Carl-Richard

PTSD? ??

That is only when you're on the other side. Before that, it's just conjecture. It's part of the frameworks of beliefs and goals I'm talking about.

Leo is not outright dismissing meditation. Psychedelics just has different outcomes, and he values those outcomes more. I would also be careful to equate meditation with causing lasting change while psychedelic doesn't. Both meditation and psychedelics need to be couched within a very specific framework of beliefs and goals to actually be conducive to the lasting change you're talking about. My mom meditates for stress relief. My friends take psychedelics for fun. You won't see them progressing on a gradual path towards enlightenment at any significant rate. Besides, even within the specific framework I'm talking about, you can argue it's not the meditation or the psychedelics that is the most crucial step for finally "getting there". It's to finally let go of all attachments. If you're not progressing towards letting go of your attachments, your baseline state will remain forever stuck in a contracted and cyclical state of unsavory behaviors referred to as "suffering". You can have 1000 very deep awakening experiences, but it will still not stick unless you fully surrender all notions of control, all notions of identity, effectively your entire life.

I've heard about it, but I didn't know it had an effect on alcohol metabolism. Interesting.

Strongest stimulant I've had is crushed Ritalin pills, which wasn't that fun. Last party I was at (the first one I didn't touch any substances including alcohol btw), I was outside with the drug people (where I belong), hiding in a dark corner chopping lines on their phones in the wind. My friend who was super drunk had some of it, and instead of sobering up, he somehow became more incoherent and more mellowed out. Either huge amounts of alcohol + small amounts of coke is something else entirely, or all of it is just super individual (he usually gets very chill on alcohol while I get hyper as fuck).

I've cracked the code! How to start off any Razard86 topic: 1. Choose a relative concept. 2. Point to the absolute and spiritually bypass the concept. I'm not even gaslighting ?

If you observe what is happening without labeling it, you'll see that it's is just a big spontaneous happening, which is exactly like imagination: spontaneous creativity without any true origin. From this perspective, it sounds more valid to say that everything is imaginary, because there is no true "ground" from which things are arising out from. But this is also just a linguistic preference. You could describe it as "groundless" or "empty" or "nothing", or choose to not describe it at all. That said, if you want to start labeling what is happening, you can start to make distinctions between things like "real" and "not real". For example, people will often call something not real if it's not shared among other people. If you're seeing pink elephants and nobody else are, they will tell you that it's not real. This is in fact where you get concepts like objective/physical reality: there seems to be a shared underlying ground from which a great amount of things are arising out from. But the mistake would be to think that this "shared ground" is nothing more than a label, just like "real" and "people".

It's true that SD, as far as it's based on Graves' initial data set, is not very empirically rigorous, but there is something to be said for how it correlates strongly with more established developmental stage theories. So why is SD not more popular? Well, firstly, there doesn't seem to be a culture of using developmental stage theories as main stage clinical interventions, which is generally how something becomes popular in psychology. They're mostly used as side pieces that you just learn about and have in the back of your head. There is a reason you haven't heard of something called "Piagetian Therapy" (because it doesn't exist) but you have heard about "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy". Secondly, these theories have traditionally been limited to childhood development. Adult stage development is actually a very obscure concept, which is probably the biggest reason why nobody is paying it much attention.

@Jwayne I can agree with that. But I think SD is largely on par with other types of WEIRD psychological theories. After all, the stages seem to line up nicely with most other WEIRD developmental stage theories (e.g. Piaget, Kohlberg). So it should be OK to apply it to e.g. people on this forum or US politics.

@Jwayne How do you think SD was created?

I kinda regret that I didn't try to draw the patterns as I was experiencing them. I remember quite vividly watching a grassy hill from the distance and seeing these distinct geometric shapes slowly circling around themselves (and this was just on 150 μg of LSD). I could've easily drawn one of them. It was as if they were actual objects that you could walk up and touch (although they were mostly like 2D-like imprints on the grass).

Because it makes you trip balls. It contains ibotenic acid which is apparently a neurotoxin.

Not specific enough >:)

I'm going to geek the hell out of this, but why do you say "hello" when you greet someone? It's a ritual that establishes connection. When you're greeting your close friends, you might develop your own way of greeting, signalling a special kind of connection. Greeting your YouTube audience is just like that. All these various kinds of social cues are contextual markers for how to behave, and I think that is fundamentally why we use them. When you hear "heeey it's Leo", you know it's Leo time and it's time to listen carefully. When you hear "waddup it's ya boy Skinny Penis", that sets a different tone.

I've been through this exact line of thinking. The way out of it is to think of the stages as levels of complexity, and that it's not modelling a strict developmental sequence, but rather developmental altitudes. But still, it's the case that individuals are statistically more likely to start out from a stage of lower complexity and then move upwards through stages of higher complexity, but that this process is of course not 100% linear, as Spiral Dynamics involves the interplay between individual and culture, and that this dynamic is a bit more open for variation than say the stages of growth within the womb or the growth of a plant. It's also true that the model was conceived in a largely Western context, based on empirical data from Western individuals and conceptual constructs from Western science, which means that the particular stages might not apply in a non-Western context. But this is not just a problem with Spiral Dynamics, but all of Western social science in general. We base almost all of our findings on "WEIRD" study populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), and even worse than that, it's mostly just university students. That is of course very limiting, but it's a truly pervasive problem that won't be fixed anytime soon.

