Carl-Richard

As someone who has experienced this process but spent 3 years forcing myself out if it, I can give you the blue pill or the red pill. The blue pill: I'll teach you how to return to a more ordinary sense of existence. There is more suffering involved, but you'll not have to overcome your fear of death, insanity, isolation. The red pill: I'll do as Axiom here and help you close off the last subtle hiding spots your mind uses to perpetuate itself. I feel hesitant doing this as I know the seriousness of such a decision.

If it's growth, some of it will never pass. He won't ever have the thought of "I'm a loser virgin" ever again.

Your writing style is easily recognizable. The fake Leo account was obvious within a few posts It's almost like the guy is arguing against the idea of following the guidelines. Visionary ?

Having a large scale community centered around proper traditions and institutions is very beneficial for general safety and mental health. Individualistic spirituality doesn't have a good safety net for inexperienced or unstable people. There aren't many people you can go to for guidance, and it leaves you vulnerable to spiraling out into your own world of delusions. And of course, it makes you prone to... joining cults. That is why spirituality needs to be re-integrated into society the way that religion was originally intended to be.

to be a survivor of a cult*

and don't forget that they're hanging up posters inside the cafe about how they have both coffee AND pizza ;D They're also not running a pedophile ring, but they might in the future ;D AND they're spiking the pepperonis with speed. I think internet anonymity makes these analogies a bit ridiculous lol.

Maybe it's just something about Actualized.org and their offshoots ;D I would like to actually study the beliefs of these people.

Yep. You've seen my threads about this. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm saying you should be cautious. I'm also not saying that the cult risk is the main reason for shutting it down. It's mainly the splintering of the community. When I created my spy account, I saw how people were talking in there (). The thing about internet anonymity is that if you don't have at least a minimum way of creating cohesion, the place turns into a toxic cesspool. Not allowing cliques to gossip outside moderated spaces is just one solution to that. You can suggest a better solution if you have one.

I guess. It's more like "I just created another cafe, and only I can decide who enters or not. I'm going to put up posters inside the walls of this cafe advertising my cafe, and I'll slip some meth in the coffee to keep them hooked. This cafe is shit. I only come here to lol at the people in it."

Ok. We can qualify what that means. In what way is this place a cult?

Maybe. But if the forum is such a garbage platform as it's portrayed to be, like a sort of glorified snail mail, then that is exactly what makes it less prone to many of the cult dynamics that I've talked about. In a way, your point is like saying that when the larger society shames people for creating cults, that's a cult dynamic. Sure, depending on how far you want to stretch the concept, that could be true, but society at large is more open, less isolated, less cohesive and less enticing than an actual cult. The main thing that makes cults appealing is what makes Discords appealing: tight-knit social communities.

You get more easily isolated from other influences, and the idiosyncratic beliefs get amplified and are less likely to be challenged due to the tighter social dynamics (invite-based membership, high-speed chat system, subtle dynamics through voice chat, etc.). The beliefs start out innocent, but with the right person in charge, they can turn wacky real fast without you even noticing it. And even if you retain a level of self-awareness and distance from the whole thing, your beliefs can still be affected (I experienced this first-hand). The main thing to watch out for is when the leader is deeply searching for some deeper truth like the ultimate enlightenment, and when they start developing their own views based on those experiences. While that might not look like it's the case with thisintegrated for now, the aforementioned dynamics within a New-Agey context, especially when it was spawned as a sort of self-proclaimed superior option to some other place, can still have a damaging effect on people's psyches. As for the point about Heaven's Gate, that cult consisted of highly educated, intellectually curious and spiritually open people. When people kill themselves based on spiritual ideas (like have happened here), and when discords turn into cults (like also have happened here), it's not such a wild possibility really.

Not if you believed it. True. There is not much that keeps even this place from devolving into a cult. A discord is the next step.

About the cult thing, I'm drawing conclusions and recommending caution, but about the splintering community thing, you can already clearly see the negative effects. Even if the discord keeps running, at least the people will have what I've said in mind, which in itself will make it less likely to happen. That's one thing I learned from being in a cult: beliefs sneak in through the back door And even if it has the opposite effect and they rebel against being nannied, if it does eventually turn into a cult, the lesson will hit twice as hard

But not based on what conversations might happen in the future. Rali's discord started out exactly like this one. The madness built up slowly over time as the community isolated itself and became more cohesive. The only important difference I can think of is that Rali was way more charismatic, way smarter and way more ambitious than thisintegrated. He was a bit like Leo, but without the wisdom. However, like I've said, even if 10% of what happened to Rali's discord were to ever happen again, it would be very bad. But that applies to anything, your statements or mine.

Based on what? Wisdom is availability heuristics ? (largely)

There is this thing about Norway that two people who live in different parts of the country will often have big problems understanding each other. This video only shows the coastal dialects. The midland ones are even wackier, trust me The guy is doing a great job according to my ears, and I definitely know more dialects than the average Norwegian . For you non-Norwegians, even if it sounds like gibberish, does it sound different in different places? Does it even sound like the same language?

Or wisdom and an understanding of human psychology and group dynamics. The damage was done and things have stabilized since then. This is an ongoing thing. It's also not an isolated cell.

When it comes to dangerous things, and when you're given evidence of an increased likelihood of it happening, it's wise to be cautious. Anyways, like I said, what is already going on (splintering of the community) is bad enough.

What makes a group of people more likely to do something stupid, based on previous evidence and knowledge about human psychology?

@Strannik Ok, so I guess your point is just that there may be things we can't know that are also extremely fundamental to reality. It sort of lends itself to the idea that the birth of the self-aware rational mind, however many thousands of years ago that was, was in a sense a step up from what existed before ("pure being"), but also, merely asking the question, or merely assuming that there can be something you don't know, is kinda self-serving to this very capacity. Anyways, blablabla

When I think about it, there was really nothing in terms of ideological inclinations that was stopping Rali's discord from turning into the next Heaven's Gate cult. That gives me chills. "The end is near due to a non-physical spiritual influence on reality": what stops you from saying "we need to leave this plane"?

@Strannik So, back to the idea that you can posit something outside formlessness which also doesn't have anything to do with our current experience of forms: As for say materialism positing multiple ontological layers (physical vs. mental), the impulse to do so is to explain the regularities of form, e.g why I can't read your thoughts. I also think was the main appeal of Kant's "thing in itself". And again, there you see is the innate pragmatism of philosophy. But to posit a thing which doesn't have anything to do with the forms we're experiencing and which is inaccessible to the current formlessness, a sort of formlessness 2.0, I don't think makes much sense. Even if you're claiming that there exists parallell universes, you don't need two formlessnesses for that. You just need a particular configuration of form. It's sufficient for making me unable to experience your thoughts, so it should be sufficient for hiding another whole universe away from me. When you peel back into formlessness, you won't see the parallell universes, because those are forms. You're just seeing what the universes are arising within.

@thisintegrated Who approved the bot comment?