Jodistrict

Meditation is difficult and not everyone can do it. In the East, only monks tend to meditate, and everyone else just does merit, in the hopes of becoming a monk in the next life. Also, before they would even be allowed to meditate they would need to practice morality for several years to calm the mind. It was westerners who believed and insisted they can instantly meditate. Osho noticed westerners had a hard time relaxing the mind due to growing up in a Christian culture, so he developed dynamic meditation. If your mind keeps spinning you can’t get anywhere. I have been meditating for over 20 years, but I never experienced the state of Samadhi I had with 5-meo-DMT. The voice had totally stopped and there was complete silence. One reason to take psychedelics is for purification – to go into the shadow world and purge trauma from the body. It’s the trauma that keeps the mind spinning. Ayahausca is useful for purging.

One thing that bothers me about Sadhguru is that he seems to be positioning himself as the “Answer Man”. He is willing to come up with an answer to virtually anything no matter how mundane or distant from his real expertise. When I took the Inner Engineering Course, you were given a certain number of tokens to look at his videos giving various answers, and if you ran out, you would have to pay for more answers. I thought a guru was someone who guides you towards liberation. Answers are just brain food that makes the mind more confused. In Zen, they give you a koan to trip up the answer seeking mind. Maybe he is appealing to the millions of lost people living in the rootless and soulless West desperately seeking answers. Has anyone in his organization obtained liberation?

The hard sciences have intentionally chosen their reality tunnel in order to avoid wasting time on false and unfruitful paths. Science is a group project that includes the judgments of wise men spanning generations. For example, over the course of centuries, scientists decided that teleology was not a valid scientific explanation. So you couldn’t explain a natural process as having goals. You had to use efficient causality. Another example, is with the advent of thermodynamics, perpetual motion machines were not considered valid explanations. The methodology was not only productive, but they succeeded in blowing up their own tunnel with quantum mechanics, making a new paradigm possible.

If FDR couldn’t pull it off during a depression, how is Joe going to do it? Term limits would be more doable and easier to justify. March 9, 1937: Fireside Chat 9: On "Court-Packing" https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-9-1937-fireside-chat-9-court-packing

For my undergraduate degree, I got a double major in Math and Physics. In hindsight, for the humanity requirements, I would study history, Latin, and Greek. The classical works written in Latin and Greek provide a solid background for living life. When it was still free, I took several dozen courses from Cousera. They were excellent and taught by leaders in their fields. The subject matter was presented clearly and easy to follow. Taking a course from a bad professor who can’t explain the subject matter is a total waste of time if you get lost. On the Internet, you can learn from the best instructors. I think college by Internet is the future

Science is like spiral dynamics, in that you have to go through the stages and you can’t skip a stage. Relativity theory couldn’t have been developed without Newton’s Laws. Each stage builds on top of the previous stage. Physics has reached the limit of the materialistic and reductionistic paradigm with quantum mechanics, wave/particle duality, non locality, and the uncertainty principle. Furthermore, particle physics keeps on generating new particles and they are reaching the limit of the size of particle accelerator that can be feasibly built. There appears to be no underlying theory to explain all the particles. These are the conditions for a new paradigm to emerge that takes into account the observer and interconnectedness of the universe.

A sick video of a fundamentalist devil violating innocence in order to spread the virus.

Hawkings is expressing the limitations of mathematics as a tool of physics. When he says it sprang from “nothing”, then the question becomes “What is nothing?”. The Buddhists see “emptiness” as the door to liberation. So nothing is beyond the mind and verbal description. But it is real. The menu is not the meal.

Another distinction that can be made is between objective science and subjective science. The West developed objective science by directing its attention to an outside world. The East developed a subjective science by directing its attention to the interior world. The Buddha was a subjective scientist. The Buddha was as precise as any objective scientist. Meditation can be seen as subjective science. I got this distinction from a Shinzen Dharma talk I attended many years ago. https://www.liamchai.com/soe/

One way to look at it is in terms of information. A map (i.e., model) is an abstraction. An abstraction intentionally leaves things out in order to highlight patterns. Thus, the territory would be 100% information and the model would be less than 100 %. Consider, for example a picture divided into pixels with 10 grey scales and a finite number of colors. The total picture would have a finite number of bits. A program detecting all the edges in the picture would be an abstraction and a model with less information than the territory. However, the raw picture itself does not have any edges. It is just a matrix of pixels with different levels of grey and color. (Keep in mind that you see edges only because your brain has a module that abstracts the edges from the territory). Edges only exist in the model. So the model is, in some sense, a different reality in itself (a territory) not contained in the original.

There needs to be a distinction made between science and scientism. Examples of scientism: claiming science is the only reliable source of knowledge, claiming something isn’t true unless it can be proved, making claims about the non existence of God. This isn’t science, but rather it’s speculation which extrapolates science beyond its area of legitimate competence.

I have done the Vipassana 10 day and Shinzen was my first meditation instructor. Osho developed numerous meditation techniques specifically for westerners. He observed that westerners, due to their upbringing and culture, have busy minds, so every attempt at meditation is futile, because they can never get to a state of quiet. He developed a dynamic meditation, where you move and dance around vigorously until you are exhausted and then you stop and meditate. I recently took one of his meditations online where a hypnotist inducts you into a state where you can meditate. Once you are in the state, he stops for 15 minutes where you meditate, and then starts with an induction to get you back to the waking state. Those are just two examples of the Osho meditations.

