Carl-Richard

I don't know how you define these things, but for me and arguably most people, beliefs and definitions are very surface-level things. And reality goes far deeper than those things. It doesn't matter what you believe: you cannot fly. It doesn't matter what you believe: you cannot see through walls (unless you are a special individual 😉). You cannot stop seeing Redness if there is Redness in an object. You cannot breathe in while breathing out. You cannot think deeply about a subject while surfing a wave. There are various constraints in reality where beliefs have little power. Beliefs deal more with what power you give these constraints, how they reverberate in your mind, what attention you give them; subtle things like that. And like I said earlier, these more hard constraints ultimately define what you believe and again reinforce the effect that your beliefs have on them. Sure, once you loosen some belief pattern, maybe you will open yourself to some dimension you hadn't conceived of before (e.g. astral realms, spiritual beings, ghosts), but even then, the existing hard constraints will definitely keep having an effect on you. There is no getting around having to wake up in the morning, eat food, breathe with your lungs, walk with your legs (if you're privileged to have them). Whether or not you want to call these constraints "physical reality" or "objective empirical reality" is totally up to you, but that doesn't change anything about the constraints. Ironically, those are just certain kinds of beliefs about the constraints.

I remember back when Opeth released their 2019 album (and also Tool), I was in my heavy meditation and seeking phase and I was listening to these pretty great works of music and not feeling moved or impressed by them at all. I think it was because I was trying to squeeze God out of the music, in a way that was not warranted (on the level of musical ideas, structure, virtuosity). Even the most virtuosic guitar players like Guthrie Govan didn't fundamentally impress me at that point. It was as if my awareness and ability to focus on the music was simultaneously too intense to be impressed by it, but also that I was so dissociated from my emotional life at that point that every engagement with music was essentially a hollow interpretation of structure (the content, the warmth of each note, the feeling, of being touched, was not there). But at the same time, this was when I had some of my most amazing musical experiences listening to other music. Maybe it was my expectation to be impressed that ruined it. It was the same for Opeth's 2017 album, and that was released before I had started meditating (in fact, I was in the middle of my unstable phase before starting meditating). But maybe in a weird sense, I was craving God there too, "perfection". Maybe that craving was what pushed me into meditating in the first place. And also, maybe (obviously) truly enjoying God comes when you no longer crave it In any case, again, Opeth's new album is a banger.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

Other states of being, emotions, behaviors, reality, etc. I don't grant a special explanatory significance to beliefs. You simply have a set of phenomena, and some of them seem to correlate in a specific way, and that is how you derive explanations of said phenomena. For example, if there is rain and you are outside subjected to the open sky, you can expect to get wet. If there is a lot of rain, you can expect a flood. If there is even more rain, you can expect a big flood. If there is a big flood, you can expect a regional emergency and property damage and maybe even loss of life. If there is a regional emergency, you can expect emergency vehicles and evacuation measures. If there is property damage or loss of life, you can expect a lot of grief, sorrow, distress, pain. So how did we get from rain to pain? Through a tree of correlations or associations. The correlations are not perfect or absolute. There is a lot left to be explained. But they can still be made. Nevertheless, to me, beliefs are simply one node or one branch of that tree. It's true to say that beliefs can affect some elements of experience, just as rain can affect pain. It's more the case that it claims that this "physical reality" is not made out of the same stuff as experience (consciousness), and that somehow, this stuff creates the stuff of experience (which they have no idea how, but they think maybe it will be explained one day). I also want you to explain what you mean by "empirical", as it is classically a term associated with gaining knowledge from experience, which is kinda an oxymoron in this case. Do you mean "objective"? It's generated by You, the vast, non-local, transcendent but at the same time immanent Self (reality itself), not "you" as a tiny monkey eating leaves in the forest (or the modern version of that).

