Yeah, there is probably some other guy camouflaged in the woods who is high as a kite on LSD and looks at OP on his nature walks and thinks "man, this guy is so stuck in his routines, he is not even dropping psychedelics on his nature walks; I'm getting so irritated watching him do this every day" (must be a microdose I guess). Meanwhile, there is a second guy travelling through the woods in astral form, thinking "man, these people are so stuck inside their bodies, it's so irritating watching them do this every day". Then you have the mystic sitting under a tree thinking "bruh, these guys spend so much time engaging in forms, they don't even know about the formless" and then goes back to the void. Then you have the Buddha at the gas pump eating a hot dog.

Firstly, an organism is not a stationary object. All organisms evolved to move in one way or another (either more overtly/motorically like most animals or more metabolically like most plants). Secondly, stress is not unhealthy: chronic and overly intense stress is. Stress in manageable doses makes you stronger, and being strong means you're more capable to handle stress in general, which makes you less prone to chronic stress and injuries, which makes you more healthy.
Imagine what would happen if one day you just stopped walking. That is one big source of stress off your back. "But that isn't stress though, is it?". Well, let's say you stopped walking for a whole month, causing significant muscle atrophy in your legs. Then try to walk up a couple of flights of stairs. Tell me if that is not stressful. Now, did walking suddenly become a bad activity just because it caused you a bit of stress? No. Unless you keep walking without ever taking a break, causing you to be in a state of chronic stress, or you walk too intensely and for example pull a muscle, walking is not bad for you. So why is working out supposedly bad for you?
The problem is not walking or working out: the problem, if any, is that you're weak and that you need to train yourself up to tackle it better. And so it is with everything in life. All of life is really just a big collection stressors, and some of it might cause you to be chronically stressed or cause injuries if you're too weak to handle it. Grandma might break her back just by bending down funnily, which is not something you want to emulate. An unathletic person might have an existential crisis just while carrying groceries or standing too long in line (or when something slightly bad happens at work, because, as you know, health is bio-psycho-social). So, would you like to face those stressors while being weak or while being strong? Which do you think makes you more healthy?

I remember when I first got into Self-Determination Theory (SDT), it was the two factors "competence" and "autonomy" that made the most sense to me and that seemed to play into each other in a logical way. Firstly, SDT is a psychological model about three factors (or "needs") that create motivation in an organism, but to me, it's a much broader model about what makes a healthy organism. The three factors are "competence", "autonomy" and "belonging" ("relatedness").

"Competence" is the organism's need to exercise their innate capacities (and fulfill their evolutionary needs, either directly or by proxy): for example, a cheetah running to catch their prey, a bear catching salmon in a river, an amoeba following a trail of food, an Olympic spear thrower throwing their spear, or a musician playing their instrument. Expressing your competence feels inherently pleasurable, meaningful and valuable.

"Autonomy" is the psychological side of that. It's the organism's need to subjectively experience that they're able to be who they want to be, not what somebody else or something else wants them to be. This naturally leads to acting in a way that is consistent with their innate capacities, because your innate capacities is in a real sense who you truly are, thus expressing who you are (autonomy) will naturally involve expressing your innate capacities (competence). In other words, you naturally want to do what you're good at (or what you're "made to do").

When something interferes with the expression of your innate capacities (through "extrinsic motivation", e.g. being forced to play a music instrument as a kid), you tend to dislike it and experience less motivation, because innate/intrinsic motivation is the strongest kind of motivation there is, and again, to deny somebody's intrinsic motivation is to deny who they intrinsically are.

So those two factors seem to fit together quite nicely and in a logical way. Now, I've always struggled with how to make "belonging" belong to those other two. Here is a definition from Wikipedia: "Will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others". It seems a bit odd and forced to be put in there, and it seems to only apply to indeed social animals. "Well, we need a social aspect in there as well, so why the hell not?". That's what I thought when I first learned about it. But of course, at least for social animals, it makes sense if you look at the fact that being social seems to be an important aspect of health and evolutionary fitness. But it doesn't seem to have the same level of logical connection to the other two factors, at least on the surface.

