Lower VS Higher Perspectives Video - Notes

[Daniel Balan]

Hi! Here you have my notes from @Leo Gura 's video on How to Distinguish between Lower vs Higher perspectives part 1. Hope it helps! No AI was used. I typed the main ideas into my commonplace book as I listened to Leo's video. 

 

• Lower perspectives are distinguished by a lack of education.( If you want to evolve you should study world wide geography, history, background, geopolitics and so on. develop high education on all domains of life)
• Learn worldwide geography and world history, for every country and every continent.
• Get a grip on basic science, mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology , geology and so on.
• Lower perspective holders lack the experience in the field they hold the opinion .
• You need to have experience within the domain you hold the opinion.
• Lower perspectives have a strong urge to defend that perspective from attacks.
• Higher perspectives are based on insights and the lower ones are based on beliefs.
• Lower perspectives will prevent you from doing deep enquiry of said perspective.
• Beware of emotional manipulation techniques.
• Close mindedness like an old mule.
• They announce the world that they are the holders of truth.
• There is always something else that these people are after. They are after money and sex and their perspective when implemented grants them that.
• Lower perspectives are not into learning.
• Lack of intellectual maturity and integrity.
• To develop a higher perspective you must:
• Develop skepticism, open mindedness,
• Genuine inquiry.
• Lower perspectives don't like new information.
• Inability to admit mistakes and reconsider in light of new evidence.
• Lower perspectives can't consider nuggets of truth in other lower perspectives.
• A high perspective sees the little nuggets of truth in many lower perspectives and jumps in and out of many perspectives. There are partial truths everywhere.
• Lower perspectives are based on groundless assumptions
• Higher perspectives go out of their way to try and falsify their perspective. They try to gather evidence that goes against the said perspective.
• Lower perspectives reject empirical evidence.
• Lower perspectives fail to make subtle distinctions. Not every Chritian is a nutcase, some are more evolved than others, not everything is black and white. Watch the episode Learning= making distinctions.
• Lower perspectives are extremely conformist.
• In a mainstream or non mainstream alternative ways.
• The low perspective mind is trying to fit in, to look up to authority for approval.
• Low autonomy of mind. Lack of basic questioning, lack of indepence of mind, low questioning of authority.
• Always question what your authority figure is saying. Think critically for yourself. Don't accept blindly.
• Watch out how you speak, weigh in every word you speak, because most of the time the first thing that comes to mind is self deception, even the third thing is self deception.
• The more that I do this work, the less that I speak.
• When you see someone that won't shut up. It is a good sign that their understanding of reality is preety low.
• When you really understand what is going on, it shuts you up.
• Ethnocentrism, Tribalism, and extreme ingroup bias. Loyalty for your team winning, us vs them, survival over truth.
• Less developed minds only care of personal gain, only want the goodies for their family and personal tribe at the expense of everyone else.
• The lower you are the more selfish you are gonna be and vice versa.
• Higher perspectives have deep respect for the epistemic ecosystem.
• Example! You have a big podcast to do tomorrow, you have done zero research for it but you still gotta pocket 10 million worth of advertising, so you spit some bullshit conspiracy theories, and voila , the audience is happy, you've pocketed the money. But you took a shit on the epistemic ecosystem which encompasses all of the knowledge society receives.
• Lower perspectives are adopted to fit in with some kind of social circle and to be part of some group think.
• Lower perspectives use worldview and perspective as a survival tool primarily.
• In order to get money, fame, sex, power, approval, love, success and influence.
• There is no interest in truth.
• Primarily all human religion is just for social fitting in! Not for truth seeking and finding good. That is just a facade! The real reason one goes to church every week is to gain friendships, connections, business deals, sex, love and to belong to a tribe.
• Lower perspectives have a high degree of emotional attachments.
• Those people use their ideology to get the best for themselves. And when you challenge them on these subjects they become extremely emotional and violent and bitter and angry.
• Lower perspective holders tend to over personalize disagreement. To them every attack is personal.
• Lower perspectives have a tendency to go on crusades against the people they perceive as evil.
• Rather than to go and seek to punish others , look inward and try to find solutions to your own mistakes and moral failings.
• The lower perspectives are moralistic, judgemental and demonizing.
• The more somebody demonizes somebody else, the lower their mind is.
• Contemplate why a higher perspective mind can't just demonize a certain group of people? Why demonizing cannot be part of a higher perspective?
• Lower perspectives are highly opinionated.
• Lower perspectives are eager to debate and own others. If you really known the truth you wouldn't feel the need to own someone in a debate.
• Lower perspectives are run on lower emotions. Fear, resentment, bitterness, nihilism, xenofobia, vindictiveness, cynicism.
• And energetically they feel bitter, negative, toxic and angry.
• If a perspective comes from a place of anger, this is an tell tell sign that that perspective is lower.
• If you are angry about the capitalists, that is not the truth, you are angry because you lack some qualities in the capitalistic world and therefore you project your lack of skills into anger at the thing you don't understand.
• To understand something you have to be objective and be outside of your biases.
• Lower perspectives are authoritarian in their style. Coercive and domineering.
• Why can't a really conscious, a really cognitive developed individual, truthful mind be authoritarian?
• It is because you believe that somehow you are  on a higher ground than the one you are dominating. That is pure selfishness, and selfishness is the hallmark of a lower perspective.
• For example a higher mind can't just beat his wife and then sexually abuse her. Because he values the sovereignty of the wife.
• Lower perspectives lead to violence, cheating, lying, and theft.
• Lower perspectives have low empathy.
• They aren't able to put themselves on the shoes of other people.
• Lower perspectives love conspiracy theories.
• A lower perspective will strawman other perspectives and people.
• Lower perspectives will use low intellectual practices.
• They will use gaslighting, whataboutism, bullshitting, lying, cheating, name calling, denial, counter attacks, dodging questions, and false equivalence.
• This kind of manipulation won't work on higher perspectives, but will appeal to lower perspectives.
• A lower perspective doesn't have enough intellectual honesty and integrity to recognize all this tactics! Misunderstanding those tactics for genuine truth seeking.
• Lower perspective uses bluster, charisma and bombast in order to trick less developed minds into buying into that lower perspective.
• A lower perspective is full of double standards!
• Lower perspectives are extremely biased and unaware of their biases. Moreover they love their biases.
• Lower perspectives conflate facts and data with interpretations!
• Lower perspectives conflate personal survival needs with truth goodness and objectivity.
• Lower perspectives reify human constructs like Christianity, Islam, capitalism, science and so on. Those are human constructs they are not absolute truths.
• Lower perspectives solely focus on the human-centric bias. Only about the human perspective of things.
• Example. Christianity says that only humans go to heaven and animals do not! How biased is that. Or that god appeared in the form of Jesus only on earth? What about the other planets in the universe? You have to understand that not everything revolves around humans. Human bias is not Truth.
• Lower perspectives don't check sources. You have to always check the source of your information.
• The lower perspectives cherry picks only the information that confirms what they already believe is true.
• Lower perspectives focus a lot on optics, grandstanding, being larger than life, pretending to know everything, and trying super hard to impress others with their accomplishments and how great they are. Peacock syndrome.
• Lower perspectives don't distinguish between corelation and causation also they wrongly attribute causation and effects.
• Lower perspectives oversimplify causes. E.g. the economy is not going well due to those democrat marxists.
• Lower perspectives refuse to believe anything other than their current perspective.
• Also limited scope, lower perspectives only focus on a very narrow
• niche of reality failing to take into account the interconnectedness of all aspects of reality.
• Lower perspectives view and interpret things from reality in order to suit their pre-existing world view. Like seeing Jesus in a coffee cup and other signs like that. They can't distinguish reality from their projections on reality.
• Lower perspectives don't understand the nature of relativity. They will only use relativism when they are defending their worldview.
• Lower perspectives also dismiss and discredit experts and expertise, they only use experts when they need them to validate their perspective. How many studies on microbiology or vaccines have you done to flippantly discredit a scientist who designed a vaccine or to cast into the world your opinion when you've done zero research on the subject you so strongly hold an opinion.
• Lower perspectives weaponize information and take full advance of mass propaganda.
• Truth can only be arrived at only through genuine process of inquiry. You can't get truth from somebody else, only through thorough inquiry.
• Higher minds are non-partisan and are not politically radicalized. There is not a clear right or wrong, each side makes mistakes and also valid points, you can't just embrace one party and totally dismiss the other. Each party has valid points. Higher perspectives care about sense-making and epistemology and truth seeking.
• A lower mind only cares about It's party to win. It's team winning.
• Lower perspectives often engage in evangelism, prizing the imposition of their worldview, while higher perspectives value respect for other minds, avoiding domination through indoctrination. True education or facilitation involves guiding individuals, like children, to explore and understand concepts like mathematics through discovery, not just memorization. This contrasts with indoctrination, which seeks to instill beliefs without questioning, as seen in some interpretations of Wahhabist Islam where there's little distinction between teaching and indoctrinating.
• Lower perspectives have no environmental awareness.
• Lower perspectives engage in information echo-chamber and want to contribute to that eco-chamber, higher perspectives tend to do away with eco-chambers and try to not take part in them.
• Lower perspectives lack self reflection.
• Lower perspectives have no clue about non-duality.
• Lower perspectives have no understanding of developmental stages. (Spiral dynamics or the Susan Cook model 9 stages of ego development). Lower perspectives don't even know that developmental psychology exists.
• Christians and Muslims don't know that their religion is ranked fairly low stages of development.
• Lower perspectives have a tendency to impose their will and agenda onto others due to their insecurity. They need the whole world to reflect back their worldview so that it feels less like a fantasy. They think that everyone needs to be like them. Which is a sign of a very low perspective.
• A religion that doesn't seek to proselytize others and to dominate others into adopting It's worldview is ranked higher on among religions than those religions that all they do is proselytize.
• The lower perspective believes that there is only one way to view reality. Their way.
• Lower perspectives sometimes stem from mentally deranged minds.
• Lower perspectives only tell you what you would want to hear.
• In conclusion you have to realize that your mind is tricking you all the time. Surviving corrupts the mind.
• The more your mind tricks you into acting selfishly for pure survival, the more you will be falling into these traps, the lower your perspective will be.

