Insightful27

Yeah actually there was research being done at Insight Meditation Society where they were micro dosing meditators on retreat and then measuring various signs of meditation progress. I would LOVE to do something like this. Thanks for your ideas!

@UnbornTao Well if I can get ahold of a general aspect of meditation that I could research then it is easy to break it down and make it specific/technical. For example, I want to do a comparison of Metta Meditation and Christian Prayer. This breaks down to technical concepts like mirror-neurons firing, oxytocin-dopamine-serotonin serum levels, etc.

@Raze Thanks for these suggestions! I just learned about the EPRC a couple weeks ago but SEMA is new and definitely something I will look into more.

@Carl-Richard Lmao maybe we can brainstorm together then. Are you also on the psychology side on things or more neuroscience? There are a lot of different options for neuroscience...

I am in the process of applying to Psychology PhD programs, the entire aim of my career is to expand the scientific understanding and application of meditation and psychedelics. What areas do you think most deserve more research? The research proposal is for a grant from the National Science Foundation, so try to keep suggestions on the "sciency" side of things. I will take all recommendations seriously, I figure that there isn't a better place to ask for feedback than here. As a side note, I took Leo's life purpose course the year before I started college and it is surreal how all the insights/inspiration I got from that course have come to fruition. This summer I am getting paid thousands of dollars to travel to different monasteries and research meditation, something I would pay to do. I highly recommend the course, the money was a drop in the bucket compared to the value I have gotten from Leo over the years. I look forward to playing a small role in legitimizing meditation/psychedelics into the mainstream, so that others may benefit the same way we have benefitted. 🙂

You know I think that this is also true at the psychological level as well. Our minds love to play into our negativity bias and hyper-fixate on the possibility of a negative future. This feels very grounding, thank you.

@seriousman24 That's a good point. There will likely be a period where AI can help augment human intelligence so we can keep up for at least a little while longer.

@Leo Gura Do you have any ideas about how to deal with the psychological distress of not having a meaningful impact on the world? While I enjoy working on my life purpose for its own sake, one of the things I got most inspired by from your life purpose course was this idea that I have a unique gift that I can offer to the world that will help people. Even if that is true today, it is becoming easier and easier to imagine a future where that isn't true. Even if we implement a high universal basic income, it will still feel empty to live a life without purpose, especially as a masculine young man.

Recently I was in a philosophy class and an acquaintance of mine wrote his paper using AI, I didn't, yet we both ended up with my same grade. He admitted to me that he wouldn't be able to pass if it was an oral exam, and that he actually didn't know what he was really writing about. This caused me to realize that in the near future (10-15 years) AI will likely advance so far that my intellectual work will become purposeless, it will turn into merely a hobby. Obvious I am concerned about the practical aspect the job market narrowing (I want to research psychedelic medicine & do philosophy) but it also makes me apathetic to think that I won't be able to do anything that is really valuable or new if (most likely when) AI reaches a certain point in its development. Has anyone else ran into this with their life purpose? Any advice?

I emailed this to my philosophy professor and asked if this was evidence against materialism, here is his reply (he is a materialist) I was tempted a few years ago to write something about this very question, but I never did, though I was satisfied that the reports of people with NDE’s could be explained consistently with materialism. For there to be a problem for materialism, there needs to be conscious experience at the same time as there is no brain activity of a kind sufficient (given materialism) for conscious experience. So it’s not enough to show that at some time the patient’s brain exhibited no activity, and at some time the patient had a conscious experience; the two times must be the same. But it’s very hard to pinpoint the times of the two things. It is not true that brain activity simply ceases entirely when the heart stops, but as far as I can tell it’s very hard to determine how far relevant brain activity has entirely stopped after someone’s heart has stopped, in part because we don’t really know which brain activity is relevant to sustaining conscious experience, and in part because we can’t easily tell what, if anything, is going on deep in the brain of someone in the ER. Apparently, though, some brain activity continues for a surprisingly long time—several minutes—after the heart stops. And it’s hard to say when the conscious experience reported by a patient actually took place. There seem to be two ways in which we might tell. First, we might take the patient’s word for it. But if someone is revived and reports having had certain experiences five minutes ago (or whatever), we can’t just assume that their sense of when they had the experiences is correct. After all, when you remember your dreams, you typically can’t say when you did the dreaming, and even if you had a sense that it was some time ago, rather than just now, that might sense well be inaccurate. Second, we might find a match between the content of the conscious experience reported (for example, what the patient seemed to hear) and sounds (e.g., of human speech) actually made while the patient was unresponsive. If the match is surprising enough that we take the experience to have been veridical (e.g., the nurse spoke of her dog, Felix), then we have a time for when the experience occurred. However, we’ve all seen TV shows of people in the ER “dying” and being revived, so we can easily imagine what might be said in such circumstances; that’s why the match has to be surprising. I’m skeptical that the match is ever that surprising. There is a skeptical literature on NDE’s and their significance for materialism. An activist scholar named Keith Augustine has written on the topic, but I’m sure there are others. For some psychologists, NDE’s are just an interesting psychological phenomenon to investigate; they’re not gunning for materialism. For all I know, there’s experimental work too. Let me add one more thing. If conscious experience occurs in the absence of any brain activity at all, then not only is materialism false, but so too are those forms of dualism that take certain kinds of brain activity to be (merely) causally necessary (and sufficient) for conscious experience. The snag is that these are the most plausible forms of dualism, since they accommodate the fact that ordinarily, as far as we can tell, we enjoy conscious experience of different kinds only when our brains are undergoing certain kinds of activity. Dualists would need to explain why, ordinarily, my auditory cortex has to be active for be to have auditory experiences , but not in the case of NDE’s. There is already a problem for dualists to explain what the brain does for the mind if the mind is immaterial; but the problem is aggravated if NDE’s are experiences in the absence of all brain activity.

This reading was assigned to me in class, I can't believe that this got published in NIH. It is a near death experience of a neuroscientist of 20 years. Must read. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6170087/ "Communication there goes light years beyond our simplistic linear thinking, beyond the bottleneck of linguistically constrained awareness we experience in these physical bodies in the earthly realm." "I came to see that unconditional love has the potential to bring infinite healing."

I found this post from JP taking about Jung's concept of circumambulation of the self and immediately made the connection to the way Deida talked about purpose in Way of The Superior Man. Basically the concept is that you have a series of mini-purpose's that you need to work through, like the layers on an onion. As you work through them you get closer to your true self and what you really desire. Any thoughts about this or about how this ties in with Leo's idea about life purpose?

@OBEler You make good points. I think I will take an extended break from Actualized. However, I do still see spirituality as a core part of my life and Life Purpose.

@OBEler Right, but "spiritual teacher" is actually pretty vague. There are a lot of ways to be a "spiritual teacher", for example I want to earn my PhD is Psychology and become a psychedelic therapist.

@Space Right, I am still learning how to use AI to get more specific answers