AtmanIsBrahman

Second this, it would be great to get another deep spirituality video. Don’t get me wrong, the recent videos are great, but the last one that feels like true deep spirituality is “A Poetic Description of God Consciousness” 3 years ago.

Ah yes, so a short, ugly person will have the same results as a good-looking tall person running the same game. I don’t deny that game works, but it’s absurd to say looks “don’t matter that much.” Plus you conveniently ignored my point about social outcomes. This isn’t just about dating.

On that note, here is a tidbit of insight for y’all. Height is very important alongside looks. This is because height gives you presence, assertiveness, dominance, etc. A tall person receives more respect and is considered more attractive. So, heightmaxxing is a valuable asset for men. Specifically, if your barefoot height is below 6’1 or so, you should consider doing some heightfrauding to get closer to the ideal range — which is 6’2-6’3 (taller heights give diminishing returns). The way to do this is by wearing shoes that give a natural height boost, such as boots or certain sneakers. Then you can add on to this by adding height increasing insoles to the shoes for an additional boost. Overall, this will add 1.5-4 inches or even more, depending on how extreme you are willing to go.

I wasn’t going to revive this thread, but I sense a lot of self-deception going on here. Let’s just think about this simply. Attractiveness is an important metric for romantic and social outcomes, right? With some honesty we’ll agree on the former, and the latter has great evidence in the form of the halo effect. So if we care about improving any aspects of our life, looks should be one of them. This is simple logic. You guys don’t realize that your ego is tricking you into thinking the looksmaxxers are the deluded ones, while it’s actually you tricking yourselves!

I guess the difference is understanding the functioning of the mechanics of the dream vs the dream that generates the mechanics. I'm sure Curt and other scientists genuinely care about figuring out the mechanics of the dream. It's kind of like being obsessed with a video game and learning all the strategies, lore, map, exploits, etc. The game is ultimately entertainment, but there isn't anything wrong with it per se. I find it problematic when scientists try to understand the dream that creates the mechanics and have no idea where to start, or insist on their mechanical explanations. It's like there's a different plane of thought they haven't unlocked.

It seems like much of the forum hasn't learned the lesson from Leo's Deconstructing Rationalism series. All I'm doing is applying the lesson. It's completely obvious what Curt and academics are doing wrong in terms of Philosophy once you understand it. The issue isn't even awakening or mystical experience, it's the way of thinking. Our 21st century culture essentially indoctrinates itself into being mentally stunted. Curt's way of thinking makes it impossible for him to understand reality unless he changes.

I was referring to the average person’s heaven with a family reunion and 72 virgins. Maybe this is how people interpret mystical teachings through their ego, or alternatively they could come from people’s partial realizations. I’m trying to figure out which one it is.

Then it wasn't full death. Hence "near" death experience. Do you think the idea of heaven/afterlife comes from people having these partial-death experiences, where the ego is still active to some extent?

I probably read about 50% of the book of not knowing. I read the entirety of this book. It is good, although dry writing like all Ralston books. It takes work to get something out of it. Some of the material you might already know if you’ve read Book of Not Knowing and watched Leo, but it’s important to use direct experience to test comprehension and not whether you’ve seen the concept before.

When you come across a video with this title, you expect it to be somewhat profound. Unfortunately, Curt spends the entire video talking about conceptual abstractions attempting to define existence— which of course is impossible. He treats the subject as if it’s some kind of academic debate that we’ll eventually find the answer to, if only we refine our conceptual abstractions well enough. But Existence is first order, so it’s impossible. I recommend watching this video to see how the rationalist mind confuses itself. It’s honestly sad to see that this is the state of philosophy and science in the 21st century. This underscores the need for big picture thinking, openmindedness, nonconformity, etc. — basically what Leo teaches. Otherwise philosophy becomes a joke.

The latest blog posts have been very insightful. Ontological relativity collapses into oneness, all anchor points must dissolve, you have no substance therefore you are God. Beautiful stuff. It’s also cool to see that I actually understand some of this stuff now, whereas before they were mindfucks that may or may not be true.

