caspex

Demonizing pedophilia would be acting like a sheep, but I wouldn't call it 'wrong'. It's the right thing to do, because I do not want to live in a society where pedophilia is normalized. You might argue there is a grey area, and you would like to live in a society that is more aware of pedophilia and would help these people out without demonizing them, but that's a fantasy. Demanding that is demanding a stage Yellow society which is a very big ask. It's so far into the future that it's not worth discussing right now. Therefore I believe it to be the right move to demonize pedophilia, because the masses move in terms of extremes and not greys, and I like the current side of the extreme better than the other side. Once society enters the grey, the pendulum is bound to swing all the way. As for pedophilia itself, I don't believe that anybody is simply born a pedophile as if it's a sexual orientation. You become a pedophile due to circumstance and habits. One way, that I believe is quite common, is through porn. Most of us do not get affected by this, but some keep going deeper down the rabbit hole and before they know it, they are into kids. I believe it takes years but it happens. There view of sexuality gets so deconstructed they do not care now if it's a kid or not. Look, you can deconstruct your sexual orientation to a point where you are attracted to stone or a table, that does not mean you should do that, the same applies to kids.

My lifestyle lead to severe anemia recently and had to do blood transfusions to stay alive. I have decided to change my diet completely since. Eat like a Sannayasi only if you are living like one. Eat according to your lifestyle or it'll lead to problems. In my opinion, for a Grihasta guy, eating two meals a day, filling 3/4th of the stomach, and not drinking water during or after eating for 40 minutes, is enough. Not eating after sunset is also one of the big changes that leads to better sleep. Eating the right food is also essential, variety is very important. I now genuinely think that if you can afford to be vegetarian(not vegan), then it's the best choice.

I think of intelligence as having better clarity in a certain area of life. If you are gifted with IQ maybe you have amazing clarity regarding mathematics, geometry and space. But there are other fields, such as people, emotions, or metaphysics. If you have clarity in spiritual matters, only then might you achieve awakening without anyone telling you about it. High IQ doesn't imply high clarity in metaphysics, philosophy or self-awareness.

Understanding is creation. The urge to understand alongside the urge to explore stems from the root urge to create. Your urge to create because God creates all the time. When you understand something, you are able to see it, create it within your mind. Your mind expands, and within, you can hold the object you have understood. Creation entails setting up of biases, boundaries, limits, structure and relationships among the various distinctions within the object. This is the exact process when understanding something. Understanding feels liberating, it feels free, because you create. Creation is liberating. The more you create/understand, the larger you are. The more you can escape your previous frame of reference. The cosmic movement towards God and dissolution in God is what fuels the urge to create.

Bhakti does exactly this to awaken you. You feel emotions so deeply that there is no room for thought anymore. You realise how the entire world is just a massive emotion, but eventually, you catch sight of this immense stillness within every part of this dynamism. Once you realise that stillness is yourself, you quit changing from within, you become as sturdy and immovable as a mountain, immovable by pressure no matter how strong. However, at the same time, your ability to feel, encompass and hold within yourself, is on par with the ocean.

Emotional labour in relation to mastery refers to situations related to progress, not dealing with accidents. Life doesn't balance things like that don't worry man. Focus/Enjoy on your actions and don't worry about the results. You seem to be doing great.

I agree with you that "the good life" is a fantasy. It's simply exists for us to not lose meaning from our lives. But I believe there is an actual good life that I have no idea what is like, but intuit is driven by being awake. Actualized.org is for those who are privileged enough to know English and have a decent internet connection. No matter what problems we face in our lives, be it material, spiritual or mental, for a lot of us, because of our standing in the social hierarchy, determination and persistence can get us to a big chunk of that "good life". For you, the good life is possible, or at least a large part of it, and that's why you had aimed for it in the first place. Therefore, you cannot blame Actualized.org for burdening you with achieving the good life, if it's possible for you, you must burden yourself with that possibility.

I am planning to set myself up materially till 30. After that stability is achieved, I decide to pursue material ventures till 40 and go full monkhood afterwards.

Option 1. Happiness is a shallow emotion compared to peace and bliss.

