Carl-Richard

That's just called not being stupid

I'm an ex- drug addict who benefited from mindfulness, but it was certainly not the whole story. Reductionism is rarely a sufficient answer. One of my old roommates from last year who began a downward spiral of heavy drug use was recently spotted by my friend picking bottles from trash cans. He regularly watched Sadhguru and talked about the benefits of meditation. When I think about it, that could've been me. I consider myself very lucky. There were a lot of fortunate circumstances in my external environment that coincided with each other and which affected my behavior and way of thinking. When I count up all the details, it actually seems like a miracle.

Addictions are distracting and reduces your ability to pay attention, and awakening reduces addictions (it goes both ways). Addictions are compulsive cycles. Establishing some order/direction/linearity is what paying attention is about and what spirituality is about.

The world is not black and white. It's green and blue (jking ?). But yeah.

Petter Northug got caught speeding and the police found cocaine in his home

To add to your list: pursue a life goal, establish a work schedule and always follow it (plan the conditions for taking breaks), write notes for everything your mind keeps reminding you to do, whether it's that day or the near future or the far future (so your mind doesn't have to keep reminding you about it), eliminate substances (caffeine, sugar), take a 10-minute walk every day straight after dinner, optimize your micronutrients (I take zinc, magnesium and fish oil and have not been sick since I started doing that), be aware of how foods make you feel and if you're getting enough of each macronutrient, get about 10 minutes of direct sunlight in the morning.

I'm referring to the sugar content.

Most people prefer to do it in small installments

Anything you do as a human is in some way biased, so yes.

It's even wilder than that. I used to hang out with people who believed that normal people can harbor harmful energies, and even though I told myself that I didn't really believe it, I literally started feeling bad around normal people. In fact, even when I stopped hanging out with the people who believed these things, it took several months before I went back to normal. It taught me that beliefs aren't chosen; they sneak in through the backdoor. So that means you should be even more careful than what you're suggesting. It's the same reason why you shouldn't let your kids hang out with bad people. You're inevitably shaped by your environment, especially when you're young and have not developed your worldview.

Probably.

Correct. I could agree Nahm used to bring up the absolute a lot in threads that weren't explicitly talking about the absolute, but I didn't get the impression that he would for example directly quote someone and try to contradict their statements ad nauseam, or at least not in an inflammatory or low effort way.

Not really. There is a fine line between providing useful and elegant pointers to the absolute in the appropriate context vs doing it in a way that for example derails a conversation. Context and style matters a lot.

Reminds me of the classic Advaita Trap:

At some point, ending suffering is seen as preferable over any singular life goal/experience. I think it's a new member thing. It will disappear over time.

What does that mean?

Can you turn off the sun just as easily as turning off the light in your room? No. There is obviously a useful distinction to be made between a personal "you" and the transpersonal "You".

There is nothing wrong with reducing suffering.

Sure, but you can still ask what is the reasoning behind it. Besides, recently there was a huge thread where somebody was claiming they're not conscious and that we are fine to kill them It's for those people you want to give the reasoning behind it.

Basically drugs.

To try to be unbiased is just another bias.

You can suffer while sitting in a silent room doing nothing and where nothing is hurting you.

Because it's so often used to deny any forms of knowledge that is not 100% certain, and people who get stuck in it have to perform the most fantastic feats of mental gymnastics to avoid having normal conversations about the most banal things, e.g. the idea that other people exist. And the reason people do it is because it's so fucking easy: just deny any forms of reasoning and stick to your "direct experience" and endlessly pontificate about how openminded you are for not entertaining anything that requires more than two brain cells to think about.

Why should I do that?