Majnun

Thank you. I'm very much interested in opinions of other people here. I envision experience of reading this book to be akin to being slowly guided through all steps of awakening. The end should be like coming back home from a long journey, with a restored sense of love and wonder.

You do. You care deeply. You think that you don't care, because not caring is part of the story that you tell yourself right now. Try imagining it like a book, in which there's a self-insert character who goes through a development arc. The character might think that he doesn't care about himself, but if you really didn't care, then you wouldn't be reading his story.

No. I'm saying that you already resolved the problem of solipsism. You resolved it by committing yourself to imagining every possible life, one at a time. That's what you're doing at this moment - you're imagining one of those lives. This way, even though solipsism is true, you can still perceive other people as just as real as you. They are just as real because other people ARE YOU, only at different points in your eternal consciousness stream. Relationships in your life are still meaningful, because eventually you will experience every single act of kindness or cruelty across time. Of course, you can go and meditate or have a psychedelic experience, with a purpose of "annihilating everything", but most likely you will stop short of it, because you're going to be too afraid of ending up eternally alone. The other possibility is that you will actually succeed at annihilating everything, ending up alone for all eternity, eventually understanding what I already told you, and recreating the world exactly as it is right now. Funny thing is, that you've already done it infinite amount of times. The point is: you don't have to do any of it. Everything is okay. You are loved.

The fact that you said that right now, tells me that you're not genuine about this whole "annihilating everything" issue. It's not possible to seriously consider something like this without first realizing with absolute certainty that there's no such thing as objective reality. Good luck with finding a path forward in your life!

You know what. I'm actually thinking about turning all of this into a single book, aimed at newbies. The title of the book would be "The Absolute Horror Behind Your Eyes." I already sketched a basic outline. It would consist of 7 chapters: 1. The Epistemic Foundation 2. The Boundaries of Your World 3. The Illusion of Separation 4. The Infinite Love 5. The Absolute Horror 6. The Sacred Vow 7. The Price of Meaning Chapter 1 would start with neutral epistemology, laying the foundation for further understanding. It would deal with the fact that we cannot know anything beyond the field of our own consciousness, cross-referencing with philosophers across time. Chapters 2-3 would begin to delve deeper into the mystery of reality, incorporating concepts from Theravada Buddhism and Vedic Hinduism, maybe also from Georg Hegel and Carl Gustav Jung. The chapters 4-7 would be the heavy hitters. Chapter 4 could be particularly powerful as the "false summit" - where readers think they've reached the ultimate mystical insight, only to discover it's a veil hiding something far more terrifying. Chapter 5 would be the emotional nadir - really dwelling in that ontological terror of eternal isolation before offering any hope. Chapter 6 becomes the ray of sunlight in complete darkness, the moment where horror transforms into meaning through commitment. Chapter 7 ties it all together, explaining suffering and offering new understanding of Christianity. What do you think? Would you be interested in such book? Is there something specific that you would like to add to it?

@theoneandnoneIf you read carefully again what I wrote in my absolute horror post, you'll see that you don't need to annihilate anything. You already moved past solipsism, infinite times before. At best, you will simply understand that yet again.

For a long time, quantum immortality terrified me to the deepest core of my being. Quantum immortality doesn't mean that you are invulnerable, and going to live happy life for as long as possible. It just means that from all possible quantum states, you will end up in one where your consciousness continues to exist. For example, if you shoot yourself in the head, it doesn't guarantee that the bullet doesn't fire. What's more likely is that bullet does fire, and you just somehow survive the otherwise fatal brain injury. And then you continue to cling to consciousness while brain injured. Given long enough span of time, you're going to suffer from countless "fatal" injuries, and might end up as a paralyzed quadruple amputee, still clinging to consciousness. After thousand years, you're still miraculously conscious. Maybe Artificial Superintelligence cured aging and fully restored your body, or maybe... you're just a piece of rotting brain matter in the gutter, miraculously clinging to consciousness due to quantum tunneling of oxygen and glucose. Of course, I'm no longer afraid of that. I realize now that I'm not the content of my dream (human being made of atoms), but the eternal act of dreamweaving itself. When my time is up, I will simply stop imagining myself as this particular human and start imagining myself as something else. In fact, I already done that, and now I'm you.