But just today when watching this video of John Vervaeke (requires membership to iai.tv), the pieces suddenly fell into place. He talked about belonging in this way:

We usually think of evolution as organisms being shaped by their environment to fit that environment (which again creates their innate capacities). But in reality, there is a co-creation going on: organisms also shape their environment ("niche construction"). In humans, this becomes very clear when looking at society and culture. It's essentially niche construction gone wild. It's when social animals come together and develop language, technology and other new ways of shaping their environment. The last part is the most important: we are each other's environment, and we're shaping each other. That is what being social means.

So what is belonging then? Belonging is when the innate capacities of the organism fit with the environment. There! It actually fits perfectly with the other two factors, and now it explains belonging both in a human social sense and a more general non-social sense:
Why do you gain health, strength and love from being with your family (most likely)? Because you're most likely very similar. You share the same innate capacities, and you're therefore each other's well-fitted environment. You belong to each other. Why does sharing similar interests with your friends feel so fun and meaningful? Because you share similar capacities and act as each other's well-fitted environment, thus you belong to each other. Why does being deeply open and honest with your partner feel good? Because you act as each other's well-fitted environment and thus belong to each other. Why are you here, together with people who share the same interests, same life goals, same worldviews, same outlook on life? Because you belong here.
  And of course, even the amoeba can be said to belong to their environment if their environment best facilitates their innate capacities (e.g. just the right pH level, salinity, food availability). Again, it doesn't have to be just the social environment, but it's just that the social environment makes it really clear. And again, I really do appreciate how this definition ties all the way down to the base biological level, even unicellular organisms, just like the other two factors do (if we assume amoebas have a subjective experience, which you can argue they have). It shows the scientific and metaphysical depth of the theory (which you could say resonates with my innate capacities, or at least interests ).  
What this has made clear for me (but which I've also intuited for a long time) is that I need to find environments where I belong, particularly occupationally and interpersonally, but also more generally. Finding your strengths, your passions, your dreams is one thing, but finding the environments that resonate with that is another. That requires effort and vision, unless you're lucky to already be in that environment. Maybe you have to create some of that environment yourself (like we've always done as organisms ), or maybe it's waiting for you somewhere. Whatever is the case for you, it's something to aim for.

It has also emphasized for me nuances like why there could be cases where it's reasonable to say leave your family, even though that would seems like a big loss on a social level, because you might just not belong there (e.g. it's a toxic environment for some reason). That said, I've never thought that leaving your family was an absolute no-no, but this new framing makes it even more clear why it's indeed not an absolute no-no. But of course, that shouldn't really be on most people's minds (I hope). It was just a thought related to some earlier discussion.

That's it  

I also think there is no reason why God couldn't do that. Besides, we act as if God does that, and we feel it intuitively when we talk to people, and we can make good logical justifications for why it is the case.

Something which can give insight to your question is a distinction I like to make ("transpersonal consciousness" vs. "personal consciousness"):
The "one God" or "one Consciousness" could be referred to as "transpersonal consciousness". It's technically everything, but it's also beyond everything; beyond all limited experiences, beyond space, time, objects, sensations, etc. More specifically, it's beyond the "person", hence it's trans-personal.

Now, we can also talk about "personal consciousness", which is what you're referring to by the two separate perspectives that exist inside each of the two closets. These perspectives seem to be describable by concepts such as space, time, objects, sensations, etc. For example, when you go into your closet and your friend goes into his closet, you've both moved in space and across time, and your experience of objects, sensations, etc. have changed. This change (or simply this difference) in spatio-temporal/sensory experiences is what you use to judge that these are indeed two separate perspectives of consciousness.

So in order to tie this to the concept of solipsism: you can speak of solipsism in a transpersonal sense, where there is only one God (one Consciousness), or you can speak about solipsism in a personal sense, where there is only one person (only one spatio-temporal/sensory experience). Those are two very different concepts, and it's a subtle distinction for some people, which is why it gets confused so often.