Look at your own beliefs and realise this belief stems from relative ideas about reality, that you hold, that you haven't confirmed. You do not know if souls are real and if karma is real. What if the kids that were to be born from you, are born somewhere else? Do you actually KNOW the kids only come into existence because of you? What if you are a mode for them to enter the world, not their creator? I am presenting to you an alternate way of looking at bearing children, so you may realise how biased you are and many are regarding this. If relatively concious people like us decide to be irresponsible and not bear children, the only people bearing children will be people who don't deserve to, who are not worthy of raising concious children for the future. You and I will doom the future to be even worse, if we don't raise responsible and concious children. If I am to be completely frank with you, reasoning that the world is too cruel for your children is not mercy upon your children but shows your own incompetency in raising a child that will be able to persist, tolerate and ultimately change this world. It's your duty to bear concious children IF you want the human society to develop in any way. If you do not feel confident in able to raise children, I applaud and commend you for taking the step of not having kids, but do not cloud your incompetence as some sort of mercy upon your children. The only mercy then on your children, would be from your own parenting.

You're shedding responsibility. Since you're fine with that I won't force you, but you should know you're not doing anything special.

Indeed when we learn of any distinction in any concept we base these distinctions on concepts and ideas already established and that the relationship between these assumed concepts/instances and the concept in questions is merely conjunctive and not necessarily true. But, that is what the process of learning is all about. You find these assumptions and distinguish ever deeper until you are satisfied or tired. Distinctions initially occur from observations, and then they are remembered. These observations are relied upon to be true and there practicality tested and therefore considered more than simply fantastical, however it is also true that practicality doesn't necessarily indicate truthfulness. In my personal contemplation I have understood that all distinctions are simply fantastical and made up, because we can dissolve any distinction between any two attributes no matter how true they may seem. I can look at a pencil and also a cup, and dissolve the distinction between them to the point I see them as the same object. You can argue this is only a mental exercise and doesn't reflect reality, but that's only a distinction you just made. I see all distinctions as imaginary, however what distinctions you make, where you make them and how many of them you make, determines a system of distinctions through which you view your world; and certain configurations are more effective at navigating reality, both practically and spiritually, than others. This is why the act of creating distinctions remains ever important in the quest to survive and in the quest to understand. These configurations which are more effective, better and more efficient, that align with larger systems in reality at play, are what, in my contemplation, indicate a 'clearer' understanding of something.

I agree with you. It's not obvious for many people that concepts are fluid and not fixed. Many times, a simple mention of a certain term or phrase can trigger reactions and the unwillingness to understand the other. Even illogical ideas can be understood if reasoned to in the same illogical manner, which requires crazy mental gymnastics. Furthermore, one would become able to transcend their own logical limitations by being able to understand the logic of others, which may even be more refined at times. Although, I wouldn't say only America is prone to this to the point that it deserves special mention, it's just more apparent on the internet that America is like that. In my experience, most people in every country are like this.

Being aware of 'Existence' is more of a feeling, awareness, and could even be called a mental state. This is why it seems to have no properties, and is often called a property itself, when compared to other thoughts. However, 'existence' as simply a concept, does have a property which is the property of 'having a property'. When you delve into the contemplation of properties, it is natural to have the thought of 'existence'. It wouldn't violate your principle of sufficient similarity, as this thought would only arise after sufficient observation of the concept of 'properties'. The similarity/pattern here being 'predicates/properties'. Correct me if I am wrong, but your principle suggests that thoughts occur in a chain in which each thought is sufficiently similar to the last and not entirely different; and the first item of that chain would be present experience. It implies that individuals cannot have completely independent and new thoughts and require some sort of stimulus or ground to begin with, which is current experience. This would explain why one's thoughts are a certain way and not another. I largely agree with you, as even most insights occur from intense observation of present experience. However, I would disagree with the implication that independent thoughts cannot occur due to a lack of sufficient similarity with something else. Take the case of Ramanujan for example, even if we don't believe in the concept of deities implanting thoughts and insights in your head, and believe that his revelations were internal calculations of his subconscious mind, it still suggests that his mind was capable of producing new insights and thought about mathematical concepts by using the building blocks of his knowledge without any sufficiently similar ground to begin on. As for the discussion on predicates. I don't agree with you that it requires will to find similarity between predicates. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine and it wouldn't require conscious will in many cases to recognize patterns. It would be done automatically for you.

