Boethius

In an earlier comment you said your goal is to return to the state of childhood innocence you had before you became "acquainted" with the n word. Even if you were successful in doing that, it would do nothing to help solve problems like the sort of policing that Black communities receive, the quality of schools that Black children are attending, the likelihood that employers call up candidates who have "Black sounding" names, etc. This is the sort of thing that is meant by "systemic racism". It is racism that is embedded in the systems that govern the various sectors of our society (school, employment, law). Again, it sounds like your focus is on interpersonal racism -- the racism that occurs between a Black person and a white person who are in conversation with each other. Working on healing interpersonal racism is an important and noble goal, but it does not address the problems of systemic racism in any direct way.

If you recognize that racism is a systemic problem, then why would you write "But to me, in my mind, what matters is what kinda person you are not the color of your skin"? If all people in society (magically) adopted that view of things tomorrow, it would not in itself solve the systemic problems.

@EddieEddie1995 I come from a pretty troubled extended family myself, so I see a lot of my cousins and my dad as being at red/blue. If I'm looking to hang out with one of my cousins and smoke some weed, then I know I can expect a fun time. But I would not trust them to help me in making big life decisions -- they seem to have enough difficulty in balancing their own life issues. I love them, but there's definitely a (class) divide there.

It sounds like you think racism is a merely interpersonal problem. If that were the case, then treating people decently and compassionately regardless of their race, ethnicity, or immigration status would be a good solution. But what you are missing, by the sounds of it, is that racism is also a cultural, institutional, and especially systemic problem. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, which is why the color-blind approach does not work. If you want to be an ally to POC then you need to become attuned to these other dimensions of racism and then start thinking about how you want to fight against those manifestations of racism.

People who are centered at the red or red/blue stages in our contemporary society have generally experienced a lot of childhood abuse/trauma. So I'm thinking about people who are prone to criminality, drug or alcohol addiction, and violence. So "trouble" is the word that comes to mind, even as I try to have sympathy for the background conditions that cause people to be stuck at that stage of development.

Nihilists are people who have succesfully deconstructed whatever religion, worldview, or philosophy they were given as children, but have not gone all the way down the path of deconstruction since they have yet to deconstruct themselves. What I mean is that if you deconstruct the views you were given and then deconstruct your own deconstruction of those views then you come to a place of finding what it is that you truly believe. What you believe in your bones, what you believe in your marrow, what you believe with every breath you take. That's not to say that you will be able to prove that what you believe to be true is objectively true or should be regarded as being true by everyone else. But at that point you will be able to make a committment to those things you deeply understand as being true, and questions about how you know them to be true will fall away since your knowing will occur at a much deeper level. That is, you will have something of a dual committment to honoring those things you understand to be true while also working towards establishing the reasonableness of your beliefs. You will have a way of steering safely in between the Scylla of pure rationality and the Charybdis of pure intuition. Or at least those are my own two cents as a person who has come to a place of deep religious committment! It may well be the case that a person with Eastern inflected views, for example, would have a different understanding of these issues.

And I would suggest that us white people do in fact have a racial identity, it's just rooted in defensiveness around the topic of race/racism. It's amazing how often white people get defensive when I (neutrally) bring up a topic like police brutality, for instance. You would think we could all agree that police brutality is wrong and that Black communities deserve the same quality of policing as predominantly white neighborhoods receive, and yet in my experience white people tend to take the issue personally, as if they were being asked to somehow "betray" their own individual selves by agreeing that police brutality is bad. Maybe it's the fact of my bringing it up in the first place that somehow leads to the defensive reaction, I don't know. I'm starting to think that a really good way for us whites to determine what our own personal racial identity looks like is to observe how we talk with other white people about race. I will say that I personally try to "advance" the progressive understanding about racial issues (that Black people have been suffering under 400+ years of systematic oppression and that us white people should try to do what we can to undo that legacy) but that I get timid about it when I sense my friends are pushing back against what I'm saying. I also live in upstate NY, which is a hotbed of racism, so I'm not surprised when I hear white people talk about "undeserving blacks" who are benefiting from affirmative action and so forth. It's uncomfortable knowing that a lot of my white acquaintances have views I would probably find to be either objectionable or grotesque should we really plumb the topic of race together. But of course POC must feel even more uncomfortable with this fact and I am in a better/safer position than they are to try to "educate" white people on these issues. I don't know, except to say that it's difficult even for a white person who is in fact trying to help "end racism" and that there is a lot of room for me to grow in talking about these issues with other white people.

Long terms consequences of covid: fatigue, headaches, vertigo, difficulties with cognition, difficulties with cardiorespiratory fitness. So why would you want to take the risk of contracting coronavirus and dealing with long term consequences? Get vaccinated.

