AtmanIsBrahman

Tricky puzzle. The main line I calculated is e4 f3 Qg5 g4 Qd2 (Qe3+ might also work, couldn’t find a difference) Qxe4+ Kh6 g6. White is out of checks and back will get mated

True, this is a more resilient line for black. I think white wins with Qa6 (threatening Qc8) Ne7 Ba3. White loses at least a piece.

D7 Qa8 Qa3, black has to move the queen. Qb8 is probably best because Qa7 is a threat, but Qa7 anyway and white wins.

What do you mean by red being absolutely red for everyone? Obviously people experience colors differently, not to mention other species entirely. I’m sure you’ve anticipated that objection, so are you hinting at some kind of absolute noumena that exist outside of perception (at least of an individual organism)? Also, isn’t everything a quality? So everything is absolutely itself. But I don’t see how this makes qualities timeless. I would say that absolute reality is timeless, but individual qualities like the color red can come and go.

How does that not contradict solipsism?

Absolute Beauty has been mentioned many times on the blog/forum, but there's no video about it. Maybe it could be connected with Love, Truth, Consciousness. Practically, you could give advice on how to see more beauty and even create it yourself. As a bonus the video could cover how art works as an expression of beauty, and how beauty can be found outside of art in everyday things too. For example, even a car crash is Absolute Beauty (according to my understanding). @Leo Gura

The point of this puzzle is recognizing your opponent's resources. You have to see that after black takes the bishop, white has bishop to c2, creating a checkmate threat while unveiling an attack on the queen from the rook. Here you have to see that Qg5+ is possible, saving the queen and forcing white to respond to the check. After that, black has many ways to stop white's checkmate threat. Without seeing bishop to c2 and Qg5+, you could easily be making a blunder by taking the bishop.

I solved it but I'm not going to spoil it

They didn’t bother to learn the patterns and played on autopilot.

An interesting question is, can you apply consciousness work to chess? It seems like you can, but I think the reason the top players are good and unconscious of how they got good is because chess is just about building up experience. You get more and more patterns in your mental inventory, learn how to apply them through experience, and eventually get good. Some talent doesn't hurt either. A chess master is someone with enormous experience in chess, and some talent.

Technically that's the hard way though. Love from others is never guaranteed, but there's a endless supply from yourself.

Thinking your career is "good" Having a dream job (unless it's something highly innovative) Academic writing Citations Christmas The way people nod and smile while talking

A big potential trap I see is calling anything you don’t like conformity. It’s tempting as an introvert to say that extroverts are just doing conformity, but maybe it isn’t conformity to them because it’s their natural personality. Still, some personalities really are less conformist than others. So if you’re a truth seeker type you’re naturally less conformist than others. Bit this creates an interesting problem, because if it’s natural for extroverted people to be extroverted, then should they really try to act non-conformist? For them it wouldn’t be authentic. Maybe conformity is largely out of your control 🤷‍♂️

Is conformity the same as survival or is it different? Most conformity is just baked into survival. You do conformist things to fit in with society and survive subtly. I’m trying to understand what you’re getting at @Leo Gura, beyond just examples. Is this one of those subtle distinctions where you view the same thing through different lenses, like maturity=wisdom? I understand conformity as another way of seeing survival, with an emphasis on lack of autonomy/originality.

I contemplated conformity. Here are my thoughts: Conformity is based on a sense of other, so it's baked into survival. We are all conformist, but it's possible to be way less conformist than the average person. Something becomes conformist when you don't know why you're doing it or where the idea came from. For example, a Christian doesn't really know where all his beliefs about Jesus came from, and if he realized it he wouldn't be a Christian. An antivaxxer usually got their ideas from social media, conservative politicians, and fearmongering. They didn't actually study how vaccines work and come to their own conclusion- that's why it's conformity. Conformity is closely connected to consciousness, because consicousness allows you to see where ideas come from. The more conscious you are, the less conformist you are. But it's not always a 1:1 correlation-- e.g. Sadhguru is highly conscious but conformist about Hindu beliefs and practices.

