Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 86
This is one of the most disturbing and disgusting things about how the government works:
How can we have a conscious society when high-consciousness people are deliberately weeded out from the most important positions?
It's very disappointing that one of the most developed countries in the world has to employ such tactics.
This is fucking crazy what the CIA does:
Grant Cardone is a popular get-rich-quick online sales guru who claims to be a billionaire. Here's how he scammed over $100 million from his online followers. This kind of stuff is rampant in the online money-making guru industry.
This is the real secret to making lots of money online quickly: You build an audience of gullible followers and then you milk and scam them dry. It's utterly shameless. And hey! — this is exactly what Trump does. And then people actually admire this kind of behavior and call it good business.
This is the 10-year anniversary of my running Actualized.org. So I have been doing much reflecting on the nature of my work — what it's really about — and how to adjust and evolve it to best serve you. Here are some of my thoughts:
The only function of my teachings is to help you deepen your understanding of reality and reduce your self-deception. If at any point in studying my work you find some parts which you feel inhibit either of those, I want you to ignore those parts and follow your own truth.
My goal is not to make you believe what I believe, but to motivate you to undertake a profound personal investigation of Reality and Mind — the deepest investigation possible. The work is not in adopting beliefs but in doing contemplation. Be careful not to frame contemplation as some extraneous labor, like some annoying homework I'm forcing you to do when you would rather be playing video games. Reframe contemplation as the game! Savor the opportunity to explore the workings of Consciousness. Otherwise you will just fall into beliefs and ideology like every other fool.
We are not interested in spiritual or philosophical ideology here. What saves you is the contemplation and personal investigation you freely and joyfully engage in. That's what purifies you from all the human bullshit and illusions. That's where the truth comes from. The truth doesn't come from me. You are going to use your own mind to purify itself, like a bodybuilder uses years of lifting to sculpt his body. No ideology adds muscle to the body, only lifting does. And the whole point of bodybuilding is not to reach some final result but to enjoy the entire process of lifting. To fall in love with lifting. So fall in love with contemplation! You will be doing it for the next 40 years. There is no way to succeed in that without loving it. Stop racing ahead to some imagined results. Slow down and relish the process. THAT is my teaching. I am not here to teach you things to believe. You don't need to believe anything, just fucking contemplate for 40 years.
My job is to inspire you to contemplate reality in the deepest ways possible, and to feed grist into your contemplation mill. Let's you and I just spend the next 40 years contemplating together and see where we end up! Trust that if you do this diligently you will end up somewhere extraordinary.
My work is going to significantly evolve and mature over the next year or two. I know I've said this before, and some will accuse me of saying that but not actually doing it. Some might even say my work has devolved or gotten less mature — more arrogant, more hostile. Nothing could be further from the truth. You just have to distinguish between surface appearances and deep internal evolution. When I talk about evolving my work I am not talking about shallow stuff like adopting a more pleasant spiritual veneer in my behavior or manner of communication — as most people would like me to do. To get the kind of evolution and maturity I am looking for, I've had to dig very deep and make drastic internal realizations and shifts in how I relate to the entire field of spirituality and mankind as a whole. I had to jailbreak my mind from 10 years of human spiritual crap that I was taught. Only now are things getting serious as my mind achieves complete sovereignty and independence. This was a huge internal accomplishment for me over the last year — it required a lot of non-public work — and it's still not over. My audience does not comprehend how significant this was for me. Over the last year I escaped the gravitational pull of the entire intellectual tradition of humankind, both West and East, to finally fly free and alone in the vastness of deep space — which is exactly where I need and want to be. Although the process is not yet complete.
The evolution and maturation of my work is not going to be a straight upward line from my audience's POV. Sometimes the way I act or things I say will seem like regression. That's because serious stuff is being worked out internally. I care about the internal much more than the external. Repressed, emotional stuff is getting worked out. I am going through a process of becoming radically independent, authentic, and truthful — which requires shedding old layers of thought, belief, and habit. I'm just letting you know so you don't freak out from the turbulence. It just so happens that the destination we're flying to has lots of choppy clouds and there will be turbulence. Don't worry, I got a solid handle on it, but there may be more turbulence over the next year or two as I metamorphosize and settle into my final form. Everything up to this point was just my cocoon stage.
As I've said in my videos, if you want to build high you must lay your foundation deep. So that's what I've been doing. At times it may look selfish from your POV because I am focusing more on me than on serving you. But that is so that I can serve mankind a much more profound way in the future. Don't take it too personally.