So you're a "new" member and every single one of your posts so far has been racially iffy at best. In fact, at your 7th post you're already discussing the IQ of Africans. If you're not a person who was banned in the past (and here under a new name) I won't be surprised to see you get banned soon. As I recall from summer of last year, the moderators has a very limited amount of patience for race baiting.

@Carl-Richard Thanks for that deconstruction! I guess I was hopeful that dialogue was still possible even if debate wouldn't work. And yeah, the ego involved is obnoxious. I guess the sort of "procedural reasoning" that Orange employs is really meant to lead to only one valid conclusion. Or at least this is true when starting from a fixed set of priors (which of course are always unstated and under-examined). So maybe we shouldn't expect anything more from people who aren't willing to analyze their priors. @Gidiot I'm glad my thoughts were helpful ?

@Emerald Thank you for sharing! I'm reading a book right now that takes white shame (rather than guilt) as the central feature of whiteness: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Be-White-Money-America/dp/0826412920/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=learning+to+be+white&qid=1616696886&sr=8-2 It's written by the (Black female) UU minister Thandeka, and is a really empathetic heartfelt exploration of that idea, in case anyone is curious.

I engaged very extensively in the youtube comments to that video. In the end, I'm not sure it was worth it or what motivated me to engage (I guess a general annoyance with the casual use of the word "mysticism" as a slur). But it did help me get a better sense of how to draw different lines on a variety of different topics so it might be of interest to take a look at the back and forth. One thing I really didn't have a sense of before engaging is the shape that Orange's ego tends to take in discussions around spiritual topics: it's like Orange wants to be convinced about the reality of spiritual topics but only on its own terms. So show Orange the relevant scientific studies, was a common request! Or Orange is willing to entertain things like "infinite consciousness" or "God" so long as you can point to some specific phenomena (that is an object) in the world that corresponds to "infinite consciousness" or "God". Well, the request to do so is clearly self-refuting: if infinite consciousness could be analyzed as something occurring outside of oneself then it wouldn't be something for a person to experience, and if God could be turned into an object of scientific analysis then there would be no possibility of worshipping God. So yeah, Orange tends towards arrogance in its own unique way and there isn't the possibility of discussing the world with Orange except in ways that are very objectifying and instrumental (it makes one wonder whether Orange is even capable of talking authentically about Love, quite honestly!)

I haven't delved into Leo's videos on quantum consciousness, but just based on my own journey I have two thoughts on the topic of "quantum mysticism": I'm not sure that a non-dual mystic has much to teach a physicist about quantum mechanics. It's entirely possibly the mystic does have something to teach the physicist, but I would want to see an actual conversation between the two before making such an assertion. On the other hand, I do believe that the science of quantum mechanics is capable of shedding quite a bit of light on the experience of non-dual states of consciousness and altered states of perception. I imagine the creator of the video shared above would look at the reporting of such experiences as either a bunch of BS or as a "malfunctioning" brain, but neither explanation truly accounts for those experiences in anything like a scientific manner.

When we think of ourselves as centered at Green or Yellow or Turquoise or whatever, how do we know that our belief is rooted in reality and that we are not in fact just centered in Orange and thinking of Spiral Dynamics as some sort of a competition that we *must* win? Perhaps the idea of "advancing up the levels" is itself Orange to the core.

I've read that other countries (like UK and Australia) would have more lax gun controls if not for the bad example that the USA sets on this issue. So as an American I could ask what are y'all so afraid of?

I'm an introvert who has been living in lockdown for the past year, only leaving the house once a week to go grocery shopping. But I'm starting to get out more as the pandemic draws to an end (fingers crossed, at least) and it seems more people are out of their houses as well (of course, the good weather is helping to bring people out). It seems I'm going to have to work on managing symptoms of social anxiety as life returns to normal. Some things I've noticed Always bumping into people (mainly strangers) wherever I go. It's like there's always someone just around the corner in the grocery store as I'm pushing my cart around. It get's annoying not being able to walk 10 feet without running into someone, and that's not to even get started on people with their carts in the middle of the aisle. All the small talk, but also the sheer emotionality of it all. I guess that's why extroverts in America love small talk so much -- it gives them an opportunity to share emotional connections with each other. Always being observed and feeling self-conscious about it. Walking down the street from my house, realizing I forgot something, turning around to go get it and then worrying that someone might have observed my "erratic behavior" and hence think of me as some weirdo. Maybe I was just grumpy pre-covid with regards to interacting with people in public. I'd like to be both confident and pleasant to the people I meet, but I can't say I've really enjoyed the heightened interactions with people, at least not with my current perspective on it all. I don't mean to be tone deaf in posting what are certainly incredibly minor inconveniences and nuisances during a time when over 2.7 million people have died worldwide. But I thought this thread might be of interest and use to people who are also working with readjusting socially to a re-opened society. So thoughts or advice?