The Absolute is existence beyond all concepts; pure undivided existence. It cannot be divided for it is One. Once you try to divide it, you're in the relative; relationships between parts. And each part is necessarily a concept, something you thought up in your mind. Solipsism claims "only my own experience exists; nobody else is conscious". It posits the concept of "my experience" as contrasted to "other people's experience". It therefore deals with the relative. It divides existence into parts (me vs. not me, conscious vs. not conscious), concepts, with relationships between them: me is the opposite of not me, conscious is the opposite of not conscious, only me is conscious and not other people. Also, behind the concepts of me vs. not me (as an example), lie a ton of assumptions and yet more concepts. How do you identify who is me and who is other people? Through bodies? What is a body? Where does the body begin and where does it end? Is there an absolute boundary, or is it relative to how you choose to draw it? How are you seeing other people's bodies? Is seeing absolute? What happens if you close your eyes? Do you still see? No? What happens if there is a brick wall between your eyes and the body you are trying to see? Do you see still the body? No? So seemingly, seeing exists in relationship to other things, like eyes and things near and around the eyes. So seeing itself is also relative. Then how can you base "the Absolute" on something relative like seeing, bodies, "conscious" and "other people"; concepts that are defined in relationship to something else (conscious vs. not conscious, me vs. not me, seeing vs. not seeing, body vs. not body, my body vs. not my body, etc.)? The answer is: you can't.

An article in such a mainstream magazine that mentions Bernardo Kastrup. Interesting development. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sense-of-time/202411/physicalism-is-dead

I'm more of the view that your experience generates your beliefs. You don't choose your beliefs, at least not easily or on a whim. But once you have your beliefs, they will also "affect" or be closely correlated with your experience. For example, back when I believed that other people carried "harmful spiritual energies" that could infect you as well as inanimate objects, that affected many things about my experience: how I perceived other people, my responses to other people, to objects they interacted with, how I interact with those objects, the emotional tone of those interactions, etc.

You're asking why a drug which undresses the ego sometimes makes you physically undress yourself? 🤔 Why do we wear clothes? Whatever the answer is, it will be impacted by LSD.

I don't believe that will be worth our time 😄

We do not inhabit the same dictionary universe 😅

What?? 😂

Maybe read the discussion. @Davino wanted to mention a model which he thought maybe would actually be universal (which, well, you can judge for yourself). By reading the papers and seeing that the samples (probably) only included Westerners. Again, maybe Cook-Greuter should do that But of course, we are not talking about personal anecdotes here. We are talking about giving thousands of people sentence completion tests. You know, rigorous, quantitative, nerdy, desktop warrior science. I did touch on the problem of cultural imperialism earlier, and it could definitely have wide-ranging effects like you are suggesting. However, there are of course other people around the world who were not colonized, and also for the colonized, there could be variability, and we would still need to do the science (as even there, there is essentially none). Merely making educated guesses and knowing a few people is not that. Now, you can get far on just that, but that's not what people like Cook-Greuter are interested in. It is, but that is what we are talking about right now. If you want to talk about something else, then don't listen to Cook-Greuter and her findings based on sentence completion answers from 4500 probably mostly Western participants. You are free! Free as the wind!

The critics disputed this with respect to the particular order of the stages (it does not reflect African or Asian cultures; link). Again, these dynamics are not systematized in her model. She merely mentions the role of culture but she doesn't elaborate on it, she doesn't focus in on it ("EDT focuses on the development of individual awareness"). Very Hindu supremacist of you 😂 What about the Tibetan psyche? Sure, but then again, let the models have "Hindu development" or "American development" in their title. You or AI? I don't care about AI answers when interpreting nuanced theoretical matters. You might as well ask an ant or a butterfly. I acknowledged this when talking about Wilber's Tier 3 model earlier. Still, how undeveloped can you be when stumbling into Awakening? Look, you're free to have your Western-centric models and use them to understand yourself. I have made this argument myself before. I just want us to aim higher and be very explicit about the frankly embarrasing limitations of our current models. And it's not a hopeless or pointless endevor to include more diverse samples even though absolute universality is not practically possible. It's in line with the general philosophy of science of falsifying hypotheses rather than "verifying" them (whatever that means). For example, if you have a Western-centric model and you repeat the study using a sample that for example controls for modernity and it ends up producing a slightly different model, then you have falsified the previous model as being independent of modernity. That is a valueable finding and is generally how science progresses (outside paradigm shifts).