Interesting studies show that rich people have less empathy and compassion than poor people:
This shouldn't be surprising. Rich and powerful people require less empathy and more selfishness in order to achieve their ambitious goals. There is a tradeoff between empathy and effectiveness. Generally speaking, you do not become highly successful and powerful by being honest, empathetic, and kind. You do it through ruthless manipulation of everyone and everything.
Don't think of this as a moral judgment against the rich. Think of it as a structural requirement of wealth-generation. How do you think wealth is made? It isn't done by shoveling shit from dawn to dusk. It's primarily done by screwing people over. It's hard to screw someone over if you're highly empathetic. This isn't rocket science.
What's galling is when wealthy people act like they are not professionals at screwing people over. Wealthy people are masters at screwing people over, and masters at denying it. Don't take this as a demonization of wealthy people. I'm not interested in that. It's just mechanically how wealth has always worked. Just look at the history of where massive wealth comes from. It does NOT come from honest labor or fair dealings. Of course there are exceptions. But one of the key skills of the wealthy is that they are really good at doing unfair dealings but then justifying it to themselves and everyone else as fair. This is quite a skill. Which is why wealthy people are full of shit at their core. They are professional bullshit artists.
Wealthy people work really, really hard. At bullshit. In this way they make billions. I'm not judging it per se, I'm just revealing some of the bullshit. Because if you ask a wealthy person point-blank if he does this, he will deny it. Because he had to deceive himself long ago to pull it off. He couldn't live with himself otherwise. Which is one of the reasons why wealthy people surround themselves with other wealthy people, because it is easier to bullshit yourself as a group. The entire upper class of society has designed elaborate social systems to blow smoke up each others asses to maintain their sense of entitlement to their wealth. Country clubs, galas, parties, exclusive nightclubs, private clubs, yachts, networking events, retreats, mastermind groups, etc. What function do you think these primarily serve? It's not just entertainment and luxury for its own sake. It's ways to socialize to bullshit each other to maintain a sense of entitlement to unearned wealth. Every rich person has to invent a story for himself for why he deserves his wealth and why it is fair.
This isn't some new phenomenon. It's been going on for all of human history. Every society, in every era, had their own version of this. You could write a 1000-page history book just documenting all the ways rich people invented to bullshit themselves. That would be quite the study in self-deception.
Of course, don't get too self-righteous if you're poor. Poor people have also invented some elaborate ways to bullshit themselves. One of which is Marxism/socialism/Communism. Yes! Of course socialism is bullshit. Did you really think you would escape self-deception so easily? Ha! Don't be a fool. This is way more complicated than anyone understands.
Warning: If you are looking to build financial independence and success for yourself, do not take what I said here as a prohibition against that. There are honorable ways to make money in the world. I am not telling you to remain a humble, poor, wage slave for the rest of your life. Please learn to create some success for yourself. Earning a few million dollars is not the kind of wealth I was criticizing here. Most normies don't even understand what wealth is. A few million hardly deserves to be called wealth. I am reminded of the opening chapter of Maxim Magazine founder Felix Dennis's book, in which he says, If you have $100 million, you're basically broke.
Having grown tired of the talking points and platitudes, I've been taking a much deeper look into the facts behind the trans gender issue. I've been thinking more deeply about the possible effects it has on kids and teens. I think it is a legitimate topic of debate to question it, and a mistake to shrug it off as mere transphobia. It's important to take seriously cases where transition fails to work. I like hearing from people who have actually gone through it, rather than listening to political activists mouthing off. I don't think the standard progressive position on this issue is fully correct because I don't see them seriously contending with cases like the following:
Yes, Jordan Peterson is pretty biased on this issue. But his biases are not as unfounded as Progressives love to claim. Yes, the trans issue IS full of transphobia, but it is not just transphobia. Not everyone who is concerned about their children changing genders is a transphobe. On this issue Jordan Peterson offers an important perspective. Obviously his perspective is not the full perspective, but he makes some good points that should be taken seriously and not just dismissed with Progressive scorn or outrage. If I had a kid who told me that he/she wanted to change genders, I would be very concerned, because this has huge life-long consequences and it should be a very rare phenomenon. Parents are not crazy for being concerned here. I see a problem here of gaslighting parents by calling them transphobes.
I encourage you to make up your own mind AFTER doing some ACTUAL research. And listening to political pundits does not count as research. Understanding this thorny issue requires direct experience with it. Or at least closer to direct experience. You need to listen to people for whom it has worked as well as people for whom it hasn't.
