Scholar

That is because language is primitive in regards to non-dual awareness. We don't really have concepts to describe all the different facets and aspects of consciousness, we literally have no names for the things Leo has been experiencing. That is why we come back to describe it in the same way over and over again despite the experience being different. The thing is that even if he used different words it would be meaningless to you because you have not experienced what he has experienced. What's the point of talking about all the different shades of red to a person who never has seen any red?

You are interpreting a transpersonal truth from a formal operational perspective, which will lead to delusion no matter how much you will try to make sense of it. It cannot make sense to you because currently you lack the perspective to see what is even meant by these statements. See how you are using an orange tool to understand something that was the result of an at least indigo tool.

Yes, but don't forget that this was the case in all currently first world countries when they went through the industrial revolution. Child-slavery, robber-baron capitalism etc. are all part of the evolution of a civilization. Third world countries are lagging behind and sadly have to go through the same insights, revolutions and changes that the western countries did. Due geopolitical circumstances these changes will look very different from country to country, western governments will not be capable of effectively help these countries until they reach second tier.

But the effect itself is based on it's prevalence among the population, that is really the whole point of calling it the effect Dunning-Kruger effect. Otherwise it's just normal incompetence and overestimation of ones knowledge or skill, I don't think there is a need to keep misinforming people about something that is just bad science.

Not quite on topic, but the Dunning-Kruger effect is not real:

My laziness comment was specifically referring to making us lazy about hardcore spiritual pursuits, like sitting in a cave for 20 years and giving up everything for consciousness work. I think the chances for people to take these kinds of radical steps will decrease as psychedelics increase in popularity especially, in the future, in yogic circles. As I said, I am not talking about people like you and me, but about the pioneers who dedicate their entire life's to this pursuit. Due to psychedelics a culture might be lost that cultivates conscious consciousness work in a sophistication that is not present in other cultures, like for example in this one. My point was that we cannot know whether conscious consciousness work might not get us to greater depths than psychedelic aided work would get us. It might seem that way in the beginning, but that could be due to an exponential increase in consciousness with formal training. I don't know anyone who has seriously embraced yoga, meditation and psychedelics in a 100% dedicated way, as in doing nothing but that for their entire lifes. And if I believe Leo, then I don't believe anyone has ever reached the deepest levels of consciousness because it goes infinitely deep. My entire point is that while psychedelics might be useful for increasing your consciousness level, a traditional practice, while very slow in the beginning, might exceed the consciousness levels that are reached with psychedelics due to the momentum it gains. I don't know anyone who does nothing but consciousness work while still taking psychedelics, and with consciousness work I am more specifically referring to the investigation into the nature and essence of reality.

As I understand it's because enlightenment is the absence of a limitation your mind puts upon awareness to operate in a certain way. The part of brain the that is responsible for imposing that limitation upon consciousness is what is being targeted and disabled by the psychedelic, among other things. Enlightenment is not an addition to consciousness but the removal of a certain aspect of consciousness, namely the dualism or the limited identity. We would most likely be lying to ourselves because we do not really know. It would take an enlightened superconscious yogi to take 5-meo-dmt for him to compare the experience, and even then we don't know if his consciousness work did not change something about the brain that effects the way he experiences 5-meo-dmt. Equally we cannot really tell whether 5-meo-dmt effects the brain in some way that changes how future enlightenment instances are experienced. Maybe in the distance future the inspection of the interactions between waves and particles in the brain will give us more accurate assessments for this.

I agree with that but I see a danger in psychedelics because it inherently makes us lazy, and again I think art is a great example of that. Since photography became mainstream we have not seen any sophisticated master realist painters that had the expressive power of idealization that people had in the 19th century. Art of that quality is extinct because there is no great need for it to be produces. Similarly, why would I sit down for 10 hours every day, in a cave, to purify my ego and reach higher levels of consciousness after I have taken a psychedelics that instantly gratifies me? Do you know a single person who did that? I am not talking about amateur levels of consciousness work here, I am talking about professional consciousness workers who do dedicate their entire life's to consciousness work. Yes, good painters exist today, but there is no John Singer Sargent around anymore. And yes, good consciousness workers are around who did psychedelics, but who reached the deepest levels of consciousness? That is not what I am asking. I understand that psychedelics are a good tool for most people, I am just asking who would eventually reach the greatest depth, a yogi who is talented and does consciousness work all day long or someone who took lots of psychedelics and had a amateur-esk consciousness practice? I have no idea, I just want to propose that it might be possible that the one who did the consciousness work all his life might get into the greater depth eventually. And yes, if he took psychedelics he would probably get even deeper, but as it stands people who take psychedelics seem to simply not dedicate their life's to consciousness work like for examples yogis do. I am sure that people used to do that in the past, but nowadays it seems non-present. Imagine you did what you did for the retreat for the rest of your life, non stop. That is what I imagine someone to do who is dedicated entirely to consciousness work.