I personally don't like to use the word "solipsism" (or the language game around that) for this very reason, because I see it causing more confusion than clarity. People tend to project their limited experience of reality onto what is being said, and then statements such as "you're the only being who experiences anything" becomes loaded with spatio-temporal notions very quickly, and it turns ugly very quickly. Of course, this happens with all non-dual pointers, but I think the solipsism pointer is particularly notorious for this, and the way it happens is particularly ugly.

Because, there is something psychologically disturbing about putting the focus on other people and questioning the legitimacy of their experiences. Pointers that can counter this tendency are pointers of love, oneness and connectedness. It pulls you out of intellectualizing and grounds you more in the embodied and emotional aspects of reality, which can be a remedy for the more general problem of misinterpreting non-dual pointers (which after all has to do with intellectualizing something which is not in reality intellectual).

It was sort of a long answer, but it's getting late over here  

Coincidentally and independent of Leo's blog post, I recently decided to stop watching clip compilations. There is this one channel (UnusualVideos) that has just the most insanely good clips, I have to rewind them 3-4 times to believe my own eyes. It's just one after another. It never stops. It's hard to imagine how he manages to find all of them.

Anyways, I don't know if it's the teachings of the likes of John Vervaeke or the entire "high consciousness" intellectual sphere (they all seem to tie back to either Curt Jaimungal or Game B) that I've been exposing myself to that has caused this development in me, but I've gotten increasingly aware of how meaningless and mentally toxic it is to watch hundreds of 7-second clips back-to-back like this, not just intellectually, but on an embodied level (I "feel" the phenomena as its happening).

About the intellectual understanding though, the things that are meaningful and nourish your soul can be boiled down to four concepts: 1. purpose (are you aimed towards a goal?), 2. coherence (do things fit together and make sense?), 3. flow (do you engage in activities for their own sake, i.e. intrinsic enjoyment or value?), 4. mattering (are you a part of something larger than yourself?). Now, clip compilations, TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts; all these sites that employ short clips and a scrolling function, are sorrowly lacking in all except one of these points:
1. It does not contain purpose. It's not working towards anything. Clear and simple.
2. It does not involve coherence in any significant sense. You jump from one clip to the next where there is generally no sense of continuity or development of narrative, theme or context. It's just pure nihilistic postmodernism and hedonism put into a technological device.
3. It does contain flow (intrinsic enjoyment), but so does eating ice cream, jerking off and taking drugs. It's not a high bar to pass. It's the only thing it has going for it.
4. It does not matter in any significant sense. It does not make you feel like you're a part of something larger than yourself. It's just you sitting and scrolling. Of course, there is a comment section under each clip, but these also run into the problem of a lack of coherence. The feeling of belonging to these "communities" is as short-lasting as the clip itself. You don't really feel like you belong to these communities. It's more like you're there as a visitor. There are no deeply felt relationships, no sense of productive contribution, sacrifice or reciprocity.

And of course, from a more conventional cognitive perspective, the short clips zap your attention span, the highly stimulating and sensational nature of the clips (often containing seduction, violence, surprise, disgust) numbs you to the experience of everyday life, and you just know you're wasting your time and you're itching to get yourself out of the loop, but it's hard because it's addictive.

All in all, it's literally consuming garbage. It's all the negative tropes of TV zombies that your parents warned you about come to life, times ten. Anyways, so that is why I think I got so turned off by clip compilations.
 
Now, do you want to see something which I recently learned and which I did find very meaningful? Here it is: 

Cosmogeny (astrophysical evolution), e.g. gas clouds to stars, to planets, to moons.
->
Phylogeny (biological evolution), e.g. fish to amphibian, to reptile, to mammal.
->
Ontogeny (individual development), e.g. child to adolescent, to young adult, to mature adult.
->
Microgeny (moment to moment), e.g. seeing the raw visual data of an apple, to experiencing arousal, to forming some mental concept about it ("apple", "edible"), to thinking about the apple ("am I hungry?"), to planning to eat the apple, to executing that plan, etc.
 