[ChrisZoZo]

Oh dam nice 

[Leo Gura]

[Daniel Balan]

Hope my input is providing a little bit of value. The worst thing about Leo's work is that you tend to forget almost everything from a video after a few weeks. So I take notes to mitigate that.

[BluntIbex]

Thank you for listing the characteristics of a lower perspective. Contemplating and writing down in my journal WHY these are lower rather than higher. Especially in the political sphere - do not care if the perspective is from a right or left viewpoint, the upper or lower perspective matters!

[Daniel Balan]

@BluntIbex You are welcome!

[Yimpa]

On 4/5/2025 at 4:34 AM, Leo Gura said:

H E Y, you sent this on my sister’s birthday! 

[Loving Radiance]

Here are my notes:

 

General

• List of psychological, epistemic and meta-features of lower perspectives and higher perspectives (POVs)
• part 1 is characteristics of pre-rational and rational POV
• part 2 is list of post-rational POV
• part 3 is list of trans-rational POV
• Low POV = being lost in survival mechanisms of the self
• Contemplate why this structure is the way it is. Check the whys and root causes of these characteristics. Come up with more points and add them to the list.
  • E.g. contemplation: "Demonization is lower because nothing in reality is demonic or evil. It seems only so because it is projected outward and believed 100%. The selfishness in you makes you create evil and separation in the world. It serves your needs because you have a self which needs to survive. High consciousness recognizes that nothing is inherently bad."
• Notice biases and ideologies that let you side with perspectives
• Question and validate this list for yourself
• Make distinctions: Notice the degrees & nuances of low POVs

