quantumspiral

@Hardkill If that was enough to discourage you, it wasn't for you in the first place. Nothing less than complete and utter resolve is sufficient.

@Evelyna It's a very interesting question- you may very well be right. One thing to note is that awareness applied to physical pain can often dissolve the pain, which may suggest there is some physiological change being brought about by the awareness. Open Focus Brain by Les Fehmi addresses this in detail

@Butters I'd say probably both. When you're meditating, you increasing your awareness of bodily sensations so you'll almost certainly discover new sensations when you reach enough awareness. However, awareness directed in specific areas of the body has it's own fuzzy, vibratory quality- I believe this is generating during meditation

How do you stay motivated and excited about life when the world contains so much suffering? 1000s of murders per day globally, countless animals in awful factory farms, more than 100 ongoing armed conflicts, human slavery etc

@El Zapato I thought the Spanish killed all the Aztecs

@Not me I would say Curitiba is- although admittedly I've not spent more than a couple months there.

@Basman That's why Africans always thrive as soon as they leave their challenging geography, right?

@Leo Gura You should go to the south of Brazil. Many parts on a par with Western Europe

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

@Buck Edwards Spiral Dynamics

@Basman They have a significant amount of purple I believe

@Leo Gura So you think they are more red than Latin America?

@PenguinPablo Yes. Of course, drugs and cartels play a (huge) role there- and there's geographic (being directly below the largest drug market in the world) and economic (poor kids from villages in the country see the only people who have money are the cartels who come through in their trucks and even tactical gear sometimes) In fact, I think the vast majority of homicides in Mexico are linked with organized crime. I have to ask myself, if in 1900 the entire population of Mexico was replaced with Finnish, Swiss, Singaporeans or Japanese, would we see as much brutality in narco trafficking as we do today?

I think you're straw manning the argument. If you're not a puer aeturnus, that does not mean you automatically have the spirit of an overly pragmatic, bitter old man. The point is that the puer hides from the harshness of reality by clinging to their dreams as a sort of ideal future reality where there will be no suffering and everything will be perfect. They cannot actualize their dreams because they cannot even touch reality, since it's difficulties and discomforts are too much to bear. So instead, the puer hides in fantasy.

There seems to be an obsession with respect, domination and violence in Latin America that is rooted in the ancient cultures of the Americas, Spanish colonization and military dictatorships that goes beyond spiral dynamics. The highest homicide rate cities are always in Latin America (Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Obregón, Acapulco). On a country wide level, the highest homicide rates have been found in Central America and the Carribean (Jamaica, El Salvador, Honduras). Is Latin America the most red region in the world?