See how they all are nested into each other like holons? That's coherence right there. See how they matter to you in terms of understanding yourself as a part of the universe, as a life form, as a human, as a being moment to moment? That's mattering right there. See how fun it is to understand these deep interpenetrating relationships between different levels of reality? That's flow, intrinsic enjoyment. Now, what purpose does it have? Maybe that is more up to you. For me, the purpose is to further my understanding, which then actually feeds into all these aspects of meaning like I've just demonstrated. So it wraps around itself quite nicely.

This "wrapping around itself" is what I think I find so fascinating about particularly John Vervaeke's work. By talking about meaning; by explicating the structure of meaning (coherence), by sharing it with others (mattering), by enjoying the process of understanding meaning (flow), by making the purpose the furthering of understanding itself; you're doing the very thing you're talking about, as you're talking about it, as you're doing it, and arguably to the greatest degree (because it feeds on itself; it's a positive feedback loop). It's absolutely fascinating.

By the way, I learned about this yesterday when listening to a curious conversation between Ken Wilber and Lana Wachowski, one of the Wachowski sisters who created The Matrix Trilogy. That conversation itself also has a definite "wrapping around itself" going on (I mean, these are high conscousness people; who would've thought that the creators behind The Matrix are even deeper than what the movie suggests? ).

This is inevitable. Like knowledge, communication is imperfect. We use words differently, we talk differently, we think differently. Still, there is a way around the differences. In the words of Stephen Hawking: "All we need to do is make sure we keep talking".

My short-lived career as a Pivot animator 😂:
Pivot is a really simple program for making animations, and I remember I loved to make funny animations with it when I was 12-13. I just re-watched the videos and was a little bit surprised of how good they are (for being that young). I certainly didn't lack creativity 😆
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
At the same time, I remember I wanted to make videos more professionally (RuneScape videos), and I asked my dad if he could buy me his video editing software that he used for work, and he said yes, but I never got it. I think if I had gotten that, there is a decent chance I could be a video editor today (maybe even a full-time YouTuber). I also asked him for a double bass pedal for my drum set which I also never got, and similarly, I think I maybe could've become a drummer instead of a guitar player. Same with me never bothering to buy a decent music editing software (like Cubase, which is what one of my friends from music class used) or basic recording equipment (the aforementioned friend had his own studio); maybe I could've been a musician today.
It's weird to think about how your life could've turned out different, and it kinda hurts when I look back at these missed oppurtunities, because I feel like I'm more of an artistic right-brained person than anything else, and that it feels like I was supposed to pursue these oppurtunities when they arose. I have also always had some deep-seated desire to be world famous somehow (page Dr. Freud for that), and I think that also feeds into the missing-out feeling (as becoming a musician and a YouTuber are probably the top 2 go-to ideas for becoming famous, at least for my generation).
On the other hand, I'm partially grateful for not having made some of these more creative pursuits into a job and thus turning them into something you have to do for some extrinsic outcome (turning intrinsic motivation and spontanous expression into extrinsic motivation and contingent expression). I can see some of this development in my academic pursuits, and it seems unavoidable to some extent, despite your passion for it (especially due to the practicalities specific to the academic machinery). It's not something I'm too bothered by, because life is all of life is like that yo some extent (it's about becoming an adult and seeing how not everything will suit your utmost sense of comfort or immediate impulses). Regardless, it's good to have something that you can go to as a "safe space" where nothing needs to happen and where you can be fully free to do whatever you want. But also, there is of course a downside with not being constantly immersed in something and being pushed to develop your skills, as your skill level also feeds into your level of enjoyment. So there are pros and cons to everything, and at some point, you have to be grateful for what you have.
And who knows; maybe I wouldn't have found spirituality in any of those timelines? I can't imagine what kind of person I would be or how much suffering I would've gone through up to this point, or if I would even be alive. It's weird to think about.

