Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 91
If you're American, it's important you vote in the upcoming Democrat primaries. It's important not just for America's sake but for the world.
It's no longer good enough to only vote in the November General Election. You must get active in the primaries.
It's not too late. Go register. Some states require that you register as a Democrat to participate in the primary. Do that if you must. I did. You can always unregister afterwards. Mark the date of the primary on your calendar. Many states have early voting, so mark that on your calendar. Voting is super easy in most places.
Now, the million dollar question: Who should you vote for?
Vote for the person who is most conscious, most loving, most Spirally developed, AND who has a reasonable chance of winning. Don't throw your vote away on candidates polling at <5%.
Of course, in the end, you will only vote as high as your Spiral stage of development allows. If you are Blue-Orange, you will like Biden and Klobuchar. If you are solid Orange you will like Bloomberg and Buttigeg. If you are Orange-Green you will like Warren, Yang, Tulsi, Steyer. If you are solid Green and above you will like Bernie. If you are solid Orange or below you will likely hate Bernie.
Remember, your vote is 90%+ determined by your level of consciousness and nothing else. The rest is bullshit excuses your mind is making up to justify your position. All of your justifications are coming from your level of consciousness and nothing else. You can't help reveal your true colors by who you vote for. There is nothing original about what your mind is doing.
Personally I endorsed Bernie Sanders 1 year ago and I'm sticking to it.
It is also helpful to donate money now if you can to the candidate of your choice. But don't fool yourself: a donation is not a substitute for voting in the primary. Voting is crucial and if you really care about the development of mankind, it is your duty to vote for the most developed humans to run society.
Important issues are at stake:
- The rise of nationalism & authoritarianism
- The perpetuation of soulless, unchecked, unjust, and unsustainable capitalism
- Environmental destruction that will affect mankind for a century to come
- The perpetuation of a corrupt healthcare system that kills tens of thousands needlessly every year
- War with Iran
- The senseless drug war
- And more!
The time for talking and squabbling is over. Now is time for action at the ballot box. Encourage your friends and family to do the same.
Sorry for the repeated Anand talks, but I'm just addicted listening to him speak on neoliberalism. He's so good at articulating the current stage Orange/Green transition that the developed world is going through:
This is a discussion about the end of Stage Orange. Picture a numb rat gnawing its own tail to the bone until one day it suddenly realizes: "Oh! That's my tail I've been gnawing on!" That is how stage Orange transitions into stage Green.
But really what Anand talks about is only the tip of the iceberg.
The role of good public intellectuals is to question and deconstruct the myths of prior generations to create a new upgraded culture that shapes how people think about things to enable the next level of society.
An outdated culture leads to people thinking and acting in foolish and self-destructive ways en masse because most people simply follow whatever culture they are programmed with in their youth. Average people need visionary yet down-to-Earth intellectuals to shows them new ways to think about the world. Yes, even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, politicians, and big name scientists need visionary intellectuals to show them how to think. Being successful or well-respected does not make you a good thinker. Often just the opposite because the culture most-rewards those who reinforce the status quo, not those who challenge it. The thing is, a Fortune 500 CEO is not thinking deeply about how to think deeply. He's just acting out old thinking routines that got him to where he is, but won't get him higher.
What isn't well understood is that the next level of society doesn't just come automatically through better technology. There needs to be new intellectual architecture put in place because the old intellectual architecture can only take us so far. More technology without an upgraded intellectual architecture is like giving chainsaws to children.
Right now we are living in an era where the old intellectual architecture is starting to strain and buckle under its own weight.
The role of Actualized.org is to build and popularize new intellectual architecture. These teachings are not just here to help you personally master your life but to create new ways of thinking that will enable the next 100-500 years of societal evolution. Which is why I use a lot of political examples nowadays in my teachings. I'm trying to show you that personal development and social development are deeply interconnected so that once you do self-actualize, you will link your self-actualization, awakening, and success to the uplifting of mankind. So your growth, your awakening, your life purpose, and your career/biz will all be integrated. This is going to be more and more necessary in the future. The days of going to a dead-end job and punching the clock are coming to an end. Factory jobs are coming to an end. The jobs of the future will require passion, self-determination, creativity, and consciousness. What do we do when robots take all our menial jobs? We train and develop ourselves to be powerful creatives, artists, visionaries, leaders, and lovers. We develop those things which robots don't have (at least yet): creativity, vision, artistry, intuition, wisdom, consciousness, empathy, humanity, spirit, love. But this cannot happen on auto-pilot. This requires that everyone consciously participate in crafting their life from any early age. And this requires that people be shown how to do this. Someone needs to take them by the hand and lead them through the process. And even beyond that, society needs to build new infrastructure that makes this process easy, natural, and normal — so your peers aren't looking at you like some freak for doing this. Right now these systems haven't been built yet, which is why it's so difficult. Most humans are only used to doing things which mankind has already well-pioneered. Something like going to school is only easy these days because social systems were pioneered for several thousand years. If you had to do school on your own, without social support, less than 1% of people would do it. It would be 100x harder.
