Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 16
For a few years now I stopped reading books because I reached a point where they stopping giving me value. It just became hard to find a book worth reading.
But recently I revisited the matter from a new angle and found dozens of amazing books, mostly on history, politics, and social science. I've read over 30 new books and I'm burning through a couple new books every week. I've been reading about terrorism, extremism, racism, communism, biographies of dictators and mass-rapists, psychopaths, narcissists, corruption, money laundering, Islamic history, Zionism, Africa, war, the CIA, the right wing, and more.
All of this is crucial reading for making sense of the social world. I don't read spiritual stuff any more, I read to deepen my understanding of social dynamics and human depravity. I study all the ways humans act like unconscious devils and how they justify it to themselves. You will never understand the full gamut of human social depravity through direct experience. So books are necessary here. To understand how the globe really works. I do this to increase the depth and quality of my politics and social commentary. To ground my politics in hard historical reality, social science, expert analysis, and awareness of global cultural differences.
I make use of these books to make sense of all the bias and confusion that's all over the news and social media. It amazes me how just a couple of the right books can resolve an issue that people in the news business will bullshit about for decades. My advice to you is, stop consuming so much online news and punditry, and instead read high quality books on history, political science, and social science. Online news is keeping you dumb for clicks. One of the keys to developing mature politics is to read lots of history and social science books. I'm excited to share nearly 50 such books with you soon.
I'm on a mission to build a library of 100 books critical to developing mature, conscious, Tier 2 politics.
At a young age, Jalal al-Din Rumi acquired a reputation as a great scholar of conventional Islamic texts. Rumi was a Sharia jurist and teacher, giving sermons in mosques. He taught classes in a school founded by his learned father, who was himself a renowned theologian, known by all around as the Sultan of Scholars. Rumi's reputation for learning was so great that students flocked to his lectures and hung on his every word.
Then, one day, a dirty homeless man crashed one of his lectures, sitting in the back, singing, laughing, howling, and disrupting the class. He seemed like a madman. So Rumi's students grabbed this insolent bum to throw him out of the class. But Rumi stopped them and asked the man, "Why are you here? What do you want?"
"I am Shams-i Tabrez," the madman said, "and I have come for you."
To the astonishment of his students, Rumi closed his book, cast off his scholar's cloak, and said to the class, "My teaching days are over. This is my master." He walked out of the classroom with the madman, never to return.
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"Why should I seek? I am the same as He. His essence speaks through me. I searched for God and found only Myself. There is no reality but God. Don't look for me in human shape, I am inside your looking. No matter where I am, that is where God is." — Rumi
That is the difference between scholarship and spirituality. You will not find God in the classroom, unless perhaps he comes to howl at one of your lectures.
Source: Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary
I spent hours studying the epistemic self-deceptions of Flat Earthers — just so that I can better understand how self-deception works. It's not about the content, it's about the structure, the psychology of sense-making in general. It doesn't matter whether the Earth is flat or not, what matters is all the self-deceptive ways people make sense of reality.
Flat Earthers are astoundingly ignorant. It boggles the mind how self-deceived they are:
This is a good example of criticism of science from below. People like this make it seem like science does not have serious errors. It does. But before you can appreciate the delusions of science you first have to learn basic science and rationality.
The epistemic mistakes of Flat Earthers are not unique to Flat Earthers. They are common to all religious people, all ideological people, to all scientific, rationalist, materialist, atheist people, and all New Age spiritual people. The self-deceptions are just more subtle and more abstract at higher levels of scientific rigor.
It doesn't take much intelligence to see self-deception in Flat Earth. It takes enormous intelligence to see the self-deception in materialism, rationalism, and atheism. And it takes even higher intelligence to see the self-deception in something like Buddhism or nonduality.
What's amazing about this whole thing is that while you are busy laughing at the obvious self-deceptions of others, you yourself have fallen into those self-deceptions, just at higher levels of abstraction and subtlety. So your laughing isn't merely innocent laughing, it's a defense mechanism against serious philosophical inquiry.
The way an MIT scientist laughs at a Flat Earther, I laugh at an MIT scientist. But I'm also aware that my laughing is a cover for yet deeper self-deceptions within myself, a distraction from the real work. If you are still laughing at the stupidity of others, you haven't yet realized the depth of the problem.
A new report from Consumer Reports found many brands of cinnamon powder to be contaminated with high levels of lead.
Click Here to see which brands are the worst and the best.
Check all your spices and powdered foods for heavy metals. Avoid consuming powdered foods unless you can verify that your brand of it is clean. Powdered foods are commonly contaminated with extra-concentrated nasty chemicals.
I don't know about you, but I prefer my cinnamon unleaded.
This channel makes interesting videos about obscure historical events like failed expeditions and shipwrecks.
I didn't even know this country existed until today. This is a little lesson for you in Stage Red.
This is profound:
Lacan's "The Real" is what I call 1st order Truth or consciousness/experience. The Real is that which cannot be symbolized, it's non-conceptual consciousness. If you look at your hand, that's the Real.
Lacan is not a post-modernist in that he has this notion of The Real, which is like objective or absolute truth.
These are some eye-opening examples of post-modernism in practice.
That second video shows the fundamental problem with post-modernism, namely, that post-modernism misses 1st order truth. 1st order truth is simply experience. A post-modernist is so lost in conceptual abstractions, social constructions, and historicism that he cannot even recognize that experience is Absolute Truth.
A = A. That's Awakening.
It might seem trivial or obvious but it's not. Not a single human on this planet understands that A = A until they are Awake. If you understood that A = A, you would realize God. But no one realizes it. It's too profound for your monkey mind. Only God can get it.
It's just damned fascinating how Dugin uses PM to undermine the West.
This is such a clean, perfect example:
"We have our special Russian truth."
What do you think? Is it true that Russia has its special Russian truth and America has its special American truth? In what sense is this correct and in what sense is it not?
It's not so obvious. Take your time mulling it over.
What do you think about this notion of multi-polarity? Post-modernism opens the door to mutli-polarity. But what then? How do we resolve disputes between different worldviews/truths if there is no objective ground? Do we just go to war and see who kills whom? And then whatever survives is the truth?
The problem with having multiple special truths is that they don't get along. One truth seeks to dominate and suppress the others. But in order to have a single truth, it too needs to dominate and destroy all the others. This situation is what I call epistemic anarchy. Imagine an epistemic wild west where there is no sheriff, no law, so every truth must fight every other truth to the death. But then what happens when one truth kills all the others and enthrones itself as king? How will that king defend his kingdom when new truths arise and plot to stab him in the back? Truth is endless war!