Science Podcast Appearance Coming Soon

[How to be wise]

There’s a possibility that they won’t release the episode. They might have realised in the editing process that this is too controversial for their audience. 

[UnbornTao]

19 hours ago, Human Mint said:

They exist nonetheless, they're something. An illusion, because they captivate you like temptation.

It takes a lot of effort to position yourself away from their gravitational force even for a moment.

That can be true when it comes to certain forms of programming, but belief doesn't exist objectively or on its own, except as a mental activity held by you. Seeing it as a belief is the first step. The deeply buried ones are seen by us as intrinsic aspects of reality, so they're trickier to unearth.

A good (and challenging) practice to take up is to identify each and every belief you hold and drop them all, aside from the functional ones. But seeing something as a belief and not as a reality tends to immediately undermine our certainty in it. 

Edited February 6 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

@Davino The 'what is fake spirituality' video reminded me of our conversation. 

[Davino]

On 13/2/2026 at 4:46 PM, UnbornTao said:

The 'what is fake spirituality' video reminded me of our conversation. 

Why?

[UnbornTao]

8 minutes ago, Davino said:

Why?

Mainly due to your failure to discern between charlatans and a real teacher.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

29 minutes ago, UnbornTao said:

Mainly due to your failure to discern between charlatans and a real teacher.

'Real' teacher? You should probably define what you mean by that for @Davino, prior to assigning him your language.

It might be useful to ask who & what we take from each teacher. Assumptions and inferences.

Edited Sunday at 12:43 AM by Natasha Tori Maru

[Natasha Tori Maru]

I think we should keep discussions like this around content and not competence. 

We cannot keep approaching topics as if things are self-evident. Assuming error without demonstration or that discernment is simple or objective. 

Lines of questioning or statements that place us in an elevated positioning of 'knowing which is which', or positioning ourselves as the 'competent discerner' are sly egoic manipulations of status. 

Goes for everyone on this forum. I have seen Leo do this. I am guilty of this. It goes against open inquiry. Against truth. Integrity. And above all, steers away from unity. We should be attempting to breach the barriers between us all. Barriers that are illusory. This is the only way to truly understand what we are each speaking about. Anything else is ego. 

Unity, infinity. The collapse of all distinction. Love 🤍

 

[Joshe]

Sometimes the feedback is correct but the tact isn't.

I've asked myself: why care what a person across the internet thinks or gets wrong? 100% it's mostly entertainment + ego. In the grand scheme, it makes no fuck. But I'll forget about the grand scheme sometime within the next few days. Integration is continuous but slow. 

[UnbornTao]

@Natasha Tori Maru What should one pay attention to when listening to teachers? 

Something to contemplate.

After all, not everyone is up to the same thing, even if they use similar terminology on the surface. 

There's a reason Leo felt the need to make that video.

[Davino]

On 15/2/2026 at 1:13 AM, UnbornTao said:

Mainly due to your failure to discern between charlatans and a real teacher.

All teachers are limited at end the of the day, don't follow mystics but what mystics follow.

After a threshold, spirituality must be self-taught, that's the beginning of real spirituality.

[UnbornTao]

47 minutes ago, Davino said:

All teachers are limited at end the of the day, don't follow mystics but what mystics follow.

After a threshold, spirituality must be self-taught, that's the beginning of real spirituality.

If teachers are limited according to your assessment as a student, then you are subject to that limitation as well.

Imagine you had spent your entire life listening to one of these charlatans, not knowing the difference. And you couldn't tell! What does that leave you with? 

I understand the sentiment of wanting to do it on your own. It's essential. On the other hand, without real feedback, one may remain confined to an insular intellectual world, avoiding any real confrontation. The ability to differentiate between charlatans and authentic teachers is a valuable skill, one that is easily overlooked by spiritual people in general. Gullibility seems to be the norm in this domain.

In sports, for example, it is much easier to tell who is skillful and who is not. In spirituality, which is rooted in subjective experience and wishful thinking for the most part, anyone can claim anything. This is precisely why the field is so ripe for snake oil salesmen.

[Davino]

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

If teachers are limited according to your assessment as a student, then you are subject to that limitation as well.

Yes but less if done correctly. With a teacher you have his awakening, the transmission and the interpretation of the communication. Moreover, you have different consciousness, psyches, personalities, gender, historical and cultural times, genetics, and so on.

With yourself, you cook it to your own taste.

And of course, you only reach to being self-taught, once you have exhausted others teachings, this I thought came without saying. My point was to proceed further with real spirituality, in the same way that Mozart learnt to a certain point from other and then had to carve a new pathway of music, self-taught, of course. Now people can arrive to that level and real music begins when continuing further.

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

Imagine you had spent your entire life listening to one of these charlatans, not knowing the difference. And you couldn't tell! What does that leave you with? 

Deluded.

In the same way, imagine you spent your whole life thinking someone is deluded, not knowing the difference. What does that leave you with? 

Moreover, it may be the case that teachers are a complex intermingle of truth and falsehood and that one needs to develop the ability to dissect and extract the truth from every perspective like a surgeon removes a tumor and studies the beating of the heart crack open.

