Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 49
There is Japanese sect of Shinto called Konkokyo. "Kami" is the Japanese word for God.
You can read about the Konkokyo's metaphysics and descriptions of Kami on this Wikipedia page.
You will see many similarities to what I teach about Kami. For example:
"God is named 'Tenchi Kane no Kami-Sama' which can mean 'Golden spirit of the universe.' Kami is seen as infinitely loving and powerful.
Kami is omnipresent and is essentially the energy of the workings of nature and the universe that gives all things a conscious mind. This is also the reason the physical universe is referred to as 'Kami's body'. Kami is often seen as a divine ideal parent — offering love, affection, support, protection, and nurturing us through his blessings. It is taught that Kami loves all people of the world no matter their race, religion, gender, and so on. Although mentioned as 'He' in materials for linguistic convenience, Kami is neither male or female."
-- Wikipedia
Why is it that some dude on YouTube in the 21st century teaches the same basic stuff that was taught by some obscure sect hundreds of years ago in Japan?
Is this just an accident?
Find out for yourself.
If you're starting any kind of biz, this is must-known advice:
Important insights and concepts here for systems thinking, holism, collective ego, and building a better society:
I have long claimed that the left and right wing are not equally conscious, truthful, loving, or developed. Many take offense to this claim, accusing me of bias. Well, here's the proof in one image:
This chart shows the vaccination rate of every county in the US vs the percentage of them who voted right-wing (for Trump). Roughly speaking, the typical vaccination rate in right-wing counties is about 37% whereas the typical rate in left-wing counties is about 53%. The stronger a county voted for Trump, the less vaccinated it is. The other important fact you need to know is that 99% of people now dying from Covid-19 are unvaccinated.
So what this chart shows is the real-world consequences of an underdeveloped epistemic framework. You see, it turns out that one's worldview, one's beliefs, one's paradigm has serious survival consequences. Those with bad epistemologies get weeded out by natural selection. I'm not saying this to gloat. This is tragic and embarrassing. But this is the consequence of the mind-cancer that has been promoted in right-wing circles and media over the last 4 years. The constant conspiracy theories, denial of basic and obvious science, grifting off culture war issues, "socialism" hysteria, and just overall reactionary attitudes against stage Green has led to what you see in the picture above. It's in vogue these days to hate on mainstream media. But actually it is non-mainstream conspiratorial fringe media which is killing people through sheer stupidity. This is also clear evidence of the costs of abusing skepticism (false vs true skepticism). The human mind can easily be poisoned with false skepticism.
In the long run it matters how accurate and truthful your worldview is. You cannot just bullshit your way through life without paying some consequences. The more selfish you are, the less truthful your worldview will be, the more negative karma it will produce for you and your community. Which is why we at Actualized.org focus so much on epistemic issues and truth. This stuff is not "just philosophy". Millions of lives are at stake. The economy is also at stake (in case you are so selfish as to only care about the young and healthy).
Sorry, but there is empirical proof that left-wingers have higher cognitive development than right-wingers. Which of course is not to say that left-wingers are immune to delusion and group-think — they are not. But on average, right wingers have less truthful, more selfish worldviews. Remember, selfishness = falsehood. Selflessness = truthfulness. Why must this be so? Because the finite self is an illusion. So anyone who clings to the finite self too much will pay a price.
This also shows the important connection between truth, consciousness, development, epistemology, and politics. Sometimes people criticize me of being too political. Why talk about politics at all? Because if we don't work to bring truth, consciousness, psychological development, and epistemology into politics, our politics will remain a domain of darkness, corruption, and devilry. If you are sickened by the selfishness of politics you should be eager to light a candle within that place of darkness, otherwise who else will shine the light? And if you don't like conscious people taking some time out of their work to light a candle, then what right do you have to complain about the sorry state of our political situation?
Stop complaining about the darkness, start lighting candles. A candle is something which helps people see reality more truthfully. The best thing you can do for the world is to become a candle. And the more light we can create the less devils will flourish in our midst, for devils can only thrive in the shadows.