 

Characteristics of low perspectives

• starts at 12:00

1. Lack of basic education, e.g. not knowing other countries, one-sided view of history, fundamentally misunderstanding science
   • Education helps you with making sense of reality and sets standards for what you take as valid and not valid
2. Misinformation, false facts from low quality sources which distort their worldview and don't allow sense making
3. Lack of direct experience, or speaking outside of one's expertise
4. Based on belief and ideology and the need to defend it. It mistakes belief for insight
   • Backward reasoning and rationalization to validate and support the belief, to survive
   • open inquiry is discouraged, self-reflection is seen as a threat
5. Bad/no epistemology and taking knowledge for granted: Are you meta-aware of how epistemology works?
6. Close-mindedness
7. Not caring about truth fundamentally, posturing about having the truth but not being willing to go through the epistemic evaluation of their beliefs, no history of epistemic work, no self-awareness & honesty to admit that
8. Having any other agenda (which serves survival) than truth
9. Low intellectual curiosity: no learning unless for agenda e.g. to disproof opponents and cherry-pick & reinforce your belief
10. Lack of intellectual integrity: Truth serves emotional need or survival need. E.g. neo-nazi investigating race
11. Lack of intellectual responsibility of taking care of the epistemology of your mind and world view, no cleaning up and looking for internal contradictions and wanting to falsify it
12. Absolutism/black-white-thinking and resistance to new, empirical information which broadens it up: rejection, denial, ignorance, dismissal, dodging, rationalization
13. Inability to admit mistakes, needing the POV to be perfect and not unravel
14. inability to change POV in light of new evidence
15. Incapability to consider different POVs being true or working out, being stuck on the same perspective
16. Inability to see partial truth in POVs
17. Overconfidence
18. Low cognitive development and low level of rationality
19. Built on groundless, unquestioned assumptions
20. Prone to fantasy, magical thinking and superstition, being built purely on faith & intuition, intuition is not tested on reality, e.g. Marxism being idealistic and having never worked out
21. Not being able to handle not knowing and building beliefs to avoid not knowing
22. Monopolistic POV: e.g. science is the best truest way to understanding reality, non-duality is the end and there is nothing beyond
23. Lack of nuance, e.g. "All of Christianity is BS.", "Money-hungry Jews run the world."
24. Conformity: taking on an ideology from culture without rigorous epistemic inquiry, e.g. establishment and anti-establishment, blind-faith science or blind-faith anti-science
25. Adoption of, accepting and mimicking pop-culture opinions and trends without critical thinking or personal reflection
26. Low mental autonomy: reliance on external authority, consensus and approval
27. Blabber-mouthing: reactive, reflexive speaking without reflecting first
28. Ethnocentrism, tribalism, extreme in-group-bias, black-and-white thinking, win-lose, survival over truth: Narrow and self-centered ethical frameworks, low scope of consideration, maximizing gain for in-group at expense of out-group (polluting & destroying ecological, economic and epistemic environments), high selfishness
29. Based on social survival and social circle (friends, family, forum, community)
30. Usage of perspective and POV as a tool to get money, fame, sex, approval, love, power, success, influence
31. High degree of emotional attachment to their POV, e.g. emotional reactivity, defensiveness and drama
32. Egocentrism, narcissism, taking criticism personally, personalizing disagreements
33. Aggressive arrogance, moral righteousness, crusading, demonizing
34. Highly opinionated, extremely serious with own opinions
35. Eager to argue, win, debate and own others. Feeling comfort when winning, discomfort when loosing.
36. Based on lower emotions: apathy, fear, hatred, bitterness, nihilism, vindictiveness, xenophobia. Negative, angry and toxic inner world.
37. Stealing and extracting value for survival gain: selfish, self-serving, manipulative, exploitative
38. Authoritarian, coercive and dominating. Seeing oneself as better and more worth
39. Violence, domination, cheating, lying, theft
40. Low empathy
41. Prone to conspiratorial thinking to avoid intellectual responsibility and arduous critical thinking
42. Scapegoating & blaming others
43. Misrepresents and strawmans other perspectives, e.g. a fundamentalist Christian says that Muslims are Satan worshippers, demonic, crazy and unreasonable. Lack of understanding, and mental inflexibility
44. Usage of cheap intellectually dishonest tactics: Gaslighting, whataboutism, bullshitting, name calling, lying, cheating, counterattack, false-equivalancy
45. Uses charisma & showing off to substitute truth & inquiry