The most important thing we need to train our children is how to connect their passion for life with life-long self-education, a career grounded in on a sense of life purpose, personal development, spiritual development, and then also social development. Without these kinds of citizens society is ineffective and dysfunctional as the majority of people are not passionate about their personal lives and therefore disengaged from being of service to others.
Imagine a society in which a majority of citizens are passionate about their careers and their careers are about being of genuine service to others, not just mindless profiteering or widget-making. That is the future, but it will be a rocky transition to get there. Design your life to fit into this mold of the future.
Those billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs might seem like they are living a life of purpose, but they are not. They are living an unconscious life of chasing success and status, which is not the same as life purpose. Life purpose is how you would do conscious work if success, money, and status were irrelevant.
I love how transparent Steve Bannon is about his devilry:
"The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."
-- Steve Bannon
Vox Article - How Misinformation Overwhelmed Our Democracy
In a sense this makes him an ineffective devil because he's too honest about his devilry. Devilry can't survive long in transparency. It has to be opaque.
But anyway, that is precisely how devilry works. It perpetuates falsehood simply by muddying the waters so much that average people cannot tell the difference between truth and falsehood. This is a broader tactic of devils that takes place not only in politics but with religion and spirituality. Many people these days are so sour on religion, spirituality, and anything smacking of the New Age because these important zones have been flooded with shit over the centuries. This makes it very difficult for people to find Truth/God. The zone has been so flooded with shit that most people think that Truth and God a myth. And in such a state, the devil wins. The devil doesn't need a proper victory — in fact he can never get one because devilry is falsehood — but he can squeak out a short-term psuedo-victory by muddying the waters.
Be on the lookout for those in society who make careers out of muddying the waters. Don't become pawns in their game. To have a high-functioning society it's crucial that public figures don't manipulate truth for personal gain.
Male/female is a duality. And if you've been following along with my videos, you should understand by now that all dualities (without exception) are untenable and groundless and must collapse at some point. This is a fundamental principles of reality. But all this sounds so philosophical and abstract that people still cannot wrap their minds around how something as concrete and "physical" as male and female could be a collapsable duality. Aren't males just clearly males and females just clearly females? Of course not! And this has nothing to do with political correctness or LGBTQ rights. This is an existential matter.
Here is the starkest proof:
Ask yourself this existential question: at what precise point did this fish go from female to male? And if a female fish can turn into a male fish, what does that mean for the categories of "male" and "female"? In what sense are they real? What are these categories grounded in?
And before you make a rebuttal such as, "Well, but these fish aren't human so they don't count", remember that fish vs human is also a duality! Which is also ultimately groundless and must collapse:
Ask yourself this existential question: at what point does an organism go from being a fish to being human? Do such categories exist outside of your mind?
The above examples are perplexing to people who believe in absolute rigid categories, but they are totally expected to people who understand that all categories are relative dualities which are destined to collapse when stretched far enough.
Amazing interview, showing how corruption happens behind the scenes:
Of course this is exactly as one would expect Trump's influence to be. His massive ego is like the gravity well of Jupiter, pulling in every other ego in the region and corrupting it. That's how corruption spreads itself. It lures in the greedy and the ignorant with promises of quick and easy wealth, power, fame, and sex — all the things an ego craves the most. Trump's Washington hotel is an actual den for the congregation and breeding of devils.
This is how devilry works.
Good work here by CNN. Without this kind of transparent reporting devils would run rampant. Notice how devils can only survive in the shadows. They cannot survive long in the light. Which is why there is such an attack these days on the media. Once a bunch of devils get into power, their first job will be to corrupt every source of light and transparency. Devils must create a shadowy environment in order to roost. That's exactly what Trump has been doing from day one with his "fake news" campaign.
IRS Puts A Stop To TurboTax Corruption
The above news story explains how Inuit, maker of the popular tax filing software TurboTax, spent millions of dollars to lobby the US government against easy and free tax filing options. That's is devilry 101. That's how self-bias corrupts all governments.
Intuit is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $69 billion, $2.25 billion cash-on-hand, 8,2000 employees, and the CEO's salary is $21 million per year . Yet they cannot help rigging the government in their favor, regardless of how it hurts average citizens. Because their concern is not what's best for the citizens but what is best for Intuit. Why does the CEO get paid $21 million per year? Precisely because he works night and day to ensure that such devilry passes successfully. But of course he is not conscious of what he is doing. In his mind all of this is justified as normal, necessary, and even good. Because it is good! It's good for his survival which is linked to the survival of the company. You don't earn $21 million per year by being nice. You earn it by being a devil.