Jaynes doesn't say that early humanoids did not have a sense of self. His theory is simply that ancient people could not introspect into their own mental states which is so common in modern society; and that due to the lack of the ability to introspect, auditory hallucinations happened in novel and stressful situations that people considered as deities. The bicameral mind being phenomenally-conscious but not access-conscious, is his main theory, although he doesn't use these terms himself. Essentially, he proposes that a-consciousness emerged culturally and not strictly biological, which I completely agree with. As described in the paper you provided, p-consciousness is simply the existence of qualia and personal experience for an individual, while a-consciousness is the awareness of their own mental states such as being aware that one has thoughts, emotions and memories. While p-conscious individuals use these mental states, they do not distinguish these mental states as something different than the world around them, and hence can believe internal monologue as also part of the world outside, as if a deity communicating with them. I actually agree with this. However, the idea that a-consciousness is common and wide-spread in modern societies is false; this is only the case in the educated population. I have met and seen time and again many people in my own country who simply do not introspect and are very foreign to this idea. They understand that they exist as an individual, as a self, but they do not access their own mental states for introspection. They are essentially only p-conscious, or rather, somewhere in between p-conscious and a-conscious. There's a stark behavioral difference between an individual who is access-conscious versus only phenomenally. The discussion in the paper about the concept of soul is also very interesting.

As a teenager, it didn't fuck me up for he first 5 - 6 years. It took a toll on my life's vision after that point on though. It made me a dopamine seeking machine and it has fucked my entire system of willpower and the ability to be consistent and persistent. I am still dealing with fixing that. Getting good marks doesn't mean shit. I scored 90/100 in a college level Mathematics exam just two weeks ago. Porn has still fucked me up. Quit it before it's too late. It will fuck up your spiritual growth.

@Leo Gura I am very curious, please answer this question.

I see where you are coming from but this concept is simply too naiive to ever work for most people. Most do not want or care off raising their conciousness and doing better for their world. Therefore it's reasonable to assume for a parent that their child is the same way, and if that's the case, the child needs to learn how to fend for themselves instead of staying spoiled.

The state of awakening in which your heart becomes a bottomless pit, an infinite well of spaciousness and love. Love, that is made completely out of pure light and truth. The heart space, so huge, if the entire universe were to fall in it, it's be simply a grain of sand floating downwards in a sea of love. The facet of awakening where you experience the void, where there is no time, no space, no you and no beingness. Where you withdraw from your senses. These two shocked me the most.

In a gym, you lift weights to strengthen your body, you increase the weights, until your body reaches it's full potential. If you lift too much at a time, you may tear a muscle, bend a joint, get a injury so bad that you may not be able lift the same way ever again. Lift too less or not at all, and you'll never tap into the potential strength your body is capable of. It seems to me that this is quite similar to taking on responsibilities in life. Consider a responsibility a weight and you can only bear responsibility of that which you are capable, too much and you are crushed under the pressure, too less and you never grow up. More importantly, it's important to notice the pattern that, when you bear a responsibility successfully, you become capable of taking on more. You're mind, heart and character becomes stronger and you are able to handle more suffering, duties and responsibilities. People who are very strong in their mind, heart and character, through this process of progressively becoming more responsible and caring, seem to me like some of the most beautiful people in humanity. They are like a beautiful crystal in midst of lumps of mud like us. For me, a person with high integrity beats a person with good looks anytime, although, provided that, a person with both beats even that. So, for growth regarding integrity, one could progressively, but carefully, increase the load onto themselves as they become stronger. I see many people who are scared of suffering, but as Leo also said in his blog recently, sharp emotional experience is what changes you on the deepest level.

I am sure there many who are under 20 here as well, but the majority would be between 20-40.

All you are doing is raising the minimum level of effort required to live your life. Yes, it may improve your life a little bit because you have bound yourself to some more responsibilities. However, you are not treating the problem, but only the symptoms. It seems you have accepted that you cannot trust yourself in the future, and therefore look for solutions to force your future self into doing the right thing. Listen, do not lose hope and give up on yourself. I have tried similar things in the past, and I made myself think that I am not terrible enough to laze around at the cost of someone else but because you have not treated the cause, you slowly but surely become that terrible. All you have done is raised the minimum effort in your day to day activities. You may be pumped up after getting a dog but after sometime you'll start to do the bare minimum again. Nothing can thrive by doing the bare minimum. What you need is to not give up on your self. What you need is more human interaction, more genuine human interaction. What you need is to let go of self-destructive habits. What you need is to feel a sense of progress. What you need is to do tangible, material action, however small, on a day to day basis. You need to set all that up, by yourself, with incredibly low levels of energy. That's why it's hard, but persistence doesn't require energy if you have enough time to recover. Keep persisting and you'll break through. Not giving up doesn't require energy, and giving up doesn't free you up. In my honest opinion, only if you are able to persist like this for a year, should you get a dog. I suffered with loneliness and depression for about 5 years before I had a breakthrough. It's hard man, but it's over when you give up.

Peace and Satisfaction is the number one thing to aim for before any other form of spiritual realisation. If you are not at least peaceful and satisfied by your whole being in your entirety, forget spirituality, you're not even succesful materially.