Scholar

Here we go:

Itt is inevitable that intellectualizing about the Divine will create significant resistance. When you take the Divine and turn it into idea, it becomes falsehood in the eyes of your brothers and sisters. This is actually a good thing, it is wisdom, because ideas could not possibly be truthful, they could not possibly be the Divine. It forces you and them to embody the Divine, and that is all you have to do. If you embody it, you will naturally pull your brothers and sisters towards the Divine, whether they know it or not. Your interactions will naturally have more grace and appeal. To the ego, heaven seems like hell. If you show the ego what heaven truly looks like, he will be disgusted by it. Of course he will, because he is thriving in hell. You tell a person from the middle ages that future generations will accept homosexuality, will be abandon Christianity and live democratically, their reactions will be to do anything possible to avoid that from happening. That is the nature of the ego. It needs to recognize it's own current limitations to be able to grow beyond them. So the dynamic here is very tricky, because just by having openly talked about all the issues, you have already painted yourself in a corner of having to defend everything you have said. You cannot guide the ignorant towards their own death, because you have told them that they will die! As you know yourself, you cannot market consciousness to the masses. You cannot use an unconscious process and expect it to increase consciousness. And thinking is unconscious. You are trying to make them think themselves into more consciousness. All of these people have problems precisely because they value thinking so much. What they need to do is engage the parts of their minds that are non-thinking, that are unifying, holistic. And of course they won't do that if not even you do that! Falling into thinking will cause suffering and disharmony, as it is causing for you. If you do not overthink it, you embrace it as a part of the process of unification and you naturally come to do that which is appropriate. That is wisdom. There won't be any need for justifications, for judgment, for any of these excuses and explanations. People are not reacting against you in here just because the normies reacted a certain way, but because you quite obviously display some lack of wisdom, lack of embodiment. In my view this is what will render you teachings most inattractive to future generations, because they will see clearly your attachments and how your ego was struggling to go beyond them, in 1080p.

I think Leo would greatly improve in these conversations if he would engage fully in R-Mode during them. Leo's mind is too fragmented, he spends too much time in L-Mode, making him unable to experience the process of conversation in unity. It causes awkwardness and a general conversational clumsiness, a lack of flow. The best evidence for this is that at some point Leo was asked if he right now was in a state of Awareness/Love. A beautiful teaching moment for Leo, if he is able to see it as such. You could see it in his face, his surprise. Then he took a moment to engage into the Unity, and exclaimed "Now I am in it!". This means that Leo has not integrated this awareness into his life, and it is because he engages L-Mode most of the time, especially when he is lecturing and explaining things. If the conversation had been done from a place of Unity/R-Mode, the audience would have felt it, and the impact would have been greater than any of the explanations Leo made. In my opinion, Leo's attachment to intellectualism is what is holding him back the most. And it is interesting how sneaky his mind justifies the disunity he causes by way of putting that very intellectualism on a pedestal.

People in the comments say they found Leo arrogant, condescending, overconfident, lacking in humility and so forth. Leo doesn't do interviews often, but I found some of the answers a bit clumsy, where he avoided answering the question directly because he seemed to have not immediately an precise answer at hand, so he kind of did the politician talk. That's atleast what the optics were, I think Leo is not as skilled in this kind of rhetoric because he has not done many of these conversation. It's something that needs to be developed. In terms of optics what was especially bad was when he didn't have an answer at hand when he was asked about what science got wrong in terms of their methodology, he could have expanded more clearly what the assumptions in the methodology, not merely ideology, of the newtonian worldview were and how that changed. Also, to answer questions about "How do you know X?" with "How do you know Y?", usually look pretty bad in terms of optics aswell, especially for stage orange people. Just by framing that a little bit differently I think this problem could be avoided. I found in general there were too many assertions made that went on unexplained, and because of how radical most of these assertions are to people, they will view any avoidance of explaining in detail any of them as problematic and untrustworthy.

