Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 7

Why is totality so important? Why must you have total scope, not partial scope, when trying to understand ultimate reality? Because if you leave out any part, that part can hold a critical factor that recontextualizes the whole picture. Parts, or lack of totality, leaves room for illusions to hide. If you want absolute understanding your understanding must be TOTAL — no parts can be left unaccounted for, otherwise your entire understanding might turn out to be an illusion. To grasp ultimate reality you have to grasp it so totally that no possibility of a hidden illusion remains. Or, to say it another way, you must find an absolute solution to the problem of self-deception. This is not a method science is accustomed to. Scientific method is the opposite of this because it seeks to divide reality into tiny isolated parts and only speaks on one part or another part at a time, never the whole. This allows science to do practical work but at the cost of never understanding the totality and never solving the problem of illusion and self-deception. This also means science can never understand God, because God is Totality.

Here’s what scientists do not understand. Understanding total reality is epistemically different in kind from understanding any one part. Why? Because when you are trying to explain the total you do not have the immense luxury to offload any explanatory power onto any other part. This trick of offloading explanation onto other parts is always done by scientific method. What’s an example of this? If you ask a scientist where a bird came from, he will say: from a dinosaur, which came from a lizard, which came from a fish, which came from an amoeba, which came from a bacteria, which came from the ocean, which came from the Earth, which came from a sun, which came from a dust cloud, which came from the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is left unexplained. My point is, this is a fundamental limit inherent to all scientific method. It’s not merely that we lack the tools to explain the Big Bang, it’s that in principle science can never explain anything in total, no matter how long it works or how good its tools.

Therefore, scientific method cannot be used to grasp totality. This is no trivial coincidence. It is a technical requirement of scientific method that it offload explanatory power onto other unknown parts. Scientific method only works because it shifts the fundamental Mystery of Being out of its domain of scope into another domain which it very conveniently doesn’t feel responsible to explain. Scientific method works like a heat engine. A heat engine cannot produce heat out of thin air, it requires pulling energy out of some part of reality into another. A heat engine achieves work at the expense of some other part of reality. Grasping reality as a whole is different in kind from a heat engine, it’s more like inventing a perpetual motion machine.

Science is a game of sweeping Mystery under one rug, then under another, until the scientist dies of old age. Scientific method only works because it deftly shifts epistemic and ontological responsibility.

Asking science to grasp total reality is like asking a helicopter to fly to the moon. A child might assume that a helicopter can fly to the moon, not realizing that helicopter blades only achieve work thanks to having bite on the air. No air, no bite, no lift, no moon. Materialist scientists and rationalists are like children who think that scientific method will keep doing work forever and work in the case of grasping ultimate reality, without seeing that scientific method only works if reality is divided into parts. “Parts” are to scientific method as air is to helicopter blades. No parts, no bite, no work. Science doesn’t see that total reality cannot be grasped with science for the same reason that a helicopter cannot fly to the moon. Science copes with this by denying that total reality matters or just by saying it’s an impossible issue. Yes, it’s impossible — for science. It’s impossible for a helicopter. But it’s not impossible to fly to the moon, it just requires a new paradigm that does not depend on parts to do its work. But here's the devious trick that science plays: Whenever someone like me dares speak about the total nature of reality, science says, "That's not true! You can't know that! That's unscientific! You're hallucinating!" Which is as silly as saying, "That's not fair! You can't use a rocket to fly to the moon! You are only allowed to fly using helicopters! You hallucinated walking on the moon! Everyone knows walking on the moon is impossible — science says so!"

Well, fuck you. I used a rocket and I walked on the moon. Because I was smart enough to understand the limits of helicopters. I warned you not to cling to your helicopter. But you just can't help yourself.

So what is the solution to this totality problem? If scientific method isn't good enough, what is? Science is too limited. Philosophy is a better method. But it also turns out too limited. So science gives way to philosophy, philosophy gives way to mysticism, and mysticism gives way to Awakening. And Awakening is the solution. Awakening is the total grasp of absolute reality without offloading any explanatory load onto any other parts.

