Carl-Richard

@SeaMonster I think splitting hairs between grammatical cases is a bit of a stretch. Besides, you have people like Sadhguru and Osho who say the best thing you can do is to "die consciously", you have buddhists lighting themselves on fire and performing automummification, mahasamadhi, rainbow body. How is that for NLP?

I'm simply inquiring into the emotion and asking "what is the emotion for?", like you recommended in your previous post. Through that, I discover that emotions allocate attention and energy towards a particular goal. If that is inherently victimizing, then I guess it is, but then you're just as much a victim of your hand picking up a coffee mug, which sounds a bit silly.

Weed. I tried mixing it with alcohol, but I didn't like how it impacted my mind. I wasn't just trying to escape myself, but I was also deeply obsessed with existential questions, and weed fuels that in a particular way. It allows you to hyper-focus on your interests while also dissociating yourself from uncomfortable realities. It's a drug of distraction, meanwhile alcohol numbs everything pretty equally. You tend to suffer the same things over and over again. Your fears, anxieties, worries, insecurities; they're endlessly stuck on repeat. If they only occurred to you once, you wouldn't be suffering them anymore. On the other hand, pain is often due to something immediate or unexpected. It's more like a one-off thing, because you'll learn to avoid the source of the pain (although chronic pain is a bit different). I think you're thinking of choice as being 100% of your making, which is never really the case. But some things are more under your control than other things. There is a difference between being struck by lightening and sticking your fingers into a socket. Neither of them are either fully in your control or outside your control, but one is more than the other. Suffering is generally more in your control than being exposed to pain. Again, pain is very much a reflexive response generally to something unexpected, while suffering is something you're generally familiar with and which can be greatly reduced by making some conscious effort towards that.

Anxiety, substance abuse. Pain is more concrete and immediate, suffering is more abstract and cyclical. There are points to be made on both sides. There are many things largely outside your control, but some things can be said to be more under your control. For example, many substance addicts develop a self-destructive doom mindset: when things get hard, they revert to "fuck it, I don't care anyway" and it magnifies their problems 10x. A mindset like that is something you can change, and while it's not necessarily easy, it's a choice you can make. That doesn't mean it's 100% under your control. You can for example go to a therapist which will help you to make that choice.

I can talk as somebody who comes from a very privileged background in terms of material things, yet I've suffered a lot. Things tend to balance themselves out.

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@UnbornTao The very word "emotion" stems from being put in "motion", hence the expression of "being moved", and also "being motivated". Whether it's mostly a reactive or proactive emotion, it's still directed towards something, and this becomes very clear if you introspect about your emotions experientially. So I see a strong case to be made for the idea of an external cause or impetus for emotions. Now, you can be daydreaming about something and feel emotions based on that, which in that case, sure, you can't point to any immediate externalities (and it's just "created by you"), but still, the content of the emotion will direct your behavior towards something. Likewise, in a roleplay scenario, the emotions may be "manufactured", but if it's indeed an authentic experience of emotions, the emotions will still have directedness to them. You can also be highly conscious of your internal state and be better at adjusting your behavior with respect to emotions, while an unconscious person may linger more on the emotions or be wholly unaware of them and how they might be perpetuating them, but still, you'll unavoidably experience the directedness of emotions. I will also concede that you can be so very conscious to the point where emotions might seem almost non-existent or irrelevant from an outsider's perspective (as with some gurus or saints). But I would propose that these people are not "devoid" of emotion (or that they have decided to "not create emotions for themselves"), but rather that the intensity, duration and frequency of certain emotions is much lower compared to the average person. They still experience emotions, and the emotions still have directedness to them. My point with this topic is that often the directedness goes unaddressed and you're stuck with either wallowing in not feeling good and not finding a way out, or you find a way out but in a way that doesn't actually address the directedness and instead short-circuits it (like with "letting go" or many other spiritual approaches, or something like distraction or future avoidance of associated activities) which enables the emotion to keep repeating itself or become worse over time. And even if you are able to address the directness and the emotion subsides, merely writing down the lesson will firstly increase the chance that you'll remember it, and secondly, you'll have the lesson crystallized in text format.

It's not merely implied. It's evident in the emotion itself. If somebody steps on your toe and you get angry, you don't just "get angry". You get angry at the person who stepped on your toe. The emotion has a directedness to it; it allocates attention and energy towards a particular goal. For more complex emotions, it's often harder to identify the directedness, but it's there.

If I ever meet a non-duality person or Guraite person in real life, I'll be so bored.

Ignoring your human conditioning because "it doesn't exist" — that's spiritual bypassing.