@Leo Gura I have a question about something that is not directly related to this topic, I see it happening quite a bit with you and many other higher evolved individuals. I am currently making myself familiar with Ken Wilber's model of cognitive/consciousness development/evolution. When making statements like "Things only happen by God's will." are we not running into the risk of confusing and deluding people due to the stark difference in interpretation between gross, casual, subtle and non-dual state of consciousness, and also due to a difference in cognition from different cognitive stages? It seems to me like a person only capable of, for example, formal operational thought is actually incapable of correctly interpreting your statement, due to the inherent limitations of his cognition. Statements coming from vision logic or beyond will actually cease to be the same statements when viewed from formal operational cognition. When they read it and they are at that stage, and they agree with you, they are actually wrong about what they agree with you about. And if they do not agree, they are wrong too because they do not even comprehend the true meaning of the statement. Either way they will come out confused, whether they believe you or not. And to me this is a real problem in the spiritual community, especially with non-dual "truths" that are being thrown around like candy, necessarily misinterpreted by those who hear them, as they themselves cannot truly understand the meaning of those truths if they have not reached any non-dual states. In this forum alone I see countless of people who are adopting non-dual, casual, subtle or psychic intellectual positions without having even experienced these states. And furthermore it seems like these statements only make sense while being in the particular state they originated from, which further complicates everything as it can easily lead to self-delusion by the person who has temporarily experienced one of these states. What do we do about this problem? I know your style is not conducive to the zen-master riddle approach, but are you not worried about leading people on the wrong path if you give them higher truths that they are bound to be deluded and misinterpreted? Wouldn't a spiral wizard be a little more sophisticated, by for example luring a person to the next stage instead of going full non-dual on them if they are far removed from that realm?

Can you show us a screenshot?

You are right, there is no cookie-cutter solution that will work with everyone. I think there are a lot of people who might be at the verge between orange and green, in those cases I think anger makes them usually regress into orange and empathy opens their hearts green. Though even that cannot be said for everyone, there are a lot of people who respond well to the more passionate/angry narrative.

Yes, that's definitely a reasonable approach in my opinion. I just think that we need to communicate more between the different groups, as we have deeper insights into the dynamics that are playing out. I think we should not dismiss people as radical or militant on the green side, but equally not as bigoted or primitive on the orange/blue side. Instead of focusing so much on the issue itself, it might be helpful to instead communicate how and why we feel a certain way about it. We can try to explain to orange people why people feel angry and sad because of all the suffering that the animals have to endure. Even if we were to talk about terrorists, I think this approach is important. We might disagree with them, but we have to inspect why they feel so helpless and frustrated. When we call them militant or fundamentalist, we dismiss the validity of their views, even though they live and experience these perspectives day in day out. Instead of fragmenting all the groups, we can make an effort to bring us closer by establishing bridges of understanding and compassion. Yes, most people don't think we should go into restaurants and protest, or to arson butcher shops because they sell animal corpses. But we have to recognize that the people who do these kinds of things are still humans, they feel very strongly about this and I don't think we can blame them. We can educate them, but we should not demonize and dismiss them as radicals that are completely unreasonable and destructive. A lot of times we get angry because we are so sad about a situation, but if we were just honest and would show our sadness, I think people would have a much easier time to show empathy for our perspective, and how important it is to many of us. We have to show the process of empathy, so they can see why we have the perspective we have.

But why are you distancing yourself from these "extreme" vegans? What is the point of that? I understand it would not be helpful to call someone names, but again, try to have some empathy for these people. They are suffering knowing what is happening to animals, they cannot handle it. It is like torture to them, every single day of their lifes. They see great injustice, and I cannot blame them. There is so much suffering that could be avoided. It's not about whether you respect someones choices or not, it's about what kind of choices you respect. Do you respect someones choice to rape children? Why not? Because you genuinely feel like you don't want anyone to rape children. On the other hand, when people are enslaving and slaughtering sentience beings of a different species, you actually are fairly indifferent about it, aren't you? To people who actually feel like animals deserve moral treatment, it will seem like you do it out of egoic reasons. You do it because you don't want to be judges as intolerant, or because you want to maintain social relationships, hiding all of it under the veil of futility. There are other ways to go about changing people, but respecting their choices is not one of them. Again, ask yourself, if you lived among people who raped children and it was socially acceptable, would you equally respect their choices? And what would a person who would respect these choices seem like to you?

