LastThursday

Super briefly: Environment Social matrix Mental health / therapy Self-awareness Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Averitasia - a condition where someone is unable to experience Truth. Actualisationable (say it three times fast) - something or someone that can be made to actualise, eventually. Spirito-arguecringement - a one-sided hostile conversation about spirtuality that is about nothing in particular. Deusmaxxing - trying your best to look like a god. This is too much fun: Double-salad - an intellectual sounding paragraph that makes sense the first time you read it, but not the second. One more: Egomortgage - the thing you keep paying for until your ego dies.

It does. But saying it's one possibility out many doesn't explain it. Furthermore it doesn't explain the quality of this particular experience. It's not as if it's just a blank field of X, it's a chaotic, structured, "full" experience.

I could be provocative and say that god is just a construction of the mind or just a word. But I'm not going to say that. In the spirit of the question, god is the thing you fall back on when you run out of explanation. For example I look around me and there's all this stuff happening, I can come up with an explanation as to why all this stuff is happening, but I can't come up with an explanation of why this in particular. There seems to be complete arbitrariness about what I'm experiencing, I could have been any one of 8 billion people at any moment in history, indeed even an animal. So I invoke god. Once you invoke god, then you have to ask what is god's nature? And the only satisfactory answer (to me) is that it is exactly what I'm experiencing - the two are the same. So it's the other way round, me and my mind are a construction of god.

I walked in the footsteps of your shadows, never looking up, afraid of the light. When you stopped, I looked away, choking with tears. However hard I listened, I could never hear your voice, just the birds in the sky. Do you see me as I see you? How is it that you're in my heart and thoughts, even though I'm cleansed, pure? Some time I will walk away and see the light, bright and blinking, I think I hope. Then there will be no shadows, and all will be a beautiful cacophony, all will be love and laughter.

@Someone here you are of course, right.

@Franz_ with thinking the only fundamental limit is time and patience, thinking is a slow process, thinking about new things is hard. Thinking has a kind of ratchet effect whereby you commit new knowledge to long-term memory and thinking becomes easier because of that. Take someone like a mathematician, all they do is think, but they can learn new abstractions without limit. Mathematics is bigger than any one person can take on in a lifetime. With physical bodily stuff, the limits are absolute physical limits like strength, speed, endurance and so on. I think for those sorts of things you will hit your own limits if you push things far enough, and you'll have a very good idea of what those are. But still, you don't know what you don't know. If you were to try and run a marathon and you've never run before then you might mistakenly think that you've reached a limit of your abilities. Clearly if you keep practising then you'll realise you were wrong. But even with physical stuff it's not as if it's just physical limits, you also have a brain controlling things. I would say there's no end of nuance in how you use your body. For example sprinters train with a coach because there's a lot to master about exactly how you should be running, outside of pure speed and stamina. So you can reach a biological limit of mastery, but still improve on technical ability. To re-iterate the point I made before, nearly always a domain is not strictly defined, it's fuzzy around the edges and you're free to explore and improve around those edges.

Most people are hung up on survival and that often means doing things in their own self interest, often to the detriment of others. The bottom line is that if your interests don't align with others then you will chose yourself over them, otherwise you don't survive. The thing is, most of the time your survial interests do align with others' because we're all just human and have the same needs. You have your family, community, country. But culturally we're being indoctrinated into individualism, where everything that must be done and are responsible for is ultimately pinned on you as an individual. Fundamentally this idealogy goes against our collective instincts as humans, because in reality we can't survive without other people, both on a social level, and on a material level: we feel lonely.

I think there has to be an answer, but I don't know if it's yes or no. If consciousness is all there is (idealism), then what happens within consciousness is highly correlated with what is experienced in consciousness. For example if I press my finger hard into my ribs, it hurts. The pain is experienced in consciouness. A rock is still subject to physics, so if you press your finger into a rock, it's the same thing. It won't experience pain, but it will experience something. So you could argue that anything that experiences physics is conscious in some way. But that's just pansychism through the back door.

10,000 hours is just a rule of thumb not a hard cut off, so there is always more to add without limit. It also depends on the "something" in the "into something" you mentioned. The more time you put into something the more it will affect other areas - the skills and knowledge translate into other things. In the end it's not that you're mastering a particular subject, it's that you're levelling up everything, but with an emphasis in a particular area. There is a sense of diminishing returns though for a lot of things, you make a lot of progress earlier, but slower later, because everything becomes more complex or subtle or about fine tuning or at the limit of some faculty such as anatomy or thinking. Also when mastering a thing you don't know what you don't know, especially if no one else has done it before. You are always working things out for yourself, and that takes deep domain knowledge to come up with new insights, and time to pick things up. Even if others have gone before you, you still need to research their techniques and embody them yourself. It can feel like there's nothing more to learn, but that's not true most of the time, you just don't know what it is yet. It's endless because mastery affects many things at once, and you're free to shift your focus around, and because there is a lot of stuff already out there to learn.

I'm sure there are lots of thoughts you have that don't manifest. But you're right that if you have an unusual thought and then it happens, there's something going on. Though, then you should ask how unusual does it have to be to manifest? And, how long do you have to wait? Another way to look at things is the triangle of causation. Call your thought A. Call the event B. Call god C. By "god" I would mean some unknown supernatural cause. So here are all the potential scenarios: A causes B (magick) B causes A to happen (clairvoyance) C causes both A and B to happen (god, but A and B are actually independent)

Before you even start you have to ask yourself what the "absolute" actually means in "absolute truth", and why it's different from "relative".

This works: https://www.marlonscloud.com/Blog/the-blueprint.html

What happens when you pour oil on water? It spreads out into a thin film floating on top. There are some people, like me, that are contrary by nature. Rather than this being the result of socialisation I see it as a just a personality trait. Others are the opposite and would rather just agree with everyone else. Whilst I have a degree of perfectionism my contrariness doesn't outwardly manifest as picking holes in others, or judging them. My contrariness comes in two flavours: not naturally agreeing with what others tell me, and, always looking beyond what others have missed. The sense this gives me is that my own thoughs and feelings are sovereign, and others don't have a natural right to that real estate. This can at times make me appear prickly or belligerent or intransigent. I don't enjoy those reactions, but my sense of sovereignty often outweighs my reactions. Very often I'm avoidant if the person is insistent on ramming their point home. The other side of the contrary coin is that I'm even contrary with myself. I'm a fence-sitter because I find it hard to hold a particular position, because as soon as I do, I want to see things from different vantage points and say to myself "Ha! But what about this?". But this constant impetus to explore further and not settle too long on anything has allowed me to grow and expand myself - just like oil on water. That isn't to say I don't take anything on board, to the contrary. It's just that I don't hold any of my knowledge or experience as gospel truth - too many times I've realised I only ever have contigent or partial truths - and when this keeps happening you eventually learn not to hold on to things so tightly or absolutely. I can see directly that a lot of people hold more absolutist views, borne out of simplicity and blindly agreeing with what they're told. It makes sense, living is difficult enough without also having to deal with uncertainty of thought or belief, we need solid supports to thrive, and we need to conform to belong.

Everything ends, even bad things. The future cannot hurt you in the present. The past is only memory. Either you will get what you want eventually, or you will not care eventually. Things that seem hard now, will be easy in future. You will underestimate who you will become tomorrow, in a year, in a decade. If you keep stepping forward you will reach the summit.