@theoneandnone From the deepest reaches of my heart, thank you for making this decision.

From Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying." Hi guys and gals. I just want to share few of my realizations. It mostly flourished from several awakenings with LSD that I had in my early 20s, and subsequent contemplation over the course of the next decade. Basically, I can confirm everything that Leo is teaching. I found Leo couple of weeks ago, while watching Kurt Jaimungal's interviews, and I was surprised that there's someone on the Internet who's brave enough to explain reality so directly. Anyway. I won't repeat every single thing that Leo is teaching, as it would be redundant. I'll just repeat some of it and then add bunch of interesting stuff on top of that. Let's start with the obvious: 1. Your present moment is the only thing that exists. 2. There are no experiences other than yours. 3. You are not the content of your story, but the very act of storytelling. 4. The story is being told with words, qualia, thoughts, and denial. 5. The purpose of this story is love. However, it's not the full picture. Most awakenings end with a profound experience of infinite love and beauty. Here's where I have to be very careful. There's something behind the infinite love. Perhaps Leo himself could attest to that. It might be that the infinite love is the last veil, behind which there's the absolute horror. I'm saying "it might be" because it's too terrifying to consider it without such epistemic qualifier. This horror has to do with the absolute, eternal loneliness of being God. Nothing has any meaning, and your ontological torment will never end. You can't even kill yourself to escape this horror. That's what led me to my next points: 6. You tell yourself this story because you don't want to be alone. 7. So you made a vow to imagine stories of every single living being in the universe, one at a time. 8. It means that you are at the receiving end of every single act of cruelty and kindness throughout time. 9. This vow is the only reason why life is meaningful, and not just a fanciful dream. 10. It's also the reason why sometimes you will experience extreme suffering. This is the reason for everything - why time exists, why the world is physical, why there's suffering - it's simply that such dream is the only way to guarantee meaning and to make love possible. Suffering is our salvation. Or, one could even say, that God had to physically suffer on the cross to save you from the absolute horror. You went to great lengths to create this story. Cherish it.

Nobody is to be trusted on any matters. And we're all fools. I'm not recommending you this book because you should trust it, but because reading it might help you do the work necessary to recognize certain blind spots that you might have. The very blind spots, that are being actively sustained by most Lenin biographies. Also, notice how you're using "communist" as an insult against Žižek in the same way, in which other people use "solipsistic" as an insult against you. I can tell you the following: There is profound depth at the intersection of radical psychoanalysis and Marxism, that allows one to understand fine structure dynamics of one's imagined social reality. Dynamics having to do with personal family relations, as well as grand scale economic stuff. It's not easy to go into that depth, as it involves deconstructing layers upon layers of assumptions. And if one really cares about the truth, then there's as much work for oneself to do on the outside of the dream (through meditation or use of psychedelics), as there is on the inside. There is an understanding that allows one to see Lenin not as an evil charlatan (that's still true from a certain perspective), but as a deeply tragic person, guided by love, caught in an impossible situation, and yet able to seize a moment of unlimited possibility, knowing perfectly well how doomed it was. But you have no reason whatsoever to trust me on that. And that's okay.

Hi Leo. First time poster here. While I entirely understand where you are coming from, and agree with you, I would still like to encourage you to open your mind to the possibility that there's much more nuance and love to Lenin than is usually understood across the political spectrum. I know that you're already superhumanly open minded, but having blind spots is just a part of playing the game of being human. If it's okay, I'd like to recommend to you a book about Lenin. It's called "Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917" by Slavoj Žižek. It entirely changed my view of the man, when I read it soon after it first came out. Anyway, if I can add some of my thoughts to the Charlie Kirk issue - this whole situation, together with how the Right is weaponizing it against the progressives, is oddly similar to the political situation in late 1920s and early 1930s Germany. I have this foreboding feeling that soon there's going to be a great tragedy on a scale of the Reichstag fire, that's going to be used to mass persecute all kinds of liberals and leftists. Reichstag fire itself was used as a pretext to create first concentration camps (such as Dachau) and throw all democrats, socialists and communists there. It doesn't really affect me as much as it does for you (I live in the EU, and my personal worries have more to do with the ongoing war in Ukraine), but I still deeply feel for all of you living across the ocean. As always, solidarity is all we have in situations like these.