From the metaphysical point of view, it is the case that your identity is relative and fluid. On this matter conservatives are dead wrong — and that is the elephant in the room which they do not want to acknowledge. However! — that is not the end of the story. On the pragmatic level — at the level of everyday human life where most people reside, have sex, have families, and experience emotions — identity is not some willy-nilly thing to be toyed with. If you get this wrong your self-esteem will be shot, your dating and sex-life will be miserable, and you will become depressed and suicidal. So the stakes are high. I do not buy the notion that there is zero social contagion to the trans issue. Which is not to say that all transitioning is social contagion. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Remember, on this issue the primary concern should not be political activism, nor even the well-being of your children, but TRUTH. Forget about all the human emotions and suffering for a minute and consider what is purely true. Are there actually more than 2 genders? Can gender actually be disconnected from sex? Can gender actually just be a state of mind? Is it actually healthy to change genders? Don't take any of this for granted. Set all your personal feelings and politics positions aside and question it all from scratch. You can start by admitting to yourself that you don't actually know what a man or a woman is. You don't know what gender is. You don't know what identity is. And you certainly don't know what role culture plays in influencing gender identity. None of this is well-understood by anyone.
Here's Richard Rorty, a popular contemporary academic philosopher and pragmatist, explaining pragmatism:
Pragmatism is a very alluring trap within philosophy. Especially for common-sense folk and business-minded folk who just want to get on with life rather than sitting around and endlessly theorizing in an armchair. The appeal of pragmatism is that it lets you say, "To hell with all these abstruse philosophical musings, let's just throw all those 'philosophical' questions away and focus on living a good life. We don't need advanced philosophy, we can just be very grounded, practical, rational, and 'scientific'. Who cares how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? We don't need to worry about metaphysical issues. We can just define truth as that which works and leads to better outcomes for mankind." This is Rorty's basic position (AKA, pragmatism).
However, do you see the problem? That will only work if it's true! If it's false it will not work. And it just so happens that it's false that you can go about living life without concern for truth. Nor can you redefine truth to simply be that which is practical and leads to better outcomes. You cannot redefine truth in that way because that's not what truth is. Truth is not utility nor survival, but pragmatism assumes it is or can be made to be without any material difference. As if nothing would be lost by equating truth with survival. But, paradoxically, something practical is lost in reducing truth to utility. Then truth just becomes whatever the ego finds convenient — which means a life enslaved to the self-serving needs, desires, and fantasies of an illusory ego — which comes with serious practical consequences. Years from now, when all your bullshit and self-deception comes due, that will not be mere theory, that will be painfully practical — like a punch to the face.
The issue of truth cannot be dismissed or ignored just because is sounds "academic" or woolly. The whole point is that truth is not academic, it's ultimate reality! Just because the topic of truth confuses you, or leads many philosophers in endless circles, does not mean that you can safely ignore it, as Rorty would have us believe. If you don't take the issue of truth seriously then you have no way of orienting yourself in life — which forever dooms you to false orientation and self-deception. You will not get truthful orientation by default or by accident. Truthful orientation requires serious mental and spiritual labor. The issue of truth is so serious that pragmatism itself turns out to be false, but a pragmatist cannot see this because he has convinced himself that truth isn't important. And so he thereby orients himself toward falsehood. But good luck convincing a pragmatist of that.
If I tell you, "Truth matters", and you respond, "No it doesn't", there's nothing more I can do to help you other than to tell you that you're fooling yourself. But to see that you are fooling yourself and how much this will be a problem down the road requires that you be able to recognize some semblance of truth. Which of course you cannot if you argued that it doesn't matter to begin with — thereby creating a Catch-22.
It is not safe to assume that truth doesn't matter, nor that you can reduce truth down to anything practical. In fact, truth is such a serious issue that truth CANNOT merely be practical. If truth were nothing more than pragmatics it wouldn't be worth a damn and we wouldn't be talking about it for 2000 years. Truth is too profound and too important to be subordinate to utility. Truth must transcend practicality because it is prior to the notion of utility, purpose, value, or meaning. This is what Rorty and the pragmatists fail to understand. If truth could be boiled down to pragmatics then I would be very displeased with GOD. GOD designed reality such that everyone who ignores truth will be punished, not by GOD, but by their own stupidity. And I would not want it any other way. Rorty's punishment for treating truth so flippantly is that he never found GOD. That will be your punishment too unless you are careful. And there will be many more-earthly punishments as well.