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Note: In this analogy the helicopter is thinking. Any form of thinking — scientific, philosophical, religious — is all helicopters. Thinking works by having semantic bite, like helicopter blades have bite on air. But reality is much more than thinking. Mind/Consciousness is much more than thinking. Thinking only takes you so far because it requires symbolic content to bite on. Thinking can't take you to domains of consciousness beyond symbolic content. Thinking is not fundamental enough, in the same way that air is not as fundamental as empty space. You can't use a helicopter to get to the moon because a helicopter is not a fundamental-enough propulsion method. A rocket is more fundamental. Likewise, meditation, psychedelics, mystical experience, or Consciousness is more fundamental than symbolic thinking. But how do you explain this to a scientist, rationalist, or atheist when their paradigm says that analytical thinking is the only way?

You cannot understand Unity with analytical thinking! — Duh! Because analysis is the division of Unity. And God is Unity!

Do you see how powerful paradigm-lock is? To reach new places requires new paradigms. But science has still not learned this lesson 60 years after Thomas Kuhn introduced the concept of paradigms. That's how slow human understanding advances. Hundred-year-old epistemic lessons have still not been learned by and large. We are dealing with a centuries-old backlog of positivist scientific and philosophical ignorance.

This is a very accurate explanation of God from the Judaic tradition:

Again, I like to show you the same truth from many different angles. The more angles you look at God from, the more potent your understanding of it becomes.

A wildly enthusiastic 19 year old Austrian engineering student arrived to the Cambridge office of world-renowned mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, announcing his intention to make philosophy his life’s work. Russell was annoyed. Of him Russell wrote, “My German engineer, very argumentative and tiresome. I think, he’s a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable. I asked him to admit that there is not a rhinoceros in the room, but he would not.”

The young Wittgenstein took to haunting Russell in his office at midnight, pacing back and forth in silent contemplation like a wild beast for 3 hours each night. Finally Russell asked him, “Are you thinking about logic or your sins”. “Both”, Wittgenstein relied. “Do you think I am absolute idiot?”, Wittgenstein asked. “Why do you want know?”, Russell asked. “Because if I am then I shall become an aeronautical engineer. But if I am not, I shall become a philosopher.” Russell replied, “My dear fellow. I don’t know if you are an absolute idiot or not, but if you write me an essay on any philosophical topic of your interest, I will read it and tell you.” As soon as Russell read the first sentence of the essay he knew the answer. “He was perhaps the greatest example of genius as traditionally conceived.”

And yet, for all his work, Wittgenstein never did figure out God. Neither did Russell. The flies never found their way out of the bottle.

So much for genius, traditionally conceived.

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Wittgenstein was born to one of the wealthiest industrialists in Austria, raised in a marble palace and schooled by private tutors. After he became a professional philosopher, Wittgenstein gave away his vast fortune on the theory that wealth was incompatible with the life of a philosopher, so he could "croak with self-respect." To make by, he became an elementary school teacher in a tiny Austrian village, where he tried to introduce university-level mathematics to elementary school children. He was forced to abandon teaching altogether when his furious impatience with his students' lack of comprehension ended with him delivering a blow to the head of an 11 year old child, knocking him unconscious.

INTP indeed :D

And you guys think I'm harsh with you? ;)

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Source: A Journey To The Edge Of Reason, Stephen Budiansky

The amount of money that supplement grifters make is insane.

This is a staggering level of corruption which goes unrecognized because it has been so normalized. But this is not right. Most of these supplements are just a sophisticated form of theft.

Mainstream media gets so much shit for being biased and corrupt. But alternative media has even lower standards when it comes to truth, bias, misinformation, grifting, corruption, and conflicts of interest. This notion that alternative media figures are not corrupt is absurd. This is part of the foolishness of populism. Most famous podcasters are corrupt people, just because they are charismatic and likeable doesn't change that one bit.

The people in the mega podcasting space are as corrupt if not more corrupt than the people in mainstream media. These mega podcasters are living off $100's of millions of corporate money. Their populism is fake. They live like billionaires and their interests align with billionaires and unchecked capitalism. They make $100's of millions off peddling performative populism to rubes.