Set and Setting. That's why I only take psychedelics as a medicine and under the direction of indigenous healers guided by their ancient wisdom.

Sadhguru gave an example in the video of “knowing” you have two hands because it is what you experience. By that criteria, I have some direct knowing of psychedelics because I have actually used them.

Any civilization that survives, will have to transcend the lower ego states into higher state of consciousness after it has mastered a level of technical ability. The ego is what suffers. If they don’t transcend the ego, they will self destruct. We are now at a stage where we have the technology to annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons. If our consciousness does not evolve, we will destroy ourselves. There is no predetermined plan that says humanity has to survive. We can be one of the failures. Higher intelligence would be living in a state of bliss. It’s either bliss or death.

In the interview, Sadhguru is careful to make the distinction between “knowing” and “belief”. He then advises us that we are better to admit “I don’t know”, which opens up possibilities, rather than be stuck in beliefs, which we never know if they are true or not. But then he expresses his negative beliefs about psychedelics. It doesn’t appear that he has any direct knowledge of them. In the interview he mentions close friends of his that died from drugs. But, this would be like condemning all screwdrivers because one of your friends stuck a screwdriver in his ear and died. He doesn’t seem to be aware of indigenous people who have been using these medicines for thousands of years. Why doesn’t Sadhguru follow his own advice and say “I don’t know” ?

Probably the main factor is that we are just too far away. The universe is vast and any information that reaches us can not travel greater than the speed of light. There may be many civilizations as advanced as we are but energy from their activity won’t reach earth until a billion years from now.

When the dramatic upheavals were occurring in the 1960s, it needed an explanation. The right wing back then believed that it was being directed by the Soviet Union. The plan was that the communists were going to soften up America with social revolution and then they would surprise the US with a land invasion. Remember, this was during the cold war. There was a conspiracy that the new rock music was being directed from the Kremlin, and the Beatles were taught musicology in Moscow. The Beatles seemed to encourage this theory or play off of it with their song “Back in the USSR”. Also, the comedy movie “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” lampooned this conspiracy theory.

I attended a Wim Hof day workshop. During the first half of the workshop you are taught the Wim Hof breathing technique. During the second part of the workshop, you are prepared for and then take a two minute ice bath. Before you get into the ice bath, the instructor tells you to clasp your hands in front of you, put your shoulders below the water, and breath deeply from the belly with a longer exhale. I got into the ice bath and the shock and pain was excruciating. My legs felt like they were frozen solid. I was breathing so fast that I was hyperventilating and starting to faint. I didn’t think I was going to make it. About half way through, I started to naturally breath with slower and deeper breaths. My body had found its rhythm. It started to become more bearable. The instructor was there all the time encouraging me else I wouldn’t have made it. After I got out, there was a tingly feeling in my arms and legs and I could barely walk. After you leave the ice bath, you go to the grass and perform an exercise that you are taught. The purpose of the exercise is to warm up the blood in your extremities, so that this cold blood mixes with the warmer blood in the interior of your body. If you go for a towel first, bad things can happen. In my opinion, the ice bath is a valuable tool for testing and training your mind. In two minutes, you are forced to confront a major shock to your body and you either relax and breath or you panic. Wim Hof says that the cold is our teacher and instructs the body how to breath. I found this to be true because after the initial shock and panic, my body finally found its natural breathing rhythm and I could relax and deal with the intense body feelings. This is a the website. https://www.wimhofmethod.com/ To find a workshop. https://www.wimhofmethod.com/activities?category=fundamentals-workshop

When I took sapito, I immediately entered into a state of samadhi. The voice inside the head that is the ego stopped. There was complete silence. I thought I was dying. However, since there was nothing, I am not sure why I remember it. The dosage was determined by an experienced shaman. Maybe a higher dosage shuts down further areas of the brain including the memory system.

Why do they offer the “multiverse theory” as a scientific theory invalidating the need for a “God” when the multiverse theory itself is equally unprovable (and more complex) ?

I have done the Goenka Vipassana 10 day retreat. The group help maintain discipline and one’s enthusiasm. Years ago, I did meditation retreats with Shinzen Young, which was nice because he was informal and would give Dharma talks. I have done some Zen retreats, and they expect you to maintain a perfect posture.

Spiral dynamics seems to make more sense if you view it as a model of large scale cultural development, and not pertaining to individuals or even groups of individuals. Any individual could move in any direction over a course of time. What's to stop him? Personally, I favor purple. From a cultural perspective, before the 60s, America was solid blue with the orange business class supporting the blues. Today, the culture is a split between green and blue, creating a culture war, with the greens winning and largely supported by the orange technologists.

Set and Setting are more important than the drug. I saw a YouTube video of some Westerners having a 5-MEO-DMT ceremony and it sounded more like a beer keg party. Garbage in garbage out. That’s why I only take psychedelic medicines in Mexico, outside of the poisonous American culture.

Sacha makes a career of lampooning blues, and I hate the “Borat” character. However, this was pretty funny and reminded me more of Candid Camera.