The latest Vsauce video actually quite surprised me, because it gets to the core of this issue. Isolated reasoning will inevitably lead to problems, because reasoning is evolved to be a social process. We live in a time in which everyone can basically isolate their reasoning and form really dysfunctional world views as a result.

Listen to the latest JRE with Christopher Mellon, for the skeptics.

The actual reason is that he engaged too much of his time in the L-Mode of his mind. He values intellectualism to such a high degree that he engages in it to the detriment of his spiritual development. L-Mode is "Left Brain", and R-Mode is "Right Brain". Leo's life purpose is centered around the "Left Brain" Functions, and I would speculate he remains in that mode for most of the day. It leads to judgement, division, arrogance, separation. You can take as much psychedelics as you want, if this will be your general mode of being you will remain such. This is primarily habitual and not about personality, however personality probably created a bias towards seeking out one mode of being over the other. You can see the consequences of residing in that Mode often when Leo is talking on this forum, or on camera. If you want to evolve spiritually in an embodied way, you have to ensure that you remain in the R-Mode for most of the day. If you spend 8 hours every day intellectualizing and being L-Mode, you will never reach the level of Holistic experience as someone who for example has his life purpose centered around an activity that is R-Mode. Much of meditation is about simply residing in R-Mode, as deeply as possible. The intellectual will have no other choice but to pump himself full of psychedelics, but even that will only get him so far in terms of embodiment. From what I know Leo is not interested in embodiment, but I think because so many people here lean towards specific personality traits that he does aswell, which is the case for me even too, viewing him as an example for us to follow can be detrimental to us especially if our goal is embodiment. The depths of development you can achieve by structuring your life around residing in R-Mode as much as possible, especially if you have an L-Mode tendency, are staggering.

These pesky radicals! How dare they look at animals as if they were individuals deserving of basic forms of respect and well-being?

Why would I tell them this? We are talking about people of the first world countries, who do have alternatives, or can indeed live life perfectly well without consuming any milks at all. These are the members of this worldly community who have to take charge in the adoption of responsibility. Nobody is changing anything by saying that we must change the institutions. To change the instutitions you need individuals who feel the responsibility to help change the instutitions in the first place. The institutions are the result of the social change, not the other way around.

The solution is to have the members of society grow so they indeed can make the easy choice between oatmilk and cow milk. See, the individuals in our society are so underdeveloped that they struggle even adopting such few responsibilities. Again, the problem you are trying to fix is the very thing you need to grow and get rid of the problem. This is the best opportunity of grow mankind will ever have. The people who don't understand why they ought to buy oatmilk over normal milk are the very people who uphold the current status quo, the system and the corporations. You cannot change the system without changing the people. This is something that has been tried numerous times throughout history, and it continously failed. It is not black and white, institutions must change, but this change will only happen as a result of the growth of the individuals within society. We live in a society that views the subjugation of individuals for luxury benefits as completely justified. This kind of society cannot ever hope to have institutions that are fair and justice. Look how many people here struggle to find ways to justify this subjugation, as people have done in the past. Fundamentally, this is the very problem that we need to get past. The desire to subjugate for the pursuit of individual freedom, rather than to take on responsibility for your own actions.

You guys really need to stop falling for these youtube videos. I don't have time to explain why almost everything is just completely misinformed, but I'm sure there will be "debunks" on this in the future. Here an article on the "expert" in the video: https://www.antaisce.org/news/balance-claims-agri-debate Here a response from Johns Hopkins: https://clf.jhsph.edu/sites/default/files/2019-04/frank-mitloehner-white-paper-letter.pdf https://undark.org/2021/02/03/beef-industry-funding-climate/ Brothers you really need to learn how to do some basic research. There should be several alarm bells going off if you see an "expert" who claims that the well established scientific consensus is completely false. This isn't any different from how oil companies confused the public with counter-research, or how the tobacco companies did the same. This is basic sharlatanism, it's like the Snakes Oil Men of the 21st century. The fact that you fall for this should make you really reconsider your epstemic foundations. This is the person you are trusting: Some of you guys are so desperate for the counter-veganism arguments that you will believe anyone. You should also look up some of the past videos the What I've Learned person has made, and how deeply misinformed they were. You should consider this person to be completely discredited and untrustworthy. I mean just compare the video he quoted to the video he made. The Kurzgesagt Channel is actually a pretty good channel, they have enough integrity to correct their mistakes when they have gotten something wrong and they consult actual researchers not some discredited shills who will give them the narrative they need to satisfy their audience. Here have this nugget of information as a balance to this misinformation:

The organizations are made by the people, and they reflect the level of development of the people. What needs to change are the people, the organizations will follow. There is no other way. The reason why these challenges exist in the first place is because it is an opportunity for us to grow. People shouldn't be encourage to do anything, people should be taught to care. People need to fundamentally change their mode of operation, not just reducing meat consumption. They must love their animal brothers and sisters more than their desire for consumption. If we cannot achieve this basic level of development, mankind will perish sooner or later, and it will be Good. Mankind should perish if it cannot meet the challenge of Evolution. This will give opportunity for others to rise and meet the challenge. Our centeredness around consumption is the root of this problem. It is not just unsustainable for the ecology of this planet, but also for the health of our individual and societal psyche. The burden of environmental destruction if on all of us, every single one of us. The test of time will show if we can rise to the occasion, adopt this responsibility, and lead life on this planet into a prosperous future. Climate Change is a gift in disguise. Be wise enough to see it as such. If all of us care enough, we would live in paradise within a few decades. The degree to which this will manifest is the degree to which we will be able to grow to care.

There are some deeper dynamics that are being missed here. The analysis or this "Tier 1 debate" is very much a Tier 1 level of analysis. Shallow, biased towards "pointing out the flaws", rather than the inherent necessity and importance of what is going on. Ask yourself, what insight has been provided here? Was this creating something new, or merely criticism of the old? "Look, this is Tier 1! Look, they are being Tier 1!" Your number 1 rule, "Don't be ideological", is itself an ideology. And the reason why it is clearly an ideology is because you have adopted it as an absolute, rather than having truly understood the depth of this issue. Ideology is what gave rise to all of civilization, all of technology, all of ethics, all of progress mankind has made. It has given opportunity of consciousness to prosper and evolve. Ideology is magical. Society is so full of it precisely because it is so useful. A Tier 2 Thinker will not judge ideology the way you do, as something inferior, to be pointed out and simply ridiculed. A Tier 2 Thinker will appreciate the reasons for why these ideologies exist, what their purpose is in the grand ecosystem of this planet. What part they play in the story of life. This is what Tier 2 will focus on. To Tier 2, this debate is magical, beautiful, necessary. There difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is not merely being opposed to ideology, it is fundamentally a stepping outself of operating from ideology. This stepping outside of ideology is due to the limitation of ideology. This means ideology is what allowed this stepping outside to happen in the first place. Tier 2 it viewing ideology as the tool it is, not to dismiss it merely because it is ideology. There are multiple fascets of development, you are witnessing here a debate that showcases two kinds of stages of moral development. Now, the question is not whether you are Tier 2 or not, the question you should ask yourself is "Do I fully understand these two perspectives, and have I embodied and surpassed them?". See, if you are morally underdeveloped, and you do not care about animals, it is very easy to not fall into ideology. If you do not care about animals as much as this vegan activist does, then to be non-ideological is effortless. This is because you are not developing anything, you are simply void of development. There is nothing for you to protect. See, once you start truly caring about your brothers and sisters, once they are part of your identity, fully integrated, there will be a completely new depth of challenge for you, to remain non-ideological, to remain objective, to remain conscious. You are playing a game, and you are at the lower levels, calling out those who are playing it at much higher levels than you do, and pointing out how much they struggle. Of course they struggle, because what they are doing is far more difficult than what you are doing. Another important insight here that I will give you is the following. If you cannot understand the depth of struggle, and if you do not have deep respect for it, it is obvious that you are below, not above, those who your point fingers at. When you sit at home, theorizing about someone who is witnessing the death of his family, it is easy for you to remain objective. But when it is your family that is being murdered infront of your eyes, your attachments will be revealed in no matter of time at all. You will then realize that it will take a new dimension of non-attachment to go beyond this. Another key insight is the following: There are two pathways to detachment. One is to stop caring about that which you are attached to. This means that you stop caring about your family, so that you are spared from the pain of realizing their suffering as your own suffering. This is dysfunctional, this is survival. Another type of detachment is one that flourished in care, compassion, empathy, while yet managing to be distanced from this in a way to allow Love to flourish. This is harder to achieve than you can imagine, and as long as your are not tested, truly tested, you will be completely ignorant of your own level of development. It is only when you can feel all the pain of your brothers and sisters, and remain loving, that you have achieved Mastery. It is when they murder your family in front of your eyes, and you can forgive them for it. Not because you did not care about your family, but despite that fact that you loved them to infinity. This ideal is what we would look at as the Sacrifce of Christ. To forgive despite the pain, not because of an absence of pain. Now, I ask you my brother. Notice that all they care about is not merely to maintain their mentally constructed notion of reality, that there is something far deeper at works here. Something you need to start to recognize and respect. Something that is part of the Gracefulness of Reality, a contribution to the Whole that is integral to it. Development of ego is different than the mere destruction of ego. If you want Non-Attachment without Development, there are much faster ways to achieve it. But this is not what Nature if Evolving towards. Seek to understand how this fits into Evolution, how what is happening here is important, significant. Notice that the spider is detached from it's victims. The Spider is non-ideological. It cares not about the suffering of others. The spiders would scoff at all of this and call it Tier 1, believing itself to be Tier 2. Things will become much more ideological. Ideology is precisely what is needed, because ideology has the power to move Civilizations. One day it will be Consciousness that will have this power, but for that to happen, ideology must enable this first. There would be no animal rights movement without ideology, as much as slavery would have never been abolished without ideology. Just look at reality, look how powerful of a force ideology is. It grips people, it controls them, it unifies them. It allows for progress on a scale unimaginable. It is utterly beautiful, a Divine Creation.