It's a human argument  It's also a "why not?" argument. What else is there to do? A bored sattva is a bodhisattva.

The only thing that beats aristocratic tutoring for becoming a hyper-genius is getting coached by a hyper-intelligent alien. And considering that it's increasingly likely that aliens (and also psychic phenomena) are real, the smartest thing you could probably ever do would be to try to contact them telepathically 👽👻

Hedonism doesn't work, because the world and the self is multi-faceted and constantly changing, and "pleasure" cannot be harvested infinitely from one single source, or just a few favorites. It's not in alignment with how reality works. On the other hand, when what you derive nourishment from is aligned with reality, it's called "meaning". Meaning is the basis of "eudaimonia", which stands in contrast to hedonism.
Meaning requires that you face pains, fears, conflict; generally what the hedonist tries to avoid; because that is what reality craves out of you for you to exist in reality. Meaning is not anti-thetical to pleasure or desire either. It just recognizes that pleasure doesn't last, and that you have many desires to tend to, both higher and lower, and that you can't afford to get stuck on just one limited strategy.
You have to be constantly moving in flow with reality. Reality is movement. If you stagnate, that is depression. If you chase just one thing, you stagnate. You need to do everything that makes you a full-fledged human: eat, drink, sleep, have sex, talk to people, be with friends, be with family, go to work, buy groceries, take out the trash, go for a walk, work out, enjoy hobbies, engage in rituals, seek understanding, connect with the sacred. You get so much more by doing these things to the best of your ability than to just sit and eat cake or watch porn or inject heroin.

@AerisVahnEphelia
I just prefer to speak in a way that is in line with how people generally speak, and if there is a misunderstanding, then you can explore that through conversation. Then the misunderstandings themselves are also more easily resolved. And people do generally speak as if things exist. The problem is not when people speak like that. The problem is when you misunderstand the depth and conceptual nuance behind things.
I'll entertain the idea that what people call "skepticism" is just when you are stuck in a certain inelegant and uneconomic language game (but of course with sincere intentions to criticize naive realists). Then, as you become better at communicating your skepticism, you naturally become a pragmatist, or a skeptic who dares to engage in all sorts of language games (including the realist one) and giving caveats when necessary.

Steps from most fundamental and metaphysical to concrete and practical:

 
Being (connect with reality):
Tell the truth Accept yourself Contemplate Meditate Meaning (what should be happening in reality?): pursue what is meaningful.
Abstract principles and virtues (what is meaningful?): goal-oriented movement functionality health balance holism integration
  Concrete domains (what is meaningful?): Systemic: commit to long-term goals and daily habits; write lists, plans, journals; do yearly, biyearly, monthly evaluations of progress. Bio - psycho - social (Engel); also, id - ego - superego (Freud); reptilian brain - neocortex - limbic system (MacLean); competence - autonomy - belonging (Deci & Ryan); monster - man - lion (Plato). Bio: diet, exercise, pleasures, hobbies. Psycho: knowledge, wisdom, self-insight, values, self-esteem. Social: friends, family, partner, community.  
Summarized, you should connect with reality and pursue what is meaningful in reality; in alignment with abstract principles and virtues; using systemic techniques, habits, goals and practices; while covering all of the three bio-psycho-social domains.
To illustrate with one example of each (not at all exhaustive): you should meditate, balance all aspects of your life, work for a set period every day, while going to the gym, expanding your knowledge base and hanging out with your friends.
Another version: you should tell the truth, pursue health, write down everything your mind tells you is important to do or remember, engage in some short-term pleasures if you so desire, act in accordance with your inner values and keep up with your family members.

As a side note, this map shows what happens when things work as they should. It's not a given that things will work as they should, and in those cases, you need to fix yourself. Often, fixing yourself is not a matter of knowledge or will, but of untangling unconscious mechanisms and trauma. For that, conventional therapy, energy work and even psychedelics might be useful. In other cases, it may boil down to medical problems, which require medical solutions. Even though the map will fall short of addressing certain pathology, it does lay the foundation of health (in my opinion), and it's therefore relevant to everybody.

