AtmanIsBrahman

I came up with a few questions about this episode. For @Leo Gura or anyone else who wants to chip in. 1) At the beginning of the episode, you said that developing an epistemic process is key, but you can’t tell us what it is because we would believe it. Why not have more trust in the viewer and share the basics of an epistemic process? It doesn’t have to be belief based. I feel like the episode How to Discover What’s True started to do this but didn’t fully flesh it out. Maybe an update could be helpful? 2) Does truth seeking have to feel like a burden, or is it just ego? Maybe the burden framing is problematic, because it assumes you don’t care about truth in the first place. 3) How important is it to read books or attend retreats? This on the list of things that are epistemically responsible. It feels like a double-edged sword because it’s a somewhat belief-based activity, yet you likely do need to take in some information. Maybe it depends on your level of progress in this work: you start out with lots of reading and learning from different sources, then you rely more as yourself as you get more advanced. The challenge then is accurately pegging how advanced you are. 4) What if you don’t love reality? I genuinely care about truth, but I wouldn’t say I love reality. Definitely not in every moment, only in peak states— to say otherwise would be dishonest. I don’t understand the idea that truth-seeking necessarily comes from a love of reality. 5) The episode frames epistemic responsibility as something that’s important for everyone, but what if that’s not true? Maybe it’s only important if you care. For example, if you have a “normie” mind and you just don’t care about truth maybe there’s nothing wrong with just living normally. The counterargument might be that not caring about truth will lead to suffering, but I’m not sure that’s true since lots of people are happy while being deluded (such as Trump probably). The best move might be to accept the radical relativism that, yes, there is an absolute truth, but if people aren’t interested in it then it’s their dream and their choice. 6) The end of the episode mentioned that even with epistemic responsibility, you won’t avoid self deception. Does this apply just to relative things or even the absolute? Obviously you can be wrong about individual things like politics, but can you be wrong about the absolute/God? In other words, can you have an absolute consciousness of God but at the same time be deceived about it? Hopefully these are interesting for discussion/contemplation.

Even spiritual poetry? Spiritual poetry written in a nonconformist free verse style could be groundbreaking. Of course most poetry is pretentious because it’s conformist and the poets don’t deeply understand reality themselves.

Just finished it, deep episode. It aligns with some things I’ve realized about truth-seeking. It also made me wonder if I’m way more epistemically irresponsible than I thought. Will be contemplating this one.

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.

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?