Just ask people. This is Jan Esmann describing remembering his past lives just after he got Enlightened ("Self-Realized") in one of his BATGAP interviews: https://batgap.com/jan-esmann-transcript/

Yeah. I was bamboozled by the context change from thinking it was Beans' thread on his general thoughts on grammar to it being a reply to a Kendrick Lamar thread. But also, ironically, he could have communicated it a bit better :>

By the way, sorry for derailing the thread, but @Yimpa baited me into it as he linked @Beans' post in this thread, and when you click on that link (without reading that it's a reply to a thread) and without scrolling afterwards, it looks like it was @Beans who made the thread.

Tell me, if you are unable to adapt to a social situation and we are interested in potential explanations based on the personal characteristics of that person, what options are there?

Let me re-iterate: if you engage with a certain social situation regularly and you are somehow not adapting to the expectations of that social situation (whatever they may be, e.g. proper grammar, or merely being able to speak, or not taking a shit next to somebody who is eating), people will not be happy with you, and in that sense, it's not good (and it may be caused by various "pathologies" like I mentioned).

Theld9ck lgogø ek jxii7 gikbnk ognno ndeinnf pmfmkrnf gjgofi. It's perfectly possible to eat a meal while somebody is taking a shit next to you. Yes. Maybe. I made a perfectly fluent point about the context. Would you listen to Kendrick Lamar if he sounded like theld9ck lgogø ek jxii7 gikbnk ognno ndeinnf pmfmkrnf gjgofi? It depends on the context. They are pretty explanatory for why people expect proper grammar in certain situations. I just explained why some people don't like improper grammar. No need to be offended.

Communication and being social in general is a game with rules. If you don't know how to play the game, people will be unhappy with you. It's not as much about grammar as knowing how to be social and follow a set of rules. And if you are unwilling to follow the rules, you are either lazy or a delinquent. And if you are unable to learn the rules, you are either disabled or unintelligent. These are generalizations, but all in all, a lack of rule-following (e.g. proper grammar) is generally not good. But of course, people with bad grammar hang out with other people with bad grammar, and for them, it's within the rules of the game, so it's not seen as a problem for them. Which rules to follow are dictated by the people you hang out with (hence why Leo made that post about what rules he wants us to follow).

😂

Why is it that when I derail a thread with an arguably not even tangential topic, everybody loses their minds, but when people do it with non-dual/awakening/enlightenment mumbo-jumbo, nobody bats an eye? 😃

