AtmanIsBrahman

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.