentions in others and being too trusting which can make one susceptible to manipulation, scams, or exploitation. I'll call it the naivety trap. Doormat Trap: Being overly accommodating and putting others' needs before one's own leading to being taken advantage of or disrespected. Leo has discussed this in his video. Especially in the relationship part. Misreading Social Cues: Failing to recognize warning signs or red flags in social situations due to an assumption of inherent goodness in people. I often tend to fall into this trap. It's my most common trap. Some level of body language analysis might help me overall in this direction. Cynical View On the other hand, having an overly cynical or negative view of human nature can also lead to traps: Paranoia Trap: I can escape into illusions of constant skepticism, once I feel threatened in some way.Constantly doubting others' intentions and being distrustful, which can strain relationships and create unnecessary conflicts. Those conflicts then turn into a spiral. Isolation Trap: Avoiding social interactions and connections due to a belief that people are inherently selfish or untrustworthy, leading to loneliness and missed opportunities. Confirmation Bias Trap: Selectively seeking out and interpreting information that confirms one's negative view of human nature, while ignoring contradictory evidence. I also call this the bandwagon. Sometimes we jump on other people's conclusions and mirror their views inadvertently feeding into their confirmation biases as well.

Oh ok. Thanks for the reply.

Feeling shame is a trap. It's one of the biggest traps. You cannot get out of it easily, it locks you in. It can make you miserable and turn into a vicious trap. Those have lived in shame will know it. Too much debating or arguing. The internet is a blessing as well as a trap. Validation is a huge trap. It's a poison to the soul. It's worse than addiction.

How is this a trap?

The trap of preaching against selfishness while actually being selfish and people falling for this trap.

Go watch leos video on traps. It's s trap you set up for yourself when you think you need to do something to get sex. You don't. Relationships have to be authentic and genuine. You're missing out on the real part. The loss is yours.

Not having compassion is also a trap. One of the biggest traps. Because it puts you in a position where you can never know any other position.

Another way to reframe what Claude said about this whole presentation is that of course, actualized.org can be a trap. Of course, it can. Of course, the very source of your highest information, your spiritual Guru, you know, your expert, your Genius scientist, that very Source itself can, you see, how that becomes a trap, all right? That's it. I'm done here. Please come check out my website, check out my blog, check out the Forum, check out the life purpose course, check out the book list. We've been having some technical issues with the actualized website over the last week, but those have all mostly been resolved at this point. I apologize for that delay. We had some problems with the server and the hosting company that's all being fixed. And I'm making improvements into the infrastructure, migrating to better server and so forth in the future. Look, final Point here is that I've been away on a very long break for almost a year. I didn't release any content. This was necessary for me. I haven't really talked about it. Why I went on this break and what happened during this break I'll reveal some of that in the future. It was actually pretty tough but also a huge growth opportunity for me. In the future, I have a lot more videos planned, a lot of deep stuff, a lot of stuff that comes from the lessons that I learned over last year. I wasn't just sitting around Naval gazing. I was suffering a lot and I was going through a lot and I I I integrated a lot of deep lessons and a lot of changes subtle changes have happened inside of my own mind and how I'm going to be presenting content going forward hopefully you can already see some of those in this episode I don't know they're they might be pretty subtle at first but maybe you can pick up on some of those. I'm also going to be working on some new courses coming soon although I don't want to promise anything but hey you know I've made that mistake before and I'm sure I'll make it again so that's kind of where we're at I'll I'll share more in the future and frankly some of the stuff that I went through I'm not even prepared to share yet for you know a lot of it is quite personal but um I do have a lot of deep insights to share with you on various topics the fundamental topics practical topics political topics I have some deep stuff on politics that I have planned so stay tuned for that and I want to leave you with one final thought this is a little reward for those of you who stick around through this long three-hour long episode you know I saved a little tidbit for you towards the very end and that is this the final thought is what is the ultimate trap in life. Self. Self is the ultimate trap.