I had an insight, that what you could call the crisis in the field, which goes by many names (e.g. "the replication crisis", "the theory crisis", "the generalizability crisis"), is essentially a crisis of construct awareness. We've become painfully aware of how we've chosen to construct our science and how it has not been working out so well. Before, we've taken our constructions for granted and let it shape our view of the world in an uncritical way. Construct awareness involves not just becoming aware of one's own constructions, but also taking responsibility for them. And that is what the future of the field will most likely look like, judging by how vigilant the establishment is about stuffing multiple dozens of papers on the issue down the throats of new master's students; the new generation of aspiring scientists who are the only hopes for saving the field.

Tiny vampires, must be demonic ?
 
Yes, after the Buddha slaps it and it reincarnates as a snotty 12 year old kid who gets bit by mosquitoes: reality comes back and literally bites you in the ass with a coool karmic strange loop ?

(sorry, this is what my brain does at these late hours).

I think you're the closest to my explanation.
 
@NoSelfSelf @Michael569
The type of rigorous empirical approach you guys are presenting is generally much more useful than whatever my explanation is (e.g. for finding specific health interventions), but I just think it's interesting and reassuring to have a highly generalized birds-eye view of it: 

Everything in life is technically a form of stress. All the processes in your body; your lungs breathing air, your heart contracting 100,000 times a day, your muscles contracting, even when doing normal things like walking, sitting, standing, even when resting; are forms of stress. It's just relatively unnoticeable, and you tend to only see the effects over long periods of time, namely through age-related damage and diseases.

So about that: how does exercise reduce age-related damage and diseases (and thus increase health and longevity)? Well, it's a bit counterintuitive at first (maybe not for you health-aware guys), but exercise is also a form of stress, just in a different way than the stress mentioned above (if you're exercising correctly, of course).

Exercise is essentially elevated stress in manageable doses over manageable spans of time, in a way that allows for rest, adaptation and growth. When your heart is pumping really fast, or you're breathing very heavily, or your muscles are under a lot of strain, this will cause these systems to adapt to this stress, for the mere reason that you evolved to adapt to changes in the environment. This means that the systems will become stronger and more able to tackle the chronic stress of everyday life: of pumping your blood, of moving your limbs, of maintaining your posture, etc.

So the reason exercise causes a reduction in age-related damage and diseases, is that you're training your body to handle the various sources of stress in everyday life that cause these things in the first place. It applies to everything: from performing daily activities, to the functioning of organs at rest, and down to the molecular level.

It can help to imagine some real-life situations to understand how everyday activities are a source of stress: imagine being in an accident where you have to sit in a wheelchair for several months before you can walk again. When you try to start walking again, what used to be seemingly effortless has suddenly become extremely hard and taxing on your body. Taking a few steps suddenly becomes incredibly stressful, and you have to keep exposing yourself to that stress before you can return to your normal state where walking is effortless again. It's of course not completely effortless, as it's still a form of stress, but it's relatively unnoticeable.

This applies to everything: when you exercise correctly, with optimal challenge and optimal rest, life becomes effortless. So it's not that all stress is bad, but it's that unmanageable and chronic stress is bad. And because everything in the body is interconnected, your whole body will benefit from one part becoming stronger, especially for very central structures like the cardiovascular system (as almost everything in our body is connected with blood vessels). But also things like strengthening your muscles will help with tackling the stress associated with things like walking, sitting and standing, which again will impact your entire body in some way.

So yeah, that's basically it: life is stressful, and exercise makes you more able to handle that stress, reducing the damage and risk for diseases that you accumulate over time as you age.