Not a very compelling article too me, it seems to just seek to justify it's own already present perspective without truly justifying it's assumptions, for example: This assumes that these hypothetical beings do not have a cosmic identity, which would make them view us as their brothers and sisters, and part of their Self. They might help us because they might be able to help us, why would they not help us if they are able to help us? Infact, maybe they are already helping us, and we aren't realizing it. See, there is a problem with projecting your own level of consciousness onto another. While most humans living today have no interest helping our brothers and sisters in nature, and even though we do not even have much capacity to do so, doesn't mean that a higher consciousness being would not view it as a basic rational action to help itself by helping it's brothers and sisters, and to develop ways to help them. Infact, to a more conscious being, the joy of life might be centered around helping others. Why wouldn't it? A more conscious being will not judge it's brothers and sisters for it's limitations. Look at how many implicit assumptions this statement carries. For one, any child is not mature enough to drive a car. That does not mean that a parent will not help that child to grow up, or to help where it needs help. The fact that they are not helping us in the way you would think was best to help us, does not mean that there aren't any other good ways to help us. We need to learn from our mistakes, as any child does, and we need to grow up. The author himself argues for why they would not help us by giving us free energy, so why would he then propose that, because this kind of help is irrational, it would be the case that they do not help us at all? How could you possibly know that this is the only way an alien civilization could possibly "save us"? This seems to be a really silly assumption. There could be all kinds of ways to help us in more subtle ways, to nudge us into the right directions, to give us insights at key developmental stages, maybe even to increase our level of consciousness by whatever means, whether some kind of telepathy, or even simply by creating an environment for us to grow up. For example, if we assume this is true: We have a perfectly valid way how aliens might help us, or atleast try to do so. With the Commander Fravor incident, if we assume it was all true and it was truly aliens, what were they doing in the oceans? You could posit all kinds of possibilities and ways of how it could have been a way to help us, or even just to do the science so that they know where we are at. What if they can inject visions into humans so that we solve the problems that they know how to solve, making us believe we have come up with the stuff that actually they have come up with? What if they have done so throughout history? We have no way of knowing any of this. Sadhguru for example hypothesizes that aliens have been here to teach us Yoga. I mean why not? They could have helped us in all kinds of ways, that we don't even realize we have been helped with. I don't think we can assume anything here, and I think much of this kind of theorizing is actually motivated reasoning. For example, I think the true reason why the author wrote this article is this: That's the fundamental idea that gave rise to his thoughts, and therefore biased him in a way that would blind him to all the possibilities. It has nothing to do with honest investigation of the matter, where assumptions are being questioned in a meaningful way. Yes, we must stop viewing these aliens as some sort of saviors, we must face our dilemma head-on. But that is seperate from the question of what is going on here. We have to be careful that when we see the bias of a certain narrative, that we do not fall into bias ourselves by creating a counter-narrative. In the end we have no clue what their motivations could possibly be, how much they are or aren't helping us, or whether they exist at all. To come to any conclusions we already have to assume too much.