I did the life purpose course 1-2 years ago and wasn’t able to find an exact life purpose I was happy with, but I knew it had to center around truth, freedom, and creativity. After following actualized.org closely for these years, I’m convinced that doing “this work”— first principles thinking about reality— is my life purpose. Leo mentioned in the life purpose course that you should find your own life purpose and avoid aping him, but I think this work really is my life purpose. My top values as of right now are truth and pure understanding, with freedom and creativity being secondary ones that are also important. In the episode on truth being the highest value, Leo pointed out that there is almost no one doing this work, basically just him and Peter Ralston. I found that really inspiring, and I think doing that similar path of truth-seeking and understanding would be most meaningful to me. I’ve already realized many of the things Leo teaches (still have a long way to go) and had some independent insights about how reality works. The question is how to fit this into a life purpose. I know what the overarching goal is, but the medium is much trickier. In a sense, making money in society just seems like a big distraction, but at the same time it’s necessary for survival to do the contemplation work. Ideally I’d like my source of income to be related to this work, but I know it’s very difficult (society doesn’t value truth 😂). Should I just separate survival and truth seeking entirely, or is there a way to connect them? @Leo Gura

But what about the way in which you use your mind to interpret consciousness and awakenings? That’s what I call reason. Sure, it’s not formal, but there is some sort of logic going on. Your proofs of god video used logic too. So there must be something to reason/logic other than the delusions of rationalists.

Just finished watching. It’s definitely an advanced episode that connects lots of other topics such as Sameness vs Difference, Deconstructing Science Series, What is Truth, How Authority Works, etc. I’ve had a lot of the insights Leo mentioned about so-called formalism. It’s really obvious that people in academia are completely wrapped up in this rules-based , community-driven way of thinking— not just in STEM, but in the humanities too. And these are the people in society supposedly doing the most advanced thinking! But I have a couple issues with how Leo presents things. He is talking about his own version of rationalism that’s different from the standard definition. Rationalism in philosophy is supposed to mean the view that reason is the best way to get to truth as opposed to empiricism or other alternatives. In the video, Leo is talking about a certain culture of formalism and rigor that’s connected to scientism and materialism. That’s not the same as rationalism, so it’s kind of strange that Leo had to reinterpret a word to get his point across. So far, the question of whether reason is the best way to truth is still left open. Obviously formal reasoning has limits, but the way the mind goes about determining what’s true— what I would call reason generally— is a different matter. Of course it’s going to involve raising conscious, but there has to be some interpretation of whats happening in consciousness, otherwise you just have raw experience and not understanding. Hopefully Leo will address this in parts 2 and 3.

I'm making this post trying to connect the dots between different parts of Leo's teachings, for myself and anyone who might be interested. I was thinking about how academic philosophy thinks of consciousness as something that biological organisms have, and that can be tested based on criteria for what makes something conscious. This is obviously wrong-- the criteria are arbitrary, and the entire approach misunderstands what consciousness is. Leo has said that consciousness is what reality is, not something that a biological organism has, so the organism actually is consciousness, it doesn't "have" it. But still, there is something that is meant by the conventional idea that an organism has or doesn't have consciousness. It's obvious if you contemplate that consciousness is a spectrum, which can be imagined as having something like single-celled organisms at the bottom, then plants, animals, humans, enlightened humans, aliens, and God. This makes a lot of sense, but it gets tricky when you think about what exists below that bottom layer of single-celled organisms. Based on our experience, it seems like most things in the universe actually fall into this category, which is what we would conventionally call "physical" or "dead matter." Let's take the example of a doorknob, for example. As a spiritual, new age person, you definitely want to say that the doorknob is conscious, but is that really true? It's pretty obvious that it doesn't have the mental machinery needed to have any subjective experience at all. So in the conventional sense, no, the doorknob isn't conscious. But if we switch to the consciousness as Everything paradigm, then the doorknob is consciousness. The issue here is basically, can consiousness decide to be unconscious? From a finite point of view, it can-- that's what it means for consciousness to appear as a "physical" object, it's dumbing itself down to a state where it has no awareness. But from the absolute point of view, the object is consciousness even if it's completely unaware of itself as such. Leo has a really profound blog post from a few months ago that touches on this topic. It's called "Absolute Blue" (link if you want to read it: https://www.actualized.org/insights/absolute-blue). The questions is, if you imagine a reality where nothing exists but the color blue (you can replace this with the doorknob), in all directions, eternally, then does this reality perceive itself? The answer is yes, because Absolute Blue is Truth and Truth is self-luminous. Truth is synonymous with existence, so it is the only thing that can exist. And Existence must know itself because it is the foundation and bedrock of reality- there is nothing behind the scenes; this is where it all ends. So the takeaway is that consciousness knows itself even in its simplest form because it is Truth. Understanding that fully is probably going to take an awakening (I haven't fully gotten there myself), but contemplating these things gets you closer and closer. @Leo Gura Is my understanding on the right track? How do you grasp the connection between Consciousness and Truth more deeply?