Suffering is cyclical. Suffering will decrease by creating some direction in your life, whether that be through creating a life purpose, daily routines or goals, or by transcending the egoic self. You should also work on various meta-techniques or values that aid towards creating direction:
Learn to commit to things for a set amount of time (you can always change your mind later if it doesn't work). Have faith in your commitments as long as you carry them. Be consistent. Don't make compulsive exceptions to your plan; plan the exceptions! Actually listen to your mind. Your mind is amazing at identifying problems in your life, but you've developed a habit of ignoring it, and you start to dislike your mind and experience it as annoying or useless instead of the brilliant tool it is. Don't let it go to waste. Write down every problem that your mind keeps reminding you about, and find a working solution for any given problem (it doesn't have to be a final solution, just one step in the right direction, and of course, commit to it!). And you'll be surprised to find that maybe your mind shuts up for once. Tell the truth, or at least don't lie. Your mind needs as much transparency to itself as possible to work properly. By engaging in lies and deception, you're creating division, disruption and eventually self-deception. And the state that lying puts you in (paranoia) is inherently chaotic and cyclical. Paranoia is poison for minds that value direction. Keep things ordered at all levels: your room, your notes, your files, your clothes. Clutter outside means clutter inside. Be punctual, use timers for remembering things, eat consistently, sleep consistently.

Ever since I was little, I had a strong intuition that this kind of blind discipline is not only highly unappealing, but also dangerous. In fact, the very word "discipline" always gave me a bad taste in my mouth every time I heard it. If you're not plugged in to some higher principle or underlying impetus for doing something, or you're not listening to the control mechanisms of your various mental faculties, you're not just flying blind, but you don't know where you're going; you're flying on no fuel, and you have no idea if there will suddenly not be air under your wings, or that where you'll be arriving will not be empty as air itself.
I always struggled with cultivating "discipline", but what I discovered was that true discipline unfolds spontaneously when you have your priorities right. It also cannot be dictated from the outside (although it partially always will be that, but a large part of it has to be an internal drive, or else it's just not sustainable). And this kind of more spontaneous discipline is more in line with your general sense and ability to feel out where you're going, so you'll not become this neurotic mess and slave-like drone to whatever superficial conditioning you happened to be indoctrinated with.

Clicking Time Stops, As God takes a toss,
The hole sucks, as all is lost.
Steps move forwards, as your head becomes slower.
Lower and lower to the point of no return.
Pushed down, there lurks, where hell starts to burn.
And when you return...

@Razard86 Let's assume you did the sensible thing and answered no to the question (and not the definition). Why? Is it that rape as a general activity probably doesn't help people to awaken to the truth? Is it that rape perpetrated at the hands of the guru reflects something about the guru and not the truth? Now, given that proposition, if your desire is to help people awaken to the truth, why do you need to be an asshole to do that? Does your need to be an asshole reflect something about the truth, or does it reflect something about you? Does you need to be an asshole reflect the needs of the people you're supposedly helping, or does it reflect something about you? Is the truth suddenly not the truth if it doesn't entail hurting somebody's feelings; calling them "delusional", "liar", "idiot", "stupid"; in full caps and with three exclamation marks? I don't think so. I think that to claim that these things are inextricably tied to the truth would only be a corruption of the truth, and it's highly possible to teach it in another way.

Back when Leo used to be based:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What happened? Did he get sloppy with his language? Did he stop giving a fuck? Did 5-MeO fry his brain? Did he become AWAKE? Or did he conclude that he couldn't achieve persistent non-dual awareness and instead opted to remake his brand into psychedelic mysticism ("God-realization") and started shitting on classical non-duality, other spiritual teachers and Buddhism, effectively separating himself from the traditions that make these fine distinctions between awakening and solipsism? That's a rhetorical question. I wonder if that will be in Leo's biography 

I just realized that my experience of being unable to think random useless thoughts after my awakenings is actually just relevance realization being refined. This also made me think about my hypothesis that the reduction of self-referential thoughts associated with meditation could partially be explained by memory re-consolidation.
To recap: sitting in a physiologically calm context (lower heart rate, slower breathing, etc.) and with psychological detachment (the ability to see your emotional reactions as an appearance rather than the emotional content) means that the memories which are recalled in that setting get re-written with a weaker emotional load, and over time, the thoughts become less threatening and are less likely to cause rumination.
And now I can better explain why: it's because less emotional memories are less likely to be relevant. If there is an important problem that needs to be fixed, your mind will load it with emotions and bring it to your conscious attention (because emotions exist to tell you what is relevant to your survival). But when a thought is less emotionally loaded, it will become less likely to occupy your attention, hence meditation reduces the time spent thinking in general. Pretty cool.