Now imagine that this is happening on a massive scale, with thousands of companies rigging the government to increase their profits. Now it's apparent why government is so ineffective and stuck. It's being debased from a thousands sides by a thousand parties.
Our government is like a noblewoman turned cheap whore, getting fucked in every orifice by an eager gaggle of desperate men. But if you stop and ask any one particular man in the gaggle whether there is any problem with this situation, he will say No, because it is normal, all his friends are doing it, the gaggle is 1000 men long, and how else is he supposed to get his needs met? And of course his need is insatiable. You'd think $21 million per year would be enough to be satisfy, but that only whets the appetite. And beside which, even if one of them quit in disgust, another one would eagerly take his place.
This is why getting money out of politics is the #1 most important political reform. And also why it's the most difficult.
I have decided to take a break from releasing videos for a while to rejuvenate my creative juices and work on myself. 7 years of constantly releasing videos with hardly any breaks takes its toll on creativity — which is one of my highest values. Yes, YouTuber burnout is a genuine phenomenon. The ever-present low-grade stress of having to constantly release great and original videos for years on end starts to eat away at the soul and feels creatively stifling — like being a one-trick pony. I have multiple creative projects and research projects which I want to work on besides releasing videos, and since the videos are so labor intensive and constant, this prevents me from working on other things that I'm passionate about, including my own development. For the kind of work that I do there needs to be a delicate balance between outer work and inner work. Outer work is work I do for you — for the world to consume. Inner work is work I do for myself which nobody directly sees, but which shapes the totality of my outer work in the future. So what I'm doing now is shifting priority from outer work to inner work. This means less immediate creative output, but laying a deeper foundation for the future.
I plan to take at least 1 month off, starting from last week.
And I have decided to make this a new yearly habit. From now on, every year I will take at least 1 month off purely for personal time — not for meditation retreats or others rigorous work, but just unplanned personal time. I find this is essential to do if you are highly creative person. You just cannot be at peak creativity 365 days of the year. That's not a good schedule for highly creative people. Counter-intuitively, more becomes less and less becomes more. So for now I'm planning to take the entire month of December off each year, but I may adjust that in the future to some other month or even months, depending on what my psyche calls for.
Fear not, I'll be back with more videos and new insights soon. There are literally 100s of important topics yet to cover. We just have to pace ourselves properly, as this is not a sprint but a marathon.
I will still be somewhat active on the forum, and the rest of the site will still be fully operational, so if you want to buy the book list or the Life Purpose Course, all of that still works.
Thanks for your support and for sticking with me through the highs and lows.
Geography plays a huge role in shaping how countries, ethnicities, and cultures develop:
Check out that channel for more awesome videos about geography. You can't understand the development of mankind without understanding geography. Geography dictates climate, resources, building materials, farming, livestock, tribes, migration, cuisine, culture, language, technology, war, disease, genetics, and more.
Well, the greatest concern about Trump's presidency — him starting a foolish war — has finally come to fruition.
Imagine if Iran had assassinated the US Vice President while he was traveling in a Canadian airport. That's the equivalent of what happened.
An accurate headline in today's morning paper would read: "US Assassinates Top Iranian Leader In Act of War". But you will not see such a headline in the US media because of Self-Bias. Of course the US will spin this as "self-defense". That's an interesting phrasing since "self-defense" — as in, ego-defense — is what this is really about. The ego always justifies its devilry as self-defense, even when it is aggression. Because the ego's notion of "self-defense" is infinitely elastic and self-biased.
Egotistical, unconscious, and ignorant leaders cannot help themselves start wars. Bush and Trump are cases in point. Dumb and dumber.
The current situation is the direct result of Trump's and the Republicans' eagerness to tear up the Iran nuclear agreement. It was obvious to even an uninformed laymen that reneging on that agreement was a very bad idea. And of course the opposition to that agreement was an act of ego.
It is the duty of conscious citizens to stand up and say, Not in our name! American citizens should not tolerate such devilry from our own. This is what being objective and truthful means in the real world. It is the ability to call out the self-bias and wrong-doing of your own team as soon as it happens, not giving them a pass because they are closer to you. A devil is a devil, even if he sleeps in the bed next to you.
I like how this tiny clip shows the whole predicament of survival in a nutshell:
What did this lady want? Love. But look how greedy she became when she didn't get the love she wanted. Then look how the Pope reacted to someone taking his love by force. That's survival on both sides.
This is what parents are doing to children; children are doing to parents; spouses are doing to spouses; businesses are doing to customers; customers are doing to businesses; businesses are doing to businesses; nations are doing to nations.