AtmanIsBrahman

What philosophers are you thinking of? Most philosophers are shockingly lacking in introspection, personal development, and consciousness work. How many philosophers are doing serious work understanding themselves? Not many. The sad reality is that the current state of academic philosophy is just scientific rationalist thinking, but without the real-world consequences that science has. In that way, people are right to say philosophy is mental masturbation-- because the academic kind is. It's just that they're missing pure philosophy.

Contemplation throughout the day Questioning the ego as in “how is my ego acting out” or “how is my ego preventing me from seeing I’m wrong” Tuning into love Radical honesty Lie down with head propped up and don’t move at all. Remove all thoughts. Literally just be— and if you can truly just be for long enough, eventually you get to a mystical state of consciousness.

The problem is that their critiques aren’t fundamental enough. They aren’t questioning the entire rationalist paradigm. What you find in Leo’s work is a special combination: some knowledge of academic philosophy, lots of knowledge about spirituality, spiritual practices, financial independence that allows for truth-seeking as a life purpose, complete autonomy of mind, and pioneering use of psychedelics. That’s why almost no one understands reality as deeply. And this isn’t just to idolize Leo— it’s something we can do too, if we don’t fall into all the traps along the way.

But hate and love are one. The hatred is the other side of the coin of love

@Leo Gura Can you elaborate on how you actually understand things? There must be more to it than just bumping your head against the wall trying different things. I get the sense that it's a sort of mystical intelligence that doesn't ever have a guarantee of being correct. The awakenings like pure direct knowing, but they're never final, there's always more. I remember in an older episode you said that you still struggle to understand understanding itself. Have you had new realizations on the topic?

The ego loves pedophiles and loves to hate pedophiles

This is Pure Philosophy, for those who haven't seen it. https://www.actualized.org/insights/introducing-pure-philosophy

See, the expectation that I have to make an argument is part of the rationalist paradigm. Making precise statements is fine, but academic philosophy overemphasizes this. There's a tradeoff between technical rigor and actual understanding. If you get too technical to the point of qualifying and defining every statement, you're missing out on actual understanding. And the irony is that you can never get a perfectly defined statement because reality is infinite and undefined-- which means that even attempting to define a part of reality will fail. That's why rationalism is an illusion of rigor. Sure, it can be useful in some ways, but its far off from genuine Pure Philosophy.

@zurew Have you watched Deconstructing Rationality parts 1 and 2? It seems like you haven’t learned the lessons. Academic philosophy is a huge trap. They don’t understand how truth seeking works. The entire epistemic paradigm is wrong.

Okay, that title was partly shock value… but I do actually kind of mean it. I’m not an incel or redpiller, but I decided to look into looksmaxxing to see if it’s really that bad or if there’s something to it. What I found was that beneath the surface of weird ideology and dangerous techniques, the core is actually very solid. Basically, attractiveness is objective. That means that humans all more or less find the same things attractive (I’m not saying it’s objective beyond humans). As long as you live in the social world of survival, you will have to deal with other humans— you will judge them and they will judge you. One of the main metrics that matters for survival is your attractiveness. There’s plenty of evidence that attractiveness affects how people are treated. It’s obvious in sexuality, but it also affects every other aspect of life like your career; the evidence is undeniable. Even babies react better to attractive faces. So the idea of looksmaxxing is that you are taking seriously this aspect of survival and instead of just accepting what the genetic lottery gave you, you decide to take matters into your own hands. For those who don’t know, there is softmaxxing and hardmaxxing. Softmaxxing is doing basic things like exercise, diet, and hygiene, while hardmaxxing involves surgeries or drugs. Everyone knows about softmaxxing, but hardmaxxing is where this becomes interesting. There are things you can do to significantly improve your appearance, like plastic surgery of all kinds and taking testosterone or other drugs. Of course some of these methods are dangerous, but if you go about it safely you can improve your appearance with no downsides. I think plastic surgery will become much more popular in the next 100 years. People who are ugly will realize they can choose to look good. What’s interesting is that it creates an arms race where everyone is trying to upgrade their beauty to meet the new standard. Also, kids will have to get plastic surgeries because their parents’ genetics won’t be as good as their looks. This means humanity will become more and more artificial… but we’re already doing that. Contemplate: what is the difference between natural and artificial anyway? . . . A lesson in collapsing dualities. Now consider this, if you care about survival then looksmaxxing is probably a good idea. Use your own judgment of course, but logically it makes sense to do at least to some extent. And of course this is all pure ego… but have you transcended the ego and don’t care about survival at all? Probably not.