So when I'm generating one of my episodes, you know that's me generating a single perspective, and it's always great to have another perspective, but oftentimes I don't have anybody else to bounce off of, but now I have AI. The next hole it pointed out was falling into traps should be reframed as an opportunity to learn, not a personal failing. The next hole it said is under the emphasis of systemic factors. Individual agency isn't the whole picture. We did focus a lot in this episode on individual agency, what you can do about these things, but of course, there are also more systemic factors. There's more collective factors. We touched on some of those, but a lot more could be said about the political aspects of this, which we didn't have time to go into. And then the final point that Claude made is, it said, "Hold the framework lightly." And when I read that, it was funny, I started laughing because it's like, "Have you been watching my videos?" Because that's what I usually say. That's the kind of injunction that I usually deliver at the end of an episode. So, I wholeheartedly agree with all these points. And the reason I present them to you here is because I'm also trying to show you the power of this AI if you use it appropriately, of course. Now, you can use AI to reinforce all of your biases and all of the gaps in your thinking, and AI is not going to automatically fix the gaps in your thinking. You have to actually see if you're actually interested in truth in understanding genuinely, not just as some platitude and virtue signaling, but if you're really interested in that, and you don't confuse the truth with your own perspective, then you will actually ask other people or an AI to point out flaws in your own perspective, limitations in your own perspective. And the reason I'm able to do that and to use the AI in this way, which is a little bit counterintuitive, most people wouldn't use AI this way, is because I'm really interested in truth. I'm not interested in just reinforcing my own perspectives. I don't need that. What I want is the value of the AI. Finally, I have someone that's very intelligent—a very intelligent mind. That's what this AI effectively is. Whether it has consciousness or not is irrelevant. It effectively serves the purpose of a very intelligent mind. It's more intelligent than most humans. You know, a human couldn't point out all these holes if given this presentation. But the AI could. So, that's a very amazing technology. The proper way to leverage that is to take whatever perspective you have, feed it to the AI, and ask it then to play Devil's Advocate. So that's literally what I told Claude. I said, "Okay, play Devil's Advocate with my outline here." And you know, initially, because Claude is very obsequious, so all these AIs are overly obsequious. They love to blow smoke up your ass. Whatever you tell them, they will say, "Oh yeah, that's a very good point you made," and then they'll slobber all over you of how intelligent you are and how good of a point you made, especially if you're telling them something of the quality that I would share with one of these AIs, you know. But then, see, that's the trick. Your ego is like, "Oh yeah, yeah, Claude, tell me more about how great my perspective is, how great my outline is." That's initially what it was telling me because it was a great outline. But I knew that that was a trap, you see? And I knew that really to use this AI properly, I have to ask it to play Devil's Advocate. So what I told it is I said, "Now play Devil's Advocate with me and point out all the flaws and holes in my perspective." And so it did, and that's the beauty of this technology. So now, here you have a brand new Cutting Edge tool for how to identify traps in any domain, which is AI. Amazing, right? This is a revolutionary technology that has only existed for like the last year, really. You couldn't do this a year ago. And so from now on, I'm going to be running all of my future content through AI to point out these kinds of holes for me. Now, of course, that can still be a trap, you know, because I haven't used the saying that much, so I don't know what the potential for the traps are. But I can already foresee a few traps. Like I can foresee that it's possible to start to get lazy because, you know, it took me a lot of work, manual contemplative work, you know, months of contemplative work to slowly develop this outline. But in the future, I might get lazy and I might just say, "Hey, I'm not going to skip all that. I'm just going to cut a corner here," which would be a trap. And I'm just going to ask Claude to write the whole outline for me. And I'm sure that a lot of people are going to fall into that very trap because why? Because they're looking for something fast, easy, free, cheap, convenient, no emotional labor, no contemplative efforts, no difficulty, right? Why spend months developing your own examples when you can just scrape and copy and paste the ones from Claude? But that's not going to be the same quality, you see? So that's a trap that I could potentially fall into in the future. We'll see. I don't know. I haven't done this enough to really understand how alluring that will be. But of course, you know, saving time is always alluring and avoiding work is always alluring. So you know that from all the traps we discussed above.