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

The ability to differentiate between charlatans and authentic teachers is a valuable skill, one that is easily overlooked by spiritual people in general. Gullibility seems to be the norm in this domain.

I know, I've spent many years deeply studying mystics from around the world from all ages, putting to test their techniques and pointers.

I've presented you in this thread with my methodology to judge the quality of teachers after my extensive work. I'm curious to know what is your methodology and then maybe we can contrast and learn from each other.

Probably you just go by vibes and validation of your own unconscious axioms of what reality is, you have not done enough work to invent your own framework, check mechanisms, error correction, bias correction, to study a new teacher. For example, I see a new teacher X and I know how to proceed, I've done it hundreds of times, you just go with vibes, it's just casual work for you but you go on trying to lecture me when I've just traversed the space to exhaustion, but when I do so you accuse me of bragging, hence the paradigm lock. Otherwise, I'm curious to know what is your methodology and then maybe we can contrast and learn from each other.

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

In sports, for example, it is much easier to tell who is skillful and who is not. In spirituality, which is rooted in subjective experience and wishful thinking for the most part, anyone can claim anything. This is precisely why the field is so ripe for snake oil salesmen.

You see the first example isn't even yours, it's from Peter Ralston, how do I know that? Mmm...

You haven't exhausted teachers hence you cannot go beyond them, they are like anchors in your mind. While the one who has freed his mind, learns the truth from everyone and has a groundless mind. If you go to search a diamond you don't care to swim in a river of shit, others just see the river of shit and say why get dirty for the possibility of maybe finding a gem, hence they are satisfied with silver. The mystics takes a deep plunge and may only find shit, but when a gem appears, it's rare and no one will understand nor go through the process of cleaning their psyche and crowning the jewel. That's the methodology I follow after exhausting the first layer of investigation with a teacher. That's also what I'm doing with you now, I've already gotten the first layer gold after years listening to you and now I'm getting a deep plunge into your consciousness and psyche to see if there is any gem in there.

Edited 15 hours ago by Davino

[UnbornTao]

@Davino Just think about this quote: 

[Joshe]

Time is a prerequisite for some of the deepest knowledge.

When I was 18, I saw how I was a fool at 15. When I was 25, I saw how I was fool at 20. When I was 35, I saw how I was a fool at 30. And so it goes. It takes time (decades) to understand and integrate this fully. Once the pattern is crystal clear, one becomes more careful with what they claim to know about the self/subjective experience. 

Most everything that I’ve ever told myself was important was revealed to be a working of ego and falsehood, including my spiritual search and my life purpose. The very things I staked my life on - for decades - turned out to be built from ego. 

No matter how intelligent, earnest, and thorough a student is, one thing they can’t see or know is how their beliefs will hold up over time.

A mature teacher understands this and is humbled by it. It allows them to see the delusions, not because they’re more intelligent, but because they’ve had more time and experience, which, unlike knowledge, cannot be given to the student. The only way for the student is to live through decades and hopefully they will see. 

Building metaphysical sand castles is an interesting and pleasurable hobby, but when you look at the why and machinery behind the building over a span of 2 decades, the hobby eventually exhausts itself after one sees all the stories they’ve told themselves were true in order to justify their building. But this isn’t a given - it will only be seen if one is open to it. 

Now, at 40, this is where I’m currently at. I’m not sure what’s next but I’ve finally learned the lesson and I’m not building sandcastles anymore. Lol, this sounds like something you’d say at an AA meeting. Actualizers Anonymous. 

Self-deception prefers to hide inside our strongest convictions. There are blind spots that cannot be accessed through introspection alone. There are dimensions of self-deception that only decades can expose.

For me, the need to construct and inhabit elaborate meaning structures wound down after enough cycles of watching them collapse, which took a lot of time. 

Edited 8 hours ago by Joshe

[Judy2]

@Joshe isn't it a shame that we're either young and 'stupid', or old and wise? i think that's so tragic. 

[Judy2]

1 hour ago, Joshe said:

For me, the need to construct and inhabit elaborate meaning structures wound down after enough cycles of watching them collapse, which took a lot of time. 

that is pretty smart though

[Joshe]

18 minutes ago, Judy2 said:

@Joshe isn't it a shame that we're either young and 'stupid', or old and wise? i think that's so tragic. 

I wouldn't view it that way. It's not a hierarchy. 

The best we all (young and old) can do with this is hold onto things loosely and keep in mind that our future selves will likely disagree with many of our current certainties. 

That said, we have to act on the best information we have. In other words, we have to take risks and act with conviction, but we need to make sure we have the courage to be wrong and not mistake our current convictions with certainty. This sounds like basic stuff, but it's not, because we literally can't see how we are bullshitting ourselves while we are bullshitting ourselves. 

5 years ago I was certain I knew why I was pursuing my life purpose. Later, I found out my certainties were justifications for my ego. But they felt completely true. I couldn't know it wasn't true at the time. 

This feeling certain and the inability to know is what needs to be accounted for as we proceed - being open to the possibility that even our deepest held convictions may one day be seen as the ego doing what it does best: hiding in plain sight.