46. Usage of double standards, e.g. circularity problem: science is built on proof but is itself built on no proof of the basic axioms and the scientific method ("the scientific method is a method for arriving at truth" isn't proven); having high standards for other tribe and relaxed standards for own tribe
47. denial games, intellectual maneuvers & mental gymnastics
48. biased and unaware of (own) biases
49. conflation of facts and interpretations
50. conflation of own survival with truth, goodness, objectivity
51. reification of human constructs: mistaking the human-made map of reality for reality itself, e.g. religions, sciences, economic systems; construct-unaware
52. anthropocentric bias: overemphasis of human-centric style of explanations, making sense of the world from the survival-based, human POV, e.g. fundamentalist Islam saying that animals are made by God for humans to eat; fundamentalist Christianity saying humans have immortal souls and animals don't ("Made in the image of God" argument)
53. Generalizations w/o regard for context, treating fact as independent of context
54. No fact-checking and thus creating an echo chamber
55. Mistakes cherry-picking information as as fact-checking; confirmation bias
56. Inability to distinguish correlation from causation: two things occurring together means that one thing must cause the other
57. Misattribution of causality due to biases: assigning wrong causes for an effect, e.g. because one is biased against a specific environment, believing an emotional state is due to that environment when in fact it's the own behavior
58. Oversimplifying causality: attributing complex events to singular, simple causes
    • inability to understand complexity, e.g. economy is bad because of party X
59. Misattribution of agency: incorrectly assigning an intentionality & maliciousness to natural events, e.g. blaming the fires on a conspiratorial government which used some tech to cause the fires
60. Overreliance on anecdotal evidence and unreliable methods, e.g. a friend being attacked in a city and then thinking that that city as a whole is dangerous
61. Low intolerance towards ambiguity
62. Low capacity for contradiction and paradox
63. Ontological inflexibility: rigid beliefs about nature of reality and resistance to other worldviews, e.g. a Christian having her POV and refusing other alternative POVs
64. Narrow scope: focusing on limited aspects of reality while ignoring broader contexts, specialization in one domain can't be translated to other domains
65. Think of reality as isolated parts and not interdependent holons, reductive and non-holistic
66. Static, non-evolutionary view of systems & ideas, e.g. fundamentalist Christianity isn't seen as a product of epochs, other religions and cultural zeitgeist but taken as original, pure and untouched
67. Committing narrative fallacies: creating fraud stories, imposing false meaning, missing patterns and inventing self-serving patterns which uphold biases, cherry-picking
68. Projections and reality are not differentiated
69. Resistance to metaphorical thinking and abstraction, taking things literally
70. Lack of existential thinking, thinking from scratch
71. Non-relativistic, demonization of relativity
72. Misuse of relativity and skepticism to defend own worldview
73. Quick dismissal of experts and expertise which don't serve their agenda
74. Information warfare: weaponizing and manipulating information to advance personal & collective survival agenda, engaging in propaganda ("spreading the truth")
    • "Truth cannot be disseminated through belief systems, ideology or propaganda. Truth can only be arrived at through a genuine process of inquiry."
75. Misplaced loyalty and political activism to groups which hurts own self-interest, e.g. voting for a party because of platitudes and them making deals to extract value and hurt you. Politically radicalized and partisan
76. Concerned about optics and winning as opposed to truth
77. Being engaged in proselytizing and evangelizing to "spread the truth" and impose "truth" as a belief system
78. Indoctrination is same as education and facilitation
79. Unconcerned about conflicts of interests because its biasing and corruption on POV is not seen
80. Unsustainable, unscalable (and no trouble with that), short-term thinking
81. Low environmental awareness because of personal agenda
82. Create and live in media echo chambers
83. Lack self-reflection
84. Incapability of handling diversity, because the POV is finite & limited
85. No understanding of non-duality
86. No awareness of developmental stages and developmental psychology and no interest in it
87. Trying to impose needs, values, worldview and agenda onto others because of inner insecurity which needs the external world to give it security (or rather reflect to it it's fantasy of security)
88. Belief that everyone should live by my values and morality
    • there is only one right way to live and to view reality
    • no intellectual responsibility
89. Tend to come from mentally ill, mentally unhinged, mentally disturbed and unstable minds: schizophrenia, bipolar, BPD, multiple personality disorder, autism