There's this popular Neo-Nazi book — The Turner Diaries — which gives us some good insight into the ethno-nationalist and fascist mind:
What you need to understand from this is that a psyche stuck in a low-consciousness state gets embroiled in a toxic, destructive energy pattern that makes fascistic action look appealing. Those of us who are not stuck in such a state often wonder how it is that people can act in such an obviously "evil" manner. Well, when you're stuck in a low state of consciousness, your life feels like shit, you are disconnected from love, you don't know how to properly receive or give love, your mind is governed by fear and bitterness, and so dominating and hurting others becomes one's reason for living. For a wounded psyche, hurting others is actually enjoyable and it can even become a sense of life purpose. A life purpose can be constructive or destructive. The less conscious you are, the more selfish you are, the more destructive your life purpose will tend to be.
Just try to imagine what life would be like if your life purpose was to exterminate an entire race who you saw as parasites responsible for ruining the world. It sounds fantastical, but plenty of people are so bitter, their connection to life is so shallow, that this becomes appealing.
I like this example because it shows you the enormous range and diversity of motivation that a psyche can have. People who experience and interpret reality is radically different ways end up having radically different motivations and values. Consciousness is extremely flexible and fluid in this regard — much more so than people believe. Consciousness's range for constructing a psyche is astounding. There are so many different possible kinds of psyches, not just a handful.
"It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt."
― Chris Hedges
Here's a prime example of the twisted ways one's mind can interpret reality:
The meta-problem with all such "intellectuals" is that they are not construct-aware. In other words, their own mind is not conscious of how it is constructing, imagining, and projecting symbolism and meaning onto reality.
The Universe is a field of consciousness that dreams up symbols, meanings, and ideas, and spins them into coherent, life-like narratives.
Consider this: your life is not a biological or physical process or phenomenon. Rather, your life is a narrative spun by Universal Mind, of which biology and physicality are sub-narratives. The Universe is a not a physical system, the Universe is a Mind which spins the narrative that physical systems exist outside of a narrative. "The brain", "the body", and "the world" are not things that Mind occurs in, they are elements of a narrative that Mind is spinning. Mind itself is unlimited and not bound by any physical constraints or needs. In other words, a brain cannot exist without Mind, but Mind has no problem existing without a brain. The key insight is to realize that Mind is more fundamental than brain or atoms. Until you realize this, you do not grasp the significance of what reality is.
But anyhow, the key for not deluding oneself is to be conscious that whatever interpretations you're making, to recognized them as part of your reality-construction-project. Until you accomplish this you will keep getting lost in your own interpretations, confusing them for an objective material world.
As much as Jordan Peterson rails against the dangerous excesses of the neo-Marxist/progressive worldview, how about the dangerous excesses of the Jordan Petersonian worldview? — as exhibited by the guy in the video above? When some conservative mind gets ahold of JP's philosophy — that's way more dangerous, even if JP himself is innocent.
Make sure you don't fall for the misinformation being spread about the Covid vaccine's supposed ineffectiveness.
All the vaccines are nearly 100% effective against hospitalization and death.
A stark documentary look at the madness that is MAGA.
This is what it looks like when the human mind is rotted from the outside-in with ideology.
Antifa my ass. This is the true face of MAGA.
I want you to see how bad epistemics creates catastrophic social and political situations. People think of epistemics as mere philosophy but as I've said elsewhere, you cannot avoid philosophy. The avoidance of good philosophy ensures bad philosophy by default, and bad philosophy does not confine itself to the classroom or the armchair, it spills out into everyday life.
For all the fear-mongering that right-wingers like Jordan Peterson do about the "radical left", the bottom line is that it was right-wingers, incited by the right-wing ideology and propaganda machine (of which Jordan Peterson plays a part) that actually executed an insurrection against the US government. Post-modernists and cultural Marxists did not storm the most powerful government in the world. It was people who's minds were addled by the likes of FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh, PragerU, conservative YT, conservative Facebook, and right-wing fear-mongering about "socialism".
