Nilsi

Have you ever contemplated the psychological significance of the progression: Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle -> Alexander ? What does it mean that the most significant philosophical lineage in the western world progresses from oral philosophy to systematized philosophy to applied philosophy to emperordom?

Thats the point. I could easily use this to justify power as virtue and in fact thats what Im doing. Whats sufficient to be a serf is not whats sufficient to become the emperor. This gives me two options: 1) become a good emperor 2) accept my serfdom and talk about how society should be run in an ideal world. I could make the point that 2) is actually just cowardice and the avoidance of responsibility - and its a pretty damn compelling point.

I would, but you're not willing to speak in a language I understand, so what can I do? You're gaslighting me with fancy language, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a fair criticism of Ken Wilber "from above" @Oeaohoo

How so? You are conflating what he would call material (as level), with the individual-exterior/it (as dimension).

This varies greatly for me. It usually happens spontaneously; rarely do I sit down to enter such a state and if I do my mind usually won't go quiet.

He talks about exactly this in "Spectrum of Consciousness" at length. I still don't get how involution contradicts emergence and no one is suggesting that Spirit is not fundamental. There can still emerge new ways of being, that are phylo- and ontogentically higher and more inclusive than anything we know of (precisely, because they are closer to Spirit as such).

Acknowledging and integrating states and stages of development; the shadow; the four quadrants - that is not trivial at all and doesn't exist in any philosophy prior to Wilber. You can dismiss this as a "pointless meta-system," but the point is that this integration affords the emergence of a higher way of being that you just wouldn't get from subscribing to Christianity or Buddhism or some other belief system.

I don't know anything and neither do you. I'm not saying don't act. If you want a good show, you have to be a good actor. I'm just saying when you leave the stage, it's okay to drop the act. If you want to pretend it's real though, you have to deny that you're just acting, so here we are.

Just putting your thoughts out there and letting them be critiqued is one of the best ways to learn and grow. Unless you seriously present your thoughts to some audience, there is no upside in looking smart and being untouchable. This is basically how talk therapy works, no? You put all your cards on the table and figure out what it means. It will depend on what your goals are. If you want to double down on and strengthen your identity, it's a good idea to embody it as best you can (like Tate or Goggins, who fully live in their character), but if you're looking for truth and transformation, it will be a liability. I'm always inspired by J. Krishnamurti's playful openness. He will talk in front of a huge audience or with serious intellectuals and all he does is earnestly inquire with the other into the nature of reality.

My mind is not that rigid. I hadn't thought these things through very deeply before, so in a sense I'm just exploring how far I can push it. I also conceded that we will always need to draw some lines. With that being said, I still believe you're operating in a broken paradigm that isn't adequate for finding good solutions to this and other problems.

I don't think we should drop everything else, I would just like to stop calling everything else a solution.

In a certain sense it is a quite radical endeavor. We're ultimately talking about God here. I think the conception of symptomatic solutions is a rather poor one. You're not actually solving anything that way. If you have high blood pressure and you take some pills that mess up your kidneys, have you actually solved anything? This whole paradigm is just intrinsically problematic, though I'm not sure what to do about it.

How can we ever move beyond blunt tools, if we can't imagine a future in which we have great tools and set up the conditions necessary for that future to happen? I'm convinced that this is a fruitful endeavor and not just utopian fantasies, but the line is quite blurry. In any case, I'd rather give it my best shot and fail spectacularly than throw in the towel and go back to business as usual.

It's not obvious to me that putting people in jail is a net positive at all. Let's assume it is and it's still absolutely pointless to throw people in jail without trying to figure out how to create a situation in which we wouldn't need to lock them up in the first place. Considering this example, I guess we would need to draw some kind of line we're not willing to cross. I guess not murdering other people is a good place to start.

Does that mean we should lie about the absolute or should we perhaps inquire what caused these people to be so disillusioned with their life's that they would prematurely end all possibility of it becoming something worthwhile? Likewise with sexual promiscuity of spiritual teachers. We should find out why this happens and when it's pathological and then address the root cause instead of repressing this stuff, causing it to pop up somewhere else in reality.

This is completely irrelevant. Skew the zero-sum ethics/truth trade-off you're proposing whichever way you please, but just acknowledge that it isn't a solution.

I don't have all the answers myself, but it's obvious to me that the way we're approaching this is fruitless and will create as many problems as it solves. I would rather not tinker with anything until I see an opening for some actual systems change. If you want to improve something now, go play some board games with old people; listen to your friends problems; call your mum; talk to a homeless person; work at an animal shelter - if you want to improve things on a systems level, you need some patience and foresight. We can create a humanistic religion, but spirituality is truth, is the sacred and is an absolute endeavor and won't need to be tinkered with if we get everything else right.

No. I'm saying we should create a situation, in which we don't need ethics codes. Until we're there, we shouldn't mess with things we don't understand. As we factor more and more variables, new solutions will emerge, that don't look like rules and ethics boards.

I'm not saying we should get rid of all law and order, I'm just saying this is not the solution. I would rather have our best people work on a more comprehensive approach to these issues and that's no rocket science - you just factor as many variables in your solution as possible and do so progressively better. You want to throw in the towel before even getting started, which is a shame.

I've given you my perspective, no? Your ethics board will create problems elsewhere, because it's not an appropriate solution. You can work out the best legislation in the world and it won't change shit, if you don't also address problems in education, economics, ecology, culture etc. Is it so hard to grasp that these problems are interconnected and you have to think about them as such, if you actually want to improve shit?

You can do that, but what good is it? If you don't address the fundamentals, you're just moving problems around. You can't disentangle spirituality from the absolute - what are you even talking about at that point? The mind virus is thinking you can address the world's problems in a vacuum.

As a language model, I can generate text that is based on patterns and structures learned from a large dataset of human-generated text. However, I do not have personal experiences or original thoughts, and I am not able to create truly original content in the way that a human can. Instead, I can take existing information and use it to generate responses to questions or prompts, or to generate text that is similar to a given style or tone.

Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins

We can talk about ethics, just not in such a reductionist manner. The question is whether you care enough to actually work on creating a holistic framework for spiritual practice, or whether you are sloppy and enforce some well intentioned rules that will only kick the can down the road.