I feel like there is a lack of perspective here. Are they really extremists considering what is happening to billions of animals on this planet? To them you seem like someone who simply seeks neutrality for egoic reasons. Why is it extreme to get upset about what is happening? Would you call resistance groups who fought the Nazi's during the Jewish holocaust extremists? Veganism is an ethic, not a diet. It's defined by the believe that causing unjustified harm to animals is wrong. It's not a neutral position. Imagine if we lived in a world where women were looked at as second class citizens whom we could rape and kill whenever we want. Would you be an extremists if you were very emotional, very upset about it? And even if you were an extremist, would that be a bad thing considering in what kind of world you live in? They might not be effective in their advocacy (even though that is debatable, as they seem to convince a great amount of people of their cause), but I think you could do well to try to put yourself in the shoes of these people. If you felt that animal were more or less equal to human beings, what would you act like? Do you really expect people to have perfect composure considering the complete lack of empathy we have for certain kinds of animals? When you say "I don't care what others eat", to a person who is ethically more evolved than you it sounds much like someone telling you "I don't care who others rape and murder.".

If more developed stages are not better than less developed stages, one might want to inspect what the even mean when they say something is better. Is our society better than the roman empire that enslaved people? Is our society as good as a future society that will be fully enlightened and reduce harm to all life on this planet? Good and evil are subjective, but I would argue that if one inspected what they value internally, one would quickly come to the realization that yes, one judges more developed stages to be better, as long as they are healthily integrated. What's better, a car that can drive on a road, or a car that can drive on a road and additionally fly? We categorize and value everything, in fact even the notion that everything is relative, and that we should (!!!) think that way is itself a value judgement. The rejection of set categories is very greenish, I think it would help to understand the purpose and usefulness of these categories. Why do we call things better than other things? What will be the consequences of calling more developed stages better? What would happen if we honestly inspected our values and then without prejudice would truthfully represent them in explicit value hierarchies? Maybe we could recognize that betterness can be useful but also destructive, but that in actuality is difficult to truly go beyond these value judgments. I definitely like developed stages more than lesser developed stages, they are better by virtue of almost everything I value. I think a more useful question would be to ask yourself what you value and how any of the stages fit into that. When you see a lot of people saying that one stage is not better than the other, they really just want people to avoid feeling superior because they are more developed. The framing itself is flawed, as something cannot be better than anything else. Rape is not better than saving someones life, and it is quite trivial to say "Stage X is not better than stage Y", because betterness is not founded on objective measures. It is a misuse of language, due to a lack of inspection and self-reflection.

I have been thinking about what it means for existence to be infinite for a long time and it seems like I keep getting stuck. I am aware that one cannot contemplate oneself into true understanding about infinitude, but still I cannot let go the concept of it. If reality is absolutely boundless, does that not mean that everything we are doing is in an absolute and total way fully meaningless? It confuses me that Leo keeps talking about the importance of enlightenment, or of any other thing in life. Is it not inevitable that god manifests all possible and impossible realities no matter what will happen in this reality? Even if Leo gets enlightened now, has the best life he could possibly have, won't god experience a life in which Leo did fail? A life in which Leo never lost his weight and eventually got a heart attack? A life in which Leo keeps little children in his basement who he rapes every day? A life in which Leo, after reading this very sentence, is going to kill himself for no reason whatsoever? And if that is not the case, then how can god be limitless and infinite? And if it indeed is the case, it means that god will experience Leo in every possible form there can be for eternity, and already has experienced all of Leo's possible and impossible life's. Is everything Leo doing not a reaction of his ego, an inability to surrender to the truth? And even if it is not the case, does there not have to exist a reality in which that necessarily is the case? Either way that would mean that no matter what Leo does he cannot avoid not experiencing all the possibilities, one day he will suffer, as an unsuccessful and miserable Leo. I was thinking along these lines and then I remember something I have contemplated when I was a teenager. I had the intellectual recognition that reality had to be boundless a long time ago, by contemplating why reality would be the way it is and why it is not any other way. It seemed very obvious that there could not be anything that would limit reality, as anything that would limit it would itself have to be limited by something else so that it would limit reality in that particular way. But that begged a few very paradoxical questions: If reality is truly boundless, then does there not have to exist a reality which cancels all other realities? A reality which stretches it's tentacles into all of the infinitude of reality to root it back into nothingness? And does there not have to exist a reality outside of ALL realities? It has to exist, after all reality cannot be limited, it cannot be bound whatsoever. If this was the case though reality would be absolutely chaotic, nothing could exist because everything would immediately be taken apart by infinite destructive power, infinite death. There would be infinite realities popping into existence while immediately disappearing. It seems like these two elements would nullify each other, but then there would have to exist a reality in which they don't nullify each other. And then today, when I remembered this, I suddenly had the idea that out of that process would have to evolve intelligence, much in the same way it does in our universe. There is a force of chaos and a force of order, and because all realities which do not have strong order would be ripped apart by chaos, there would only be those realities left which had a mechanism against this chaotic power. And because this chaotic power is infinite, the realities would have to construct themselves in an infinitely intelligent way. In other words, intelligence is and unlimited limit, a limit upon Chaos with a capital C. It would be like survival and evolution were not mechanisms of nature, but rather metaphysical aspects that are unavoidable, and these aspects would then resonate into the realities which prevailed. And now it is obvious for why reality has to be love. The only reality that could manifest and not be destroyed by infinite chaos would have to be a reality which infinitely loves it's manifestation, it's own existence. If it wasn't infinitely loving it's intelligence would not be concerned for the manifestation whatsoever. In a very real sense that would mean that love is a prerequisite for existence, for only that which loves itself will preserve itself. These aspects seem to reflect in some shape or form our ordinary consciousness, as we strive to survive because of our selfish love, and that reminds me of the saying that god created us in his own image. It almost seems like for structure to exist at all there needs to be a fundamental force which keeps it from dissolving, and that force simply is love. But then the question is, would the infinite destructive power not evolve too, being put under the same evolutionary pressures, to then destroy the infinitely loving reality? Would there not be a reality which infinitely loves destruction, death and suffering? And maybe that is what our reality is, a fight between these two forces? It all just confuses me more and more, there is so much I have not even began to think about and it seems like this would go on and on for infinity. But then what is infinite intelligence, why does it exist? Does it exist precisely because this process goes on for infinity? I have no idea anymore. I guess what I would like to know is what infinite intelligence is, why it exists and whether it's existence means that not all realities will manifest, but only particular ones?