The irony is that right-wingers are supposed to be the defenders of traditional hierarchy, yet there is nothing traditional about doing an insurrection against a democratically elected government. This is a classic contradiction within right-wing and fascist ideology: it tends to revere the past and hierarchy, but also will not hesitate to subvert it in order to exercise power.
When I say that the right and the left are not symmetrical, that the left is more developed and more conscious, this is precisely what I mean. I do not just say that merely because I have a personal bias towards the left (which I do). I mean that the right is more prone to low-consciousness mentality and behavior such as fear-based propaganda, conformist thinking, ideology, judgment, hatred, closed-mindedness, selfishness, corruption, oppression, and violence. Objectively, the right wing poses a greater threat to democracy than the left. The above video should make that obvious. Which is not the say the left doesn't have some of it's own ideological problems and group-think, but if you cannot acknowledge that these things are objectively worse on the right, you are the biased one and you are living in a bubble. But this is not acknowledged by the likes of Jordan Peterson. If people like JP were intellectually honest they would come out and say: "I was wrong. I miscalculated the political dangers of the left vs the right. The right is the greater political danger today." But he does not do that. Precisely because of bias. Instead they try to hand-wave it away, refusing to even call it an insurrection. But as the video above clearly shows, this was a serious insurrection attempt. This was a full-on coup attempt. Failure and incompetence does not make a bank robbery any less of a bank robbery. You can't do a bank robbery and then say, "Oh, but I wasn't serious" when caught.
The culture war that is so popular in right-wing media today is a smoke-screen, exaggerating dangers which are mostly benign while obfuscating those that are serious. The serious political dangers in America are not LGBTQ, not Antifa, not BLM, not SJWs, not socialism, not critical race theory, not immigration, not gender relativity, not post-modernism, not higher taxes, not a higher minimum wage, not stricter government regulation, not abortion. The serious political dangers are: corporate money/lobbying, a shrinking middle class, environmental pollution and climate change, demagoguery, corruption of the collective epistemic framework through toxic and fallacious media, conspiracy theories, overly lax regulation, and generally: inaction on badly needed basic governance.
At this moment America is missing a serious approach to governance, and this is largely due to the right-wing media's ramping up of the culture war — which pisses people off, gets them fired up, gets them clicking and foaming and buying guns, but produces no improvement in the quality of governance. Quality governance cannot be done off the back of heated emotions like fear, hatred, and conspiratorial thinking. And this all comes from a general ideological trend on the right which preaches that "government is bad". Which comes from a deep ignorance of the crucial functions of government.
This example also serves as a stark warning about the dangers of populism. Populism might sound good in theory, but in practice populism appeals to some of the dumbest, least developed, and least conscious members of society, foaming them up with a hate and fear -based ideology which cannot lead to better governance.
The solution to all this is simple: we need better governance. We need more intelligence, consciousness, and love in governance. And the only way to get that is to deeply care and value government and its functions, and to genuinely desire to improve them, rather than blow things up to spite the elites. It should come as no surprise that you cannot improve complex systems from a pissed off mental state.
If you love America, if you think America is great and special, recognize that that specialness came from the profound intelligence and sober contemplations of its founders. People like Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and others. These were exceptionally well-educated elites. These were philosophical people who had the wisdom to design self-balancing systems. What we have today, especially on the right, is the empowerment (via democracy) of a horde of fools in the tens of millions, pissed off over silly culture war stuff, spurred on by right wing propagandists and social media companies like Facebook who profit from these toxic ideologies by the billions of dollars. It is a toxic mix of the worst aspects of Spiral stages Blue + Orange.
Lastly, some people will wonder: "But Leo, why must you be so political?" to which the answer is simple: if you want to live in a democracy it is your responsibility to do your part to maintain that democracy. If you have a public platform and you are not speaking out against this shit, how can we have a democracy? You see, I am not neutral when it comes to letting low-consciousness fools govern me. I suggest you shouldn't be either.
Guess what dies first when low-consciousness fools seize power? Consciousness, Truth, and Love.
Philosophy has practical real-world consequences. One of the key functions of philosophy is to discern how to create a better society.