I thought of another even more simplified model. It has four categories: 1) How the ego relates to itself 2) How the ego relates to other egos 3) How the ego relates to God/Reality/Truth 4) How the ego becomes God, i.e. relates to God as God These categories put self-help concepts and practices into an even more big-picture overview. For example, Understanding your personality, health, and life purpose fit best into (1), while socialization, looksmaxxing, getting money fit into (2), philosophy and rationality fall into (3) and establish the bridge into the only non-egoic category, (4)— merging with God. Of course all these distinctions are collapsible. They are just meant to give a new way of looking at self-help.

I decided to make a list of the sub-fields of self-help, inspired by Leo's old video from a few years ago. https://youtu.be/HJXthKsytpE?si=rpkTXIayk_0O__ky One criticism I have of Leo's list is that he often presented practices (such as shadow work) as fields, whereas I would consider them a practice that is an aspect of a field. I only listed what I consider to be fields. I also added some fields that Leo didn't mention. My list: 1) Life purpose- finding and creating your life purpose, and pursuing it as a career 2) Career- figuring out the thing you will spend a large portion of your time doing that will lead to getting money 3) Getting Money- finding out how money works, strategies to make money; learning investing and business; hustling 4) Mastery- mastering a skill, and learning the art of mastering a skill 5) Learning- finding out about various subjects and, importantly, the meta-skill of learning how to learn 6) Looksmaxxing- improving your physical appearance to get better social outcomes. Overlaps with health, biohacking, and social dynamics 7) Getting girls- Learning game; Online game, daygame, nightgame 8) Socialization- learning how to talk to people, make connections, enjoy socializing, be socially calibrated, influence people. Especially important for introverts. 9) Social Dynamics- understanding the social domain on a systemic level. Includes sociology and anthropology, politics, psychology and evolutionary psychology, blackpill/redpill, understanding conformity, and understanding collective ego. 10) Understanding your personality- figuring out the static aspects of who you are as an ego, and how to fit your life around them. Might include MBTI, Big 5, neurodivergence, etc. 11) Spirituality- the vast field of mystical and direct-experience approaches to reality. Can be used for being happier, eliminating suffering, chasing mystical states, psychedelics, the paranormal, contemplation, meditation, etc. 12) Philosophy- finding out what is true about the Universe/Existence/Life. Includes metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. This overlaps with spirituality and makes use of but goes beyond rationality. 13) Rationality- learning to reason well and distinguish between truth and falsehood for worldly things. This includes scientific method, logic, argumentation, etc. It helps you to make better life decisions and ultimately do philosophy. 14) Health- living well and long. Includes nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management (or avoidance), avoiding drugs. 15) Biohacking- using biological knowledge or pharmaceuticals to improve your life. This involves using rationality and science to figure out which chemicals might be worth using (of course be careful). Might include taking psychedelics, taking supplements, peptides, testosterone, etc. 16) Happiness- finding out how to be happy. Might involve all of the above areas. Of course, there is some overlap between many of these, but I think they sum of the landscape of self-help pretty well. What do you think? Is this a good summary of the self-help landscape? Or did I miss some fields? Leo's list, for reference: 1. Success, productivity and goal setting 2. Law of attraction 3. Time management 4. Career and life purpose 5. Creativity 6. Business and entrepreneurship 7. Marketing and sales 8. Leadership and management 9. Money management 10. Dating and attraction 11. Relationships 12. Love 13. Family and marriage 14. Sexuality, masculinity and femininity 15. Health, fitness, nutrition and alternative medicine 16. Body awareness and bioenergetics 17. Self esteem and confidence 18. Emotions and emotional mastery 19. Shadow work 20. Addiction recovery 21. Trauma recovery 22. Mental disorders 23. Personality types 24. NLP and (self-)hypnosis 25. Religion 26. Spirituality (and consciousness work) a. Non-duality b. Meditation/mindfulness c. Yoga d. Psychedelics e. New age/paranormal/psychic abilities 27. Shamanism and the occult 28. Healing 29. Psychology a. Positive psychology b. Transpersonal psychology 30. Lifestyle design 31. Technical "how-tos" 32. Politics and government 33. Philosophy, meta-physics and epistemology 34. Social psychology, cognitive psychology and anthropology 35. History and science 36. Biographies

Ah, sorry. I was going off of memory. I really liked that video though. It’s one of my favorites.

This video is quite insightful