Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 61
Sometimes an obviously great thing sits right under your nose for years as you ignore it.
YouTube Premium is such a thing.
I don't know why I hadn't subscribed to it earlier. It's only $12/mo and gives you access to a totally ad-free YT experience, with a built-in button for downloading videos and the feature I really love which is the ability to play videos on your phone with the screen off.
If you've been hesitant to try YouTube Premium, I highly recommend it. $12/mo is a bargain to stop sitting through all the mindless ads, and it helps support your fave YouTube creators directly, unlike when you use AdBlocker.
I wish the whole internet had a single ad-free subscription option.
Sometimes, by being cheap you end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Note: this is not a paid promotion. I don't get paid for you signing up.
Rick Doblin is doing amazing work with his organization: MAPS.org
After some 25 years of tireless work from Rick and his colleagues, it looks like the first legal, FDA-approved psychedelic therapy/medicine will finally be ready to go in 2021 or 2022 in America. This is HUGE!
Please donate to MAPS.org if you care about the legalization of psychedelics. This is the real deal. This is our best shot.
P.S. Best YT comment under the video: "He’s grinning like a mushroom gnome."
BTW, this is a great example of how to execute a high-consciousness life purpose. It's just the right mix of idealistic yet pragmatic.
"There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity, disorder, and chaos. Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity — especially sexual ambiguity — in check. It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, church and world, Christianity and secular-humanism, male and female. These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare. Reality thus defined, is made predictable and understandable — something deeply comforting to believers — who've had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence. There is, in this Christian worldview, clearly demarcated order and disorder. Behaviors that do not conform, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder, tools of Satan, and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear boundaries, can be made rational, it can be managed and controlled. The petrified, binary world of fixed immutable roles is a world where people — many of them damaged by bouts with failure, despair, and their own ambiguities, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities and live with the illusion that they are strong, whole, and protected. The decline of America is described as the result of the decline of male prowess. This decline has led to weakness and moral decay. It has resulted in a bewildering human and social complexity that — often seen as feminine — is the work of Satan. By submitting to a Christian leader and powerful male God who will destroy those who misbehave, followers avoid dealing with life. The movement seeks, above all, to banish mystery — the very essence of faith. Not only is the binary world knowable and predictable, but finally God is knowable and predictable. Since life has a way of not respecting these artificial lines — since ambiguity, inconsistency, and irrationality are part of human existence — the only way believers can push forward is to pretend that these troubling aspects of our internal and external reality do not exist. They create a parallel reality, one that allows them to escape... into a world of their own creation. Unconscious motives, longings, and fears are denied and responsibility for them is abandoned as fundamentalism makes a pretense of being all about cut-and-dried truth, and clear and recognizable feelings."
-- Chris Hedges, American Fascists
The above is a characteristic feature of the Spiral Dynamics Stage Blue conservative worldview.
I'm lookin' at you, Jordan Peterson & Ben Shapiro.
But to truly become whole, this attitude cannot fly. Instead you must dive deep into the ambiguity of life and wrestle with the relativity of all boundaries, binaries, and dualities until you've recognized this as God's — and your's — ultimate nature. You cannot become whole or healed while denying chaos, vulnerability, uncertainty, femininity, feelings, emotions, intuition, relativity, mystery, irrationality, paradox, spontaneity, surrender, and love.
So beware the conservative, stoic approach to life. Beware the cult of masculinity. Beware the cult of "facts over feelings". It won't work, as it makes you emotionally stunted, repressed, bitter, and robotic.
It's the shit you deny which will come back to bite you in the ass. Since reality is a Great Circle.
Great video. The perfect balance of educational and entertaining:
This is mostly an episode about me, so you won't find much theory or practical advice in this one.
This is how devilry works in a nutshell:
A member of our forum — Rasheed — shared this amazing YT channel which I wanted to share more broadly here with you.
This channel features candid interviews with some fringe and far-out people. This channel will challenge your paradigm of mankind. Warning: Radical openmindedness required.
Here's a sampling of the kind of gold you'll find on there:
So here's my challenge for you: Contemplate how you'd create a community that gets all of these people to co-exist together peacefully.
That's the real challenge of politics and government.
And if you really want to go deep, check out this Sociopath & Psychopath Masterclass video.
Much of the political turmoil we see today in the world can be simply explained as a battle between nationalism vs globalism. For thousands of years mankind has lived in communities separated from each other via geography, language, religion, race, culture, etc. But today, thanks to technology, each year, mankind is becoming more and more interconnected as one global community. This trend is inevitable and irreversible. But much of the world's population is running on the age-old nationalist operating system, thus resisting global integration. It's an matter of identity. Global integration requires relinquishing one's old, limited national identity — which feels threatening and uncomfortable for many people. So they invent all sorts of defense mechanisms to avoid it. These defense mechanisms include: judgment, blame, scapegoating, gaslighting, strawmanning, demonization, projection, denial, propaganda, lashing out, conspiracy theories, ridicule, righteous anger, violence, and fear.
I recommend you acquaint yourself with what the term "nationalism" means. It's good to have an explicit definition of it in your mind. It will explain a lot of what you will see going on around you during your lifetime.
Nationalism comes in many flavors and degrees. Read up on nationalism here: