But "rationalism" or "rationality" in, say, the sense commonly used on LW does not in fact mean denying any of that.

But that's what you're mostly doing in your post. I will bring this up below.

The guy in the video comes across (to me at least) as smugly superior even while uttering a succession of trivialities, which doesn't do much to encourage me to watch more.

I don't think everyone shares that view, at least it's not for me. I don't know if I am contradicting myself, though. If someone was similar but in differing in opinion then me. The contradiction would then lie under if I told you the world is your mirror.

So I thought "maybe it gets more interesting later on" and skipped to 50:00. At which point he isn't bothering to make any arguments, merely preening over how he understands the world so much more deeply than rationalists, who will come and bother him with their "arguments" and "contradictions" and he can just see that they "haven't got any awareness" and trying to engage with them would be like trying to teach calculus to a dog, and that the mechanism used to brainwash suicide bombers and fundamentalists are "the exact same mechanism that very intelligent scientists use to prove their theories of space and time and whatever else". OK, then.

That's what he said, of course it's kind of harsh, but it's his way of going on these things I think, I don't know why or what's most effective but for myself I am unaffected or in the positive. That might be just because I agree.

Since I obviously wasn't enlightened enough for minute 50 of this thing, I went back to 40:00. He says it's important to connect with your emotions and not deny they're there (OK), and then he says that "rational people just assume that, well, we don't need any of that emotional stuff". OK, then. (And rational people like scientists get emotional when they argue with highly irrational people because they're attached to their rational models of the world and don't want to hear anything contrary to those models because of cognitive dissonance; they close their eyes and ears to the arational because they demonize it as irrational.)

By becoming aware of the emotions that you are suppressing, not the "feeling emotions" rationally because the reason of emotion is rational.

OK, clearly still too advanced for me. Back to 30:00. Apparently, if your "awareness" is low then you think thinking is great (OK...), you think thinking is all there is (huh?)

There is awareness of thoughts, not only thoughts, and the awareness is not a thought. That is a definition game of what is a thought, consider it being different from awareness.

Yes, you don't have a thought of a thought, you have awareness of thought. Otherwise, you're trapped in thinking and don't know that there is something else.

, you think thinking is a powerful tool for understanding reality (OK...), but as you gain in "awareness" you realise that thinking is a system of symbols, and "this gulf between the map and the territory just grows wider and wider and wider, until you see that the map is just a complete fiction, a complete illusion", and once you realise this you see "the gross limitations of thinking".

Einstein's theory of gravity isn't revealing anything deep about the world, it's just a set of sounds and symbols on paper. "That's what it literally is, except your awareness is too low to actually see that". And then he pulls an interesting move where he complains about people with "low" "awareness" getting "sucked into the content" of a theory because they don't see the "larger context".

See how he never mentions the larger context of an understanding of relativity itself? But the context of which sounds and symbols make up our "reality".

You might think he's now going to explain what the larger context is and how it should affect our understanding of relativity. Ha, ha. What a silly idea. Only someone with low awareness would expect that. What he actually does is to tell us how when rationalists criticize him they're doing it "on the level of thoughts" while he is "on the level of awareness, which is a much higher level". Bleh.

You missed the point, there was nothing said about affecting the understanding of relativity, you fell into the exact paradigm which the video said.

The larger context of the symbols and sounds on the paper. Not the theory itself according to physicists. That's the matrix.

Oh, wait, he has something resembling an actual point somewhere around 35:00. Rationalists give too much credit to logic, he says, because logic "has no teeth", because it depends on its premises and the premises are doing the real work, and if your premises are dodgy then so are your conclusions, and "most of them are very very wrong". Cool, he's going to tell us what wrong premises we have. ... Oh, no, silly me, he isn't. He just says they're very wrong but gives no specifics.

He gave the specifics right after that, rationality itself. Asking about the premises which make rationality possible.

Saying things that are true but elementary and not in fact denied by rationalists. For some of these, he actually gives some kind of justification.

It seems like you disagree on numerous points, but not being aware of it. Like Einstein's equation is simply symbols and sounds (and pretty much everything else which you give attribute to)

Saying that rationalists are wrong in various ways (giving too much weight to X, having wrong premises, ...). In every instance of this I heard (though I have not listened to the whole dreary thing) either the claim is flatly wrong, or he offers no sort of support for it, or both.

Let's say the rational mind cannot understand something, why continue to use the rational mind? Is there something else? Maybe awareness? There might be something worth pursuing there.

Now I know I am not responding to my quote of your text. Rationality is wrong because of rationality itself. It cannot be right without the right context. The context of which rationality exists. Where thinking exists. Which is "outside" the subjective experience according to you. That's the whole point. It's right under your nose if you'd bother to meditate and separate awareness from thoughts.

Saying smugly how much more "aware" he is than rationalists are, and how this puts him on a higher level than them. If there's anything actually useful there, I missed it. And now I've listened to enough of this without any sign that he has anything useful to teach me, and I'm going to go and do something else. My apologies for not sitting through all 82 minutes of it.

Well. You're capable of becoming aware as well. It's not a radical difference. :)