Carl-Richard

Your energy levels follow the same patterns as your sleep cycles; up for 1.5 hours, down for 1.5 hours, etc. If you delay your sleep for 2 hours after you were initially tired, you will experience an increase in energy again for the next 1 hour or so, which makes it harder to fall asleep. If you are prone to 5-MeO re-activations or other types of energy phenomena, it would be wise to carefully craft a sleep schedule that puts you to sleep and does not provoke those things.

I have Sony WH-1000XM4. Worth every penny. If I use them together with foam ear plugs, there can be a party going on downstairs and I won't really hear anything.

Ah. I've lived with such a person. He started rearranging furniture and using a saw at 03:30 am. I screamed at him so much he felt like buying a white t-shirt for me as an apology. Then he played bass and music on speakers at similar times as well and I had to keep reminding him about the 11 PM rule of the apartment which I had also made him personally agree on beforehand. So I've been clear about setting boundaries like that. But if it's noise during daytime that is the problem and it seems unreasonable to ask for boundaries, get noise-cancelling headphones, use them together with ear plugs. It would probably solve most of your problems.

But why?

Unless you feel literally no need for it, which is possible. You pretty much copy my position now

I will give you a rundown of how "New Age healing" could work: Let's say you buy a pendant from this highly charismatic, spiritually attuned and good-feeling energy person that makes you feel good in their presence. If this person has claimed to have imbued their energy into the pendant, or given it a specific healing power, here are two possibilities: Every time you wear the pendant or think about the pendant, you will be reminded of this person and their virtuous state and the state that you feel in their presence (which is one of peace, tranquility, safety, reassurance, etc.). This will have a real and direct impact on your state right now. Your mental state is directly reflected in your physical state (they are two sides of the same coin). And this could do things like reduce the rate of aging, cause increased rates of healing of physical ailments (through reduced stress, etc.). Who the fuck knows what reality is: maybe it is possible to imbue something in some way that has a special impact which differs from if you had not done that. That's the claim of places like the Dhyanalinga, or the Himalayas. People do claim this is possible, people with real "spiritual credentials" if we can call it that. Besides, reality is rampantly and in fact inherently mystical (unexplained by physical mechanisms), and we are all somewhat empathically and even telepathically attuned to each other (I believe we share information across mental space that is either poorly explained or indeed unexplained by physical mechanisms). Now, if it's possible to leave an imprint in mental space (which we all do all the time by merely thinking), like an intention that a certain object will evoke certain states in certain people who wear it, then this intention could manifest its effects on those people, simply by virtue that we all share this mental space. And certainly if you are open, willing, and "bought in" (both ideologically and economically), and also align your focus and intention with it, then you will be more open to tune into this information in mental space.

They could actually work though. Does a surgeon's scalpel not work if they don't also teach holistic health? You sound very openminded here. Placebo is amazing. It's amazing that it's possible to heal oneself in ways we can't explain physically. What's being transferred during the assisted meditation?

1. Do what you want.

You could create a Spiral Development Index, e.g. based on other indexes like the Corruption Perceptions Index or Democracy Index (and other data you might find relevant), and then you can give each country its own score (and maybe a color scale from blue to white). And you could give an info chart that maps the SD stages onto the blue-white scale, representing the country's "center of gravity", and make an option to switch the graphic between the blue-white scale and the SD center of gravity.

Maybe you’re not aware of this if you haven’t studied psychoanalysis in depth - and I say this having studied a few semesters of psychology myself, where I often debated professors who treated it as little more than a historical footnote - but late Freud and Lacan don’t believe these symptoms can be cured. They don’t disappear; they just shift forms. The best you can hope for is to become conscious of the structure of the unconscious itself - and learn to live with it. Maybe not cured, but severely handled. For example, if I start a PhD thesis in something I have zero passion for, I will become straight out depressed. That's a big difference from starting a PhD thesis in something I'm passionate about. It's certainly the case that following my passion won't "cure" negative thinking full-stop, but it's certainly a night and day difference. So that's the point about choosing the right structure for your life: you can make a big difference. As for what I'm "working on" (or what I'm passionate about), that would be to do a study that compares the effects of meditation based on spiritual/religious motivations (awakening, enlightenment, "seeking the sacred") vs. "modern", secular, non-religious motivations (e.g. stress reduction, productivity). What has always bothered me with the secularized, sterilized and scientificalized version of "mindfulness meditation", is how tame it seems in comparison to the potential that it truly has (i.e. slight reduction in negative thinking vs mystical awakenings and spiritual transformation; alleviating pathology vs literally cultivating sainthood). So the aim is to point towards this potential and slowly prod the scientific discourse in this direction. And while this is not a "new" idea at all, by doing it in this way; by comparing two groups in the same study, by looking at "motivations" in people who already practice meditation on their own accord (as opposed to recruiting complete newbies and teaching/forcing them to meditate, giving one group a "spiritual meditation" and the other a secular one), and also by using neuroscientific methods (which I can copy directly from my current study); it seems like an approach that can provide new insight and clarity into the topic, and nevertheless, again, provide attention to it. Side note: The way I approach science (and the way I think most people approach it fundamentally) is as an activist platform for the things we value and intuitively think is right and true. And we use science to clarify and quantifying those things, testing their limitations, finding out where they apply and where they do not apply. And if you want to be a good activist, you want to ernestly and honestly approach the scientific process and be objective. Or else your activism is empty. But you should also be honest that you're driven by something. And the more driven you are, the better you are. My advisor is probably the epitome of this (he loves doing studies about the benefits of music), and maybe not coincidentally, he is quite successful at what he does. That's another argument for following one's passion: you don't just feel good, but you are good.

I really wanted to use the word "metaphysics", but I accepted the framing.

The human game, since the dawn of meta-awareness 30-50k years ago, is to become self-aware and self-interested and distance oneself from the eternal ground of being in terms of identity. The fact that people are different leads to this happening in different ways for different people. So of course people are confused and disagree about the absolute. That's virtually a given.

I'm saying most people here don't, even us who proclaim to understand. Because we don't produce these level of ideas ourselves. We mostly just download a stripped-down version and then go about our lives making simplistic observations, thinking we're being profound when in reality we're as simple as the so-called materialists we put beneath our feet. That's the pessimistic version, as there is also "upward assimilation", in that immersing yourself in symbols above your development will eventually start to lift you up. But there is no good way to prove this other than your mind actually creating something new at these levels. If everything sounds like recycled quotations, the safest bet is that you are indeed only recycling quotations. (And as a proof of concept: "downward/upward assimilation" is something I've read. I did not invent those terms).

That face is barely me, it's from 10 years ago 😆 I expected to be on camera like some of the other radio shows on that channel, but oh well, you're spared from my balding for a little longer.

Well, birds of a feather flock together, roughly speaking: would Sam and Emma be able to understand Wilber? That's exactly my point. You don't need to be very developed to spout some of Ken Wilber's ideas. That's the power of downward assimilation, of adopting cultural symbols above your level of development. Those that are really developed and that are truly able to grasp the ideas down to their bones, are able to produce similar ideas (original ideas) at a similar level. Now, if you take a look around, most people can barely construct a coherent sentence. Forget a meta-systematic or meta-paradigmatic theory.