Carl-Richard

The way you use language and concepts lacks clarity. "You just fear insanity". Why do you "fear" clarity?

Progressive melodic death black metal 😍

That's perfect, but you see that it's before you create the physical universe that you can really say those things and it becomes really clear what you mean. Conversely, when you start creating the physical universe and things in it, like people, and you start making statements about those things and those people, that is when people get lost and start conflating You with those things, which is not the essence of You. The Absolute is simply isness, and it's hard to see what isness really is until you strip away the surface appearances (the physical universe) and all that is left is pure unobscured isness. Likewise, to say "it's only You" only becomes clear when you strip away the physical universe. Then it becomes harder to conflate the You with the little ego self and its machinations.

😂 I actually used to watch a few of his videos like 10 years ego. And I used to debate him in the comment sections, trying to convince him of something about multiculturalism. Then at some point, I hit a crossroads where I felt I had to choose between pursuing more ethnonationalist Alt-Right content vs embracing my more deeply felt leftist inclinations ("I don't actually hate colored people or immigrants, I don't want to exclude them from my society, I'm for compassion, empathy, equality"), and I chose the leftist route. But he and people like Sargon of Akkad almost got me down that road. But no, I love churches, but also, the concept of church burnings scratches some deep anarchical itch in me 😆 Also, I think more and more about survivalism nowadays with these new geopolitical changes ("maybe the lunatics are right?").

Any organism's attempt at sustaining itself will involve gas and breaks. The Left just has a particular configuration of those. It would only be weird if there weren't such "contradictions".

Asking nature "why" is like asking a kid why it wants candy. Nature does what nature does.

That's very funny because he actually lived in the same neighborhood as my mom back when he lived in Norway

Uhm achtually, that's deathcore, not black metal☝️🤓 This is black metal: You know it's black metal when he is singing in my native tongue (Norwegian) from inside a Norwegian prison cell 😌 (correction: it was recorded from before he was in prison, but released while he was in prison. Some of his other albums were recorded in prison). Or this if you want something that wasn't produced on a potato:

I wish Leo never moved beyond calling it Absolute Infinity. Because then the people who mindlessly parrot his language would never think about putting a limit on infinity.

Dave's entire audience is a bunch of 14 year old New Atheist clones who just learned to string sentences together.

I finally let do ChatGPT do something useful for me and let it write all the code for a MATLAB script I need for an experimental paradigm I'm gonna run I have zero knowledge with MATLAB or really any coding in general so that saved me probably a lot of time (even though it's a simple script). AI is perfect for tasks where you only need something to work and you don't really care how, less for telling you things about how reality works and where the point is the "how". My god you're being influenced by the social matrix every moment you live in society. ChatGPT is just the social matrix fed through a meat grinder and re-assembled using essentially the same principle as the autocorrect on your phone, sometimes producing Frankensteinian contortions.

There is a difference between opening your mind and transcending the mind. The former is just another mind game. It can be a useful and interesting and beautiful mind game, but it can also be terrifying and difficult. If you get to that point, and if you value your existence on Earth, you will eventually fall back on virtues like balance, temperance and clarify of mind (relevance, integrity, health). That is what a biological organism is anyway.

I don't quite see the connection to what I said. Seeing "things" is not absolute, which is clearly what you "see" me elaborate on in that quote. You can of course be conceptually corrupt and use the word "Seeing" to refer to Consciousness which is absolute, but that's indeed the problem. You're being conceptually corrupt (but probably in a less severe way than simply refusing to distinguish between the relative and the absolute). Of course, again, we're always being conceptually corrupt when using words for something that cannot be worded, but we can at least try to keep it to a minimum. Or else, the reductio ad absurdum to that would be that everything is allowed and for example even the most vague resemblances could be used to refer to the absolute, like the word "cheese", because it's so delicious once you taste it. And before you know it, you would see people on the forum referring to "Cheese" and "Absolute Cheesiness" and people making threads asking whether the cheese in their fridge is actually the Absolute Cheese, and then people like @Razard86 would be like "no you don't understand: there is NO DIFFERENCE between eating the cheese in your fridge and tasting Absolute Cheese! It's only a distinction you're cheesing up in your own cheese! The deepest awakening you have yet to discover is that reality is CHEESE!"

Is it possible that some colors, sounds and thoughts are hidden?

It's a minor disagreement in the same sense that lobotomizing your brain with a screwdriver is a minor disagreement with doing everything you can to keep it functioning.

They are relative but not equal. See my newly elaborated response above. It's true that it's essentially a doomed project from the start irrespective of your approach, but there are gradations of that doom depending on your approach, and your particular approach has particular consequences.

@Razard86 I just remembered why I stopped talking about non-duality a while ago. All talk about it is fundamentally impossible, no matter what standards of conceptual rigor you hold, and it gives the low standards of conceptual rigor air to breathe. To talk about it, you have to wrestle in the dirt of subtle conceptual corruption, and some allow themselves to wrestle like absolute pigs. And as happens with solipsism, this porcine activity spreads to other things that have nothing to do with non-duality, which is the danger I want to avoid. Of course, the non-dual project is about going beyond concepts altogether, and some wrestling in dirt can be a justifiable means to those ends given the potential positive outcomes. But it is possible to do this while employing at least some standards of conceptual rigor, and it can save many people from becoming completely lost with respect to using concepts in general. But if some people don't agree to this while discussing it, then it's a losing battle. A war on two fronts when all else is equal is unwinnable. More confusion may come out of it than clarity. The least corrupt way I think I can contribute is again to recommend to study relevant disciplines that employ high standards of conceptual rigor (be it philosophy, science, religious texts) and start to appreciate the value of such standards and again hopefully see how corruption of them in one place quicky bleeds over to another. That's not to say I will stop talking about non-duality altogether, but I'm considering to stop amplifying the reach of those who I consider to not do so in a rigorous way. Essentially, you're getting cancelled @Razard86 🤣 (personally by me, not through forum restrictions of course).

I have to recruit people to my study for my MSc, and I have gotten so many wild ideas. For example, I'm hanging up posters in the city, and I thought about putting a "lid" on the poster which says "look behind the lid!" In big black on white letters (but maybe other colors as well), which definitely will make at least someone curious. The whole trick with posters is to catch people's attention, so when there is addtional suspense, mystery and uncertainty involved, that could probably increase that likelihood. I also thought to make it Christmas-themed in December, as if they are opening a Christmas calendar to receive a gift 😂 (which arguably it could be for some people 😇 🧑‍🎄).

12 centimeter light worms burrowing through your spine and exploding through your head 😆 I have gotten more in contact with Shakti lately (it's mostly situated in the pelvis like a burning ball of energy) and meditating on it is so powerful it's terrifying. If I let go fully into it, it feels like it will start climbing and tease out the snake 😂

I suppose the analogy assumes the dog in the dream is just a solipsistic projection of your finite mind, an NPC, right? Now, firstly, whether or not you conclude that the dog is conscious is of course a relative matter. You're not dealing with the absolute here. You're dealing with conceptual accounts of finite appearances, in the relative. But also, secondly, I see through this analogy because I have concluded (from a relative perspective, based on observations and logical inferences) that there is no reason to believe that people in your nightly dreams are not conscious like yourself. But again, this is dealing with conceptual accounts of finite appearances, again in the relative. Nevertheless, when you concede to dealing with the relative, solipsism becomes laughable. It's only appealing if you try to make it absolute (which you can't) or use it to satisfy some other pop-philosophical absolutistic tendency (e.g. "absolute skepticism", which is actually in reality incompatible with solipsism anyway).

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?