Alex is the only one in the debate who cares about truth. Dr K is concerned with how to live a good life, while the Christian guy is just defending Christianity. Alex is a good example of how to do truth-seeking. He went through the atheist stage orange and is making his way to green and yellow. Maybe in a few years his views will have evolved more (i.e. dropping atheism). Dr K just isn’t the best philosophical thinker and has an ideology combining science and Hinduism in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. The Christian guy is basing his argument on human psychology, which has nothing to do with truth as Alex pointed out. All Alex has to say is this: if you were born as an alien on another planet, would you ever hear about Christianity? No. Would you ever come up with the worldview that a human called Jesus is God and the only one who is God, and worship him? No. So the only way that you could have the Christian worldview is because you are a human who believed humans when they told you there was another human who came along with the one and only truth. Yet this guy thinks he actually has the truth and is doing good by spreading it in the debate! It’s amazing how deluded people can be while thinking they have the truth.

Being a human feels really weird. Out of all the possible things you could be incarnated as, a human is the result. Doesn't it feel random and kind of odd? Like when you look at your hand, it isn't just a human hand but some foreign object. There are so many possibilities of what one could be other than a human, and even beyond whatever we know to exist. Why is it that we take being human for granted as something natural? A human is an accident, a smudge on the design of God's infinite tapestry. Think about it: even if you're really deep into spirituality, your life is still run by survival needs 99.9% of the time. Even if you claim to have transcended suffering, you're still maintaining the ego by keeping it alive, even through actions as basic as eating and drinking. If you're alive as a human, you are an ego, and you're imperfect. But at the same time, the God or Spirit within feels there's something more. Does anyone else genuinely relate to feeling like being a human is weird or accidental? Like you are a majestic wolf forced to wear sheep's clothing, an infinite singularity compressed into a small distortion?

How do you know this? Have you tested this or do you have direct experience, or is it just a belief? Common sense tells us that humans are limited by genes, karma, or whatever you want to call it. Even Leo admits that genes are highly important for someone's level of consciousness.

This sounds a lot like what Leo describes in his infinity of gods video. The issue with solipsism is that it's so fundamental and tautological that you can't use logic to argue around it. The fact is, you have only experienced your own consciousness, and that's all you ever can experience. That's a deep realization to have. Any other consciousness could just be imagined by you- there's no way to know that it exists independently. And what does it mean to say it exists independently? If everything is one/God, then nothing is independent of anything else. There's definitely something to solipsism, but there is also truth to the infinity of gods perspective that involves the other. Absolute truth is paradoxical.

Naught-knowing When a scientist, rationalist, or normie insists that the ultimate nature of reality cannot be known, as a result shutting down metaphysical or spiritual inquiry. What it is not: Naught-knowing is to be contrasted with “not knowing,” which is the radical admission that one doesn’t know something. The naught-knower claims that it is impossible to know or that such pursuits are meaningless. Therefore they shall know naught Examples: 1) You: Hey, have you ever thought about the ultimate nature of existence? Normie: What? How could you know that? It’s impossible! (reacts angrily) You: Hold my crocodile infinity! 2) “I tried to talk mysticism with Brian and his naught-knowing took over. I called him out on it and told him to get on his not-knowing game instead. Then he got confused and started doing crocodile tears🐊🐊🐊. Smh, hate these normies man.” 3) “When Richard Dawkins started doing his naught-knowing spiel, I gave him a slap on the cheek and said, ‘YOU’RE INFINITY GODDAMIT!’ “ Why it’s important: Because this identifies a common behavior of humans who are not interested in truth. Now you can recognize what they’re doing and decide how to react. You also now better understand what actual not knowing means based on the contrast.

I'll give it a try (keep in mind there isn't a consensus on these) Ne- potentiality Se- actuality Ni- will Si- memory Te- rationale Ti- logic Fe- ethics Fi- morals