 

Characteristics of high-quality perspectives

1. Highly and broadly educated
2. Based on true facts - objective research, fact checking, differentiating correlation & causation, using large studies & meta-studies and using less anecdotal evidence & emotional reasoning
3. Based on direct experience
4. Values epistemology (doing or having done the epistemic work), open-inquiry and self-reflection
   • Leads to intense inner work and precise, context-aware speaking
   • Thinking from scratch; existential thinking
   • A fluid, yet grounded mind is needed to do subtle epistemics
5. Intellectual responsibility
   • Questioning, falsifying and disproving oneself to stand on solid ground
   • Reality checking: testing the lived experience, projections, and perspectives on real life
   • Inner jihad, and non-attached sharing of own worldview
   • Eliminating internal double standards & biases
   • Aware of self-deceptions, mind's tricks, conflicts of interest
   • Undoing and stepping out of echo chambers
   • Recognition & acceptance of diverse values & moralities
6. Open-mindedness, intellectual humility
   • Changing POV when introduced to new information
   • Admitting mistakes
   • Low emotional attachment to POV
   • Flexible worldview, holding opinions loosely
   • Handling not knowing and ambiguity (related to emotional maturity)
7. Truth for truth's sake
   • Truth is not serving a survival/ego agenda or belief system, not attached to ulterior motive, or is not corrupted by fulfilled lacking needs (security, belonging, ...)
   • Intellectual integrity
   • Intellectual curiosity
   • Independent of social survival
8. High cognitive development
   • Cognitive flexibility to deal with partial truths, nuances, complexity (and not generalizations), patterns, different lenses, contradictions, paradoxes, abstraction, different developmental stages of consciousness, diversity
   • Steel Manning
   • Construct-awareness, inclusive and holistic
   • Being trans-rational: integration of rationality, intuition, emotion, mysticism
   • Politically unpartisan and yet involved
   • Long-term thinking & execution
   • Embodied understanding of non-duality
9. Independence of mind, sovereignty
   • Political & communal engagement is unpartisan. Thinking critically to associate with groups of shared values & principles, working on addressing root-causes
   • Acceptance & support: Respect other minds and POV, gives space, helps people to explore and arrive at their conclusions, to not dominate and conquer them
10. Cosmo-centric
    • Selflessness
    • Win-Win & value-creation
    • Acting on behalf of all sovereign beings
    • Environmental awareness, sustainable, regenerative, scalable
11. Emotional maturity
    • Handling not knowing and ambiguity (related to open-mindedness and intellectual humility)
    • High empathy
    • Healthy self-control and delayed gratification
    • Based on high emotions: love, joy, peace
    • Curiosity-driven and connection-driven inquiry
    • Emotional responsibility
    • Emotional detachment to personal & collective survival agenda
12. Embodied understanding of impermanence & evolution of reality

[Daniel Balan]

@Loving Radiance Great work! I have to admit your notes are more well structured than mine! Kudos to you!

[aurum]

Now contribute to the mega-thread!