Let me demonstrate my contention with an example: (1) Physics tells us that water consists of a series of molecules that contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. (2) When I am standing at the side of a creek, bend down to the water, and cup my hands together to draw some water up to my face, there is no way in which the statement from (1) registers in my direct experience of the water that is sloshing around in my hands. In fact, in terms of direct experience I couldn't even tell that the water consists of molecules at all, let alone their precise composition. So a statement like (1) is a mere intellectual abstraction -- in terms of my direct experience you could tell me that water is H0_2 and I couldn't tell that you were lying to me. Maybe you contend that I can look at water through a very powerful type of microscope in order to literally see the molecular structure of water. Well, with all due respect, what I can affirm is that when looking through this particular piece of scientific instrument I am able to see a particular image that (apparently) confirms this abstract claim you have made about the "scientific" nature of water, and yet it still doesn't tell me much of anything about my direct experience of water itself because the scientific instrument has been placed in between my eyes and the water. I don't know, maybe all of this is obvious to people (in which case, apologies for making you read it all!) but I do suspect a large part of why we struggle to understand the "nature" of scientific truth claims stems from our inability to translate such claims into our direct experience of the world at large. Instead we are trained to walk around paying homage to a series of essentially abstract assertions about the nature of physical reality (60% of my body is water, most of my body consists of empty space, my brain consists of a series of neurons and synapses, etc). So it's not so much that scientific claims are true or false (though, to be clear I do accept the truth of them in an empirical sense). More it's that "most" scientific claims/statements are meaningless in terms of our direct experience of the world. Thoughts?

You should look up why there are no longer almost any Buddhists in India, even though India was the birthplace of Buddhism.

I thought Jonathan Pageau put it well when he said "Earth is round and the world is flat". But if you start telling people the world is flat they tend to think you're a conspiracy nut, so I generally keep those thoughts to myself ?

@tatsumaru I am wording everything in terms of a certain naturalistic framework wherein there is some objectively observable reality "out there" that is available to my senses. I don't personally believe that to be true. I have, for example, observed that the colors of the world appear to be brighter on days when I'm happy than on days when I'm feeling down. And apparently science has provided some sort of "verification" than this observation about my subjective experience can be scientifically recorded: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/the-quirky-brain-how-depression-may-alter-visual-perception But it's very trippy to consider that my perception of the world is somehow dependent upon my state of mind. Aside from cultivating a good mental, emotional, and spiritual life, I'm not sure it's very wise to try to alter how one perceives the "external" world. Though I might feel differently if I were committed to a Buddhist path that gets into that sort of stuff.

Taking a cue from what tatsumaru wrote, I could say that my direct experience of this object is not as a static image. Depending on how one looks at it (depending on how and where one focuses one's sight while looking at the image) one sees it as moving in one way, moving in another way, static, etc. If I were being a bit playful, I might say that this is an image that has personality to it. And who or what could tell me I was wrong in that? Science? The Magic Eye books are popular for a reason ?

I hadn't thought about that. Like you could use scientific models to predict the first day of winter when water starts to freeze, which certainly is something that registers in one's direct experience. For some reason this reminds me of how Native Americans were experts as recognizing natural patterns like how the agitation of certain animals predictably came before the start of bad weather. I guess you can, to some extent, develop a science that is based purely on direct experience without the aid of any scientific instruments. True!

How are Republicans adjusting to the reality of a Biden presidency instead of a Trump presidency? I'm thinking here about how the transition for me (a generally progressive-minded guy) from Obama to Trump felt like the world had turned upside down, and then from Trump to Biden it felt like the world turned right side up again. So even though I disagree with their politics, I do feel sympathy for conservatives who might feel like the world has "gone to shit" once again now that Democrats are back in control. So for the conservatives in our forums, how does the new political situation feel and is there anything us left-leaning folk can do to help the conservatives in our lives feel more comfortable with the changes?

"King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine" is a classic, written in 1991 from a Jungian perspective. Some things I really love about this book are that it views working with one's masculinity as being a part of maturing as a man, that it's more about balance than going to extremes, it identifies "toxic masculinity" as being an unhealed boyhood rather than an overdeveloped manhood, and there is no hint in the book that man is being painted as superior to woman. It's a book that allows for meaningful and deep personal exploration and development while at the same time passing most of the "smell tests" of contemporary PC culture.

This is the Eastern Orthodox view of these topics.