UnbornTao

Surely they'll receive whatever you give them and will love unconditionally most of the time. I don't know about the plants, though. Just don't do it with alligators.

Of course. I'm not sure how to explain why I feel certain about this. Emotions themselves are manipulations and can be uncreated, difficult as that may be. Imagine someone is conveying an experience with no emotions - now that's a contemplation. Feelings are a different matter. You need to be sensitive (receptive) to them.

"Let me tell you about my day"

The original sin of self. Repent now!

So we agree. There's a painting of Diogenes looking for a truthful person with a lantern in an Athens supermarket, if I recall. I suspect the subtext is that, ultimately, no one is - except perhaps Diogenes himself. That's why he's looking, and failing.

Everyone's corrupt by that definition. The corruption of you.

I think I lost you there. It's more like this: with your emotions involved, you'd still be focused on your own world and viewpoint, not the other person's. In that sense, it's an obstacle here. Listening is not about you. Communication is getting your experience across - and someone else receiving it as it is. That's all. Simple enough on paper. But when it comes to profound insights, it can take years or even decades to learn how to listen. One thing you realize the more you look into this is that it doesn't seem to be a common occurrence. We often don't even realize when we aren't listening, despite going through the ritual, gestures, and so on.

What I mean is that he comes across as having real vitality and enthusiasm. It looks like he's truly enjoying himself. It doesn't feel performative. And to me, it's contagious. I think he ended up poor. It's clear that he profoundly cared about what he did.

The guy's passionate.

@zurew Always refreshing to read you.

Why do people do this? Are they really taking their discussions with LLMs that seriously? Tell them to go fuck themselves (except when you need a haiku or a technical problem solved).

If you hand me a ball called "my experience" and I catch it, then in that connection we might say that, metaphorically speaking, listening took place. Not the best metaphor. We see that this has to occur outside of, or independent of, my intellect and view. This action of mine would have to be entirely about you. If you think about it, you can't escape being relational. And being emotional oneself obstructs listening. It isn't really needed at all. One's reactions would be irrelevant here. Jargon, giving instructions, providing information, sharing the contents of your mind - these are not the same as the act of communicating. I feel that the depth of this simple act is hard to convey and develop for everyone. Just consider that it is possible for two people to create the same experience as a result of this process. Magic! And then what you do with it is up to you. Maybe you see it as a delusion, a fascinating idea, an intriguing notion, a profound insight, a manipulation, a joke, nonsense, or a feeling of sadness.

Oh yeah. Like K said, to truly listen to someone isn't very common. What would you say listening to another, in that case, would require? What would the other "do" beyond the ritual (nodding, hearing, paying attention) of having heard what you had to say? What would that process leave them with? For example, an idea? What would make you say, "Oh yeah, you listened"? This can be hard to see. Sometimes it seems someone may have listened because they agree with you or share the same view or conclusion, or can express themselves with similar terminology as yours. Not necessarily. After the process: What's their experience? And this very process is happening to us as we speak, and yet we think it doesn't apply to us.

Learn to discern hoopla from a communication. The following is an extremely obvious case of the former. Also, it's just funny as hell:

@EmiHyen Welcome.

@Eskilon I had finished writing a long response but ended up deleting it. This is just too superficial and inefficient. It would require a course or a seminar. Just be grounded. Enjoy.

I'd look into the work of someone who knows what they're doing, like Gabor Maté.

I admire your dedication to the craft. With AI, it's too tempting to outsource most of the coding work to it these days. Not that this is necessarily bad. It depends on your goals. Ahh, yeah, I remember lurking on one of those websites many years ago for your book list and downloading your commentaries/journal, but I never got around to reading them (just some fragments).

Didn't watch the entire video. Too depressing. What kind of people do that? Monsters.

Convert it to JPG.

Do you often code from scratch? Best I can do is *Markdown*.

No

There is, once again, a conflation between listening and gullibility or agreement (or disagreement, for that matter). As usual, we tend to see listening as "saying yes" to things. Anything that takes the form of a straightforward position against a stance comes across as not having heard. Understandable, but wrong. And don't forget that the same position could be taken by the other party: "I'm the one not being listened to - don't be so closed-minded." Listening isn't incompatible with recognizing what something is - deluded, accurate, plainly false, biased, a manipulation, and so on - whatever purpose it may have had when it was invented. This is why questions are asked in the first place, especially basic, common-sense ones that people somehow tend to overlook. Educating people on this would easily take a good hundred hours of work. Why do cult dynamics always implicitly emphasize a certain kind of "open-mindedness"? You can begin to intuit what that's about. So yes, being critical and listening are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they complement each other. Without the former, what you may end up with is a kind of lightweight spiritualism, which is quite common. "The Earth is a rectangle."

Discussing listening while some kind of noise keeps making him pause, like on the other video. The guy knows what questions to ask.