So I was walking my usual night walk, and before I came back to go inside, I stopped to look at the beautiful snow, the moon and the oddly lit clouds up above. Then I got a nostalgic feeling back to when I used to smoke out in the night. Then I simply had the impulse to pretend taking a hit from a joint, inhaling and exhaling, just for the nostalgia. Then I decided to pretend like I'm going to smoke an entire joint just the same way I used to. I was also curious if I could recreate the high state this way. Smoking is like riding a bike or playing an instrument in that even after a long break, you quickly if not instantly get into the old groove, the old patterns. So I took the careful puffs like I used to do to not accidentally cough. I filled my mouth with the cool winter air running through my fingers, and the cool air filling my lungs gave the feeling of inhaling something other than just air, actual smoke, causing the slight heaviness and irritation in the lungs reminiscent of the real experience. After each exhale, I felt into my body, searching for the faint warmth associated with the body high, and the memories of this feeling flooded me, creating a feeling reminiscent of the real experience. I thought that smoking for a high like this is actually quite an exercise in body awareness. Similarly, I remembered the sensation of becoming more aware of one's surroundings, of sounds, of the visual scenery, of the visual static in the visual field while looking up at the dark blue early-morning nightsky. I kept on taking puffs, following the script, pretending like I'm not wasting it, hurrying a little in between puffs, feeling the slight excitement of smoking it, again feeling the body high coming on, feeling slightly exhausted from smoking, thinking that there is not much left of the joint and it's soon time to pack up. I finished the imaginary joint with the smaller and smaller puffs, milking it for every last breath, all until it nearly burns my fingers, until I throw it away. As I throw it away, I look one more time at the beautiful snow, the dark blue nightsky, feeling my lungs breathing slightly labored, feeling the warmth in my body, and standing there for a moment taking it all in, until I decide to go inside. I turn towards the door and walk slowly towards it, I type the PIN slowly and unlock the door, step inside while carefully removing my shoes, removing my jacket slowly and gently and hanging it on the jacket stand. And then I walk and turn on the light on dim, and I pause for a moment to assess my overall state. I was actually feeling quite "high". Not in the sense that I was overwhelmed by bodily euphoria, although I did feel something in my body as well, but especially my mental state had experienced quite a significant shift. Even as I'm writing this, I feel different. I've read about how the embodied or procedural aspects of drug use have a strong effect when it comes to driving things like addiction and craving, but seemingly, it seems to have a strong effect on the drug experience generally, and that you can emulate some of the experiential aspects, granted that you are able to emulate the procedural aspects accurately (which I felt I did). I wonder what a similarly invested attempted emulation could do for something like LSD. I have sometimes done small excursions with my mind where I try to emulate the psychedelic state, and it does have some noticable effect, but if done in a procedurally similar fashion, it could probably have even more profound effects. And as for people saying "it's placebo". Well, yes, that is exactly what it is. Placebo, or the mind, is incredibly powerful. It's the thing that gets high after all. You can make it do incredible things if you push the right buttons in the right way. Ingesting a substance is only a particularly powerful way of doing it (and of course, should not be undersold or underestimated). But I believe with such techniques like I've described here, especially if practiced and mastered, similar to other techniques like seated concentrative meditation, could definitely aid in profound transformation. Does that mean I will get "high" more often like this? Maybe? Anyways, thanks for reading my "trip report", travelling sober into the sea of memories and deeply ingrained procedural habits, triggering pathways of mind and feeling that have long laid dormant but which are associated with truly altered states of consciousness, partially emulating and provoking them in an act of psychic necromancy. Thank you and god bless America.

The new Opeth album is finally out and it's amazing: What Opeth is known for is their insane dynamic range (jumping between soft prog rock and death metal in the same song), but with this new album, it is taken to new extremes, which I will explain: Their last four albums saw the elimination of death metal elements (particularly the death metal growls) and rather a revertion back to hard rock or heavy metal elements, while still keeping the dialectic with the soft elements. So until now, they have essentially had two main "modes" in their dynamic range which they play on. Now, as they have spent the last 13 years building that more classic hard rock heavy metal style, they have created a new mode, which when they reintroduced death metal elements on this album, creates three main modes. There are some songs where you can distinctly feel this, where instead of a sudden contrast between a soft rock section and a death metal section, you get a slow ramping up from soft, to hard, to death metal. And the death metal parts are really death metal (the song Paragraph 4 contains arguably some of the heaviest death metal parts I've heard). Now, there are some songs from older albums that seem to do this, but I think it has become a more mainstage quality of their songs with this new album.

True. Insanity is insanity of the mind, the ego. The ego reacts in fear, with rage. Awakening transcends the distinction-making ego that fears, that rages. The ego is left alone to be sane or insane if it wants. It's true that you have to let go of the fear of insanity, of the possibility of insanity, and giving yourself completely into that when transcending the ego which generally sustains itself on what it perceives to be sanity. But this is not the same as actually becoming insane. This is a dangerous conflation which can lead to a lot of unneccessary pain and suffering. If you are insane, you are insane, not You.