Judging yourself for falling into a trap is a trap. You want to have self-compassion when you make mistakes. Don't beat yourself up for making a mistake because that itself isn't a mistake. You just have to look, you lacked consciousness, lacked experience, you were lured in by something that you needed, you were desperate. That's the human condition. So, don't beat yourself up for that. Ultimately, you have to get good at reframing your traps as gifts, opportunities to learn deeper. A lot of times, when you go through your deepest suffering, you learn the most. So, of course, traps can be sources of some of your greatest suffering. Life is a balancing act. It's all about finding balance. Achieving success or goodness or truth in some domain usually involves having the right balance. For example, you need to strike the right balance between being too cheap and being too wasteful with your money, between working too hard, being a workaholic, and then avoiding work and procrastinating, between believing in religion blindly and dismissing all spirituality. There's something in the middle, the right balance. Trusting people too much foolishly or distrusting everyone in a cynical, toxically skeptical way where then you can't relate to them properly, you're too distrustful. Being too selfish on one hand and being too selfless and self-sacrificing on the other. Engaging in too much theory or not enough theory. There is a balance there. Being too serious or not being serious enough. Of course, it should be obvious that I am not immune to all of these traps, and yet I should say that anyway, just to reiterate it. How do you think I know about all these traps? Many of them, of course, because I've just contemplated them and thought ahead, but a lot of them I've fallen into myself, and I still reserve the right to fall into some traps in the future. If you see me falling into a trap and doing something stupid, that's not a mistake. That's expected; I expect that of myself. I think I spent a lot of time thinking about what is the value that actual art or content brings to its audience. One of the functions of my content is that I try to point out all the traps to you of all these various tricky domains. That's something that I'm passionate about, and notice that there's a lot of value in that. It's actually very practical, rather than me waxing philosophical for you or filling your head with ideology and various kinds of belief systems. It can be a lot better to just point out traps to you, and that's really what I've been doing all along. Going back for 10 years of this content, I've been implicitly pointing out traps. Now, we've made it very explicit that that's what we've been doing. Now, I want to conclude this with a little bit of talk about AI. I started using AI recently and I discovered the power of it to supercharge my contemplations. This is the first episode where I applied AI to my contemplations, and I have used AI to improve this talk that I gave to you. This talk was run through the Claude Opus AI. This doesn't mean that this talk was generated by the AI. I spent many, many, many hours and two years compiling the research for this topic, brainstorming all the examples, and I got it to the point where I would normally get one of my outlines. I don't write out what I'm going to say word for word; I speak off the cuff, but I do make an outline. I speak from an outline just because there's so much content here and it's so tricky that it's easy to forget stuff, which we don't want to do. Also, it needs to have a nice, logical, linear order in order to flow well. So, I arranged my outline, which was like 70 pages - 70 pages of outline for this talk, one of my longest ones because there are so many examples, over 250 examples. Then, what I did is I fed it into the Claude AI. I have a funny story about that, but we don't have time. Anyways, I fed it into the AI, and then I told it to read through my whole talk and then offer me improvements. So, that's what it did. It took just a couple of seconds to do that. I asked Claude to find holes in my thinking. Right, I asked it for additional examples. Some of the examples above that I mentioned were generated by Claude. Most of them were generated by me, but a few of them were generated by Claude, maybe 10 to 20 of the examples. Which was nice, I mean, it generated a lot of examples. I had to filter them through, so I'm not just using every example it gives. It might give me 50 examples, and I'll pick 10 of those that I think are the best. So, I'm using my judgment there. Here's the magic question, here's where the power of the AI comes from: I asked it to find holes in my presentation. So, here is the list of holes that it found. I'm going to read them verbatim. Hole number one: a risk of oversimplification. Not every situation is a trap. Hole number two: potential for excessive cynicism, mistrust, and paranoia. I've sort of addressed that; some of these holes that it mentions I've already gone back and I've made some corrections to make sure that people don't misunderstand things. Now, hole number three is potential for blame and shame. It's important to not judge or blame others too much for falling into traps. Compassion for others comes from understanding how complex, deceptive, illusory, and intelligent reality is. Very well said. The next hole is the potential for rigidity and dogmatism. The trap's lens can become a rigid absolute perspective. Of course, that's a trap. The next hole is traps are context dependent. What can be a trap in one context can be an opportunity in another. Excellent point. The next hole is a limited exploration of the potential gifts of falling into traps. Our greatest growth in insight comes from falling deep into traps. I've added that improvement already above because I already mentioned to you some of the gift aspects. When I was making this presentation, this outline, I was so focused on generating the best traps that I didn't even think about the gifts of the traps. It's only after I ran this through the Claw AI that it started talking about gifts, and I'm like, oh yeah, I was so focused on this one aspect of the topic that I left out that other aspect. You see, this is the power of the AI, it can point out these kinds of little blind spots, these kinds of little biases, and kind of like fixations that you have, especially when you're working on something. You can get very fixated into one way of thinking about it, and then this is where you need alternative perspectives. Remember I said that having only one perspective is a trap.