There are only 2 personality types that can awaken (in general), and they are INTP and INTJ. Why is this the case? Let's look at the cognitive functions. The first two cognitive functions define what someone will be drawn to. The first function is the hero function, the most important one that is your north star in life. The second function is the parent function, which is a complementary function that is also strong, though not as strong as the hero function. For INTP, the first two functions in order are Ti (introverted thinking) and Ne (Extroverted Intuition). For INTJ, Ni (Introverted intuition) and Te (Extroverted thinking). Why is INTP fit for awakening? Ti allows them to care about truth above anything else, and they're also more likely to be logically correct. They filter everything through their own framework of how things work. Ne allows them to interconnect various ideas and generate new ideas in an ever-expansive way. Surprise, surprise-- Leo is an INTP. Why are INTJs fit for awakening? Ni allows them to have deep mystical insights and intuitively track everything down to its source. Ni hero is a convergent intuitive process that takes in perceptions and tracks them all to their source. Te allows them to remain somewhat grounded by cross-referencing various existing perspectives and keeping an eye on efficiency. Both types are good for spirituality in different ways. But the other types? All of them have other problems that make it unlikely they will awaken. The intellectual types are most likely to awaken because they have the most powerful, nonconformist minds. The other types are too conformist or uninterested in truth. But the other intellectual types (ENTP and ENTJ) are extroverted, which draws their focus away from truth seeking and toward the social domain. So there is your blackpill for the day: if you're not INTP or INTJ, you probably won't awaken, at least not very deeply.

Looking back at this post, I’m no longer convinced INTJ and INTP are most likely to awaken. It may be more about something different from personality, something like “depth of soul” if that makes sense. Personality is something that belong to an illusory identity. It’s not the personality that awakens

It might be useful to also look into Big Five for this topic. I'm not sure how all the traits correlate with awakening, but I'm pretty sure about two of them: openness to experience and disagreeableness. The higher those two are, the more likely you are to pursue awakening.

Do you think it's fair to say that more introverted and intellectual people are more likely to pursue consciousness work?

I get the sense that he’s not that awake. He’s done discussions where people directly asked him if everything is consciousness and he usually gives a waffling answer where he talks about chitta as pure consciousness, but referring to it as a state of consciousness and not what reality is. Maybe Sadhguru has awakened to some facets but not others. I think he’s probably awakened deeply into the bliss facet, but I’m not sure about what else. And his mind is filled with Hindu beliefs.

Sadhguru is actually a good example of this. He has had some degree of awakening, but his ability to explain it is very limited. He presents awakening as an experience of bliss if he ever explains it at all. Most of his teachings are more “your life is your karma” type stuff. And Sadhguru is probably an ISTP. It’s obvious he isn’t an INTJ or INTP as he’s not intellectual— even anti-intellectual. I think part of why his awakening doesn’t reach the depth of Leo’s is because of personality type.

Time for me but not for thee

You can play as fast as you like. 1 minute chess and 3 minute chess are among the more popular time controls

You're right, it was a little bit tongue and cheek. But I think there's some truth to it. Let's say that an INFP awakens-- they may have a profound mystical experience, but I doubt they'll really make sense of it on the level that an INTJ or INTP would. So I would say mystical experiences are available to everyone, but truly understanding reality on a high level is something that correlates with personality.

Look, you don't have to memorize anything. You can play 1.b3 with white and 1.g6 with black every game and take it from there. Playing fischer random because you prefer it is fine, it's just that your opening claims are overblown.

That's fine, I was just pointing out that some of your thinking on this is wrong. The enjoyment reason is totally valid, it's just the other insights you gave about chess weren't accurate and I felt the need to correct them

Ok, but we were talking about openings. Now you're changing the subject. You claim openings matter, I claim they don't with much more experience in the domain. If you want to disagree, ok, but you're just wrong on this.

That's only true at the top level. At a lower level, all you really need is a basic opening setup that you like to play. Many beginners deceive themselves that not knowing openings is holding them back, when really it's tactics and overall understanding of the game. Well, that's just inertia like in any other discipline. It takes time for anything to change. But also, part of the reason fischer random isn't picking up as much is because it just isn't necessary. The pieces are set up the way they are for a reason- it's much more harmonious than a random assortment of pieces for each new game. Since openings don't matter that much, the benefit of fischer random isn't that much. Yes, a top level player. Not relevant for most players. If openings don't matter, then there's no reason to stop playing classical chess.

Reading this discussion, it kind of makes me cringe as a more serious chess player (2400 peak on chess.com). I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about chess— a domain you don’t know @Leo Gura. It’s like taking about how Peter Ralston’s martial arts mastery when you don’t have experience in martial arts yourself. By the way, the idea that people are good at chess because of opening theory is ridiculous. Any strong chess player understands that openings are part of the game, but not what makes you strong. A 2000-rated player can play horrible opening moves and still easily beat a 1500 player. The difference is about holistic understanding of the game, not opening theory. And also, a person’s Fischer random rating isn’t ever far off from their standard rating. It’s fundamentally the same game. The difference is probably 100-150 points, maybe 200 in extreme cases.

The podcast was good, but it’s sad that so little ground can be covered because people don’t have a solid foundation in consciousness work. It would interesting to see Leo talk to someone who’s already advanced in this work. That could make for a truly profound conversation