If I could change one thing about this forum, it's the way solipsism is conflated with non-duality.

I watched that entire train wreck. I could somewhat understand Rollo if that tweet was actually not posted as a serious thing, but the thing I don't understand is why he can't just give his own definition of a high value man. He did it on another podcast from 7 months ago: "maximizes money, muscle and game".

I'll try to make myself more clear: If the emotion signals you to change your behavior in a way that is ultimately in line with your higher self, and you somehow manage to keep neglecting the signals using acceptance and mindfulness, that would be a form of spiritual bypassing. And again, relying on intuitive solutions can of course be sufficient, but also writing it down can amplify those solutions. There are competing forces within you, and your cognitive capacity is limited (memory, attention, etc.). Over a large sample of situations, sometimes the lower forces win, and sometimes you forget about prior solutions when faced with a situation where they're relevant. Writing it down provides you with a structure that crystallizes your commitment to your higher self. In that sense, merely relying on intuition could be more "spiritually bypass-y" than also relying on text, but that is of course stretching it (but also, intuition is just another tool just like text, so why limit yourself?). And I know I'm using the term in a very broad sense, but I think you can still follow it Damn that's some good stuff Ok I admit I'm very sloppy with my use of the term. There I was just thinking about it as neutralizing worldly matters by zooming out to a larger spiritual perspective. It's not a particularly scientific term with a strict definition, but I guess we're making process

Bernardo Kastrup has a word for it: dissociation.

Mindfulness and accepting emotions are both aspects of psychological flexibility, so yes that can be a part of it. It's just that if you accept something without changing your behavior, it becomes a form of spiritual bypassing (I used to do that a lot). Then again, you don't have to manually think about it or write it down to change your behavior, but it helps. I used to underestimate how powerful writing something down is. I do it for almost everything now and it has likewise changed almost everything. For example, about a year ago, I started writing down any and all insights about how I could improve my form when lifting at the gym (because I had been struggling with muscle imbalances for a while). I would consistently have about one insight per session which I would implement in the next session. This is what it looks like (most of it is in Norwegian lol): Now one year later, my body is completely changed and almost perfectly symmetrical, through nothing more than the power of insight and structured recording and implementation. For example if you're going bald, or you lost some of your limbs, or got a stroke which impacted your ability to speak; those things are likely not going to change, so merely accepting them or zooming out to the absolute perspective can be appropriate in order to deal with them. The problem is when it becomes compulsive and done as an unconscious defense mechanism rather than a conscious choice.

I would also add that beliefs don't necessarily need to have zero proof (but I would have to challenge your idea of proof). What you mean by proof in this case would be direct experience, but there are many other types of proof beyond that. For example, you can get convincted for a crime based on DNA tests, but the test doesn't "prove" (in your definition of the term) that you actually committed the crime. It only gives you a strong indication that you likely committed the crime (depending on the context), but yet we tend to call that proof (or evidence). That's just one example, but even the fact that you left the car in the garage is in a way proof that the car is in the garage (it's just maybe not a strong proof). So a belief doesn't need to have zero proof, but rather a belief can always be wrong.

I would also add that beliefs don't necessarily need to have zero proof (but I would have to challenge your idea of proof). What you mean by proof in this case would be direct experience, but there are many other types of proof beyond that. For example, you can get convincted for a crime based on DNA tests, but the test doesn't "prove" (in your definition of the term) that you actually committed the crime. It only gives you a strong indication that you likely committed the crime (depending on the context), but yet we tend to call that proof (or evidence). That's just one example, but even the fact that you left the car in the garage is in a way proof that the car is in the garage (it's just maybe not a strong proof). So a belief doesn't need to have zero proof, but rather a belief can always be wrong.

Then I would say no, you can't live without beliefs. If you leave your car in your garage every day and then one day you open the garage and find out it's stolen, you will act very surprised. The reaction is explained by you believing that the car was still in the garage. Had you instead believed that the car was stolen prior to opening the garage, your reaction would be very different. The belief is of course not always congruent with reality, but often it is, and it helps you to survive by reducing complexity and organizing your cognition. Also, you don't choose your beliefs. You can't help yourself but act surprised when you open the garage and find there is no car in there.

Give an example of a belief you have.

If you want to really lean hard on the caveat of "in subtle ways", isn't this the case for all of non-duality?

Pick some shrooms my dude. Create some adventure

Then don't link newspapers

Then don't link studies.

@thierry Are you ok?

I peaked in college when I did an impossible volleyball smash and everybody literally lost their minds. Sports feats when there is flow involved is one of the best things you can experience.