When you decide to discount truth, GOD himself can no longer help you. Your care for truth IS how GOD helps you. Truth is the umbilical cord that connects every creature to GOD. Because GOD IS TRUTH! But if you cut that cord out of stupidity, then you're doomed to a hell of your own creation. By discounting truth you disconnect yourself from yourself. Because, of course, YOU ARE GOD!
Now you might protest, "But Leo! Isn't it unfair that GOD would doom stupid people to hell? What kind of GOD would withhold himself from the stupid? Why is GOD so elitist?" Well, you see, since GOD is Intelligence, it cannot be accessed other than through exceptional levels of intelligence. It's not that GOD is withholding itself from the stupid, it's that the stupid simply cannot fathom GOD, because GOD cannot be stupid, GOD is Intelligence itself. So either you rise to GOD's level or you don't get to see GOD. If you don't see GOD there is only one reason: you're not being intelligent enough. That's it! GOD itself is not powerful enough to disclose itself to an idiot, precisely because that idiot is GOD. The only way GOD can disclose itself to an idiot is if the idiot cures himself of enough ignorance to realize that he is GOD.
The notion that the best kind of philosophy is one which rejects all philosophy to just focus on practical earthly matters, is one of the stupidest kinds of philosophy. You'd have to be a fool to think that this would work. Unfortunately, many of the best scientists and business-people have convinced themselves of this very notion. But if philosophy worked like that then philosophy wouldn't exist! The whole conundrum of philosophy is that you cannot avoid philosophy any more than you can avoid a charging rhinoceros by burying your head in the sand.
Many people believe that they can avoid philosophy by being very practical, business-like, reasonable, and 'scientific'. As if that wasn't a philosophy! The issue is, Is that a truthful philosophy? And the answer is No! So it's not that you're outsmarting philosophy by avoiding it, you're actually fooling yourself into doing false philosophy. It's like you've entered a boxing match and decided to open by tripping and falling flat on your face because you're worried you might get punched. And you're convinced that this is the winning strategy. No! In life, if you fail to act wisely you lose by default.
That's pragmatism in a nutshell. Pragmatism is one of most popular philosophies on the planet. It's so popular that most people don't even recognize themselves as pragmatists. It's popular because it gives the ego a blank check to run hog-wild with its favorite activity: survival. Money, success, convenience, pleasure, fame, status, sex, power, family, tribe — all of this is now equivalent to truth, which is the very essence of devilry. The Devil is a pragmatist, for obvious reasons. The Devil's notion of truth is anything that serves him — anything that's useful to him. But that is NOT truth!
And yet, despite all this, the final paradox here that academic philosophy is so bad that I would rather have people be pragmatists than doing academic philosophy. This is the awful state of current philosophy in our culture. It's embarrassing how bad humans are at philosophy. I would rather live alone in a cave than participate in the horseshit that is academic philosophy. There is hardly a single Western philosopher in the last 2000 years worthy of respect. They were all clowns and devils. So much debate, so many words, so little substance. None of them can render a satisfactory explanation of Consciousness, Truth, or GOD. I reached the ultimate understanding of reality despite all their bullshit. I spit on all of them. None of them comprehend GOD. Fuck you academic devils for what you did to philosophy. You turned the most important subject of all into a joke. I had to wade neck-deep through 2000 years of your horseshit to finally reach GOD on my own. So pardon me if I'm a bit bitter.
I'm trying to show you how to cut through all the crap and do some serious philosophy.
I have an episode called Learning = Making Distinctions, in which I explain how to super-charge the rate and depth of your learning by consciously focusing on making sharper distinctions.
If you study the mechanics of how these powerful new AIs are trained, it's exactly by this method! AIs are trained using sharp, clear, distinct data-sets. For example, you feed an AI 1000 clear images of dogs and 1000 clear images of cats, and it will learn how to distinguish them. If the data-set is murky or ambiguous, the AI will not learn well. Your mind works in the same way.
One of the things that makes learning anything difficult is that no one gives you enough clear, sharp, unambiguous examples. Much of the labor of learning is finding these distinct examples out of all the crap humans feed you. One of the biggest parts of AI research and development is to use humans to curate very clear data-sets. For example, if you want to train a Tesla car to avoid driving over children, you have to curate a data-set of 1000s of videos of children running across the street. Then it will learn to recognize or distinguish children. Otherwise it won't.
Which is why I fill my episodes with dozens and hundreds of excellent examples. I rack my mind to come up with the best examples for you. Because I know I need to train you like a neural network.
Ta-da! ;)
A neural network is a massive set of distinctions that mirrors the infinite set of distinctions that we call Reality.
I just explained the metaphysics of AI.