But anything might be true. Why are you particularly focused on whether people could be conspiring against you?

The thing is I wasn't trying to communicate what happened to me by that entire post. That already happened in the first sentence. I was trying to link it up to a scientific hypothesis I've had in mind for a few years and also Vervaeke's concept of relevance realization.

Yeah, and any future plans.

Blissed out yogis can be low on the spiral as well. Spiral development and spiritual development are from a general standpoint only weakly correlated imo. Contrary to the "popular" or "trashy" or "low-culture" beliefs about Spiral Dynamics; Jesus, Buddha or Adiyogi were not Turquoise. They were probably barely piercing Blue. As for violent heavy metal, as @integral was alluding to, it's not that black or white. Meshuggah, which has created some of the most violent sounds in metal music ever, has an album called "ObZen" (as in "obscene" + "Zen"). The album cover has a picture of an androgynous man meditating with blood on his hands. So even in that imagine alone, you see that it's possible to marry the pure and the violent, at least conceptually. And the music in that album is likewise simultaneously trans-like and meditative and on the other hand terrorizing and disgusting-sounding. The amount of thought and conceptual brilliance put into the overarching concept and each song is certainly "high art". Besides, the story (in my interpretation) deals with a man who wakes up to himself but also becomes aware of the corruption within himself and of the surrounding world (pointing to the two-way split again). Tell me if all of that isn't profoundly deep. Then on the other hand, I've noticed times where I think heavy metal feels too violent for me to listen to, and it sometimes correlates with how "sensitive" I feel. But on the other hand again, there are many times where I listen to heavy metal while entering states of no-mind and it's completely ok. So again, the only real pattern here is that it's not black or white. So it seem to have very little to do with spiritual development, but you could make the case that more complex music correlates more strongly with spiral development. For example, I would place the guys in Meshuggah at Green. You won't find that level of conceptual and musical detailedness in say a standard country song (which is more likely Blue). But you also have pop songs that ooze Green (certainly Orange) in a more cultural way (less cognitive), but which are painfully simple both conceptually and musically.

Maybe I should've asked what you're currently doing first (it's a bit late over here lol).

Find the notepad on your phone. Set a specific life goal that you think is meaningful for you and lay out the concrete steps you need to take to pursue it (e.g. getting a degree, then getting a job). If it's something you find truly meaningful, you're tapping into intrinsic motivation, which is the most powerful motivator. Write it down. Write a daily work schedule for pursuing that goal. Plan out the conditions for taking breaks (and do take at least one break a week, but otherwise never deviate from the plan unless you're e.g. terribly sick or for other reasons not able to work). Just in general, whatever your mind tells you to do, write it down and plan the conditions for fulfilling that goal, and COMMIT to that. Whether it's a daily errand like buying groceries or a long-term goal like getting better at dating or an intellectual idea, it doesn't matter. Write it down so that your mind is not burdened by excess thoughts, indecisiveness and uncertainty. These are meta-tools that are extremely useful for getting some basic structure into your life at all levels and on track towards something meaningful, regardless of the particular goal you have in mind. For me, they're indispensable. Merely choosing a goal, even though if you end up changing your mind at some point, is curative on its own, because you'll be going towards something, which is fundamentally what we're designed to do. You'll also be growing and learning different skills and things about yourself. Merely writing a schedule and sticking to it eliminates indecisiveness and uncertainty from your mind, and it makes your mind think clearer, which energizes you and gives you momentum. Merely writing things down is curative because you solidify that structure and also outsource your mental working capacity and eliminate unnecessary clutter so that you can focus on what is meaningful.

Haha keep telling yourself that

Hey, we need some people to be interested in science But yeah, that's the greatest understatement ever Silence can kill.

I just realized that my experience of being unable to think random useless thoughts after my awakenings is actually just relevance realization being refined. This also made me think about my hypothesis that the reduction of self-referential thoughts associated with meditation could partially be explained by memory re-consolidation. To recap: sitting in a physiologically calm context (lower heart rate, slower breathing, etc.) and with psychological detachment (the ability to see your emotional reactions as an appearance rather than the emotional content) means that the memories which are recalled in that setting get re-written with a weaker emotional load, and over time, the thoughts become less threatening and are less likely to cause rumination. And now I can better explain why: it's because less emotional memories are less likely to be relevant. If there is an important problem that needs to be fixed, your mind will load it with emotions and bring it to your conscious attention (because emotions exist to tell you what is relevant to your survival). But when a thought is less emotionally loaded, it will become less likely to occupy your attention, hence meditation reduces the time spent thinking in general. Pretty cool.

The planet will be just fine. Even if humans wipe out 99% of life on the planet including themselves, give it a few million years and you'll have big fertile ecosystems again. We're really only a threat to the current ecosystems.