What do you mean by that?

It is very possible that he might not fit the Spiral Dynamics model.

What you might have seen is that your mind is awareness. Rocks, trees, walls and the universe are happening in awareness, so by nature they must be awareness. I think your interpretation is deluded, as you lack a realization that the rocks are not what you think the rocks are. Nothing is aware, there simply is awareness, and when you are conscious of that without having the proper intellectual framework, it will to you seem as if these objects are aware, even though these objects are no objects at all. In my opinion the more accurate interpretation is: "Cells are awareness. The whole universe is awareness and aliveness. It was on mushrooms that awareness came alive, that everything was revealed to be consciousness. Rocks, trees, the wall, etc."

It's because Leo created a purple cow.

I have had these troubles too, and you lack a realization that all your questioning isn't really questioning at all. With every question you ask, you simply construct new ideas, and you keep blindly believing them. When you say "How can I be certain that I can doubt stuff?", you are not really asking anything. The process of doubt is not a concept, just as certainty is not. By forming any question or doubt whatsoever, you have already assumed something. What is basically happening is that you are using a tool designed to inspect certain phenomena to inspect itself, which simply does not work, because as soon as you are inspecting it you have constructed something that is not it. Reason is not what you think it is, but you equate it to a thought that was created by reason. By asking these questions you are constructing a new story, a complete delusion. When you think, "Oh my god, I can't trust anything I am thinking!", you are actually trusting that very thought. You have replaced your story with one that you like less, and that is why you are suffering. You have to use the tool for what it was made for. You cannot deconstruct anything with thought, you can only reconstruct. Deconstruction happens with experience, which can be triggered by a thought, but not at all necessarily so. Instead of asking more questions, start observing what the words you use to establish the questions truly mean/truly are. You don't need to do anything but look to see how silly everything you have told yourself was. Here is a hint: There is no answer to the question of "How do I know?", I simply know.

You have to be really careful with media representation of these kinds of people, they are usually very biased and looking for clicks.

I think you are asking the wrong questions. God doesn't want anything, as he is the source of wanting. God doesn't create any particular game, he creates every game there can be, because there is nothing to stop him from doing so. God is nothingness, and nothingness does not feel bad about creating a world full of misery, because that would require for god to have already made himself in a way to dislike a particular thing. Nothingness doesn't want to create anything at all, it simply does, because there is nothing to stop nothingness from making everything come into existence. It is wonderful, but it is also terrible. It is every adjective you can possibly imagine and more. It is the is-ness of every idea and emotions you can feel, of everything you have every experienced and ever will. How would infinity be infinite if there was something lacking inside it? You have yet to grasp what there even is to grasp.

There is no outside the matrix outside the matrix.

How does one know whether one has a metaphysically-oriented mind and personality?