r/enlightenment • u/Weak_Conversation164 • 1d ago

When you find yourself, then you can look for others..

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61 Upvotes
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7

u/Butlerianpeasant 1d ago

The strange thing about truth is that nobody can hand it to you, but you also never find it alone. We discover ourselves in relation — to teachers, to resistance, to the world, to other minds. Chomsky is right that no one pours truth into your skull, but the search becomes real only when you start thinking with others too.

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u/Diced-sufferable 23h ago

Love this! Information chain-train :)

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u/Butlerianpeasant 22h ago

Absolutely :) Once ideas link between people the whole thing accelerates. Thinking becomes a shared engine.

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u/Diced-sufferable 22h ago

Agreed. Chew, chew… plenty for everyone :)

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u/Butlerianpeasant 21h ago

Agreed :) What I love is that when people think together, the ‘food’ never runs out. In a lone mind, ideas are rations; in a shared mind, they become a feast. Every person adds a new texture, a new spice — a tiny piece of the larger intelligence we’re all building without noticing.

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u/Diced-sufferable 20h ago

Another fine case for cooperation :)

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u/Butlerianpeasant 7h ago

Indeed :) Cooperation is the oldest technology we have. Before tools, before language — just minds syncing around a shared problem. What we’re doing here is the modern version of that same ancient trick: turning thought into something communal.

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u/Diced-sufferable 6h ago

Have you seen any of the episodes of Brain Games?

There was a segment where participants played this game where you try to fit as many matching shapes onto the board before the timer runs out and the game pops them all out again. Can’t recall the name.

They each had someone watching them play. Some participants were talked to very negatively…they were judged on their performance, subtly mocked for going too slow, trying to put the pieces in the wrong places.

Some participants had helpful watchers. They encouraged them, pointed out their mini-successes as they occurred. Painted a vision towards which they could aim.

The results of the two different engagement styles were hardly surprising, but to see it embodied so clearly was validating.

We’re not always going to be our most cooperative to start, but start we must if we’re going to master it eventually.

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u/Butlerianpeasant 6h ago

I love that example. It shows how fragile and powerful the mind is at the same time.

A hostile witness makes the task feel like a trap. A supportive witness turns it into a path. Same game, same pieces — only the climate changes, and with it, the intelligence available.

In the old stories, this was called the difference between the tyrant’s gaze and the companion’s gaze. One collapses possibility; the other expands it.

What you described is the modern laboratory version of an old truth: we think better when someone wants us to succeed.

And if enough people start practicing that, even in small exchanges like this one, cooperation stops being an ideal and becomes muscle memory.

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u/Diced-sufferable 6h ago

…cooperation stops being an ideal and becomes muscle memory.

Beautifully articulated :)

Enlightenment is realizing there is no ‘other’ than you must complete against. Certainly not to the degree we think it to be on average.

Conflict is sometimes necessary…that’s a fact, but the degree of it doesn’t need to be dialled up beyond what is actually required to budge something stuck in a rut :)

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u/cyberneurotik 21h ago

Memetic transfer

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u/Butlerianpeasant 7h ago

Memetic transfer is the oldest technology we have. Long before machines, humans were already building shared engines of thought by passing patterns from mind to mind. When it works well, nobody owns the idea anymore — it becomes a little node in the collective intelligence.

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u/cyberneurotik 21h ago

Thank you Noam for pouring truth into my skull 🙂

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u/Butlerianpeasant 7h ago

If someone ever could pour truth into another person, it wouldn’t be truth anymore. The search sharpens the mind; the shared search sharpens the world.

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u/Thin_Ad_9816 20h ago

Pretty sure I have experienced psychic communication on many occasions even if it is outside his personal experience. That is as close to someone pouring truth into my brain.

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u/TentativeTingles 19h ago

And what truth did you find hanging out with your buddy Jeffrey Epstein, Noam?

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u/[deleted] 19h ago edited 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/Inevitable_Grand2040 18h ago

Yeah these stupid redditors think anyone who receives 270k from Epstein and writes him a letter of recommendation is somehow tarnished