Basman

-as opposed to being still by default? It also seems like the mind wanders more, daydreams more, when physically fatigued, which is strange because even though you have less energy, the mind becomes busier, but in a more thoughtless and automatic manner. When you are tired, you don't want to be present. You want to watch slop on TV and do nothing instead of literally doing nothing and taking in the space. I guess a better question would be, why is the mind so attached to "noise"? I wonder how human minds compare to animal minds in this regard. Animal minds seem to be less busy, less conceptual and more present compared to us, but it is hard to tell, right? Animals having less complex minds counter-intuitively simplifies happiness for them, assuming their needs are met.

You shouldn't just believe people, especially if they make huge claims like that. I think it is interesting, but I'm not going to believe them outright. Especially since Sadghuru seems to treat this notions as a given.

I'm not as optimistic. It is in general extremely hard to replicate natural processes. Artificial cell production requires expensive machinery and skilled experts to work whereas a cow just needs a patch of grass and doesn't care if it gets dirty. Dumb cows effortlessly convert grassland into meat.

Religion is a social game. You can't practice spirituality effectively while being locked into an ideology that presupposes that it has all the answer, especially when that religion is rooted in the middle-ages. Like, not eating pork makes no sense in the modern age. It's fine to play that game I think. It is a form of community. I've myself gone to church a couple of times for the experience. Just don't get lost in the sauce. Though I don't think you really need it. Personally, it is impossible for me to subscribe to any one religion as "the truth". I'm too aware of how religion is a product of collective imagination. There might be aspects of that imagination that are rooted in something wise and spiritual, but those ideas are treated as dogma, making them effectively noise. Which is why you have to think for yourself. Most people are religious primarily because they where raised as such. They programmed/brainwashed depending on how you want to interpret that. That is huge when you consider the epistemic quality of religion. Which also explains why religion is intertwined with culture. Islam is culturally Arabic and vice versa, just like western culture is Christian and India Hindu. You cannot subscribe to religion without also subscribing to culture, which is to a large extent unavoidable. Western culture is rooted in christian beliefs and values. Though those beliefs and values have been watered down and lost their religious edge over time, those values where originally christian, like seeing nudity as shameful.

What are your goals? Why are you studying CS?

I wonder if his estimates of the actual effect of AI is overblown, but his proposals for regulating AI are sound. It's pretty clear that AI is being used to consolidate resources. Little to none of the dividends of technological advancement is being shared with the common public. For example. work hours are the same as they where almost a hundred years ago despite productivity being up over 400% since then. There's definitely room for regulation to negotiate better conditions.

I actually thought about this exact question a bunch. I think the biggest factor would be how material our society is despite being as technologically advanced as it is. How exploitative society is run in all of its facets are consequences of this materialism. I also think a lack of care for social cohesion will be seen as self-destructive and short-sighted. Politically, a lack of long-term strategizing will likely be seen as primitive. One of the reason China is doing so well currently is because they can plan for the long-term, as it's a one-state party which doesn't have to compete for power. In general, modern society is a bit too short-term in it's approach. It's more like immaturity than straight up barbarism though, I think.

The only reason people drink coffee for work is because they can't afford cocaine.

Your addicted obviously. That be like quitting heroin after 5-10+ years.

Coffee is a luxury. Kind of illustrates the luxury trap of modern life. What we consider "basic" objectively is a very good standard of living.

Good point. I didn't think of it like that. Have you had experience with this?

Foundational and essential self-help. You can't do proper self-help and personal development without understanding the core premise of this book, that you can improve your life by consciously controlling your mind. For example, by understanding and controlling the standards you set for yourself, the beliefs you order your life around, your values, how you condition your mind and much more. The book is packed with different principles and techniques that all revolve around this one concept, taking charge of your life by understanding and employing the principles that control your mind. Understanding how you take control of your mind is the core of self-help and why I consider this book to be so essential. If you don't know how to employ your mind in order to create an awesome life, your essentially leaving your life up to happenstance. I consider a book like this basic level self-help and I recommend everyone who's into personal development to read this or something else similar. But you'll be hard pressed to find something as jam packed as this one. There are so much information in this book that it was hard to keep track of it all in my experience. Definitely worth reading over and over to squeeze it for all of its juice. You can spend a lot of time just integrating all of this principles. And only working with one or two will alone massively contribute to you happiness. What is neat about this kind of self-help is that the principles and techniques are things that don't depend on externalities. They are wholly internal and can be employed at any time at any moment. That is such a beautiful and powerful thing and hard to appreciate the power of. That is power of your mind. This book has been massively awakening for myself relative to just understanding how much power I actually have over my life and potential to create a great life. It is basic, but basic is good and needs to be practiced. You wouldn't go without breath after all. In my opinion, the majority of people lack a strong grasp on the basics. We would have a much healthier and happier society if people understood just a fraction of these principles. 10/10 Page count: 544

