Carl-Richard

Until Leo makes the admin position of the forum up for democratic election, I will not consider him Yellow

And I bet you if I had framed this thread as "contemplating the limitations and pitfalls of identifying Tier 2", i.e. Tier 2 larping language, everybody would throw themselves at it and provide lists upon lists of spectacular examples and just a free flow of creativity. But because I have this disagreeable tone, I have not primed the Tier 2 larp, and instead people react with their "inner Tier 1", their true self, feeling that their identity, their "single limited perspective", has been attacked and needs defending (being a bit hyperbolic of course; some of you kept it up despite it; and also of course, I know about the power of emotional cuing, priming, framing, so I don't blame you 🥰).

Yes ok, substitute "great actor".

Also, people who are just temperamentally careful, agreeable and not very comfortable with taking firm stances, who always qualify their statements with degrees and ifs, "maybe", "probably", are so extremely good at pulling of the Tier 2 larp. What better identity for someone who prefers to not stand up for anything at all than "there are just different perspectives", "you shouldn't be so critical or fight so hard with other perspectives", "people grow at their own pace, be kind".

Do you think Leonardo DiCaprio could pull off a good Tier 2?

Yeah, but you get the point: reducing reality down to something smaller or simpler, that's what an explanation is. And I get your point: you can sometimes treat the end of the reduction as what is "most real". However, I don't think that is the only thing we tend to call reductionism. I think reductionists often get criticized merely for just reducing a large number of things down to one or a few things, irrespective of any claims of realness. It's the idea that they're missing the bigger picture, epistemologically, rather than making a specific claim ontologically. The classic example is explaining everything with "capitalism", or reducing a complex problem down to simply "capitalism". There, the critique isn't necessarily that they're claiming that capitalism is more "real" than e.g. atoms, but simply that they are using it to explain essentially everything (or really complex problems), and that this is very simplistic, or reductionistic.

Yes, as we all know, friends and community are purely an Orange phenomena, and nobody needs to make a living or form ties with people of similar interests.

Easy: you look at the before and after the larp has begun, before learning about SD. Were you talking about roughly the same things, or did you suddenly get fixated on a new set of beliefs? Was there always a principled and embodied stance underlying it, or is it pure identity? I remember maybe a couple of weeks before my friends introduced me to weed at 16-17 (and I had no knowledge that it would happen then), I had a conversation about drug criminalization with some other friends, and I was speaking critically about it and claimed that maybe weed is not as harmful as it's portrayed and that punishing people for using it makes little to no sense. And then after I was introduced to weed, I felt a sense of pride of having held that position before I was introduced to it and before it became a part of my identity. I had sort of reasoned it out of myself. This is sort of the same dynamic I'm pointing towards: is it really you, or is it something you have to believe now because of your newly adopted identity? And yes, as everybody is pointing out, I acknowledge pretty well that learning about the right ideas can facilitate development. But I'm getting more and more wary of the cases where it doesn't.

Go for a walk.

So again, it's about work, wordly occupation, doing things in the world?

So you don't know if any celebrity intellectual you haven't personally spoken to is Yellow?

How do you know when it has changed how somebody's mind works and that they're not just larping?

Oh really? So the telling signs are what somebody does in the world rather than what somebody is capable of understanding? Interesting... My point with this thread is essentially that if you let for example Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson spend a week learning about SD and make them go larp as Tier 2 on the forum and make them do it as best as they can or they get kicked out (to imitate the incentive that the Tier 2 fanatics on the forum have for maintaining their identity), I think they will do it much better than the average Tier 2 fanatic on here. And if that is the case, what does that say about their Tier 2 larp? Maybe you have to dig a bit deeper to judge whether or not you are actually Tier 2 (like for example looking at one's worldly occupation). Again, I'm just trying to pull people's pants down for those that might need it. Yeah, like "seeing" a YouTube video or "seeing" a fancy graph on Google Images. That's as much gusto you need to pass the "I'm actually Tier 2" bar. The only libido here is being shot into a Kleenex 🙈

Notice what I've been asking in this thread: does Elon understand Yellow, or does he mascarade with a stereotyped, developmentally ungrounded, shallow understanding? And if Elon is capable of understanding Yellow, why not Ben Shapiro, Chris Langan, Jordan Peterson? And if these are not truly yellow, who is? Jordan Hall? Daniel Schmachtenberger? John Vervaeke? And why are they Yellow?

Which did not change, or did it?

