Carl-Richard

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.

If you want bliss from being in their presence, you would want a teacher with a strong Shakti. Jan Esmann is pretty unmatched here. But he doesn't call himself a saint, so there is that. He does Shaktipat, a focused transmission of energy.

There are so many assumptions behind words like "experience", "proof" and "true" that I'm afraid only can be remedied by unwinding the pop idealist worldview for yourself. There is nothing behind the scenes in an absolute sense, but at the same time, in a relative sense, there can be things behind the scenes. And this is not a contradiction of the absolute, because again, the absolute transcends and includes the relative. Even if it seems contradictory on the surface as we are seemingly dividing the absolute into absolute vs relative, you of all people should be able to understand this as you seemingly love contradictions and counterintuitive inversions. Besides, you yourself go to great lengths to divide the absolute into concepts to elucidate your points, so again, I don't see what the struggle is.

If by "if you imagine that", you mean "if God imagines that", then it's all good. Alright, so if you claim that it's indeed possible that some colors, sounds, thoughts and feelings can be hidden, then we have at least defeated the problematic form of solipsism that the thread is about ("no other people are conscious, and this is absolute"), which is the type of solipsism that many people seem to be concerned about. Now, some might say "I can only be certain that my colors, sounds, thoughts exist, but it's still possible that I'm wrong" and call themselves solipsists, but I doubt people would be losing their minds over that if that was their actual position. What is actually happening, of course, is that they're conflating it with the absolute: solipsism is "absolutely the case", there is no other way. And that's what's so dangerous. Anyways, again, this was the kind of solipsism we were concerned about addressing in this thread. And again, this form of solipsism is obviously not absolute. You can of course speak of a different kind of solipsism where it's the divine Self that is the only "self" that exist, but within that "self", certain colors, sounds, thoughts and feelings may still be hidden to some smaller selves. And also again, we are addressing the other kind of solipsism here, which again is a pervasive issue that needs to be addressed. You have to lay down with this habit of asserting that the other person you're speaking to "doesn't understand". It's so needlessly condescending.

Answer the question: is it possible that some colors, sounds, thoughts and feelings are hidden?

I was being a dick, and I'm sorry, but that is what I said. I let it sit for many minutes and I still felt like it was appropriate to say. Maybe it wasn't. I don't take mental health stigma lightly, but I also don't take parading it around lightly either, especially not in this context with what's at stake. Because, are we acknowledging what is happening? That on serious matters such as solipsism, where people routinely become mentally unstable because of thinking about it, people are routinely muddying their language or in fact abandoning the function of language altogether? Is it not in line to maybe call this out and maybe provide a counter? Are we acknowledging what's at stake?

The fact that you portray a trip to the mental hospital as something which you had a fully sober and clear personal account of is indicative of the problem. Of course you won't have a problem with chaos if it thoroughly pervades your mind. But don't expect others to be OK with that. ...sure: [...] Whatever perceptions you are perceiving are the only perceptions available in the current state. [...] In hindsight, your response to that question doesn't even make sense, but I let it go because I was focused on you explaining how a relativistic concept like "currently" could be absolute (which you never answered by the way, you just gave your usual pop idealist ramble while not responding to anything in particular).

The misunderstanding is claiming to not speak about "things" but then continuing to speaking about "things". As for pinning down the distinction between concepts like perception vs consciousness, I can only suggest reading or watching some videos on that. 09:23 Here, Rupert Spira takes you on a guided tour, starting in the world of perception (of "things") and ending in the world of consciousness (beyond "things").

Well, @Razard86 and some others are assuming there are such things as perceptions, which is where the problem lies. I just read some comment on Bernardo Kastrup's website which used the term "popular idealism", which I found quite interesting. It's the popular notion in most spiritual communities that says "experience is the only thing that exists". While this is ultimately a true statement, of course, it does not go more into detail than that. It does not make subtle distinctions between things like perception and consciousness, which again requires either some understanding of science (psychology, cognitive science) or having thoroughly read some philosophical or religious texts, or frankly being enlightened (which almost nobody in the aforementioned camp are). And herein lies the confusion when you start making inferences based on that very general notion "experience is the only thing that exist". Once you start invoking other concepts such as "you" and "other people" and generally "things" happening in experience, people quickly opt to the most seemingly parsimonious but rather naive position of "only my experience of things in experience exist, not anybody else's experience of things". But of course, those are inferences based on the original statement and lousy distinctions, not the statement in itself, hence the problem of conflating that original statement with solipsism. So it's the problem of "pop idealism", similarly to the problem of pop science; of being interesting in the topic but making surface-level statements and flawed inferences based on inaccurate distinctions.

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.

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).

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. It's so obviously ungrounded and vacuous. You might as well ask an ant or a butterfly. I acknowledged this when talking about Wilber's Tier 3 model earlier. But 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 (or rather provided evidence in that direction). That is a valueable finding and is generally how science progresses (outside big 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).