Of course the concept of the ontological unknown is just a concept that the intellect makes up, but that doesn't mean the concept isn't pointing to something in reality.
It's the same thing with the concept of non-duality: it's a concept pointing to something in reality. I guess what the non-dual tradition is saying is "just don't concern yourself with the ontological unknown; concern yourself with what is experienced directly". That is why it rejects things like matter, because nobody has directly seen matter, only direct experience. But that doesn't in principle invalidate the existence of the ontological unknown. It's just an ontological preference to say you only care about the known. Therefore, "the absolute" is only absolute in the realm of the known.
It can also be the case that the unknown is just a fantasy, or a kind of artefact of the functioning of the intellect (which is to ask questions; "what if?"). In other words, for the intellect to ponder the unknown is self-serving to its very existence. Of course it will do that — it's in its nature. If the known is "this", it will ponder "not-this". If the known is non-dual, it will ponder duality.
Also, I guess the non-dual tradition focuses on accepting the unknown, to make peace with it, rather than rejecting it. Because when you're obsessing about the unknown, you keep projecting "what ifs" all the time, which is the root of suffering. It doesn't get you anywhere other than existential OCD. So if you care about reducing suffering, accepting the unknown by letting it remain unknown and living in the known is the way to.

Imagine a parasitic life form that speeds up evolution and maximizes the diversification of life, but it also speeds up the process of dying, because dying is a part of evolution, hence you add a relative propensity towards annihilation, expressed through the human avatar as a dysfunctional hazed-out state of wanting to return to the creator (like some freaky out-of-control LSD trip). That is just evolution or God doing its thing, but it's a perplexing thing for humans who are comfortable in their paradigm of living semi-long lives as civilized Martini-drinking drones, but yes, that is just a humancentric bias. There is no reason why life couldn't work like that (and why the ultimate expression of that can't be some kind of hyper-dimensional DMT elf that floats across galaxies and nests on various planets).

I would actually say that most New Age spiritual teachers do not provide proper guidance, as they're not grounded in a tradition with an ecology of practices or a holistic understanding of the human organism (e.g. the Eightfold path). Besides, the accessibility problem is a real problem. No people I know in real life know anything about spirituality. It drastically reduces the chances of getting help. How would they help me with things like working through spontaneous ego deaths or kundalini symptoms? What do they know about the dangers of misapplying spiritual concepts or techniques?
If I had always been under the supervision of a teacher in my local community who draws upon a well-established tradition, maybe I wouldn't have spent 2 years spiritually bypassing or another 2 years in absolute terror and rapture from overdoing meditation. It's interesting how we praise our institutions and traditions when it comes to politics and democracy, while pointing out how the alternative would be pure chaos and anarchy, but when it comes to something like spirituality, we're in the dark ages.

That is why hardcore relativism is a midway point between naive realism and pragmatism. You get hung up in the fact that there aren't absolutes (because you've discovered pluralism and relativism), and absolutes is what the naive realist wants, and you want to critique that, but you sort of forget that it's possible to be pragmatic and choose something that works relatively well, or is relatively wise. But you can't go back to absolutism, so the logical choice is to marry pragmatism with pluralism: take a meta-theoretic approach, see common trends in a large selection of wisdom traditions, and boil it down to the basics (find the "systemic" principles). That is how you re-introduce order and hierarchy in a meta-modern framework, and when it comes to wisdom, that is where concepts like holism and balance come in.