You got drunk because alcohol binds to your GABAA receptors, or because it invades all the cells in your body including your brain responsible for movement and higher cognitive functions, or because you wanted to have fun that night, or because you conformed to the social pressure to drink, or because you wanted to numb yourself to emotional pain, etc. You can explain it in many ways, and the point of calling it a reduction is that each of the ways are partial and often somewhat unitary (something gets reduced to "one thing"). You take the infinite complexity of reality and reduce it down to a specific structure. Whether or not your reduction base contains many units or notions like top-down causality, there is still a reduction happening.

Why did you put Elon Musk in Tier 2 initially? What changed?

You want to see what I made my study participants stare into while measuring their brains? (PS: if you are on mobile, the dot is very small):

I also want to bring up another point about the role of identity (and survival) that is really obvious but seemingly often forgotten when interpreting SD: Take somebody like Ben Shapiro. He is often painted as Blue or Orange. I severely doubt he isn't able to grasp what SD is. I also doubt he is unable to really understand what the progressive/"Green" ideas he is fighting against are. He has read a lot, he knows what post-modernism is, what post-structuralism is, all these philosophical underpinnings that supposedly spawned Green. Yet his identity, his upbringing, his attachments, his biases, lies with Blue and Orange values, politics and way of life. Same with someone like Chris Langan, who I could also see somebody paint as Blue or Orange, with his support for Trump and general conservative views. He is a god damned panentheist that talks about the connections between Hindun and Christian notions of God! He has his own metaphysical hyper-model that puts "cognition" at the bottom of reality (it's in the name; "C"TMU). His context and construct awareness is millennia ahead of the average 18 year old stoner on this forum that self-proclaims knowledge of SD (I'm talking about me from the past of course). Then you have the juicy examples, like the plight of Jordan Peterson (1) and more recently Elon Musk (2) who Leo funnily decided to "demote" from his list of examples of Yellow: How could this be, that a highly credentialed professor of psychology, who has made it essentially his life's work to study the metaphorical interpretation of religious texts and connect them to insights in modern psychology and science, who claims to have studied post-modernism and cannot stop talking about it, who is routinely and ironically even called a post-modernist by many of his critics (both sincerely and tongue in cheek), could "fall" to the depths of Blue political punditry? Not a lack of understanding, but of course, identity and survival! He was even crowned as one of the promising spearheads of the "intellectual dark web", which Wilber himself called a potential catalyst for widespread Tier 2. Then he became severely ill, almost died and came back noticeably impaired and with a strong financial and power incentive to stamp out the wokeness that had plunged him into worldwide fame and that had also cost him his academic career and even his clinical license. How could this be, that a geeky tech billionaire who has fixated on futurist fantasies for humanity for most of his career and has made rather successful steps in that direction (more than anybody else, but yes, granted giants flops, broken promises and failed predictions) could indeed fall to the depths of not just Blue punditry but frankly Red-ish monarchy? Identity and survival! Not a lack of understanding. Some say his sole motivation for funding the Trump campaign was to "destroy the woke mind virus" that allegedly had "claimed the life" of his then son and now daughter. And of course, how can we explain the 18 year old forum dwellers that preach the Yellow doctrine? Identity and survival. Identity and survival directs your focus, what you find important, and it can be largely orthogonal to pure intellectual understanding or even organic "SD development" (which frankly is a very simplistic and yes reductionistic model which has been elaborated and expanded upon by other thinkers like Wilber and my favorite Hanzi Freinacht). Just in general, I think identity and survival explains so much of what we see around us and also where staircase models don't fare as well. I was personally just an inch away from going down the rabbit hole of ethnonationalism as an 17-18 year old. I starkly remember standing at a spiritual crossroads and choosing one over the other; the familiar values of my social democrat upbringing, or the new and exciting, challenging and transgressive tribal taunts of my privileged brothers. I could've been one of the guys I almost banned from this forum for repeatedly rubbing in people's faces that Nick Fuentes is supposedly a perfectly swell guy. So often, it's best to let the obvious points come to the surface instead of letting the cognitive dissonance from an overly simplistic model reign with its "totalitarian" grasp on your mind ( @Nilsi ).

"Choose your reductionist poison" - probably something Bernardo Kastrup has said. What he has actually said is that to explain something is to reduce it to something else. So it's all really reductionism. It's just some explanations are more reductionistic than others (e.g. explaining everything in terms of one thing, which is ironically what reducing everything to "differences" is ).