If he was right he wouldn't need to argue in bad faith.

Birds are dinosaurs.

@Elliott I've made a substantive point of how technology expands the capacity for morality, but I'm yet to receive a serious respond. Your only responding with these empty platitudes and moving the goal post. You are not arguing in good faith. I'm not going to waste any more of my time on your nonsense.

Technology doesn't automatically make you live more morally but it does increase your freedom to do so. It's not trivial to have the agency to alleviate survival challenges. Child mortality, murder, rape, etc. aren't moral issues in a tribal society because they don't have the capacity to avoid them. Most hunter-gatherer tribes are restrained by base survival and group conformity. In that sense they have less capacity for moral development. It's really fucking hard to be a hunter-gatherer comparatively. You could become one today if you really wanted to, but you would have to be crazy to do that. And even then, you'd be hard pressed to not rely on modern tools like guns and clothing, which proves why technology is so significant. Even the humble spear was a revolutionary technology at the time that changed which reshaped ecological systems. The spear has been instrumental to the extinction of hundreds of species, millions of deaths and the proliferation of humans across the globe at large. That is what one invention did for humanity. But when modern humans invent technology it doesn't count?

The question is, why do you need to be spoon fed meaning by your externals? I understand the fascination with tribal life. I too think being part of tribe would naturally lead to a lot of happiness because it is the environment humans are adapted for. But it isn't utopic, your are ruled by your environment to a much greater degree and therefor you have much less capacity to live virtuously. You can do all of this things that you listed today. What is stopping you? Tribal people are using technology and have been from the very start. This is ridiculous.

Rumination and an unquiet mind seem to be characteristic of bipolar disorder and your distress in a broad sense. I would assume professional help would be the most constructive approach but there might be techniques you can find online that could help you find more inner peace. Self-help doesn't rely on other people's opinions. It's not required. If something doesn't work for you then just discard it. The point of positive thinking is that it is more solution-oriented and takes you out of a victim mentality. It is not meant to gaslight you, but the truth is that you have a lot of room for how you interpret any situation. It is often no more true to see something in a positive light as it is seeing it in a negative light. But you gain more from being positive, so you might as well. That is my thinking at least. Negative thinking in its extreme is creating one's own hell distinct from actual reality. There's a huge difference for instance between thinking that the world is conspiring for you as opposed to thinking that the world is against you, not only in how it makes you feel but also what actions you end up taking down the line. Though how it makes you feel is probably the most significant part.

I was talking about hunter-gatherer tribes. Not ancient civilizations. Ancient world art are products of technology.

