Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

The perfect illustration of how humanity corrupts God with its own survival:

When we say that religion is stupid, this is why. Religion is a corruption of God by mixing God with human survival agenda. This clip makes it look silly, but if you look at how humans use God/spirituality in their lives, it's not far off from this clip. Humans use God as a survival tool, and they genuinely have no understanding that there's anything wrong that. Humans don't really want God, what they want is God as a tool to serve their petty human biases and needs. You want God to help you earn more money, make you more popular, give you sex, breed your children, give you political power, and spread your human mind viruses across the land. You want God to make you feel good. You want God to endorse your judgments and criticisms. You want God to align with your historical ethnic fantasies. You want God to anoint your tribe and damn your enemies. You want God to endorse your silly political views. You want God to make you successful. You want God to feed red meat to your ego. And perhaps, most of all, you want God's Love to be the grotesque, selfish, pathetic love that you have mistaken for your survival. And when God doesn't do those things you get quizzical and find some way to rationalize it without changing anything fundamental in your view of reality, humanity, or yourself.

How can God or Love be understood when this is what humans want spirituality to be?

By the way, this is also a perfect parody of Trumpism.

Are you familiar with D-Limonene?

It's an all-natural, non-toxic solvent, cleaning solution, and degreaser. You can use it as an industrial grade hard surface cleaner for removing all sorts of difficult stains, grime, grease, labels, ink, dyes, tar, goo, glue, etc. It's especially good for removing stubborn labels and stickers. It can be a paint stripper, food-safe insecticide, bug spray, kitchen cleaner, wood finisher, electronics cleaner, automotive cleaner, weed killer, air freshener, adhesive remover, chewing gum remover, mold remover, essential oil, flavoring agent, and even an oral digestive supplement. It's just so versatile.

D-Limonene is made out of hyper-concentrated orange peels. It has a potent orange smell that stings the nostrils. It is available in food-grade form, but it's so potent you should be careful because it can burn through plastic or skin. Imagine concentrating orange peels into such a potent solution that it can burn a hole through plastic! That's D-Limonene in a nutshell. D-Limonine is not a corporate brand or gimmick, it is a type of chemical.

I recommend keeping a bottle around the house for difficult cleaning jobs which will inevitably arise.

I just used a few drops of it to remove an impossible sticker from an Ikea dinner plate. The sticker came off without a trace.

One time I was walking on the beach in Southern California and I stepped on a bit of tar that washed up from an offshore oil spill. It clung to and nearly ruined my favorite sandals. That tar is very nasty stuff that refuses to wash off with anything. But D-Limonine can dissolve tar.

Got ants? You can use D-Limonine on them without poisoning your dog or your kid.
(Note: D-Limonine and all citrus oils are toxic to cats.)

Got weeds? You can make a non-toxic weed killer by mixing D-Limonine with dish soap and vinegar.

It's affordable, can be bought in bulk, and lasts for years.

Buy Here (affiliate link)

I want to warn you about the trap of pseudo-archaeology.

As you get into spirituality, you'll get sucked into the New Age and you'll see that domain overlap with the domain of pseudo-archaeology. Myths of advanced ancient civilizations, Atlantis, ancient flood stories, ancient golden ages, people living in Antarctica, aliens building the Egyptian pyramids, etc. At first these ideas will sound appealing, playing on your sense of mysticism, wonder, openmindedness, and unconventional thinking, but eventually you will come to see that these are lower perspectives — self-deception — based on poor epistemology. The evidence for it just doesn't exist and the people who engage in this type of unscientific speculation are falling for their own New Age biases. It's not just that the content of these beliefs is wrong, the epistemic structure of how these beliefs are being formed is wrong. I'm talking about the kind of theories that people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson are pitching. The kind of New Age -fueled speculation they engage in is an epistemic trap that you should be intelligent enough to see through.