If you are able to incrementally increase your sessions all the way up to 60-90 minutes without being in severe mental anguish during the practice, that alone means you're doing something right. But yes, as long as you try to do the practice, simply sitting there for the time you chose is the only criteria. Setting a timer removes the expectation to "perform" or to expect a certain outcome. You just sit there and do the thing and when you're done you're done. If you become better over time, sitting there will become more fun, and if you get just a little better, that means you can get a lot better if you keep going. Delete from your mind the notion that "you can be sitting in meditation but you're not really meditating". This is the pinnacle of mental self-sabotage.

You have to find the right balance. There is always some discipline or structure involved, or else it's not a "practice". You're taking time out of your day to focus on something for some time. How structured or how disciplined you want to get is something you have to try out for yourself. I just think setting a timer for your meditations is very helpful as it frees up unnecessary potential fears and thoughts, it allows for consistency and a structured way to up your progress, and it just simplifies everything. When you decide "I'm going to sit here for 15 minutes no matter what happens, and I'm fine with that", then there is no "have I meditated long enough?", "how long have I actually meditated for?", "when will I enter the zone?", "ah, I have to become just a little more conscious before I end the meditation", etc. Structure focuses you and reduces uncertainty. But yes, meditation is very intuitive, and you have to find a lot of it out on your own. Choose some structure to follow, but let your intuition work within that. And if you feel some intuitive push to go outside the structure, test it out and see if it works. You can always return to the structure if it doesn't work. The way I discovered all of those things I listed was mostly through intuition, and because I'm a semi-ADHD kind of guy, I ended up practicing all of them at once. (Sometimes I prefer just zeroing in on one method, e.g. focusing on the breath, but doing many methods in parallel can be beneficial as it fills up your mind with a lot of things it has to keep track of and it makes your mind less likely to wander off somewhere else. Sometimes there is no method, just sitting. And what works the best can change over time).

I just thought about staring yourself in the mirror, like really close up into one of your eyes, could be interesting, because you get a super detailed feedback of how still you are and what microcorrections you need to make, you amplify the state you are trying to create by presenting it directly in front of you, and by making your own eye an object, you deconstruct the sense of being centered in that very thing you are looking at. 👍

First set the intention that you will be completely ok with just sitting meditating for the next whatever minutes. Try setting an alarm clock for e.g. 15 minutes so you don't have to keep track of time or become insecure about not sitting for long enough. Increase the alarm clock by 5 minutes every session. Sit with your legs crossed in an upright but relaxed position. Take three deep breaths. Start scanning the sensations in your body and try to relax and release any tension you may find, starting from your feet, moving up your legs, to your stomach, chest, back, shoulders, arms, neck, head. Then do it one more time. When you reach the head again, move your attention to the sensations of the rising and falling of your breath (pick an area e.g. around your chest or nostrils). Keep your awareness of the breath. Then become aware of sounds in the room or the silence. "Hear" the silence. Then become aware of tensions in the body, relax them or let them dissolve. Feel the small movements of your body as you sit there, let the movements run their course. Feel the fluctuations of small tensions in your body, encourage the unwinding of tensions. Keep your awareness of all these things. Then become aware of your thoughts. Try to see when the next thought pops up. See what it's about. Try to become aware of the silence between thoughts. If you notice you lose yourself in thoughts without knowing that you are thinking, return to the breath, re-establish awareness of sounds in the room, awareness of the movements and tensions in the body, and repeat. If some thoughts seem to bother you more than others, e.g. if it's something you need to do today, write it down so you can stop thinking about it and address it later that day. If the thoughts are simply general concerns or anxieties about your life or things that may or may not happen, simply let them go. Simply tell yourself "whatever happens to me, I will be fine". And as you sit there, simply re-assert that you will be fine with just sitting there for the rest of the meditation until the alarm clock rings. Other things you can do is become aware of the visual fluctuations behind your closed eyelids. Become really curious about what they are made of, why they happen, why they move the way they do. Try to really become intensely aware of them. Observe them with all your attention. Another thing can be to try to actually enter a state of samadhi (no thoughts) and pure void devoid of forms. Try to release yourself from the tensions of the body so much that you become weightless, try to literally leave your body behind, pretend like you're dead, like a corpse just sitting there. You want to feel like you are sitting so still, so relaxed and are so present with the sensations in your body that your sensations equalize and you enter a state of anesthesia, feeling like your body slowly becomes numb. And the more numb it becomes, the more you distance yourself from your body and the further into pure awareness you go. Here, your concentration should be intense. Also, your breathing should be intense, but not in an excessively labored "breathing method" kind of way, but rather your breathing must be filled with sensuality and love. Another general tip is to try to feel the natural euphoric sensations of the breath (and the body in general) and immerse yourself in that, try to almost make it orgasmic.