Keep in mind that I'm no psychologist. My knowledge doesn't extend further than a general interest in psychology, philosophy and self-help, so take what I say with a grain of salt. First of all, it seems like your mind is juts very cluttered, with overlaying stressors and internalized feelings of believing you are unworthy of love. Feeling like your inherently unlovable seems to be a recurring theme, between fatherly abandonment, feeling like nobody supports you and generally being lonely. This could explain why you are hung up on your mother scolding you for molesting your younger sibling, even though it would be normal to freak out over that kind of sibling abuse, objectively speaking. It's an old wound. It might be worth going through and explicating what is objectively your fault VS what is theirs for each issue you've had for every major relationship you've had in a kind of list style. A = incident B = what your responsible for in this incident C = what they are responsible for in this incident This way you can make it clear in your mind what is theirs and what is yours in a more objective manner. The truth is that a lot of abuse is not about you anymore than the fact that you where vulnerable at that moment and the abusers very own psychology. You also seem to tend to interpret things in a very negative way. Like with the example of your mom scolding you earlier. It is a fact that she freaked out. It is a subjective interpretation that that means your inherently unworthy of love. I believe it is a symptom of BPD to ruminate and catastrophize. This tendency towards a negative and implicitly self-defeating thinking could be contributing to your feelings of suicidality, which is in my understanding the consequence of prolonged distress and not being able to see a way out. Suicide is a symptom of not being able to imagine a way out of distress. One technique you could try, if you feel so inclined, is softening your language. Softening one's language lets you negotiate with negative thinking. For example, you recently experienced a bunch of set-backs, like losing your job, losing money, drugs not working, etc. The first obvious example is to think of these as set-backs as opposed to failures. Or another example, "the medical system exploited me" to "they don't know what they are doing". Or "life is really hard" to "life is challenging". However you choose to interpret a situation, you'll be right. It's not about gas lighting yourself but dialing how you interpret events. In reality, this events don't actually mean anything. Your mind creates meaning in order to deal with this situations in order to survive, but one's interpretations aren't always constructive and solution-oriented.

Meaning is a projection of the mind. As a tribesman, you have very little individuality and the tribe equips you with all meaning. This is also fundamentally true of modern societies, but you have way more wiggle room as an individual as the scale of society expanded. But there is something to be said about the meaninglessness of modern society. We live in a highly material society which has rejected the religious spirituality of the past, but didn't replace that with anything beyond a vague pursuit of happiness. It is one of the downsides of stage orange and likely an aspect which will exhaust the population of it. People are missing meaning in their life. The other day, I learn of a violent prank called the "Blue Whale" which are a series of challenges which illicit young people to partake in a series of increasingly violent forms of self-harm, culminating in suicide. I can easily imagine young and very lost people being drawn to something like that just because it gives them a purpose. But it is not the case that modernity is exclusively meaningless, you just have too be more proactive about it. There are plenty of examples of people who live meaningful lives today. Arguably humans are adapted for tribal life. So we would naturally "slot in" to that kind of lifestyle and easily find meaning in our lives. But you can't compare modernity to tribal life without acknowledging that being a hunter-gatherer was an extremely hard life with very little room for self-dignity. Modern life is the current peak of humanism in comparison. There is no denying it. It is not possible to find a better time alive to be "useless" and have self-dignity, or the best you can get at least, be it as gay, elderly, sick or as a child. In a tribe, the elderly and children are particularly vulnerable. Child mortality is high and the elderly are often killed or left for dead if they can't up. There's an account of an Acho man who used to sneak up to older aunts and kill them with an axe. And he was proud of it too. Greenland, whose culture is closely rooted to a stone-age culture due to being a nomadic hunter-gatherer society up until colonization only a few hundred years, tend to see children as somewhat disposable, with sexual abuse of children being rampant (about every third child). In part due to the liberal tradition being less rooted in their culture as well as other factors like rampant alcoholism. That is not to say that modern society doesn't have any evils of its own, like pollution (I would be tempted to say war too, but that would actually not be accurate. Relatively, we live in the most peaceful era of human history). There also the factor of depth. The meaning you would find being a tribesman is obvious and immediately enrapturing, but it is also limited by how harsh life is. Most of your thoughts go to "food" and "danger". Compared to modernity, you can create and discover incredible purpose and meaning that can change other people's lives. Just look at any great musician or philosopher. It's like, would you rather have the tastes and hobbies of a dog or a wine connoisseur? The latter is easily pleased, but doesn't enjoy nearly the same depth. Technology is just an extension of natural means through ingenuity and generational knowledge. Humans have always used technology to survive better and to better themselves. Because it improves our survival it contributes significantly to the development of our consciousness overall.

In western societies, we tend to put happiness on a pedestal. We treat happiness as the end goal of life, more or less. So, are you ashamed of being unhappy/stressed? Because if you are, then that would be just added stress.

How much would this cost to attend you think?

I wanted to do this for a while, compile videos of strange and weird games that are dreamlike, trippy, ethereal, etc. The weirder and more obscure the better. Feel free to add your own contributions. --- LSD: Dream Emulator