Unfortunately, podcasters like Joe Rogan have popularized and mainstreamed a lot of these bad ideas because they sound fascinating to uneducated people and they make for good, cheap slop for the endless content mill that is the alternative social media ecosystem.

Here are some good videos to help you deconstruct that misinformation:

More links:

What Graham Hancock Gets Wrong About Flood Myths

How Rogan Was Fooled By Graham Hancock

One of the most important lessons I hope you learn from me, from the Actualized work, is that spirituality is not about speculation, it is not about adopting New Age beliefs. Such things are false spirituality. True spirituality requires extreme epistemic rigor, more rigorous than science, not less. Distinguish between direct experience and speculation. Distinguish between grounded scientific evidence vs wild ungrounded wishful theorizing. Have the intellectual discipline and integrity to refuse wild speculation about history or the future. This is an important discipline for serous truth-seeking. Truth-seeking is NOT what Graham Hancock or New Age people are doing. Recognize that difference.

One of the most important lessons for you to learn is to stop your mind from adopting beliefs it wants or needs to be true. If you are unable to do this, self-deception is guaranteed. Be extra skeptical of any belief that feeds into your sense of the mystical and magical. Just because some aspects of spirituality are true — like God, Love, relativity, or the imaginary nature of things — does not mean that anything you want goes. Spiritual New Age fantasy is a serious, serious problem that you should be on guard against. Just because spirituality is valid does not mean that you don't take scientific rigor and rationality seriously. Evidence for things still matters. Sound reasoning still matters. Scientific method still matters. Epistemic rigor still matters.

My African mask collection:

That's about $5000 in masks and 3 years collecting.

This was just a proof of concept. It took me a long time and lots of wasted money to figure out how to select the best masks. Now that it's proven successful, I can start collecting rare masks in earnest.

Tim Snyder has a great view of our political situation:

Although, I must add a warning. Snyder does not really understand what freedom is in an existential sense. The entire point of government is that humans do not and cannot like freedom. Freedom is not good for you. Freedom is bad for you. This fetishization of freedom comes from a misunderstanding of what freedom is on an existential level, and when you get freedom so wrong you will end up living under a corrupt and unjust government.

But Snyder's perspective is still good to consider. Not every perspective needs to be existential.

Rich and powerful people often do not have an ideology or a consistent set of beliefs. Their ideology is pragmatism and opportunism. They will believe and say whatever they need to in the moment in order to get more wealth and power. This is vital to keep in mind when trying to understand and predict their behavior.

Acquiring and wielding enormous power and wealth is virtually impossible without constantly lying, both to others and yourself. Rich and powerful people lie so fluently and constantly that it doesn't even register in their minds, it's just the only way they know how to live. Their entire lifestyle and mental structure is oriented around it. So there actually is an important psychological difference between ordinary people and megalomaniacs. Megalomaniacs do not think like you or me. They have sold their souls to the devil for power, wealth, and status. This is a fundamental decision they made early in life and never looked back. Truth and integrity does not exist for them, even though of course they tell themselves otherwise. But it is crucial that you understand that rich and powerful people are literally incapable of doing the Actualized work because their life would implode. I want you to really understand and appreciate the cost of the Actualized work, and why it is so rarely done. You have to give up aspirations for serious power, wealth, fame, and sex in the name of truth. Very, very few people will do that because they do not comprehend the value of truth while the value of those others things is obvious.

Truth is antithetical to power. Contemplate why.

Note: Of course, do not make the silly mistake of thinking that poor and lower class people are champions of truth. No, no, no. Lower class people also have a shocking disregard for truth, but for other reasons, usually reasons of ignorance and low intelligence. Lower class people are usually more honest and authentic than the powerful, but they are still profoundly ignorant. One can be a very authentic and honest ignoramus. This is why populism is a canard. On the other hand, the powerful are more cunning, conniving, and manipulative.

So who cares about truth then?, you might ask. Basically, no one. But there are degrees of selling your soul to the devil and you should distinguish between them.