That's because interpretation is not the same as that which is being interpreted. It's all nonsense, some teachers just take their nonsense more seriously than others, depending on how attached they are to it.

Another great documentary about the consequences of animal agriculture, specifically fishing, and how it is by far the biggest threat to our oceans. Must watch for every person who is consuming fish, or who thinks plastic straws are bad for the oceans. It also illustrates well why this problem can only be tackled by fundamentally changing our relationship to our brothers and sisters who live in the oceans, and by making the consumer responsible for their actions. You can find it on Netflix. We can use this thread to discuss fishing and the health of our oceans. Veganism is so powerful because it is a unified ideology that tackles all of these problems wholistically. You don't need to convince a person to care about each individual problem, rather you create a new moral framework from which all of these problems are tackled at once. One story that fundamentally changes how we relate to the world, because this change must happen.

I know this plot, it ends by Leo realizing that the carnivore diet made everything worse and that he reacts to vegetables even more severely than before, possibly permanently locking him into having to avoid plants for the rest of his life. Good case study on what desperation does to a mind.

Excellent presentation by Dr. Sailesh Rao, people who understand Spiral Dynamics with love this especially.

Isn't that the entire point of MAPS? If what they claim is true that he is somehow seen as an authority and leader who is looked at as a model by many of the pioneers that are to establish said"official" instutitions in the future, then I would say such criticizism probably have their use. This also has a function of bringing attention and conversation to this issue in general, and makes us contemplate what kind of practices we want to distance ourselves from to be able to establish such "official" systems in the future.

This is like debating what Little Red Riding Hoods grandma made herself for breakfast two days before the wolf ate her. Believe it or not, but the answer to your question depends on whatever you want it to be.

The closest thing we will get to a conversation between Leo and the rationalists he always criticizes.

They talk about how we need to reevaluate the way we engage with politics, applying specifically to the United States.

This isn't true, meat does not contain all the essential nutrients, nor are the important nutrients it contains exclusive to meat. If the school was worried about nutrition they would simply give the kids meals that were nutritionally adequat.

Because the very premise of veganism "insults" butchers and animal slavers, because it showcases that in the eyes of the animals these individuals commit atrocities. I have already posted this study a few times, but here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/1368430215618253 Vegans are inevitably going to be discriminated against because they are norm challenging, especially in regards to morality.

To be fair, I did notice this too. I think Leo sometimes just doesn't take the time to properly engage because it would be too much effort, but that can often lead him to dismiss others with this authoritative vibe where really he didn't even engage with what was being said. I don't know how this applies in this thread, but I definitely felt misunderstood and strawmanned by Leo quite a few times in the past on this forum. Maybe it's the nature of the way he interacts with us here. It would be nice though if he could sometimes put in a bit more effort to understand others.