There's no possibility of truth, philosophy, or genuine spirituality in this kind of hyper-capitalist cesspool. Because everything is about maximizing profit, which means pleasing the rubes who are to be milked. The rubes are so ignorant and corrupt themselves that they will be milked while wearing a smile on their face.

You have to really look under the surface of how all these mega successful alternative media figures work. Look at their business models. Look at where their hundreds of millions come from. Look at the conflicts of interest. Look at the audience capture. Look at the algorithm capture. Look at the clickbait and gossip. Look at how conspiracy theories are used to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. None of this is coincidental. You don't just earn $100 million dollars for being a good guy. That kind of money requires corrupt shit to be afoot.

Great, simple, direct description of what 5-MeO-DMT feels like.

I share this so that you see that what I talk about is not just my opinions or inventions. Real stuff is being pointed to. You can find corroboration for everything I talk about if you bother to search for it. Uncommon but not uncorroborated.

Actualized.org accurately describes how higher consciousness works. Not perfectly, but good enough. This is distinct from New Age spiritual fantasies. And Actualized.org has predictive power. It predicts how consciousness will work at high states. So the more you access higher states the more true you'll realize my teachings were. Those who never put in the effort to access higher states will never realize how true these teachings were.

Credit: Forum user Razard86.

The word “physical”, as used by scientists and philosophers, is completely meaningless. There is no difference between anything physical and anything non-physical. To say that you are a physicalist, or that you believe only physical things exist, is to say nothing at all. All things are non-physical. Physicality is just a confusion of the mind. All things are Consciousness, all things are spirit. A brick wall is spirit. A digital virtual reality world is spirit. A number is spirit. An idea is spirit. A brick wall is no more physical than an idea. There is no such thing as a class of physical things and a class of non-physical things. Because all classes are imaginary. There's no such thing as classes. "Physical" is just an empty class.

Same goes for the word “material”. Material is a perfectly meaningless word used by ontological fools who think they are saying something meaningful by calling things material. Material means nothing. A brick wall is as immaterial as a ghost. Materialism and physicalism is not even worth debunking because they have zero ontological content. These are just empty confusions of unserious minds. To claim that everything real is material or physical has as much substance as saying that everything is a unicorn. You can say it, you can even believe it, but it means nothing. Whatever a brick wall is, a video game world is, a ghost is, a dream is. To think these thing are different is just ontological cluelessness. Just because it’s said by credentialed people doesn’t make it any less clueless.

Don't you see? Anything that science discovers in the future that we today consider nonphysical, it will just reclassify as physical. Because "physical" is just a proxy concept that clueless scientists use to mean true. If science ever discovers a ghost, it will just call ghosts physical. And if science every discovers God, science will call God physical. Science simply calls things "physical" once enough people agree it is true. Science simply calls things "scientific" once enough people believe in it. There's nothing more to it.

Is "science" physical or non-physical? Material or immaterial? Is the category "physical" itself physical or nonphysical? See how quickly the categories defeat themselves and fall part? You can easily deconstruct any attempt to distinguish physical from non-physical things because by science's own definitions the mental process of doing science will fall into the category of the non-physical. On the one hand science wants to claim that only physical things are real, but on the other hand science cannot escape the fact that all of science is just a mental process, which is non-physical and therefore unreal. So if physicalism is true, science is unreal. If science is unreal physics is unreal.

Here's the key insight: The category "physical" is not itself physical! It's metaphysical. This one fact destroys any possibility of grounding science, or science ever being complete. Science cannot be complete because it cannot ground any of it own categories. This one example demonstrates why metaphysics is more fundamental than science. Metaphysics can never be done away with. You can't just "shut up and calculate" your way out of this.

"Physical", "material", "scientific" — these are empty word games that the mind uses to keep itself from realizing that everything is Spirit. Spirit dawns when you realize that all categorizations of Being are illusory. Spirit is what remains — Undefined Reality. Spirit is not a category! Spirit is meta, spirit is when you realize that Being is uncategorizable. Spirit is Null. Spirit dawns when you finally realize that everything is nothing.